I have pasted my essay in its entirety below, please feel free to read, comment and link to similar studies or blogs of interest. I know that this essay does not fully explore its subject area, but I believe that in making it accessible to the same community it examines, it will help to create more of an understanding of the complex and shifting relationships between blogs, bloggers and readers.
Happy Reading...
Women Talking Dirty: Sex, Authenticity, Community and Privacy in the Blogosphere.
A 2007 Channel 4 documentary estimated that by the end of that year, there would be 106 million blogs on the internet and noted that amongst the millions of blogs popping up, ‘the blogs that consistently attracted massive readerships were the anonymous, confessional sex diaries written by women’ (Channel 4). However research has shown how discourses of personal narrative and autobiography such as erotic blogs, are often problematised by issues of ‘authenticity’ and ‘truth’. These issues are particularly pertinent online, due to the anonymity which is so important to many erotic bloggers. This makes it more difficult to apply traditional rules of ‘authenticity’ to blogs. But as feminist discourse has moved away from one-dimensional aspects of autobiographic truth (Cosslet et al., 9), the internet has become a space for the exploration and discovery of new and alternative ‘truths’. ‘Truth’ has been defined as ‘a fact or belief that is accepted as true’ (Oxford), illustrating that ‘truth’ is not immutable, but ‘socially organised, contextually bound, a matter for contestation’ (Plummer, 170). It is in contesting this truth that the search for ‘authenticity’ becomes more personal: a part of the complex and reflexive communities between bloggers and readers. Analysing blogs within the concept of authenticity can open up dialogues of community, acceptance and interaction and creates an opportunity for a unique perspective. In this paper I explore the extent to which erotic blogs are ‘authentic’, critically examining them in the context of the still relatively unexplored nature of blogs and blogging. I argue that blogs are a rich site of community interaction, and that discourses of authenticity can be useful for examining the place of blogs within feminist interpretations of story telling.
Initially known as a web-log, a blog has been varyingly defined as a ‘spontaneous online public journal’, a ‘hybrid diary/ biography/ community/ bulletin board’ and a ‘chronological diary descended from the personal home page’ (Taylor, 68; McKinnon, 64; Webb, 22, qtd in McNeill, 28). Today a blog is most often viewed as a place where an ‘author’ reflects on her everyday experiences, thoughts and desires, and engages in reflective and reflexive thinking through an online community which engages with her. Since Blogger, a tool for creating blogs, was created in 1999, blogging has grown exponentially (Blood, ‘Weblogs’), as it became much easier to create and maintain this form of website. Although millions of blogs exist, blogging is still a relatively new media, particularly in terms of academic research (Palmer, 38). Although blogs have been lauded as potentially significant for feminism, academic studies are still limited.[1] Research on erotic blogs is even scarcer; although there has been some work carried out on online sex and pornography (see Wolmark; Wallace) and debates around the freedom of speech associated with talking about sex online (see Faucette), almost none of the research carried out on blogging has considered the increasing proliferation of erotic blogs or their significance for blog research.[2] Because of this lack of research, particularly on blogs containing erotic material, there are certain ethical issues I feel I should clarify. My methodology focuses around textual analysis of blogs, and it is thus important to articulate whether I regard online participants as ‘subjects’ or as ‘authors’. Feminist research in autobiography has concluded that personal narratives cannot be separated from their authors: these texts are ‘embodied by breathing passionate people in the full stream of social life’ (Plummer, 16). The presence of the author is especially evident in blogs, as the blogger interacts with readers, helping to authenticate the blogger as a ‘real’ person. However whilst these blogs are indisputably in the public domain, they are not equatable to a physical public space (Palmer, 39; 42). Given the potentially intimate nature of erotic blogs, bloggers’ anonymity is very important, as this seems to enable more inhibited users to express candidly their thoughts and feelings about various sexual issues (Spinello, 244). All of the bloggers I consider here use pseudonyms, thus suggesting that they value their privacy. I will explore the role of anonymity in authenticating blogs in more detail