sex blogging Archives

More Sex Blog History

Saturday, April 5th, 2014 -- by Bacchus

Following up on my post about sex blog history (and my semi-dubious claim to have invented the “sex blogging” notion, even though I’ve always acknowledged that others were doing it long before me, under different names) here’s what I said last week:

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.

Here’s what Susannah has to say about that:

As I pointed out on Twitter this morning, I was preceded in sex blogging by Daze Reader, whose first blog post dates back to May 2002. I didn’t launch The Reverse Cowgirl until August 2002. I’ve always seen Daze as the first sex blogger. I don’t know that I would’ve ever created my blog if it weren’t for Daze’s pioneering sex blogging.

In regards to Lilly’s question, would I consider The Reverse Cowgirl blog a sex blog? Yes. At the time, I was a freelance journalist and my primary beat was sex. I created the RCB to share my crazy life working the sex and porn beat, from Porn Valley to the Playboy Mansion, and I was intoxicated by the opportunity that sex blogging afforded me: an uncensored venue where I could write and express whatever I wanted — without censorship.

I am abashed that Daze did not come up in the “early sex blog” conversation before now; he was one of my inspirations for sure. I don’t remember him calling his blog a “sex blog” out loud anymore than Susannah did, but by any reasonable measure, it surely was. During that summer of 2002 when I was surfing blogs on breaks at my desk at my unrewarding office job — and yes, there was a logging Sonic Firewall device in that workplace, but I had the password and thus the ability to confirm that nobody else was logging in check the logs — Daze was one of my never-miss daily stops.

Another proto-sexblog mentioned on twitter as dating back to August of 1999 (!) is Debra Hyde’s Pursed Lips. I was linking to Debra from the beginning; her focus, as I remember it, was somewhat specialized around erotic literature, both writing it and collecting it. (Sadly, nothing of her site from before 2004 or so seems to have survived in the Internet Archives.) The most recent archived version of her “About” page says:

I’m a long-time blogger and sometimes podcaster. Pursed Lips is among the oldest blogs to bravely explore sex in our culture, a baby I birthed in 1999 when bloggers numbered around 200 people!

It’s astonishing how ephemeral these sites turn out to be. The Internet Archive helps a lot, but their coverage in the early years was spotty at best. And you can’t search it, so if you don’t already have a link, even stuff in the Archive is as good as gone in most cases.

Update, Debra Hyde on Twitter: “I saw PL as a sexblog, tho not sure the term yet existed.”

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A History Of Sex Blogs

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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Why She Posts Nude Photos

Saturday, February 1st, 2014 -- by Bacchus

This intensely personal essay from Penny describes her evolution towards the emotional freedom to post her own nude photos on her blog. It’s a good read and in the end, a manifesto of self-ownership. Excerpt from the middle:

My true sexual revolution didn’t happen until I started working at a sex shop during my senior year at UT. During the three years I worked there, I read and learned more about sex and met sex positive women who I could talk to. I finally got to the point where I was truly proud of my body and my sexuality again.

While working at the shop I started modeling (sometimes nude), but at that point I only showed the photos to Jake and certain friends who I knew would appreciate them. Eventually I started my blog because I loved talking about sex with people at work, and I wanted a bigger outlet for sexual discussion and exploration.

Since I already had sexy and nude photos, I wondered if I should post some on my blog when I started it. I’d always wanted to share my images with a wider audience, but at the same time I was also afraid to. My main fears had to do with family members seeing them or with the possibility of my real identity getting out and the repercussions or lost career opportunities that could come with that. The exhibitionist in me won though, and I began posting photos, although at first only ones that didn’t reveal my face and didn’t show any actual nudity.

After blogging for a while, I realized that I was tired of hiding my face from my photos. I admired women who had the courage to post nude images that showed everything, including their faces, boldly and with pride. I gradually became less concerned with hiding my face.

Posting nude photos as well as sex blogging in general has been an extremely liberating experience for me. Finally, I don’t feel like my body is something I need to hide. I’ve come a long way from my scared and ashamed 13 year old self, and I’m extremely proud of that, especially considering I was raised to believe that my body is obscene and sex is sinful.

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Sex Blogging In The Stream

Saturday, November 17th, 2012 -- by Bacchus

ErosBlog has been paying attention to Anil Dash for a very long time. Indeed, the second ErosBlog post ever quoted his 2002 musings on the masturbatory uses of hand-held shower nozzles. So I’ve been mulling his Stop Publishing Web Pages article for about a month, now. Specifically, he talks about how mobile apps tend to present stuff to the user in a highly-functional stream that’s just more useful and easier to process than standard web pages are. I don’t consider myself much of a media company, but I recognize ErosBlog in this unflattering description:

Most media companies on the web spend all of their effort putting content into content management systems which publish pages. These pages work essentially the same way that pages have worked since the beginning of the web, with a single article or post living at a particular address, and then tons of navigation and cruft (and, usually, advertisements) surrounding that article.

Users have decided they want streams, but most media companies are insisting on publishing more and more pages. And the systems which publish the web are designed to keep making pages, not to make customized streams.

And I recognize myself (and my behavior) when I read this:

Pay attention to the fact that all the links you click on Twitter, on Facebook, on Pinterest, all take you to out of the simple flow of those apps and into a jarring, cluttered experience where the most appealing option is the back button. Stop being one of those dead-end experiences and start being more like what users have repeatedly demonstrated they prefer.

The Google Analytics for ErosBlog reinforce this unwelcome sense of familiarity. Not only do I click back in horror when I land on an old cluttered web page that doesn’t play well with my smartphone, but so do you. The ErosBlog bounce rate (a measure of people who arrive at the site and very swiftly leave again) is already an unflattering 61 percent, but for mobile users, it’s an even worse 68 percent.

What’s less obvious is how to streamify the ErosBlog experience. Even Anil (much smarter about content management systems than I could ever hope to be, having been the first employee of the folks who invented the once-famous Moveable Type blog software) admits:

Obviously, I’ve written this in an old-style content publishing system, and this piece lives on my website as an old-fashioned HTML page. But if I had my preference, I’d write up an article like this, and it’d seamlessly glide into a clean, simple stream of my writing, organized by topic and sorted with the newest stuff on top. Blogs have always worked this way, but they were shoehorning this stream-like behavior into the best representation possible under the old page model.

I don’t have a tool I can use to run my website which will output a stream that works the right way…

Of course it’s been three months since he wrote that. And (to me, at least, who may not be understanding what he’s saying as well as I should) it looks as if there’s no theoretical reason why smart HTML5 templates in a properly-constructed WordPress theme couldn’t do the job. Has anybody written them yet? Not that I’ve found, but I keep hoping.

I’ve been tinkering for more than a year on various efforts to make ErosBlog more mobile-friendly, but my coding skills deficit has proven too large, and so I’ve not really gotten a lot of traction. I’ve done a lot of not-so-idle Googling for solutions coded by others, but haven’t seen anything that really does the job the way I want it done. And that’s when my vision was simply to make something that “looks like ErosBlog” while making more efficient use of small screens. Then Anil came along and convinced me I was thinking too narrowly. Now the goalposts are moving, because the app ecosystem is teaching people to want/demand new functionality in the ways their media is displayed to them.

Do I have any idea how to get ahead of this problem? Nothing concrete, I fear. As I tinker with this, my skills get better (so slowly!); that helps my feeble efforts, and on top of that I take heart from the notion that smarter people than me are working up awesome templates and themes that I’ll eventually find and put to use. All suggestions gratefully considered!

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Ten Candles

Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012 -- by Bacchus

Erosblog’s first post went live on October 3, 2002: Is This Sex Blog Thing On? That was ten years ago, which makes us like 70 in dog years (or internet years, take your pick). Surprisingly enough, there have been 3,652 posts since then; as close to a post a day as anybody could want. Plus, 16,772 non-spam comments. Thanks to everybody for reading and participating!

I have to shout out for the three other sex bloggers who were at it before I was and who are still at it; there may be others, but these are the ones I know about and remember, who were there when I started, who I found early on, who have kept at it, and who are still here. Violet, BJ, Daze — it’s been a hell of a decade. There’ve been dozens who came later, who told us (and the world) they knew more about how to do it, who did it harder or louder, or who (maybe) did it better. But we are still here, and most of those others are not. Survival is the ultimate measure of success, no?

I also have to acknowledge Indie Nudes — an ancient and venerable “list of links” that has survived and thrived like some ancient dinosaur turtle. Lists of carefully chosen links were the way the web was organized, for a few years a long long time ago, before blogs and even before decent search engines (*cough* AltaVista *cough*). So, when Erosblog was pretty new, Indie Nudes put me on their list. They’ve kept me there ever since, and they send surprising traffic; nobody but Google sends me more. I don’t know who runs it or why they keep doing it, but thanks!

There have been lots of changes since ErosBlog was a mere puppy. The architecture has changed a bunch of times; when I started, I used a desktop blogging client for Windows called simply “BLOG”. Eventually I updated to Graymatter, but I was late to the party and its evolution was slowing down right at a time when challenges (especially in the area of comment spam) were speeding up. WordPress was the next obvious step, and by now (how many templates later?) it’s such an old friend as a content management system that I use it for everything, even things that look nothing like blogs. If all a man has is a hammer, everything looks like a nail…

Just as many changes in my life. When I started, I was single and lonely, and I had a professional job, with a tie and a (very small) office that put me one tiny step away from cubicle hell (just outside my door). I quit that job (for the second time) just days after ErosBlog went live, when the boss who was keeping the place afloat took a political appointment. I’ve been self-employed (at various things) ever since, and I couldn’t even tell you whether I still own a tie; if I do, it’s in a box in deep storage somewhere. Like most people who aren’t part of the metastasizing financial-services-and-megacorps conglomerate behemoth that’s eating the world, I’m poorer than I was ten years ago and a lot poorer than I was when I was lucky to be climbing the inflating side of the last bubble. But I’m living somewhere they can’t take away from me, I’ve got a good woman who loves me slumbering in our bed as I type this, I’ve got a big dog (who also loves me) slumbering protectively just inside my front door, and there’s pease porridge in my crockpot that’s been simmering fragrantly all night with a chopped onion and a hint of cumin. So life is excellent by any reasonable measure.

Changes in the sex blogging world? Wow. Blogging was a thing, had been for a couple-few years, when ErosBlog got going. But sex blogging as a category? I wasn’t first to do it, not by a long shot; but I think I may have been the first person to put “Sex Blogs” in my sidebar as a blogging category. Eventually it got real popular and it seemed like everybody was doing it. Even the SEO spam robots were doing it for awhile; they’d scrape actual blog posts, mash them up and change a few words out with a thesaurus program, and then bung them back up on the web somewhere as bait for GoogleBot. Now, of course, we’re on the downside of the slope; blogs are old and boring, more “stable place to put my essays” than “exciting community where I make my connections”. The web itself is changing in the era of Facebook and Twitter and the smartphone and the ecosystem of apps; people are looking at it in different ways, on smaller screens, from more places, in shorter bursts, if somebody tweets a link perhaps. Links in sidebars are as dead as webrings as a way of moving traffic around, to the point where a lot of things-that-look-like-blogs don’t link out to anybody at all and sidebars are going away as people do mobile-friendly redesigns. People still stare at screens for amusement, but almost everything about the process (when they do it, how they do it, how they decide what to stare at, how they find what to stare at) has changed.

