A History Of Sex Blogs
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!
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=11582
Quibbling is par for the course here ;)
I suppose I do consider VB a sex blogger but yet not exactly prior to the dated posts, valid point.
My definition of “Sex toy reviews on blogs” is modeled after the current standard: Not necessarily given for free, not necessarily sponsored, but just reviewing for the sake of helping a consumer decipher if it’s what they want. I would consider today that a review should be at least X number of words, talk about this and that, but you’re right….at the heart of it, yours can be considered a review. I’ve updated my post to include that ;)
I had no less than 50-some tabs open at one point trying to find everything. I thought I’d found a long, detailed, full of pictures and product details review back in 2004, but I must have gotten distracted by another link and another link and the web of the archives took me away from it. This really COULD be a book, and many might even find it fascinating outside of our little microcosm, but I am not the literary scholar.
Including all of the tooltip notes I got it somewhere around 2100 words.
You’ve made an epic effort and your post will doubtless be cited in whatever book-length history is one day created by some intrepid soul. The biggest problem with talking about this stuff has always been defining it; “I know it when I see it” is just not rigorous enough, and yet it’s often the best standard we have. Since my earliest days I’ve struggled with “is this a sex blog?” questions, because I’ve had “sex blog” as a blogroll category and never wanted to include anybody in the list who would be offended by the monicker. There are no easy answers, and as you’ve made clear, “is this a sex toy review?” isn’t much easier.
I’m interested to hear other people’s definitions, too. Many think it started on Livejournal, but I’m having trouble finding anything in the Archives.
p.s. I also love the related posts that pop up for this. All worthy citations for the story!
I already quibbled (my sad, selfish) comments at Lilly’s site about Sex Kitten not making any mention, but wanted to say here that the now defunct Backwash.com had an adult (and aptly-colored red) site as well that dates back to 2001: http://web.arch....com/
[…] 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: […]
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