later. Like Palmer, I find it appropriate to consider blogs as existing on a continuum of public-private, published-unpublished (43); thus it seems appropriate to think of bloggers as semi-authors and as semi-subjects, and to treat them ethically as such. I therefore contacted the authors to make them aware of my research and to request permission to use direct quotations. I gave bloggers the choice of being anonymous or being referenced and thus fully credited for their work. Of the four blogs which I analysed in this essay, two bloggers replied allowing me to quote them directly and refer to them by their pseudonyms, one of which asked me to reference her real-life name. Two bloggers did not reply, even though I attempted to contact them on several occasions. However neither states explicitly on their blog the need to ask permission to quote directly and both authors are pseudonymised. In this case I feel the best approach is to maintain the anonymity the bloggers chose in my citations and to make both bloggers aware of the essay by posting it online so they have an opportunity to read and comment on it as I have had the opportunity to read and comment on their blogs.[3]
A central part of this study is going to be my definition of ‘authentic’ and I will attempt to tease out the meanings and implications of authenticity in online discourse through the course of this essay. Traditionally, a text is considered authentic by direct linkage to an identified author (Marcus, 263); however, as anonymity is a key element of erotic blogs, readers have to seek less traditional ways to identify a blog’s authenticity. The communities which build up around blogs play a large part in this, as do the links to and from other sites – if an erotic blog is linked with another blog which is generally perceived to be authentic, this lends authenticity to the linked blog. However, should we be insisting on authenticity online? Given that ‘cyberdiscourse revolves around notions of mobility and freedom in terms of identity and self-expression’ (Paasonen, 2-3), is it possible or even appropriate to apply ‘real-world’ rules of authenticity to Internet discourse? However examining women’s erotic blogs with reference to existing research on women’s autobiography will reveal the ways in which these blogs in particular seek authenticity; furthermore the focus of this essay is an examination of how blogs create authenticity, not whether they should or should not. I explicitly chose to examine women-authored blogs; although these bloggers are not the first women to talk about their erotic experiences, women’s personal narratives on this subject have generally not been validated in autobiographic criticism. ‘Not only were women’s autobiographies self-evidently outside the “Great Men” tradition with which many autobiographical critics operated, but generic definitions served to exclude forms of “life-writing” such as diaries, letters and journals, often adopted by women’ (Marcus, 1). But the scale and accessibility of blogs has allowed millions of women to read and identify with these narratives, moving the discourses of women’s erotic experiences into the open. This is evidenced by the emergence of web-rings such as the Adult Sex Blogs Directory (www.adultsexblogs.com), the Erotic Blog Directory (www.eroticblogdirectory.com) and increasing public awareness of erotic blogs, of which the aforementioned Channel 4 documentary is one example. Such prevalence makes it essential for feminists to examine this new, discourse and the ways in which it seeks authenticity from and in feminist discourse. Of course, the blogs I examined are not representative of all women’s erotic experiences, or even all women who blog about their erotic experiences: every woman writes from her own specific social situation (Jackson, 49). And blogs are still a privileged site as only an elite minority have the financial means to access the internet: currently, less that one percent of the world’s population is part of the ‘knowledge economy’ (Thurlow et al., 85) and in Britain, those with no formal qualifications are least likely to have an internet connection in their home at 56% (Office of National Statistics). It is also vital to consider the extent to which erotic blogs’ proximity to the norm authenticates them: whilst some of the blogs I read described experiences of polyamory and lesbian erotic experiences, the majority described only heterosexual erotic experiences. Ken Plummer identifies a ‘hierarchy of sexual stories’ and ‘those at the bottom of the hierarchy have stories that cannot easily be told’ (30-31). This is undoubtedly an area which will benefit from further study, but unfortunately I cannot explore this issue further here, other than to acknowledge how presentations of sexuality can authenticate and alienate in differing ways.