Where in all this do sex blogs fit it, in the waning month of 2012? Well, people still like reading about sex and viewing dirty pictures, and they all have these miraculous and awesome (I think so anyway; that’s how you can tell I’m old) little always-connected internet devices in their pockets now. Even if “blogs” finish going away and “surfing the web” has become hopelessly quaint, there’s got to be some way to keep on doing what we do (find sexy stuff, pull it together, make a few wise-ass remarks about it, entertain the folk). Our challenge as sex bloggers (or whatever we become when blogging is as dead as carriage racing) is the same as it always was: to do it well enough to be valued, to earn and maintain the attention of our readers in an overstimulated world where attention is the scarcest currency.

In 2007 I asked “Will there be a Ten Candles post on October 3, 2012?” In my secret heart, I was pretty damned sure the answer was “yes”. I’m delighted to have been right. But what about the future? Will ErosBlog still be here in 2017? I’m less confident than I was in 2007; I grow older and move more slowly, while the world speeds up and accelerates into the future. But I’m persistent, and I’m stubborn. Unless I stop being entertained by porn (which seems unlikely) I can’t imagine not having bits of it that need pointed at and talked about. So, just as I did in 2007, I’ll say “I truly do hope so!”

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10 Years Of Sex Blogging: Best Of ErosBlog 2006

Sunday, September 30th, 2012 -- by Bacchus

Next Wednesday (October 3) will mark the first day of the eleventh year of operations here at ErosBlog. So it looks like this will the last of the “10 Years of Sex Blogging” retrospectives. That’s OK — covering the first five years has a decent symmetry to it. Without further ado, here’s 2006:

My micro-rant on why lap dances in strip clubs are “DO NOT WANT” territory for me, plus somebody else’s tips for getting a good one: How To Get A Killer Lapdance
I found possibly the best happy-exhibitionist photo I’ve ever seen: Half-Naked And Happy To Be There
Of all the things I’ve ever written on ErosBlog, this essay on joy and BDSM acceptance is perhaps the post I’m most proud of: Two Smiles
Remember that shower gel commercial with the tagline “How dirty girls get clean?” Yeah, me neither; or I wouldn’t, if I hadn’t managed to associate it in my mind with this memorable photo: Girl Washing
I can’t recall laughing harder or longer over a web thing (unless maybe it was the immortal Dogs in Elk waaay back in the last century) than I did over this cybersex transcript that didn’t quite go the way the dude expected it to: And Who Shall Be Master?
I don’t often lose myself in consumerist fantasies, but I confess I did the first time I saw this product for sale. It’s still for sale, but sadly, I still don’t have any: Leather Sheets
I’ve softened my stance on the virtues of color blindness over the years (having been exposed to possibly-better arguments) but I haven’t come close to abandoning it. Here’s one of the places it got me griped at, especially in the comments: Nude Women, Skin Color, Huh?
This post and its comments was one of the places I’ve tried to expound on the foolishness and impossibility of imposing our personal interpretations of art (here, pulpy sex comics) onto other people. Of course it got me snarled at, as it generally does: Whipped With A Hat On
What’s going on when women dress themselves to be looked at, and then appear to resent the looks they get? I had a theory: On Looking At Women
I think every sex blogger has taken a go at mocking the contents of sex spam. Here’s one of mine: Sex Spam Subject Lines
This I still believe: “If you can’t see a person without having a racial classification for them pop into your head, you’re part of the problem.” Not Ignorant, Adamant
Even a cartoon ’70s metrosexual (before they called them that) understood that a fist in her hair can make the blowjob better: Hair Pulling Blowjob
In which I stand up for the proposition that not all men are dicks: No Gentlemen, No Sex Pictures
I had forgotten until just now this back-and-forth with Susie Bright about the reasons for the gender imbalance in the sex blogging world: Sex Bias In Blogging
I still want to know what happened to this sex doll: Sex Doll Accident
I still don’t think Violet is wrong about a word of this: Public Submission Ritual
Another effort on my part to demonstrate that the sexy elements in art are (and ought to be) available to the viewer no matter how reprehensible the artist, his motives, or his historical context: Male Soldiers Fucking
My irritation with a certain class of creepy comments, it overfloweth: Flashing From A Window
My opinion on fake boobs, followed by an opinion that arguably matters quite a bit more: Big Fake Boobs
I still laugh every time I see this: Bill Versus The Penguin
The topic of what it does (did) to our society to have porn go from “hard to get” to “available on all screens” is fascinating to me, and has been for a long time: Internet Porn For The Greater Good
Title speaks for itself: Dirty Owl-Fucker!
“Who wants to find herself covered with Winnie-the-Pooh BandAids after sex?” There’s always somebody: But Gardens Do Differ

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Forensic Photoarcheology, Vintage Blowjob Edition

Sunday, September 23rd, 2012 -- by Bacchus

Alternative title: How To “Waste” A Fine Morning.

Dateline ErosBlog, 2003: I published a wallet photo of a vintage blowjob.

Most of a decade later, I see a similar photo on Tumblr, and I’m thinking “This woman looks familiar!”

So I do some image searching (on the web and on my hard drives) until I find the best available watermark-free version. And then I rummage my archives to find the other picture of the same woman that I posted back in 2003. Fast to say, but an hour’s gone already. Is it the same woman?

Yes! It sure looks like her when I make a side-by-side composite:

a pair of 1920s vintage blowjobs

Hair is the same, and most importantly, she’s wearing the same striped hose. It’s her!

But now I’m in a frenzy of pointless data acquisition. I want to find and post the best available versions of these pictures, which turns out to be these (click for full size versions, the biggest and cleanest I found):

That’s another hour gone, spent in pop-up-hell ruski image forums and ancient foreign-language blogspot archives, satisfying myself that none of the versions in Google image search are better than the ones I’ve already found. I don’t find the holy grail I’m always looking for (glowing 1200-pixel-wide HD scans of these fragile old cracked wallet prints) but I do find another, wider, less-cracked, less-cropped version of the second one. Did you like the striped hose? That’s good, because now you can see more:

blowjob woman with striped hose

At various times over the years I’ve encountered life coaching advice that boils down to “figure out what you’re good at and really enjoy doing, then figure out how to turn it into a career.” Well, this post right here is what I’m good at. Rummaging through old porn, spotting something unique or special, making connections based on tricky searches and faint memories, finding kinky gems in badly-curated collections (including the biggest dusty porn closet of them of all, the internet), making do with unreliable metadata clues and suggestive image details, putting it all together with an artful crop or an illuminating caption or a half-witty line or a fantasy notion gestured at in an overwrought sentence or two. And it’s all “a waste of time” because at the end, all I’m generating is not-so-deep insights like “hey, these two vintage pics are from the same shoot” or “wow, here’s another picture where you can see her nifty lingerie better”. Maybe some people other than me are amused, but it’s not important to anybody … not even me (most days).

Still — it’s what I’m good at, and I really enjoy doing it. For awhile there (back in the mid-oughts, before the feral-debt bubble burst, when many ordinary people still could still afford to put porn subscriptions on their cheap-and-easy credit cards and porn “piracy” wasn’t yet a fundamental computer-literacy survival skill for everyone who doesn’t golf with Money Boo Boo) it paid the bills. These days? Not so much. With the ten-year ErosBlog anniversary just a couple of weeks away, I find myself wondering something I never expected to wonder. Not “Do I want to keep doing this?” Because — amazingly — I find that I still do. If desire were the only issue, I’d be confident that I could steer ErosBlog through yet another decade. And even if the commercial porn industry were to thrash its last ugly death rattle sometime in the next ten years, there’s enough stuff out there to keep me happily threshing-and-winnowing for a lifetime.

Nope, the only issue for me is, where am I gonna find the computronium? It doesn’t grow on trees, and web traffic doesn’t monetize as automatically as it used to back when we were all hiding from crack-addled refi mortgage brokers trying to sign us up for too-cheap-to-meter debt. The challenge of ErosBlog’s second decade, clearly, is going to be finding ways to keep the server up, and me “playing” at my keyboard.

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10 Years Of Sex Blogging: Best Of ErosBlog 2005

Sunday, August 19th, 2012 -- by Bacchus

It’s been three months since the last “Best of ErosBlog” installment. That was 2004; previously we saw 2003 and 2002. At this rate I might get one or two more done before the genuine 10 year anniversary in October.

2005 went down like this:

We encountered sexual multitasking of a particularly impressive kind, in the form of a gentlemen who could simultaneously bone his woman and peel his figging ginger: Peeling Root Vegetables During Sex
Pac Man’s endless ghost chase got re-imagined as a rough sort of seduction: Pac Man On Viagra
I reluctantly had to abandon my status as the last man in America who thought Halle Berry’s Catwoman movie wasn’t so bad: Halle Berry, Screw You Too
We found an anecdote about the time Catherine McKinnon picked the wrong audience to talk to about the alleged horrors of deep throating: Putting Catherine McKinnon in Her Place
The vocabulary of privilege was not so mainstream back in 2005, or I would have termed this an example of unselfconscious female privilege: The World Is Different For Men And Women
I’m going to slide this in here just because it’s the first time (only time?) I ever had occasion to mention my sister on ErosBlog. Also, nice mental image of Penelope Cruz, duct tape: Marriage: The Shit Changes
This might still be my all-time favorite vintage oral sex picture: Oral Sex For The Happy Woman
I got to thinking just a little bit too hard about the making of a visually-arresting bondage photo: Astonishing Bondage Photo
Making light of alternative-religion sexual practices is generally not something I’d put in my “Best of” category; I do the “ha ha loonies” sometimes, but I’m not sure it’s ever as funny as it seems at the time. Nonetheless, I stand behind this post title as worthy: The Holy Handkerchief of Cum-Saving
It is always dangerous to let other people caption your art: Here Comes Johnny With His Pecker In His Hand
Was it really only seven years ago that Dan Savage had to lay down the law about oral sex? Sometimes I forget just how fast this culture is moving! Oral Sex Is Standard Equipment
Sometimes just finding a thing is the sex blogging victory. Example: this account of anal sex with a coughing wife: Whooping Cough Sex
Speaking of how fast the culture has moved: it was also just seven years ago that a website by an American porn producer that mixed actual bondage and actual sex was a surprising, nearly-unprecedented thing: Sex And Submission
A rare childhood reminiscence from me, in which I recollect having to explain dildos to a grown-up: “What’s A Dildo?”
Of all the things I’ve written on ErosBlog over the years, this disquisition on the ethics of being a porn consumer is perhaps my second-favorite: Evil Porn Werewolf Enslavers Debunked
I argued against the wearing of clothes in bed. It got a LOT of comments: Lame Reasons For Wearing Clothes In Bed
A very vivid image: Four Lips, Two Cherries
The dirtiest picture I’ve ever published on ErosBlog, I think: Dirty Picture
The comment thread on this post was where I first found out just how many people are scared of the idea of female ejaculation and would like to pretend it’s not a thing: Diary of A Squirter
A post about why so many internet comments about erotic photography are body-negative and body-critical: Crapping All Over Beauty

