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The Sex Blog Of Record
Friday, August 28th, 2015 -- by Bacchus
This lazy-seeming and somewhat derivative history of the American blowjob was redeemed for me by linking to its source material, especially the much better 2006 essay on the subject by the late and lamented Christopher Hitchens:
As American As Apple Pie
For me the laugh-out-loud Hitchens anecdote was this one:
My friend David Aaronovitch, a columnist in London, wrote of his embarrassment at being in the same room as his young daughter when the TV blared the news that the president of the United States had received oral sex in an Oval Office vestibule. He felt crucially better, but still shy, when the little girl asked him, “Daddy, what’s a vestibule?”
Nobody could write about a delicate subject — or an indelicate one for that matter — like Hitchens:
Stay with me. I’ve been doing the hard thinking for you. The three-letter “job,” with its can-do implications, also makes the term especially American. Perhaps forgotten as the London of Jack the Ripper receded into the past, the idea of an oral swiftie was re-exported to Europe and far beyond by a massive arrival of American soldiers. For these hearty guys, as many a French and English and German and Italian madam has testified, the blowjob was the beau ideal. It was a good and simple idea in itself. It was valued — not always correctly — as an insurance against the pox. And — this is my speculation — it put the occupied and the allied populations in their place. “You do some work for a change, sister. I’ve had a hard time getting here.”
I’m interested to discover just how much I enjoy the Hitchens essay today. Nine years ago, it didn’t impress me nearly as much.
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Thursday, April 17th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
According to this site, in the run-up to the Spanish-American war there was a breathless account published in the New York Journal about a supposed provocation by the Spanish:
As the American steamship Olivette was about to leave Havana Harbor for the United States, it was boarded by Spanish police officers who searched three young Cuban women, one of whom was suspected of carrying messages from the rebels. The Journal ran the story with the headline, “Does Our Flag Protect Women?”
It was accompanied by a dramatic sketch by Frederic Remington across one half a page showing Spanish plainclothes men searching a nude woman. The Journal went on to editorialize, “War is a dreadful thing, but there are things more dreadful than even war, and one of them is dishonor.”
This caught my attention because the lurid sketch of the strip search is by none other than THE Frederick Remington, the same one whose Western-themed art and cowboy sculptures later beceme so iconic and evocative of the fantasy of the American west. Here’s a detail from the strip-search sketch (click the image for the full sketch):
Of course, the sketch is hopelessly lurid compared to the reality behind the tabloid account of the strip search:
Soon, however, the story unraveled. The World quickly produced one of the young women who contested the Journal’s version of the incident. Eventually the Journal was forced to correct the story. The search had been appropriately conducted by a police matron with no men present.
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Tuesday, March 25th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
Speaking as the person who claims (not with much energy or certainty) to have invented the notion of the “sex blog” and as the first person to refer to my efforts as “sex blogging”, I must say Dangerous Lilly has done a very nice job of pulling together a “view from 10,000 feet” overview of sex blog history in her article A Brief History Of Sex Blogging. I inspected each urge to quibble that arose within myself as I read the piece and in each case the only possible fair assessment was “if she’d spent the space to sort out that detail, then it wouldn’t have been a brief history any more.” I say, good work.
That said, I was a quibbler and a pettifogger long before I was a sex blogger, and some old habits die way hard. So here are a couple of points I would make about the older bits of sex blog history in her piece. (Everything in this post is “as far as I know” — it’s always possible somebody more knowledgeable or with a better memory will pull up proof of my internet wrongness, in which case, better history, awesome!)
- Susannah Breslin’s blog The Reverse Cowgirl’s Blog (which you might or might not consider a sex blog, though it had a lot of sex-blog-like content, and rocked the subtitle “in which a writer attempts to justify the enormity of her porn collection” ) got started a month plus five days before ErosBlog did. That’s why I have always acknowledged that blog as a possible contender for “the first sex blog” even though nobody called it a sex blog before I first coined the phrase.
- Before I ever came along, Violet Blue was writing sex book and video reviews for the Good Vibrations sex toy store as her day job, while posting handcrafted HTML pages by night that today look a lot like sex blog posts. That started perhaps in 2001. But I didn’t discover her actual blog of dated posts in reverse order (which she called “a tiny log”) until sometime in May or June of 2003, and the first post I can find in her archives is dated February 16, 2003. Whether or not you consider Violet a “sex blogger” before she started publishing dated posts, she was doing essentially that thing (only more and better) long before I was.
- I believe Lilly must be using a different definition of “sex toy reviews on blogs” than I am when she dates her oldest evidence of them to 2005. My guess is — and I haven’t asked her — that she’s talking about the current “manufacturer provides toy contingent upon a review, which review will also have the reviewer’s affiliate link in it” review model. Certainly I thought this was a sex toy review when I posted it in early 2004, and I didn’t have any notion of doing a novel thing when I did it. (Note that there were product links in the post originally, that later got edited out when the links broke.) At about the same time, I posted for the humor value about a review series in which one Cly Maxwell received “two huge boxes of [rubber] pussy” in exchange for a promise to review these fake pussies at the rate of one per week, which he then began to do. My memory is that the “bloggers review sex toys in exchange for getting them free in the mail” model got going prior to July of 2003, but it’s hard to separate in my memory the VHS/DVD porn review offers from sex toys, which may have been slower to arrive in the mail.
I’ll stop there — that’s quite enough quibbling for any mortal man. Kudos to Lilly for tackling a difficult bit of 21st-century cultural history with both brevity and aplomb!
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