I focus on three women-authored blogs in this essay, although I do refer to others peripherally. I searched for these blogs in the same way a reader would (see Rak, 178) – through search engines such as Google Blog Search and through links on web sites and other blogs. The three blogs I selected were authentic experience (http://www.
authenticexperience.blogspot.com/) an account of a young married woman’s heterosexual erotic experiences, written pseudonymously by greenlacewing; Sex in the City - The Real Version (http://selinafire.blogspot.com/), described by its pseudonymised author Selina Fire as ‘a 48 year old New York City woman’s sexual adventures’; and Three of a Kind (http://tofak.blogspot.com/), ‘an ever-growing account of the sexual evolution of me, Krysta’, detailing her life as part of a polyamorous family. Whilst I chose these blogs mainly for their erotic content, they also significantly link to and from each other and comment regularly on each other’s blogs, highlighting the importance of community in blogging.
‘If something is defined as real it is real in its consequences’ (Thomas, quoted in Jackson and Scott, 106).
A sense of community is important for the creation of authenticity. Blogs become authentic as we read and absorb them, comparing them and applying them to our own erotic experiences: reading blogs can have a direct effect on the way we read our own lives and experiences (Blood, ‘Weblogs’). This reciprocity between reader and blogger that this sense of community evokes creates trust and helps the reader to authenticate the blog. Selina Fire often communicates with readers and other bloggers and they regularly interact on her blog page:
Evan: I had a blast. Great blog. Loved the piece about your mother.
Selina: Thank you! So cool that you noticed that post about my mom. It came to me in a flash. I was asking myself (as I often do): "Why am I like this?" ...And then that came to me. I'm glad you read the blog. Now you know something about me (Fire, ‘Dick for Two’).
Crossblog talk led to the innovation of comments (Blood, ‘Hammer, Nail’), allowing readers to leave feedback and interact with bloggers. Thus the process of reading and writing in a blog becomes much more reflexive (Rak, 171). ‘Challenging the enduring view of diary-writing as a solitary activity, online diarists have made community-building a major component of their texts’ (McNeill, 33), following the discovery that ‘issues and experiences which felt uniquely personal...were indeed very common experiences’ (Swindells, 207). Plummer has explored the extent to which our sexual stories are drawn from and influenced by culture and media, as the ‘boundaries between fiction and “reality” collapse’ (137). Erotic blogs are formed by a stream of erotic discourse created by all of us: Plummer sees stories as joint actions which people reflexively engage in (20-21). This enhances the blog’s authenticity, as whilst it may be authored by a limited number of people, the experiences described come from the surrounding culture: ‘a toolkit of resources’ (Swidler, 281). Furthermore, as readers examine these blogs, they internalise the descriptions and use them to form their own erotic authenticity, thus validating the blog’s authenticity: the moment a story is told, we come to own it (Plummer, 168). To some extent, I would argue, a blog is created by the online community surrounding it: as bloggers read other blogs and incorporate them as part of their own blogs, they are validating the authenticity of those blogs and using that validity to authenticate their own blogs. Three of a Kind quotes the postings of another erotic blogger, ChelseaGirl (pretty dumb things
I would extend the theory that reading and blogging are shared erotic experiences to indicate a similarity between blogging and netsex.[4] Although some researchers have drawn a distinction between erotic writing which is static and netsex which is interactive (McRae, 258), I would suggest that a blog is, to a certain extent, interactive and it is not inappropriate to regard reading and blogging as mutually reflexive acts. Whilst blogging does differ from netsex in that the blog is published as a finalised text and blogging and reading do not necessarily happen simultaneously, the interaction and community surrounding blogs move them towards online chat and netsex. Readers leave comments on blogs stating that they are sexually aroused:
Anonymous said...
greenlacewing said...