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10 Years Of Sex Blogging: Best Of ErosBlog 2004

Friday, April 20th, 2012 -- by Bacchus

My sporadic series in honor of ErosBlog’s upcoming tenth anniversary continues. We already did 2002 and 2003, now here are some of the “best of” posts from 2004:

“If you don’t love pussy THIS MUCH…” Dumb young men.
Definitely the highlight of 2004 for me was when The Nymph and I had our first visit. I’d been lonely for a long time before that. I don’t know if anybody but me ever got the joke where I linked a .wav file of Gerald Ford saying “Our long national nightmare is over.” But it still makes me grin! The Nymph In My Net: Oh What Fun
Eight dollars very well spent. Funny thing, this handy kitchen tool vanished from our lives quite soon thereafter, and was never seen again! The Nymph In My Net: Ticklish
Remember when sex bloggers were such hot media properties that tabloid reporters were going around offering cash money for tips that would help them identify the anonymous ones? Kind of funny how quaint that seems now, but it wasn’t funny to the (mostly female) bloggers who were the targets, back in the day: Tabloid Sleaze Emails
All these years later and I still can’t think of a better example of why “I read about it on the internet” is such an insufficient justification for trying out a new idea: “Honest, Officer, It Was Marital Advice I Read On A Blog”
Men and women. I think it’s Samuel Johnson I’m plagiarizing from when I say “two species divided by a common language.” I’m moved to steal that joke by this post featuring a woman fretting incomprehensibly over the aesthetics of blowjobs: The Blowjob Letters: A Correspondence With Aliens
Remember that innocent age when it was actually news that the laws designed to protect children were being used to punish and stigmatize them, instead? Sadly, these days this is just routine, it doesn’t even make headlines: 15 Year Old Girl Criminally Charged For Self Abuse
Sometimes guys can be real dicks. But sometimes they just need to be educated: A Basic Rule For Gentlemen
All these years later, I still can’t believe somebody actually complained that “My child’s head literally exploded.” Kid Views Oprah, Head Explodes
Sometimes in writing this blog I’ve managed to be controversial in ways I never intended. For instance: Markets In Sex, Redux
This post is noteworthy because it’s the first appearance of what I’ve since learned to call Bacchus’s First Rule Of The Internet: Why Blogging Services Suck
This post features one of the most memorable comments ever left on ErosBlog: The Price Of Anal Sex
To date, this remains the only pop-fiction discussion of prostate milking that I’ve ever encountered: Half-Cocked Canadian
I think I should have titled this one “Teddy Bears And Hookers.” What I actually called it: Tales From The Nevada Desert

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10 Years Of Sex Blogging: Best Of ErosBlog 2003

Sunday, March 25th, 2012 -- by Bacchus

As I mentioned last time, ErosBlog will be ten years old in October. So I’m rooting through the archives on an occasional basis to pull together some “best of” posts. Today’s list is from 2003, if you can remember that far back:

I think this may have been the first post where I really started defending porn on the basis of its genuine utilitarian benefits: Bacchus on Porn
An object lesson on photoshopped porn: Alas, Fun With Photoshop
This was the post where I learned the vital lesson that no matter how obscure ErosBlog was then or is now, if you say something about a named person on the internet, they may just show up in your comments to remonstrate with you about what you said. Also: never have felt the same about citrus fruit after this. Got Orange Juice?
Was this the first of many many times I linked one of Dan Savage’s Savage Love columns? I think it might be. Also notable for my cynical joke about marriage: Let’s Not Make This Harder Than It Needs To Be
I tried then and I try now to stay away from war and politics, but it’s impossible to talk about sex at any great length without war and politics creeping into the discussion. Early in the Iraq war, I had this to say on the sexualization of artillery: Money Shot.
It’s really a bad idea to let me start tinkering with old song lyrics. Bill Grogan’s Girl
I didn’t say so at the time, but the reason I posted this artwork was that it reminded me strongly of an unattainable girl I had a crush on in college: Veil Dancer
The first dirty joke I both heard and comprehended back when I was just a sprout. Illustrated: What’s Better Than Two Roses On A Piano?
Sex news you can actually use! If you’re flexible enough, that is: Interview With An Autofellator
This may be the first post in which I started failing to conceal my somewhat radical views on the toxicity of the traditional cubical-rat wage economy: Work Is The Curse Of The Drinking Class
I’m still a little reticent by modern sex blogging standards, but in the early days of this blog I revealed astonishingly little about my own thinking on sexual matters. Here’s an early departure from that policy: Olfactory Delights
Why I hate warning pages, adult verification check-the-box traps, and anything else that interferes with the smooth operation of hyperlinking technology. Yeah, it’s a little bit political. THIS Is The Culture War?
One of my very rare forays into the provision of safer sex information, along with the reason why they are so rare: Soon To Be A Daddy
How long have I hated the “NSFW” label? Forever: Safe To Cuddle
This is still one of the best spam emails I ever got: Found Poetry
The dirtiest little yellow animated smile icon I ever saw. All these years later, yup it still is: Raunchiest Smiley Ever
There were other memorable posts in 2003, but none more momentous. Here’s the very first post on ErosBlog mentioning The Nymph, with whom I was then carrying out a nascent internet romance via email and ICQ. At the time of this post there had been four phone calls. Less than four months later, we were living together. Today? Still together, still very happy with each other. Never let anybody tell you that you can’t find true love over the internet! The Nymph In My Net: Beginnings
For as long as I’ve been sex blogging, the gender imbalance among sex bloggers has been noticeable. Here’s one theory about it: Men And Sex Blogs

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10 Years Of Sex Blogging: Best Of ErosBlog 2002

10 Years Of Sex Blogging: Best Of ErosBlog 2002

Friday, February 10th, 2012 -- by Bacchus

It has suddenly dawned on me that by early next October, ErosBlog will have been up for a full ten years. There most likely will not be a parade.

However, I did think it might be fun, from time to time as the year progresses, to dip into the most ancient archives and pull out a few of the more interesting posts. There’s no specific schedule for this; we’ll just see how it goes.

Herewith, some fun posts from 2002:

Inaugurating my tradition of shamelessly reblogging sexy excerpts from other blogs was a bit by Anil Dash explaining what fancy hand-held shower nozzles are really for: Because Then She Won’t USE It
A very dirty animated cartoon, one of the first .gifs to make it onto ErosBlog: And Making Sure It Stays Clean
A fun recipe for the ultimate aphrodisiac for married women, concluding with a jokey flourish: Sex Potion #9.
Perhaps ErosBlog’s first foray into celebrity gossip, in the form of a press acount about the Spice Girl who enjoyed a good sex spanking: Spanking A Spice Girl For Jesus
Who can forget the words of the Prophet Mohammed (a serious true quote as far as I could tell at the time, but subject as always to the perils of translation) approving of rear-entry sex as long as it wasn’t up the butt: From Behind, But In The Front
The first serious rant on ErosBlog, I do believe: Bardex — The Rectal Catheters For Assholes
The unforgettable story of a wife who put candy in her pussy, and the husband who didn’t go in after it: “Husband, A Towel! Lickety-Split!“
The first discussion of a male sex toy on ErosBlog: The Fleshlight: Better Living Through Technology
Still the hilariously worst book title ever, after all these years: The Dangers Of Self-Publishing
My first effort to grapple with the ethics of blogging about stories that involve real world sexual atrocity (like Uday Hussein and his pony girls) but which also contain elements of what I’d call fetish fuel nowadays (though I didn’t have the phrase back in 2002): The Uses Of Pornography
And finally for now, some good clean dirty fun, in the form of a link to the slashy notional diaries of LoTR characters: I’ll Never Look At Carrots The Same Way Again

I’m so glad nobody can make me cough up a list of the early blog posts that I’m the most sheepish about…

6 Sexy Comments »

Brutally Honest Talk From A Married Man

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012 -- by Bacchus

Sometimes you find unexpected stuff in unexpected places. I happened to follow a link to a random spanking blog and there I found a man blogging in an unexpectedly raw way about his mortality and his marriage:

The years seem to get shorter and pass with frightening regularity. When I look back and think that my time ahead is much smaller than those behind; just take a look at my butt that proves it. So to sum up I have been feeling that my days are numbered and if I am going to do anything sooner would be better than later.

Then he shares a vivid spanking fantasy, but when he gets to the part where he checks to see if the woman he’s spanking is aroused:

At this point I think that I am straying into forbidden territory. I have been married for 14 years and have vowed that I would keep certain promises. I do not remember anywhere in that contract that would forbid me from spanking a pretty bottom. If my handiwork left my friend even slightly aroused and or excited this could be a problem. I have to admit that aroused may be pushing it a bit, at this time I would be happy if she were amused or even a little irritated.

I really believe that sex and spanking go together very nicely, you know like a horse and carriage, but I did sign on for monogamy. I did not agree to be celibate and if the only choice I have is celibacy or cheating well I have had enough of celibacy.

…

I like to believe that I have a few good years left in me, maybe more. For too many years now I have been closed to any possibilities. I even negotiated this blog. My wife thought that it might just increase my “unnatural desires”. She may have been right about that, not the unnatural part but by writing and reading posts from like minded people I am feeling that there are more possibilities and I am not finished yet.

For what it’s worth, my own years as a sex blogger have convinced me that, yes, reading and writing in a community of like-minded sex-positive people does tend to alter our views of sexuality, making us much more comfortable with our own desires and kinks, and confirming our innate sense that we’re good enough and smart enough and sexually likable enough that we not only deserve, but can get and are righteous to expect, sexual fulfillment in life. In my view, a spouse who is eager to preserve a marriage but determined to remain sexually ungenerous (or who is, to put it Dan Savage’s way, unwilling to be “good, giving, and game“) should indeed be concerned that sex blogging by the other party might eventually undermine this ambition.

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Sex Blog Posts From Twitterland

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 -- by Bacchus

Whatever I was expecting from my new Twitter account, I can tell you truly, I did not really anticipate it would be a fertile source of answers for that age-old question: What should I blog about today?

And yet, this morning in my Twitter stream I found the following, any one of which I could churn into a full blog post on a slow day:

@violetblue asking “wondering: what sex toy changed your life?” My flip-sounding answer (but it’s true!): “WordPress. (And its ancestors.)” The beauty of Twitter is that I can just say that and let people unpack it for themselves, whereas if I said it here, I’d need eighteen paragraphs of exposition. But @MollyRen has part of it: “Sex blogs changed my life. For the 1st time I found out what people were *really* doing, met awesome people through them.”
@mistressmatisse linking to her Stranger column about shooting for Kink.com The excellent quote I would have used to pad a link-post about this item:

Before we began shooting, I asked Bobbi about her limits. She eyed me a little warily. “Don’t slap me in the face–someone dislocated my jaw that way. And don’t call me a stupid whore or spit in my face.”

