It has been a wonderful week. Regrettably, I must now put down my dick for a moment to take up some intellectual discussion.
The subject is male sex bloggers. For the past few days, I've been watching Aleks, Bacchus and Steve bat the birdie back and forth over the net. Now I'm running in to make a fourth racket.
Steve's blog is not a sex blog, and perhaps we should cut the guy a little slack as he has obviously stumbled into a world he does not understand. But it galls me to see him accuse Aleks of neglecting the emotional aspects of sex and providing little more than a "travelogue." That's just absurd. So I'm going after Steve on a few points.
1) "Men tell sex stories, but they leave out the details."
Not if they're good writers, they don't. The pleasure I take from a good sex blog is as much literary as it is prurient. I'm with Aleks: "I'll be damned if the erotic doesn't make for great art."
Hot Action started out quite simply as "the guide to sex with Philip Clark," but it has become much more than that. Nowadays this blog is about dipping the quill as well as the wick.
For me, sex just happens to be a powerful enough blasting cap to set off the writing charge.
2) "It is incumbent upon men to be discrete."
(Let's talk about writing for a second. I'm not normally one to pounce upon typos, but Steve subverts his own intended meaning by repeatedly using the word "discrete" when he means "discreet."
Here we have a man arguing for emotional wholeness in the sexual male, who subliminally argues that men should consist of unconnected distinct parts?
Pardon my deconstructive digression. We'll presume to recognize Steve's intentions.) Discretion, then:
3) "When you're with someone, it should be private, a unique shared experience."
Before I comment, check out this story, which made the front cover of today's Globe And Mail.
It seems the mayor of a town in BC gets her husband to take some nude photos of her in the official chamber. The pics get swiped from her home computer, are immediately emailed all over the place, and finally earn her bare-shouldered smile a front-page headline in Canada's national newspaper.
Several people express shock over the content of the photos and allege disrespect for the municipal office. The mayor contends that she has been the victim of a crime and vows revenge upon whoever stole the photos of the private, unique experience she enjoyed behind the mayoral desk.
These days, it seems private moments just don't want to stay that way.
I can't even walk from here to the store without getting my face recorded on half-a-dozen video cameras. But it's not just The Man keeping an eye on me. Since I started a sex blog, my seduction moves in public are scrutinized by people I don't even know. Some of these people would just love to see me slip up. There are haters out there in Halifax, and they crave dirt the way a junkie craves dope.
So I waived my right to privacy when I started a sex blog, and the concept of discretion has come to mean little to me. My response to the haters is to give them nothing to chew on--I try to live my life as if everything I do could become a matter of public record at any time. This policy will do wonders for a man's honesty.
As far as I'm concerned, the mortified mayor's only mistake was that she didn't post the photos on the web herself in the first place.
"That's fine for you," I can hear you saying. "But what about the privacy of the women you involve yourself with?"
Like I said, I don't take the concept of privacy too seriously, especially not in a city the size of Halifax where everyone knows everyone's business anyway. Plus I crave ownership of my own experiences--my default assumption is that if something happens to me, it's my life, and I'm going to write about it. I won't name names and will occasionally alter details of setting, and if you would care to suggest a more stringent anonymity policy, I'd be happy to listen.
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. This is where I feel Steve really misses the point of sex blogs.
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 still occasionally meet women who will ask me not to write about them. But many more women are secretly or openly pleased to be "on the website."
Whenever that happens, I feel doubly successful.