Thus bloggers and readers connect in their mutual sexual arousal. Yet, admittedly, there are differences between netsex and erotic blogging. Bloggers do not always engage in ‘one handed typing’: greenlacewing, responding to a comment on her blog entry writes “oh no, this is just my representation of the sex of the previous day. I don't type and fuck” (Greenlacewing, comment on ‘hearsay’). However a sense of urgency is maintained through the blog’s rapid posting, conversational tone and the blogger is constantly aware of the presence of another individual, who, through reading the blog often becomes aroused.
To gain authenticity, I am arguing, a blog has to engage with its readers and create a sense of community. This allows for the development of trust, which is of vital importance in identifying and authenticating a blog. However verifying authorship becomes problematic when the blogger is using a pseudonym; the traditional ways of verifying representations as authentic – signatures, photographs, full names (Rak, 175) – are not possible for many erotic bloggers, who feel that their anonymity is essential to enable them to write as they do. Greenlacewing claims that ‘anonymity makes my transgression safe’ (‘theory’), and Abby Lee, otherwise known as Zoe Margolis, who was famously ‘outed’ as the author of the erotic blog Girl With a One Track Mind blogged:
Take the anonymity away from a blogger who depends on it and you get a blog with no heart: true sincerity and authenticity about events, people, thoughts and feelings rely on anonymity. I'll challenge anyone who says that anonymity shouldn’t matter when someone’s writing about their own life. It does. (‘Anonymity’)
Whilst Internet researchers have claimed that virtual reality offers a certain amount of safety in pushing the boundaries of erotic experience and expression, they have also recognised that ‘the anonymity, distance and partly imaginary nature of virtual space can lead to a situation in which one person feels deceived’ (McRae, 254). Sherry Turkle says ‘life on the screen makes it very easy to present oneself as other than one is in real life’ (‘Tinysex’, 411). However bloggers do take steps to authenticate their identities and create a sense of identification with readers whilst protecting their anonymity: Selina Fire geographically situates her blog Sex in the City: the Real Version in New York, culturally references the popular TV programme in her blog’s title and regularly writes about her erotic experiences with other bloggers who then respond to her descriptions by commenting on her blog. The description of real-life people, experiences and places in her blog create a trust between reader and blogger and her frequent referencing to and by other bloggers authenticates her own blog’s validity and authority in the same way that the blogger of Three of a Kind attempted. Finally, there has been considerable research interest in the psychological properties of computers supporting a user’s experience with it as an ‘intimate machine’ (Turkle, ‘Computational Reticence’, 367) which is relevant to this study. Readers often access the internet from home, making the interaction between reader and blogger more personal, as computer use is generally a solitary activity. Transferring Turkle’s theory of net communication to readers and authors of sex blogs, using a computer to access the internet and read blogs can make the experience feel more intimate, enhancing feelings of identification and trust between reader and blogger.
Who are we when we are online? (Jones, 15)
In order to fully explore the authenticity of blogs, I next examine cultural assumptions about the authenticity of women writing, specifically women writing narratives. Plummer has identified that there is a massive gender skew in sexual story-telling (30): women’s autobiography has traditionally not been taken seriously, as women writing was equated with transgression (Gilmore, 116) or with other ‘more fugitive, because apparently trivial, forms of communication such as gossip and conversation’ (Broughton, 243). Women were seen as less suited to autobiography as they were ‘unable to objectify themselves into an absorbing whole to the extent necessary for successful autobiography’: women were more suited to the cosmetic art of fiction (Williams, quoted in Marcus, 123-24). Women were expected to conform to ‘traditional’, objective ways of writing autobiography, through an ‘authorised discourse of truth’ otherwise their authenticity was removed (Gilmore, 127-130). But feminist research has criticised these distinctions and has been hugely influential in problematising autobiography and broadening critics’ consideration of the definition of autobiography (Cosslet et al., 3). Feminist autobiographies of the past have subverted the ‘autobiographical pact’ (see Lejeune) by including problematic signals which trouble the distinction between autobiography and fiction (Marcus, 280): Ann Oakley’s Taking it Like a Woman opens with the line ‘some of these characters are real and some aren’t’ (7). Scholars challenged the notion of a universal and essential ‘truth’, instead recognising that truth is part of a cultural process (Gilmore, 110). Critics also attempted to move autobiography away from the limits of self-life-writing, concentrating on ‘outlaw genres’ of personal narrative, such as testimonial literature, oral narratives and ethnographies (Marcus, 294). Finally, feminist autobiographers attempted to diminish the ‘autobiographical pact’ of continuity of name through author, narrator and character (253-254). This challenged the central idea that autobiographical authenticity is secured through the status of the author (254). This reconsideration of autobiography is vital in exploring the specific issues of authorisation and authenticity in erotic blogs.