I was slightly taken aback. It isn’t that I’ve never done those things. (Except the “stupid whore” part; I don’t like that brand of verbal humiliation.) But I wouldn’t do them to someone I just met unless he or she very specifically asked for that. I suppose it’s different in porn, but I assured her that wasn’t my style of domination.

So Bobbi and I got along just fine.
@rollertrain (Rollertrain! I’ve missed you terribly since you left us for art school and moved to a not-many-words PG-13 Tumblr…) passing along a link that informed me of a woman who died after elective buttock-enhancement surgery.
@MollyRen again, this time her profile link: “Stuffies: A blog about food and sex“. Leading directly to a question for Faustus: Do you suppose feederism, with its sometimes interest in controlling body size/shape in a real and concrete way, has anything in common with the fantastical shrinking women and inflation fantasies you’ve blogged about? (And, yes, I’m aware of the awkwardness of specifying “fantastical fantasies” — but how else to contrast a fantasy that cannot come true, from the great many achievable ones?)

All that hit me inside of ninety seconds, whilst I was still blinking the sleep from my eyes. My head, it’s swimming I tell you!

8 Sexy Comments »

Bacchus On Twitter

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 -- by Bacchus

I scoffed. I balked. I dug in my heels like a crochety old person. Kids these days, and their newfangled fads. It will never amount to anything, I said. Waste of my time. If I wanted to send funny little short messages, I’d have texting enabled on my cell phone. Blah blah blah.

Meanwhile, the world kept right on changing without me.

Slow I may be, but I am finally figuring it out: people I find interesting are having conversations I want to know about, and they’re doing it on Twitter.

So, here goes. My Twitter name is: ErosBlogBacchus.

Better late than never, eh?

9 Sexy Comments »

Porn, Described

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 -- by Bacchus

Looking at porn is one thing. But, to state the obvious, porn is pictures, commercial pictures. Everybody who makes porn wants to sell it. Specifically, they want to sell it on the internet. Which means they need words about their pictures.

What’s strange is the way people write, commercially, about their pictures. Every nude is a “scorching hot teen beauty!” or a “filthy cum-covered nasty slut”. Every penetration is a deep dicking, every orgasm a screaming fountain of some hyperbolized fluid or other. It’s rare to find anybody who writes honestly and descriptively about erotic imagery.

It is so rare, in fact, that after seven years of sex blogging I sometimes fantasize about creating a porn blog or review site that allows people to market their own stuff, but only to the extent that their posts can survive some sort of Slashdot-style community moderation on the sole criterion of honest and non-hyperbolic descriptivity. The trouble is, I’m not sure anybody would participate.

Sometimes, I’ll even catch myself imagining what bits of porn — especially in some of its more specialized or unusual forms — would sound like if neutrally and fairly described, in sentences of standard English, without emphatic punctuation.

An unusual post on Bondage Blog triggered my lastest “porn, described” reverie. The linked gallery contains the following descriptive prose, mostly in all caps before I standardized it:

“Gorgeous babes and teens bound, tied, gagged, probed and submissively serving their master and misstresses [sic]. Real bondage. Real torture. Real pain. Real tears. Click here for more erotic fetish action! Submissive slaves bound in rope, chains, and leather. Domination. Discipline. Sadism. Humiliation. Hard sex.”

The picture displayed on Bondage Blog? Here’s my best shot:

A nude woman with a shaved head (think Natalie Portman in V for Vendetta) is tied with rope, in a squatting position, inside what looks like a wrought-iron basket. The basket, and she, are on top of a bale of hay, next to a ladder with a rusty chain hanging from it. She’s looking nervously at a reasonably-buff man wearing leather pants. He’s approaching her, and in his left hand is an old-fashioned wooden blueberry-picking scoop with metal tines.

I know my description wouldn’t sell porn the way “bound, tied, gagged, probed” presumably does. But I’ve got some sort of defiant, lingering attachment to the idea that words ought to be deployed usefully. Maybe a list of fetish-triggering words is useful in the sense that it encourages more credit cards to be deployed, but in the sense of actually painting a useful mental picture of the thing described, it’s full of fail.

Even more interesting is the fact that nobody sees the same things when they look at a porn picture. How would you describe our basket girl?

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Mark Davis Picks On The Girl With The Shaved Head

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Porn Studies 101

Sunday, February 15th, 2009 -- by Bacchus

Although I have it as a policy not to blog for the boring purpose of explaining or apologizing for my frequent lapses in blogging, I don’t mind saying the paltry and image-heavy posts I’ve made this past week are in part due to a standard and crashingly dull winter cold. When I’m zonked on cold meds, I tend to play lots of computer games and neglect my long-suffering ErosBlog readers, or fob off on you various barely-explained images from my hard drive.

That said, last night I took a TV break, during which I watched D.L. Hughley interview some nominally-hip pastor from Seattle who is said to preach good sex (for married people only) from his pulpit. Of course, when D.L. turned to topic to porn, we got a concerned face and a hasty “D.L., porn’s all bad” or some similar short dismissive statement.

Thus it was with great glee that I learned, upon waking up this morning, that ErosBlog readers will soon (it should be up within an hour) be able to read another Sunday Sermon in defense of porn from our new guest blogger Faustus. This one has … wait for it … cat girls!

Are you all enjoying these sermons as much as I am?

Beware EdenFantasys.com

Friday, October 24th, 2008 -- by Bacchus

If you’re a regular sex blog reader or writer, you’re probably aware of EdenFantasys.com (Eden Fantasys). They’re one of the many companies competing for your internet sex toy dollar, and they are more prominent than many because they spread a fair amount of money (and sex toys) around the blogging community in exchange for reviews and attention. They never impressed me much — despite advertising briefly on ErosBlog — because their store front and inventory always seemed hopelessly “more of the same” to me, with nothing to distinguish the brand. But, probably, that’s just me.

One of the smart things they did was to hire AAG (formerly “Always Aroused Girl”), whose sex blogger credentials and contacts were (and are) very good, to do PR and outreach for them. And she did it well.

The not smart thing? When their business relationship with her went sour, they refused, she says, to pay her for work performed. Apparently they forgot the first rule of business, which is that your PR professional remains a PR professional even after she stops being your PR professional.

My own many years of doing business over the internet have taught me something that serious businessmen already knew — namely, that business is all about trust, and especially about character. I’ve quoted J.P. Morgan before: “A man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom.” Thus, in my opinion, a person, or a company, that fails to resolve its business disputes on the labor side, is also the sort of outfit that can’t be trusted to fairly resolve its disputes on the customer side. Whatever the details of AAG’s dispute with EdenFantasys.com, I know her well enough to know that she’s not unreasonable. If they failed to resolve their dispute with her, I personally don’t trust them to resolve their dispute with you, if you should be unhappy with your results after playing the big internet gambling game that is forking over your credit card and ordering merchandise from Hera-only-knows-where.

Hence, this warning.

There are plenty of sex toy stores on the internet. You don’t need to take a risk on an outfit that treats its contract employees unfairly.

One final note: Eden Fantasys is currently sending out spammy form letters to sex bloggers, seeking to arrange link exchanges, toy reviews, and the like. If you get (or have gotten) any of these, you might consider responding with a suggestion that they resolve their dispute with AAG. I’m sure she would appreciate the support.

14 Sexy Comments »

A Fetish For Commitment

Friday, May 9th, 2008 -- by Bacchus

I’ve commented before that anything can be a fetish, and that one of the things I like best about sex blogging is reading people try to explain why certain things turn them on, that we’d not usually expect would do so. Needless to say, this ring fingering thing from Chelsea at Pretty Dumb Things made my day:

Marriage is a contract that I may never make, and yet I like being fingered by men with wedding rings. It’s not that I can feel the ring. Wedding rings tend toward the slim and the flat. I’ve never had the experienced the interior wriggling of a finger with a ring rococo as Liberace’s , a skull bauble thick as Keith Richard’s, a chunk of metal clunky as Robert Lee Morris’s Superman. The rings that have been inside me have been modest, prudent, utilitarian bands signaling commitment.

There have been three of them in reality and one in my imagination.

…

Clearly, when the finger is diddling me, I can’t see the ring. I can’t even feel the ring. So the pleasure of the ring comes neither from the visual nor from the sensual. It’s a purely imaginative power. It’s a pleasure that rests in the seat of all pleasure–my pinky-grey and corrugated brain.

It’s difficult for me to put my finger on the exact spot of that imaginary pleasure. I would be remiss if I didn’t admit that part is powered by the shock of the illicit thrill, if indeed the finger belonging to the man fingering me is infidel. Like almost every other human, I do feel pleasure in transgression, and crossing this boundary, like all the strange others that for one reason or another give me the good down-low tingle, nudges whatever purely physical pleasure there is into electrically-charged territory. But the illicitness isn’t it in and of itself.

I know that it’s not because the man, the imagined man, the one without the ring, the one whose ring I imagined and in imagining it found great delight, was Donny, my now-X and then erstwhile fiancé. It was his imagined not-ring that prodded me to gyrate indecorously one sunny August afternoon, his naked fingers twisting and turning inside me. My mind furnished his finger with a ring. It bedighted his third finger on his left hand with a ring, and though neither the ring nor even possibly that exact finger was rubbing the walls of my pussy like a magic lamp, it was real enough to me, and I came from the concept as much as from the reality.

Which all leads me to believe it’s not the cheating that I like. It’s the abstract concept of commitment. It’s the symbolism of the ring, this piece of metal that our culture uses to denote those of us who have made a pact with another human from those of us who haven’t. It doesn’t matter whether the man has committed to me–though clearly my fetishization of the ring in general and my somatic response to Donny’s fictive ring in specific suggests that a commitment to me would be ideal–it’s that this man has committed, for good, bad, or ugly to someone.

It’s all very strange, though. Just as a gentlemen is advised to remove his socks before sexual congress with a woman, wouldn’t the usual rules of etiquette demand that he remove his wedding ring before fingering a woman not his wife? I’m not sure Emily Post ever covered that nuance.

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Porn Versus Activism In The Troll Ecosystem

Sunday, March 9th, 2008 -- by Bacchus

Just in case you missed it, Violet Blue did a talk at the big Etech 2008 shindig, a talk that ranges widely across the big topic of sexual identity online and how we construct it, shape it, and especially, defend it (and ourselves, where there’s a difference) from online trolls, stalkers, and haters of all sorts. Here’s Violet Blue about her talk, here’s the transcript.

It’s juicy chewy idea-rich media, the sort of thing that makes me worry about the decline in printed magazines, because I like to buy printed magazines with this sort of info-dense article in them (Wired used to do a lot of this) to read when I’m traveling and have a lot of time to read and think. Just pulling out a random useful and true paragraph:

I’ve been a blogger and occasional full-time editor at Fleshbot.com almost since its inception, a job when full time requires me to scour the internets for explicit sexual content of reasonable quality. We endeavor to cover a wide range of sexual expression and all genders and orientations; one of our regular features is the Sex Blog Roundup. When I did it weekly, I had upwards of 300 text-only sex blogs written by individuals worldwide in my RSS reader — outside the 50 or so usual suspects of variety sex blogs, mainstream media news, linkdumps and sex news blogs. Every week I’d have to cull for new blogs to add to my feeds because invariably a handful of sex bloggers who were blogging “anonymously” had to quit blogging — meaning they were for one reason or another, no longer anonymous. It was such a regular occurrence I developed a snarky attitude toward the anonymous sex blogger, even though they often offered up the juiciest and most explicit posts about sex. Time and again, they are a sure bet for being outed or discovered, have the shortest life span, and are the least reliable for following as a human narrative.

(That paragraph is also nostalgic for me, because I compiled the first of Fleshbot’s Sex Blog Roundups, and immensely enjoyed doing them until I ran out of time to keep up with the extra work. Sadly, I don’t think I understood the full power of RSS back then, or I might be doing them yet.)

One thing that struck me about Violet’s talk, however, was that it describes a dangerous-sounding online world for sex bloggers, full of hatred and weird jealousies and stalker trolls and malevolent creeps, so much so that she’s got an entire array of procedures and tactics for defending herself and returning the fight to her attackers. And that’s bizarre to me; in more the five years of blogging, the worst I’ve seen from that list is ranting commenters who are deeply threatened by a world — the world I advocate — in which no sexuality is condemned or forcibly closeted or judged by any standard other than who gets hurt. Death threats she gets? It’s been months since I so much as got one of those “you’re going to burn in hell” invitations to attend church services.

So, why the difference? I trust Violet innately — as far as I’m concerned, she’s one of the most honest voices on the Internet — so she’s not exaggerating or being oversensitive or doing anything else from the “there there, little lady, don’t be hysterical” laundry list of excuses for men to ignore surprising and unwelcome female narratives. Of course, she is a woman and I’m not. And equally of course, she’s got ten thousand times more skin in the game, literally and figuratively. She doesn’t use a pseudonym, she’s active in print and broadcast media, she lives and works visibly in a vital and media-connected city, she talks about her real and actual life, she gives people handles by which to grab for her, and she bares experiences online that actually matter to her, stuff her enemies can use against her.

Whereas, I sit in my undisclosed location in Red-State America and upload an endless stream of pointers to, and scanty commentary on, sexually entertaining stuff that’s happening somewhere else in the vast internet information ecology. When I started this blog, I didn’t even have a personal sex life to blog about. I was temporarily unemployed and sitting in a studio apartment sharing badly microwaved nachos with an unsympathetic parrot who perched on my shoulder and chewed holes in my undershirt while I blogged. (I know that sounds sad, but I was actually enjoying life quite a lot, apart from the “no girlfriend” thing.) By the time I fell in with The Nymph, I was comfortable with my pattern; sex blogging is something I do about other people, using information they’ve already made public. It makes things much safer and more comfortable, and (combined with the male versus female thing) explains a great deal of the difference between Violet’s and my experiences of the sex-blogging life.

So, that’s a lot of the explanation, but is it all of it? While pondering the matter, and reading reactions to Violet’s talk, I found Ethan Zuckerman’s blog and especially, his notes from his own Etech talk on The Cute Cat Theory Of Digital Activism. He was apparently at Tripod back in those dark ages where most folks needed a service like Tripod in order to “have a web page”, and he formulated the theory that

Any sufficiently advanced read/write technology will get used for two purposes: pornography and activism. Porn is a weak test for the success of participatory media – it’s like tapping a mike and asking, “Is it on?” If you’re not getting porn in your system, it doesn’t work. Activism is a stronger test – if activists are using your tools, it’s a pretty good indication that your tools are useful and usable.

Reading that paragraph was an “ah-ha!” moment for me. Because another huge difference between Violet and me is that, although we are both sex bloggers by any reasonable definition, I’m more of a pornographer and she’s more of an activist.

We both do stuff that blurs the lines, of course; sometimes I make posts that have at least a whiff of activist sentiment in them, and often she links to pretty pr0n pictures. But at any given blogging moment, my first thought is “will this amuse, entertain, or turn somebody on?” And, while I can’t speak for what happens in Violet’s thoughts, she’s clearly got causes — like sex education, to name just one — that animate and drive her blogging, her published writing, her public appearances, whole swathes of her professional life.

Perversely, I think her activism makes her sex blogging even more interesting and entertaining than my detached approach, so it’s not like there’s a sharp division between entertainer and activist. It’s just that — and this is the not-very-startling hypothesis you’ve waded through many long paragraphs to hear about — activists are more threatening than entertainers. They upset more apple carts, gore more oxen, get more done, make more enemies because they threat more status quos. Activists piss people off. Their fans and enemies alike are more animated and engaged.

And that, maybe, is why Violet Blue needs police contacts at the SFPD, while I make do with a lightly tweaked comment moderation plugin for my WordPress install.

9 Sexy Comments »

George Clooney’s Sex Pillow

Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 -- by Bacchus

george clooney with a liberator sex ramp

Yup, that’s universal heart-throb (well, hearts are at least on the throb list) George Clooney carrying a Liberator Wedge on the set of a new movie. Talk about Liberator product placement!

(Cue an entire legion of ladies simpering “He can place his product anywhere he wants as far as I’m concerned!”)

Picture (and all the details) from here.

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Five Candles

Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 -- by Bacchus

Ladies and gentlemen and faithful readers and visitors, I’m pleased to announce that today marks the fifth anniversary of ErosBlog’s first post.

I’m rather proud to have been in continuous publication for half a decade. 1,853 posts spread over 1,825 days averages to 1.015 posts per day. Of course it wasn’t that regular — there are a couple of posting gaps that stretch close to a month in length. But a daily post has always been the goal, and if I never managed that much, I’ll settle for that 1.015 posts-per-day average.

When I started this thing, internet diaries had been around for at least as long as the web, and some of them (especially the BDSM lifestyle ones) had a lot of adult content. Blogs (known by that name, or by its then-still-in-use linguistic ancestor, “weblogs”) were a few years old, but had exploded in popularity and visibility just in the previous year. Sex blogs — as a genre — were unheard of. There was Daze Reader, there was World Sex News, there was BJ’s Gay Porno-Crazed Ramblings. There were pretty pictures every day at Sensual Liberation Army and some other places. Lots of proto-sex-blogs, but none that had adopted that characterization of themselves. So, as far as I know, Eros Blog was the first internet thing to claim that description.

I can’t claim to have invented the idea of a sex blog — whomever registered sexblog.com, before I tried to, can prove that — and I can’t claim to have invented the act of sex blogging, which was all over LiveJournal before I ever heard of blogging. But I think I was the first person, to think of it, do it, and call it by the name.

One possible exception — a sex blogger who was there before me by a few months, doing what I’d consider the first recognizable sex blog and conceptualizing her work in roughly that way, was Susannah Breslin. She did a blog called The Reverse Cowgirl, she was well connected with web heavyweights and early blogging gurus, and she blogged pretty exclusively about sex and culture. It was nice stuff, she was kind enough to link me early, but I simply cannot remember if she ever called her project a sex blog. She might have; certainly she could have, because that’s what it was.

Unfortunately it was from Susannah that I first learned to hate the destruction wrought by blog vandalism. She was linked all over the web, she was getting a lot of media attention, and then one day without a word of explanation her blog was gone and links all over the blogosphere were 404ing. Then a while later she had another project up, very artistic and overdesigned but having many bloglike features; it too vanished. After that I lost track, but there have been more; she’s got another “Reverse Cowgirl” blog going at the moment, with archives going all the way back to 2006, but not a single link to any of her earlier projects (presumably because they are all gone). I owe Susannah a considerable debt for inspiration and early traffic, but she’s also the one who taught me to be wary of folks who treat the web like a rented space for temporary performance art.

So! Five years. Two hosts. Three blog software platforms. At least half a dozen different templates. A metric buttload of spam and raging idiocy moderated out of the comments. Two web interviews, perhaps half a dozen press inquiries (ignored because I still enjoy psuedonymous posting). One hell of a lot of fun.

One of the fun things for me is to look at how my posts (and me) have changed over five years. When I started, writing about sexual stuff was very hard for me (even in my usual detached “look at those people over there and what they say they are doing” style). I was stilted and awkward. I was afraid that to write about a thing meant people would think I liked it. Worse yet, I cared about that, and would include horrid little disclaimers. Bacchus wrote about Bacchus in the third person for eight long months. I remain indebted to Eugene Volokh for providing me, a day too late, with the vocabulary word for that literary atrocity. Thanks to him, I now understand that I Am No Longer An Illeist.

As for me, when I started this blog I was single, lonely, and underemployed by my own choice due to increasing disillusionment with my profession (a little) and with the demands of the job culture (a lot). Now I’ve got The Nymph, we’re ridiculously happy together, and my adult web projects support me better than a job ever did, with me working only when it suits me. And it does suit me! I used to read in the business magazines about successful power suit types who would wake up in the morning full of enthusiasm for getting into the office to do whatever they did, and I’d boggle at that alien worldview. Now, I wake up in the morning, often as not, with an idea for tweaking or improving one of my websites, and I’m full of enthusiasm for the idea of getting up and tinkering with it. Life has never been better.

I couldn’t hope to thank properly all the other bloggers who deserve it, for providing me with support, encouragement, linkage, ideas, material, inspiration… but to list even the first fraction of them would require listing half my blog roll. All I can say is, thanks to you all. And thanks — even more thanks! — to the thousands of loyal readers who come back every day to see my blather and follow my links.

I owe special thanks to my regular guest blogger, Aphrodite, who has been backing me up and providing the woman’s touch around here for more than three years. Although her posts have never been frequent, she’s provided considerable invisible assistance, especially with comment spam filtering before we got it as automated as it tends to be today. I remain delighted and honored to have her help.

What about the future? Will there be a “Ten Candles” post on October 3, 2012?

At the speed technology, culture, and politics are changing in this crazy world, it’s hard to know for sure, but I truly do hope so! I love doing this blog and I can’t imagine stopping voluntarily. Five years ago it was still possible to claim that blogs were a fad. Five years from now, it’s possible we’ll all be considered impossibly old-fashioned, like paper magazines and network television and phones that plug into the wall. But this is about the sex, baby! And people don’t get bored with that, so I should still have an audience.

I’ll conclude with a list of some of my forgotten favorites — an even dozen sex blog posts I enjoyed writing and still enjoy reading, posts that seemed important to me, or posts that other people seemed particularly to enjoy.

31 Sexy Comments »

Perverted Sex Story, Real Life Version

Thursday, September 27th, 2007 -- by Bacchus

In the movies and the stories and the fantasies, if you order up a stranger off the internet for perverted sex, and meet for perverted sex, then the story is about perverted sex. Predictably, and sometimes boringly, so.