Autobiography has traditionally been authorised by the verification of its author’s identity. As I have shown, this is not always possible for women-authored erotic blogs, due to the anonymity required for the description of personal and intimate experiences. Therefore readers have had to find alternative ways to authenticate bloggers, such as status in the online community, reputation with other bloggers and readers and identification with ‘real-life’ places or people in the blog itself However I have also examined the extent to which sexual narratives are collaboratively formed by the cultural and social discourses to which we all draw on and contribute. Some current cyberculture research has suggested that cyberspace will become a place where individuals will cease to be identified by real-life physical markers, such as age, gender and race (O’Brien, 77). However given that the ‘social significance of gender rests in the way in which we experience and understand our ‘selves’ in relation to communication with other human beings’, gender online is an act of subjective interpretation using available cultural scripts (78). Thus gender online is reciprocally authentic – it is true because it is defined and accepted in relation to others. Marjorie Kibby has asserted that ‘the Web is not a new world, but an electronic reflection of the world we currently inhabit’ (Kibby). It is therefore appropriate to suggest that the erotic experiences described in these blogs, whilst authenticated to some extent through their online contexts, are further authenticated and validated by their integration into ‘real-life’ social scripts and sexual scripts by their readers. Sexual scripting is the idea that ‘sexual behaviour is a product of ‘scripts’ learnt and negotiated through interaction’ (Jackson, 59). ‘The term script might be invoked to describe virtually all human behaviour in the sense that there is very little that can in a full measure be called spontaneous (Gagnon and Simon, 19). Thus the erotic experiences described in blogs are indicative of a learned social and sexual identity and conform to the ‘elements of what a culture agrees is sexual’ (21). Though it may seem that the Net is the place where we can really be real, we live online in the context of our offline lives (Rak, 174). I have already explored the way readers internalise and thus authenticate blogs, thus erotic narratives in blogs are further authenticated by their relevance to our real-life lives; if an experience relates to a reader’s own erotic experiences, they will consider it to be more authentic, as it corresponds with their had similar experiences. Wistful Vista, a reader on greenlacewing’s blog comments ‘it reminds me so much of my spouse, with whom I had many wonderful intimate moments -- ending just as yours do’ (comment on ‘how good it can feel’). Blogs gain further authentication in their creation of new sexual scripts which, evoking Jackson and Scott’s work on social scripts, ‘while always socially situated, are active compositions, not merely pre-defined guides for action’ (111). Thus blogs, given the contributory and reciprocal nature of their composition, have become a new way to conceive of sexual interaction, thus creating new and authentic sexual scripts of their own.