What I love about sex blogging is that down here on earth in real life, sometimes other stuff happens too, which makes for a more varied and interesting narrative.

For instance, when Bitchy Jones whistled up a submissive feller off the internet so she could do mean stuff to him, there was indeed some perverted sex, but not without a hitch you’ll never see in a dirty movie:

Just before Jack was due to arrive one of my next door neighbours came and told me they had seen my cat limping in the street. I went out to look for cat but there was no sign. I called Pan in a panic. I told him to turn around and come home so he could care for cat. It started to rain. I was standing in the street looking for the cat when Jack arrived.

Jack was all, ‘Hey are you standing in the street waiting for me?‘ And also all, ‘Hey, here I am. I have arrived for perverted sex.‘

And I was all, ‘No. Perverted sex is canceled. We must find lost injured cat ZOMGZ!‘

We found the cat. (Sorry if that stressed you — I probably should have warned at the top for mild cat peril.) I called Pan and told him I thought the cat would be okay until morning and that he should not come home after all.

Then Jack cooked. I kissed him quite a lot — endangering cooking. We did some painful things too. (Painful for him.) Some naked things. (Naked for him.) Some kneeling things. (Kneeling… (oh, get with it.))

I don’t know if his tongue stud felt so very different on my cunt — but on my nipples it was incredible. Bliss of death.

I love it. “Perverted sex is canceled!”

Definitely About The Sex

Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 -- by Bacchus

I suppose it’s possible that after almost five solid years of sex blogging, I tilt too much toward novelty and shock in selecting new material to blog about. Not that sex ever gets boring, but the blogging fingers can get jaded. Whatever the topic, didn’t I already write a post about that? Or three of ’em?

For whatever reason, I’m definitely still finding novelty in the transsexual porn from TS Seduction. Old fashioned “tranny porn” (conceived and presented as a freak show, with transsexuals as the freaks) is hardly novel, but it was always presented with the emphasis on “ZOMG, freaks having sex!” and never a care in the world paid to whether the sex was hot sex.

Of course we expect (and get) better from a Kink.com franchise. We see models like this, and we want to see some sex:

Mel Voguel and Poax Lenehan

Of course, without some advance warning we wouldn’t necessarily expect to see those two sucking each other’s dicks, but when it happens, at least it looks like they mean it. And if that’s not sex as Bill Clinton would define it, surely this is:

Poax Lenehan and Mel Voguel

Similar Sex Blogging:

4 Sexy Comments »

Marketing Blogs That Don’t Suck

Monday, June 25th, 2007 -- by Bacchus

A while back I got a very nice email from the “E-Marketing Manager” for Liberator.com (the folks who make those wedge-shaped sex pillows and a fair few other nifty looking items.) The email went like this:

Bacchus,

We at Liberator.com are doing our best to provide our readers with more content, and a better connection to our product. We are beta testing a blog currently. I came across you amazing blog while doing some research, and wanted your input. You seem to have a great community of bloggers linking to each other. How would I get my blog in with all of the other wonderful sites? I look forward to speaking with you, and wish you all the best in the development and growth of your site.

It’s a big question on a hard subject with no easy answers. None that I have, anyway. But opinions, those I am not short of. So I wrote back an email that went pretty much like this:

I’ll have to be honest with you, you’ve got a tough row to hoe. Starting up a marketing blog and making it human and interesting enough to get natural and organic (and free) links from the blog community is really, really hard. Indeed, I’d say it’s next to impossible. I’ve seen dozens of attempts in the five years I’ve been sex blogging, and most of them have been horrid…and doomed.

I’ve got a lot of info for you on the problems and pitfalls, rather less so on how to make it work. Because it’s an interesting question, I’m going to go into it in some detail. You get what amounts to free consulting work from me. In return, I get a blog post out of it. Fair?

Let’s start with the pitfalls. First of all, you’re just getting started at a time when most bloggers (and especially, most bloggers on sexual themes, who blog in an industry awash with advertising dollars) have become acutely aware that so-called “traffic of good intent” has enormous economic value. Your letter suggests that you are starting a blog in the hope of getting some of that valuable traffic for free. Nobody blames you for hoping, but nobody’s going to feel particularly inclined to just give away valuable traffic that — because you’re in the business of selling things for fairly big chunks of change — you might reasonably be expected to purchase.

As an added complication, some bloggers have powerful aversions to participating in the advertising market that circles and stalks their traffic of good intent. Reasons differ, but they usually add up to some sort of profit-averse “blogging should be unsullied by filthy lucre” anti-capitalist vision of what their blog is for. These people won’t refuse to link to you because they want value for their traffic; they’ll refuse to link to you because they don’t want to help you make a profit. So they tend to be a tougher nut to crack even than the bloggers who have banner space for sale.

Second, linking to marketing blogs is hard, because marketing blogs tend to suck. They suck for various reasons, often recombined uncreatively in newly horrifying ways. For example, they can suck because the authors usually are, first and foremost, marketers who haven’t yet gotten on the Clue Train. If the marketing blog is a one-way broadcast, talking to the “customers” instead of talking with the readers, it will suck. More to the point, it will be boring, and nobody will link to it or read it.

Or, marketing blogs can suck because they don’t participate in the blogging community. The vast majority of marketing blogs don’t link to other blogs. Or, if they do, they limit themselves to carefully-negotiated link exchanges. They almost never link to competitors, the leading blogs in the industry, or any of the other resources likely to be of interest to potential customers. A good blog functions almost like a mini-portal, linking generously outward so that readers come to rely on the page as a place to start surfing. “I’ll start there, and if there is no new post, I’ll find something in the links to read while I finish my sandwich.”

Or, and this is common, they can suck because they only talk about one thing (the product). Unless you’ve got a product with a huge and passionate community, your one-note one-product blog will be boring as hell.

Worse yet, the poor marketing sod (who is often, in these days of small business, also the owner / proprietor) will run out of interesting things to say about the product. Which quickly leads to the next knell of doom for any blog: lack of frequent and regular posts. I would guess that, as a rule, a reader who visits a blog on three different days without finding a new post is a reader you’ll never see again. Very few marketing blogs can meet that hurdle.

So that’s a big kettle of wet blankets. Now that I’ve spoiled your fun, what is to be done about it?

1) Hire a blogger. Seriously. Blogging is not as easy as it looks. If the person writing your marketing blog does not already have a successful blog that’s been up and attracting consistent traffic for at least two years, get a different person. Pay them, with real and actual money. Do this right and they will be a profit center, not a cost center. The world is full of starving bloggers who would much prefer to blog for a living than to do whatever it is they do for a day job. You can find somebody who works cheap. Underemployed sex writers are not hard to find. Most of them even have blogs you can check out first.

2) Buy blog links. If a blogger has an advertising offer, try it out. Don’t track this traffic for sales or conversions, that’s not why you’re buying it. Just measure the percentage of the traffic that bookmarks your blog. If the percentage is low, improve your blog. If it doesn’t go up, buy better traffic. As they say on Making Light, iterate.

3) Flatter and Bribe. Where you don’t buy, try the heady combination of flattery and bribery. You can sometimes bribe your way into a link using nothing but sincere flattery plus traffic. Find a new but stylish sex blogger, quote and say something nice about one of their posts, and give them a permanent link in your blogroll. Often this is all it takes to get another good incoming link. But you have to mean it. People despise insincere flattery from marketers. And yes, it’s obvious when it happens.

(Er, you do have a blogroll, yes? No? BZZZT. Game over, return to the beginning and start over.)

4) Send Loot. When flattery and traffic are not enough, go with your strength: loot. You sell loot by the box car load, so use what you know. Send people samples of the stuff you sell. You do sell something people want, right? And it’s expensive, right? (But, not so expensive for you, because you bought it wholesale.) So send out some loot! (Email first to ask about safely discreet delivery addresses.) When the loot from you arrives in a discreet box via UPS, that will impress a lot of bloggers. If it’s good loot, it will impress them favorably. (If your loot sucks, it means your business is doomed, so we’ll assume it doesn’t suck.) Ninety percent of the time, they’ll feel compelled to mention you and your loot on their blog. Some of those mentions will be intensely favorable, because you’ve just made a new friend. You just got a nice link for a wholesale-priced one-time cost. However, beware: you can’t afford to even hint that you expect or demand a link or a writeup in return for the stuff. Review stuff doesn’t work like that. You cast it forth, like bread upon the waters, and if you’ve picked your targets carefully, they’ll be so thrilled they will not be able to wait to write about your product.

5) Blog Strongly, Market Subtly. Forget everything you ever learned about old-school hard-sell print marketing. Build a blog first. Sneak the marketing in later. Be subtle. No, much more subtle than that. Imagine a first time reader being asked about your blog. “What is it about?” If they answer “that foam wedge sex furniture” you’re screwed. You were too focused, you will be too boring for the long haul. Any other answer is acceptable; something like “all kinds of neat sexy stuff, it’s hard to say exactly” is ideal. “All kinds of neat sexy stuff, I think it’s by the folks who make those Liberator sex pillows, but it’s not just about that” you have scored two touchdowns and you may schedule a righteous celebration with strippers and vodka and free popcorn for everybody on your team.

6) Participate In The Community. Finally, don’t forget to be part of the blogging community that you want traffic from. I’ve mentioned that you have to have a blogroll. (Believe it or not, a huge percentage of marketing blogs skip this step, and then wonder why they never get any links. Most links come with at least the hope of reciprocation; if that hope is lost, the links don’t come.) Blogroll: have it, use it. Don’t just blog about your product; do what bloggers do, which is read other blogs and quote (with links and approving commentary) the best bits. That’s also an easy way to jack up the quality of your own blog, so where is the downside?

It was my intention at this point in the email to apologize for not providing you with a few good examples of how to do an adult marketing blog. I was going to explain that I didn’t know of any good examples, and then append a short list of “the best of the bad examples” — a few marketing blogs that don’t suck, and that are getting it almost, but not quite perfectly, right. However, in looking over my examples, I discovered that one of them had graduated (by improving its content-to-marketing-copy ratio) into a genuine “good example” worth linking to for its sex blog content alone. (So I added my link, and then finished this email.)

Best of luck with your blog —

Bacchus from ErosBlog

Good Example:

Good Vibes Blog by the Good Vibrations people. If they can keep it up, they’ve got the formula nailed. (The link to me: bonus points.)

Getting There:

The Blowfish Blog by the Blowfish people. Some really excellent blogging, but the “and here’s the product we are selling” posts are a little bit too frequent and mundane for my taste. Worse, they have at the time of this writing no blogroll to speak of, so they are still missing the whole participate-in-the-community thing.

Tony Comstock’s Blog by Tony from Comstock Films. Tony has nailed the community part, but the marketing posts to me feel too “recycled press release / film brochure”. Tony (with great justice!) is excited about his excellent product, but PR text needs a better wash-and-tumble before it makes a good blog post. I know he’s not in the highest-margin business, but he ought to consider watching an old Star Trek marathon for a few hours, practice saying “Captain, I’m a film-maker, not a blogger!” a few times in a Scottish accent, and then biting the bullet and hiring a blogger.

(Full disclosure: In the past or currently, I’ve had some sort of advertising or affiliate relationships with the companies and people behind each of these three examples. Sometimes they pay me for ads or traffic, but they haven’t paid me for these opinions, which are my own.)

Similar Sex Blogging:

11 Sexy Comments »

The New “Related” Links

Friday, June 1st, 2007 -- by Bacchus

Pardons for the purely administrative prattle with no sex, but what do folks think of the new “Similar Sex Blogging” links appearing after certain posts? I’m doing them with a WordPress plug-in called Terong’s Related Posts, which makes it quick and easy to add links to posts from the archives. I saw it being done by some of the blogs in my blogroll and thought it was a neat idea — a sort of low-impact way to entice people back into the ever-growing and mostly-unread archives.

To cure the “no sex” boredom of this post, I’ll use the plugin to link to a few older favorites of mine.

Similar Sex Blogging:

8 Sexy Comments »

Violet Blue On Sex Blogging

Saturday, November 4th, 2006 -- by Bacchus

From time to time people have asked me my opinion on the question of what makes a good sex blog. I’ve spent some time toying with the question, and I’d like to write a detailed post sharing my opinions, but it’s a big job. It’s on the to-do list, but don’t hold your breath while waiting for it.

In the meanwhile, however, Violet Blue has written and posted what she describes as her own personal blogging style guide. It’s got lots of good stuff in it that would be of value to any blogger on any topic. However, Violet being Violet, it’s also got sex blogging tips at the end, disguised as ethical notes. The two money paragraphs:

My ethics about readers: Never insult the reader, call them a freak for liking anything you think is strange, or suggest the reader is not smart. Never judge anyone’s sexual preferences or orientation. Let people think things are weird all by themselves — don’t assume the reader will agree with your perceptions about what’s right and wrong in any context. When I run Fleshbot, my line is this with the writers: no one cares if you think trannies are freaky or fat chicks are gross; the reader who’s into it (and there’s a lot more than you think) is a reader just like anyone else. If you have something to prove about your sexual orientation, this isn’t the place to make your point. If it makes you uncomfortable, or you’re more worried about what people will think of you for posting it than the fun things you can say about it, don’t post it — give it to me!

My ethics about content: Avoid racist and sexist content. If it’s “interracial” but really hot, say something about how lame the titles are or how stupid racial sexual stereotypes are, but how nasty and hot the sex is. I link to christian anti-porn sites when I slap them, hard, and want them to see who is sending them traffic. No one is ever ‘stupid’ or ‘sick’ for liking sex, no matter what kind. I make fun of stereotypes and pastiches; I won’t endorse a “how to pick up chicks” book, but *will* make fun of it. I’m all about irony (especially of sexual stereotypes), making smart commentary, finding hot things to wank to and strange things for people to look at.

Electric Sex Blogging

Saturday, September 16th, 2006 -- by Bacchus

So when I saw Susie Bright’s essay on electric sex (in which she responds to the question “Have you ever experienced electricity during sex?”) my first thought was that she was talking about, you know, electrosex: cattle prods, electric zapper paddles, violet wands, fancy tech-wet-dream electrostim gear, that sort of thing. Well, she wasn’t — although her discourse on sexual electricity is, as always, worth your time.

But there is, it turns out, a blog that is about all the electric sex, the kind with actual electrons and visible sparks and twitching and whatnot. It’s the Electrosex Blog — make sure you’re well grounded before reading!

Blogging For A Living And The Global Microbrand

Thursday, February 23rd, 2006 -- by Bacchus

99% Sex-Free Post:

In my recent interview at Sunni’s Salon, I had this to say about the merits of sex blogging instead of having a job:

The job culture is as big a threat to human freedom as anything governments ever dreamed up. How can you be free and happy when you spend most of your waking hours in a place dictated by someone else, pursuing their priorities rather than your own, and living by their petty rules? With no time or energy to pursue your own priorities by the time you get home after a long unpaid commute? I lived that life for years, until I finally realized that I had to control my own working conditions to be truly free. Nobody but me deciding whether to set my alarm clock, or when to set it for; nobody but me deciding what my project will be on a given day, or whether I’ll choose to take that day off. Nobody but me deciding whether my head cold is bad enough I should just go back to bed.

About three days out of five, I take naps in the afternoon now. Why? Because I get sleepy. A twenty-minute snooze in the mid-afternoon cuts two hours off the amount of sleep I need at night. Right there, my life got seven percent longer by escaping the job culture.

I was therefore intrigued to discover that Hugh from Gaping Void (the blogger and blog famous for those funny cartoons drawn on the backs of business cards) had written something similar (but far more eloquent) in an essay called “The Global Microbrand Rant“:

It seems to me a lot of people of my generation are locked into this high-priced corporate, urban treadmill. Sure, they get paid a lot, but their overheads are also off the scale. The minute they stop tapdancing as fast as they can is the minute they are crushed under the wheels of commerce.

You know what? It’s not sustainable.

However, the Global Microbrand is sustainable. With it you are not beholden to one boss, one company, one customer, one local economy or even one industry. Your brand develops relationships in enough different places to where your permanent address becomes almost irrelavant.
…
Frankly, it beats the hell out of commuting every morning to the corporate glass box in the big city, something I did for many years. Just so I could make enough money to help me forget that I have to commute every morning to the corporate glass box in the big city.

There are thousands of reasons why people write blogs. But it seems to me the biggest reason that drives the bloggers I read the most is, we’re all looking for our own personal global microbrand. That is the prize. That is the ticket off the treadmill. And I don’t think it’s a bad one to aim for.

Similar Sex Blogging:

17 Sexy Comments »

Interview With A Sex Blogger (Me)

Tuesday, February 14th, 2006 -- by Bacchus

Barely slipping in under the wire for Valentine’s Day, Sunni of Sunni and the Conspirators has just published a wide-ranging interview of me at Sunni’s Salon. She calls it:

[A]n appropriate Valentine’s Day interview with Bacchus, the man behind the popular sexblog ErosBlog. Our conversation wanders through sex, blogging, and government interference with sexual pleasures, of course; but we also discuss the myths and realities of sex blogging and making money online, and more.

You’ll also learn why I think politics and sex blogging don’t mix, and why jobs are bad, m’kay?

7 Sexy Comments »

The Manners Of Giving And Getting Head

Friday, September 16th, 2005 -- by Bacchus

OK, OK, so there’s like, a jillion oral sex guides out there on the internet. I fondly recall reading one back when I really needed one, back before there was a World Wide Web, when the best internet resources took the form of huge lovingly-crafted ASCII text files. After a few years of sex blogging, though, the oral sex guides all start to run together and feel the same.

Which is why this one is worth linking to: It’s not so much about technique as it is about etiquette, and it’s written in a fresh and entertaining voice:

Okay, pervs and pervettes. It’s time for Chow Yun Smut to step up and testify on the importance of manners. I don’t care which fork you use at the dinner table, I don’t care if you hold the door open for the ladies, I don’t care about the ongoing debate on who pays for a date. This is all about giving head.

DISCLAIMER: This is NOT a primer for technique…. Manners, folks. Etiquette. Because I was recently confronted with a person who has apparently been allowed to be sexually active with more than one person, and yet nobody has taken the time to inform this person of some very basic rules of engagement.

Of course, I didn’t find this first; I found the link over at Fleshbot, where the skilled professional sex bloggers tend to find all the goodies before I do. But hey, Violet Blue did write the book on oral sex (well, two of them, actually) and so if she recommends it, it’s surely worth your time.

4 Sexy Comments »

All Hail Dionysus!

Monday, May 16th, 2005 -- by Bacchus

Folks, I’ve got a guest blogger to introduce. The next two weeks for me are set to be a whirlwind of travel and (fun but hectic) turmoil, with few opportunities to blog and little time to do it in. Aphrodite should be putting in some appearances with any luck, and I’ve implored The Nymph to post once or twice — but I’d hate for you to grow bored.

No fear of that. Not any more.

Your new guest blogger has volunteered to do some guest sex blogging under the handle “Dionysus”, and I jumped at the chance to have him. He’s an experienced blogger whose intense sex writing has been known to make my jaw drop. But like many bloggers, even psuedonymous ones, he’s become — to an extent — a captive of the expectations of his regular readership. Guest blogging here, under a new name, should let him really cut loose. Whether he plans to tell stories he dasn’t tell where they know him, or whether he plans to turn the intensometer dials to eleven, I couldn’t tell you (because he hasn’t told me). Who knows? Perhaps he plans to write tender tales of young lesbian love, full of flowers and unicorns and fluffy cotton-candy orgasms. We’ll all find out together.

Welcome, Dionysus!

2 Sexy Comments »

The Fun In Sex Blogging

Thursday, March 17th, 2005 -- by Bacchus

Here’s an interesting paragraph from Violet Blue about the fun she had during her ~~brief reign of terror at~~ five days at the helm of Fleshbot:

It was also very interesting to get so up on where and how to find this information in the blogosphere, and see the various media as they operate, watching sex stories hatch and travel around the ‘net, see how various people handle the topics — and see just how much Fleshbot is watched. I saw certain well-known sites pick up items I had posted, and regurgitate the material, post it on their own sites, and even in the same order that I had put it up, with no reference to Fleshbot. I experimented with them to test my theory. I watched sites try to slam, scoop or discredit things I posted. Facinating.

Although Fleshbot’s way bigger and more prominent than Eros Blog, and not so concerned with getting stuff while it’s still fresh, we’re big enough that I’ve seen what she’s talking about, and it is a lot of fun to watch.

More Anal Sex Blogging

Saturday, February 19th, 2005 -- by Bacchus

You have to love a blog entry that starts:

“And then I am kneeling on the bed, ass up in the air, and I am not quite sure how I got this way.”

Sarah’s tone in that opener reminds me of the old cliche of the pregnant young miss who breathlessly exclaims “I don’t know how this could possibly have happened to me!”

Promoting Anal Sex Blogging

Thursday, February 17th, 2005 -- by Bacchus

I’ve always fancied that ErosBlog should be a force for social good. Now here’s proof. Among its many and manifest positive social benefits, ErosBlog encourages evil science chicks to blog about anal sex. What’s not to like about that?

{drums fingers}

Evilsciencechick, we are waiting….

3 Sexy Comments »

The Nymph In My Net: Making Time To Play

Friday, April 16th, 2004 -- by Bacchus

Several of you have emailed with the comment that the blogging here is of a lower quality lately, and I’d cheerfully have to agree. One possible explanation is that frolicking with The Nymph has blunted the keenest part of whatever horny edge I once brought to the sex blogging project. However, for the most part, I blame lack of time. The aforesaid frolicking is certainly a factor, but I’m also engaged in a significant reorganization of what I do to pay my bills. That’s eating a lot of my remaining free time in the short run, but in the long run it should (fingers crossed) free up more time for frolicking, blogging, and general whatnot, while simultaneously (crossing toes now) improving the cash flow picture.