Finally I examine the extent to which erotic blogs can be perceived as an authentic feminist resource for re-examining women’s erotic personal narratives. Selina Fire blogs about a conversation she had with other female erotic bloggers, who stated that ‘their reason for blogging [was] to empower women, to let women know what they are not alone, and to bring sex-positive consciousness to women’ (‘Swinging London’). The majority of the blogs I read discussed, at one time or another, their positions as (erotic) women in their real-life and virtual worlds and the discrimination they encountered. Although the Internet has traditionally been seen as a male domain – although two out of three on-the-job computer users are women (Coyle, 42) and as many as thirty percent of Internet accounts are held by women, this does not necessarily mean they are taking up a third of the bandwidth (Evard, 188) – most online diarists and bloggers are women (Sorapure, 20, n6). This potentially marks a reversal of the idea that women are more reticent computer users, as women bloggers are actively dominant and authoritative, thereby gaining an authenticity and autobiographical validation which was previously denied to women. Whilst the emergence of easy-to-use, free blogging tools undoubtedly had an influence on the numbers of women blogging (Blood, ‘Weblogs’), this does not detract from the ability or impact of these erotic narratives to finally speak with the authority and authenticity previously denied to women. It is therefore not audacious to assert that blogs are, in this sense, a new way of telling our sexual stories. There is a further aspect of blogging which has significance for feminism. The anonymity that is so essential to women erotic bloggers suggests the possibility for safe interaction online, similar to women’s ‘safe spaces’ in real-life (Youngs, 64-65). Online interaction offers new possibilities for communications between women, defined by them, away from wider social gazes under which breaking boundaries and testing norms may be more difficult (65). This potentially identifies the Net as a unique and flexible sphere of woman-to-woman cross-boundary identification (66), most clearly exemplified by the supportive and active communities surrounding blogs. This interaction undoubtedly plays a significant part in the authorisation of women-authored erotic blogs as an authentic feminist medium.
Whilst I have found this study fascinating, I am aware of its limitations. I have only been able to read a tiny proportion of women-authored erotic blogs and thus the information I gained from these blogs will necessarily not be representative of all women’s erotic experiences. I have also not been able to explore in detail women’s erotic narratives in other places on the web, for example on personal web pages, or as part of discussion forums. However the questions that this study have raised have been valuable for a feminist interpretation of erotic blogging and may help to prompt an expansion of this discussion of authenticity to other internet genres. It is very important that I do not forget that my reading and use of these blogs has given me a position as part of the blog community. In reading these blogs, I have accepted the bloggers’ and readers’ truths and I am founding this study on that truth. Therefore, in a way, this study can be said to further authenticate the blogs in its acceptance of their authenticity. As I have used the information that the blog communities have made available, it seems appropriate to publish this study online and allow bloggers and readers to examine it and reciprocally engage with and challenge my interpretation of their blogs’ authenticity and thus my own authenticity as a researcher.[5] Perhaps this sharing of authenticity is one of the most significant aspects of the Web for feminism – an opportunity to access and contribute to a collective ‘truth’.
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[1] Some notable recent exceptions are WMST-L’s valuable collection of links to feminist blogs and articles, Gaden’s ‘Carnival of Feminists’, work by Hewitt and Kline and Burnstein.
[2] One exception is Serfaty’s The Mirror and the Veil which contains a short consideration of the content and audience of erotic blogs.
[3] For an extensive account of blog research ethics, see Palmer, The Visible Techno-foetus. One aspect of erotic blogging which I will not explore in detail here is to do with the issue of free speech and erotic content on the Internet. There has long been a concern with children being able to access pornographic material on the Internet (see Spinello, 246) and several of the blogs I examined contained disclaimers stating that their blog was for those over 18 or 21 only. Whilst it is true that most erotic blogs contain strong sexual imagery and description which is often indistinguishable from the content of pornographic sites, I feel it is not useful to automatically codify these blogs as pornography as this may place a particular intent onto the blogs which might not be there – a commercial intent, for example. Women-authored blogs tend to move away from traditional pornography towards a more woman-centred depiction of sex; by even writing about their erotic experiences from their own perspectives, women bloggers can be seen as re-appropriating erotic discourse from male-centred pornography, placing it firmly within a women-dominant community.
[4] ‘Netsex’ has been defined as ‘a form of co-authored interactive erotica’, Reid, 114.
[5] I have published this essay on my research blog Nearly Theory, (http://www.nearlytheory.
blogspot.com/), which will hopefully allow for a similar dynamic of authenticity to emerge, as I have observed in the other blogs I have read.
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