So do please hang in there. I may spend another month or three stuck in this “one desultory link per day” blog mode, but I hope to resume normal service by high summertime.

2 Sexy Comments »

The Nymph In My Net: Touching

Thursday, January 29th, 2004 -- by Bacchus

Isn’t it an amazing feeling when you click random blog links and stumble onto a post that feels like the author was eavesdropping in your brain? I’ll tell you what I mean:

I’m a hands-on sort of guy. I love to touch and be touched. But I’ve never been very good at it. The lady I used to be with a few years ago was the sort who always managed to shrug my hand off her arm, or turn away just as I was reaching for her. Always so innocent and seemingly random or accidental, it took me years to catch on to the fact that she just didn’t like to touch. Even early in that relationship, I often wished she’d touch me more. I’m not talking about sex, here, although I could. I’m just talking about a friendly gesture as we would pass in a hallway. A hand touching a wrist, that sort of thing.

The Nymph does not have this not-touching issue. Quite the contrary. She warned me on the phone, seemed concerned even, that she’s “hands-y”. I said “Sounds yummy to me!” and meant it from the bottom of my heart.

Hands-y? She is, too. And I love it. I never want her to let go. But she keeps making comments that make it clear, she’s worried I’ll grow to think she’s clingy. The woman actually jokes (the “ha ha, only serious” kind of jokes) that I’ll get tired of her “hanging on me” all the time.

That’s so not going to happen. Have I mentioned I love it when she touches me? Or, that I’m touching her just as much, and feel like I can’t stop?

It’s like Dan wrote about his Amber (links long gone):

When we first got together, I came to understand how starved Amber was for this kind of attention. She was actually afraid that I was going to get *tired* of touching her. What I realized was that I’d been starved for years for someone *to* touch, and she’d been starved for years for someone to touch *her*.

A perfect match!

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled (i.e., non-sappy) sex blogging.

13 Sexy Comments »

The Freedom To Be Naked

Wednesday, January 21st, 2004 -- by Bacchus

Although ErosBlog does not cover politics very much at all, I’ve long seen this sex blogging project as being my little contribution to a vital culture war. Because we are very sexual monkeys, control over sexual expression is one of the most important tools in the arsenal of the orcs who seek to govern and enslave us. (“Govern and enslave? Sorry, I repeat myself.”)

Daze and others have amply covered the case of Melissa Lincoln, the Nebraska lady who likes to get naked in public and enjoys making a buck when she does it. She’s been charged with public nudity, and faces actual jail time for it (although doubtless she’ll be offered a nice plea bargain that requires her to promise she’ll keep her pretty naked assets securely wrapped). After all, the point is to control sexual expression, remember? This isn’t about Melissa, it’s about reminding everyone that the orcs are watching and they will come for you if you don’t follow their rules.

Melissa Lincoln behind bars and not following the rules

Except that Melissa wants to fight. The liberty activists at the Liberty Round Table have been in touch with her, and it turns out that she doesn’t plan to knuckle under. She wants to fight this “all the way” and she doesn’t intend to plea bargain.

That’s a big ouchie, folks. A basic misdemeanor criminal defense starts at five grand, and that price assumes you’ll take any decent plea bargain. Appeals often cost thirty grand apiece, and you can need several.

The Knights of Nonaggression over at the Liberty Round Table have a list of what you can do to help, but the most obvious thing you can do is throw money. In Melissa’s case, the easiest way you can do that is to buy a membership at her web site. Sure, it’s commercial, but this is no “help me buy some fake boobs” bogus plea; the lady really does face jail time if she stands up for basic freedoms here. She will be under tremendous pressures to take a plea. As the LRT puts it:

For our part, we are not exhibitionists, but do believe that anything that de-mystifies sex, shows that good clean fun and healthy bodies are not ‘dirty’, is a very positive thing. There’s no end to the flood of misery produced by people’s twisted ideas about sex, love, and the human body, so we say: ‘Hurray for Melissa’s one woman war against benighted puritan attitudes!’ That Melissa’s site has a commercial side makes her work no less valuable — have not libertarians and objectivists always said that freedom is so valuable that there ought to be a way to promote it at a profit? We agree with Melissa; she has nothing to be ashamed of, not her body, not her pictures, not her profit.
…
It seems to me that there is no better way to show appreciation for an artist than to pay for her work; it has a better, cleaner feel than straight charity and allows her to be able to give some value in return for the help.

Indeed. And thanks to Don and Sunni at the Liberty Round Table for getting in touch with Melissa and publicizing her will to fight!

Tentacle Yaoi

Friday, December 26th, 2003 -- by Bacchus

And now, back to business. The anonymous link contribution of the day: Tentacle Yaoi. And what is yaoi, you may ask? Indeed, you may:

What is yaoi? Yaoi is a woman’s genre of manga (comic books) and short stories, produced by female artists and writers for the enjoyment of female readers. It’s a fantasy form which focuses on the romantic, emotional and above all sexual relationships of guys together.

Huh? That’s right. M/M. Men in Love. Homosexuality, homoeroticism, platonic love. Whatever you want to call it. Two Guys.

So it’s gay porn for women? Nope. It’s a female fantasy of what’s sexually attractive, not a gay male one. Yaoi embodies the (surprisingly common) female notion that m/m relationships are the stuff of high romance and beauty and true love and angst and impossibly wonderful sex five times an hour. Not surprisingly, yaoi gives real gay men the giggles.

For a start, the first requirement is that all the men be better-looking than any real man can possibly be, like the heroes of Japanese cartoon series (anime). The relationships are given a highly romantic slant that appeals to a lot of women, but rarely to men. Yaoi emphasizes the emotional side of things as much as the physical, and the stories happen in a very unrealistic version of the real world. Yaoi men tend to have impossible anatomy and very unlikely psychology. Silver hair, purple eyes, and a tendency to self-mutilation as an expression of love are not uncommon.

I learn something new every day. Who knew this sex blogging business would turn out to be such a tremendous broadener of the mind?

A Male Sex Blogging Credo

Wednesday, December 10th, 2003 -- by Bacchus

Philip from Hot Action has some very cogent thoughts on male sex blogging. I specifically liked his thoughts about the ethics of blogging about sex:

As I see it, my main responsibility is to write as accurately and honestly as possible. I always picture the person involved reading the post and try to gauge if there is anything she could possibly take issue with.

But of course, it’s about way more than accuracy. […]

As a male sex blogger, I feel I have a duty to women to do them right. To give them my best writing, to extract the most beautiful or the most telling image from a situation, to pay tribute to them with elevated [or debased] language.

There are far more ways to make an event “unique and special” than by keeping it private.

I’m ashamed that I didn’t even know about Philip’s blog when I started discussing this subject.

Soon To Be a Daddy

Tuesday, August 12th, 2003 -- by Bacchus

First of all, a disclaimer: I am not a safe sex nazi, and this is not a safe sex blog. The web is awash with info on ways to avoid STDs and pregnancy, and although such info is useful and necessary, it’s often not terribly arousing, so I do my readers the courtesy of assuming they already know what they need to know. At least, that is, until my nose is rubbed in the fact that sometimes, they don’t.

Rambling aside: Back when I linked with affirmation to Red-Headed Slut’s positive comments about Johnson’s Baby Oil gel, I got numerous emails from folks who were eager to be sure that I know that mineral oil destroys latex. Some of these were low-key “just want to be sure you know” sorts of emails, but several were high-energy strident “oh-my-god-I-can’t-believe-you-didn’t-warn-everyone” type emails. I found this puzzling, even a bit patronizing, considering that
(a) I knew this;
(b) I assume that most of my readers know it;
(c) I have never undertaken to be the safe sex education for those readers who don’t have basic safe sex information; and
(d) the effect of mineral oil on a latex condom is not terribly relevant in the context of a discussion of a lube recommendation for a hand-job where no condom was mentioned.

In short, I felt that I got spammed by knee-jerk safe sex activist warrior partisans, who have for whatever reason been conditioned to be uncomfortable hearing any mention of oil-based lube unless “destroys condoms” is uttered immediately thereafter, even if that’s not relevant to the discussion. With all due thanks and appreciation for their good and noble intentions, I don’t want to be like those people.

But just this once, I’ll take the risk.

So now, in the fifth paragraph of this post, I’ll get to the point. I got a nice email from a young man who has started a new sex blog [now defunct], and who wants a link. Now, young male voices being quite the minority in the sex blogging world, I naturally went and had a look.

It’s worth a visit. There are two honest-sounding tales so far of young sexual encounters. But (and you knew there was a “but”, didn’t you?) I was immediately struck by the first post, in which the narrator says:

“I guided her into a position so I could spoon with her, lowered her pants, and slipped myself inside. We continued for a while, and then (as a matter of anti-pregnancy) I pulled out and put on a condom.”

When read this, my inner safe sex nazi started yelling and screaming. Given the existence of precum (that droplet of clear fluid that shows up shortly after erection, which can contain sperm and is perfectly capable of making a girl pregnant) this simply is not a good way to avoid unwanted babies. The condom really needs to go on the dick before it touches the pussy; exceptions aren’t a good idea unless one wants a family.

Sorry, I just had to say that.

Bring Your Pitons And A Gallon Of Stolichnaya

Monday, December 9th, 2002 -- by Bacchus

Jessica Parker over at BlogAnon has announced her intention to reclaim the number one Google search results spot for the phrase “sex blog” which she apparently had at some point back before Bacchus got into the sex blogging line.

Now, Jessica evidently has more web designing talent in her left nipple than Bacchus could ever hope to possess, plus she has some natural (and they do look deliciously natural) advantages, which she proffers up most fetchingly at the top of her blog as the “#1 Blog Boobies on the Web.” (Bacchus is way too much of a gentleman to argue, even if he was inclined to do so, which he is not, even though he has seem some other fine candidates that discretion and an avoidance of invidious comparisons prevents him from identifying with particularity.)

So anyways, BlogAnon is a damn fine read and goes on the linklist. But about that #1 Google spot for “sex blog”? Not gonna happen. As the dad says in Cheaper by the Dozen: “Over my dead body, and it will be quite a climb.” Bacchus fought and scratched for the magnificent twenty hits a day the number one spot delivers, and he’s not gonna give it up without a fight. Bring pitons and a helicopter for the photographers.

[2006 Update: Four years later, BlogAnon is long gone and the domain snapped up by a click farmer. In recent months Eros Blog has been swapping the number one spot with a defunct blog by one TwiddlyBits. BlogAnon never did rescale those heights.]

Jessica has a secret weapon, though, in the form of this fine sex blog song to the tune of Tom Jone’s Sex Bomb:

Sex blog, sex blog
you’re a sex blog,
showing us your boobies
there’s no way you can go wrong
sex blog, sex blog
you’re a sex blog,
and baby you can turn me on