on the website
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.
Comments
This is the best web site EVER. I stumbled onto your site somehow last saturday taking a break from studying for exams, and you've been getting me off ever since. Although (sadly) not speaking from personal experience, I think what makes you such an incredible lover of women is the same thing that makes you such an amazing writer -- your eye for detail is fantastic. You seem to notice & appreciate & find pleasure in the all the little things that truly count. Good writing is sexy. Good writing about sex is just...delicious. Keep it up.
Posted by: heather | December 11, 2003 03:29 PM
yep. I second that.
happy to have found you. keep it up. literally.
Posted by: vanilla | December 11, 2003 07:06 PM
New reader, long time sex blogger.
I disagree with you a bit about the privacy issue. I agree that it's difficult to take the concept of privacy too seriously, especially in this day and age, but I also think that there are details that lose their shine (and appeal) when written about. And even worse: they can paint a false picture about an event that happens.
If you have thicker skin than I have (as you almost certainly do), this won't be an issue for you, My point is that I don't have very thick skin, and therefore I've noticed that a little bit of holding back makes the experience of sex blogging way less scary for me.
So.. the comment about private, unique experience is not always incorrect, or always correct. And there's nothing wrong with it in either state. :)
Posted by: k | December 11, 2003 08:05 PM
Was your page this color earlier? Am I crazy? It's almost...vanilla-colored :-)
Posted by: vanilla | December 12, 2003 12:33 AM
No names, altered settings. But your timeline and physical locations are known to any observer. I would hope the timelines you write within wouldn't correlate with the linear arrow of time.
And, while I'm writing, I have found delight in several individual entries in this blog. However, altogether to me they are cheap and your appetite, gluttonous. Makes me wonder.
Posted by: anon. | December 12, 2003 12:59 PM
thank you all for posting.
k: i completely agree with you that some details lose their shine when written about. i'll often try to extract the one perfect image from a situation--something sexy and poetic with a hint of naughty narrative; hovering somewhere between explicit and implicit.
i enjoyed reading your blog--for those who missed the link, it's at spiraldreams.blogspot.com.
anon.: "your timeline and physical locations are known to any observer."
so the observers are observing. oh indeed. but the observers would be observing even if i didn't do this website. at least this way i can make sure they get their facts straight.
considering the amount of time and emotional energy i invest in this blog, i would suggest you find a better word to describe it than "cheap."
and "gluttonous." do you really think i'm much hornier than the average male? news flash.
makes you wonder... what? is there a complete thought in there somewhere?
Posted by: phi. | December 12, 2003 02:43 PM
I love your point about writing as accurately and honestly as possible, and living your live as honestly as possible to reflect that. That's one of the reasons why I, as a transsexual, have chosen not to go the safe way, and hide among the masses. I must live honestly, and in my own journal (see my link), I try to write that way as well.
Some of the things people do are private, but at the same time, people have to know about them. So some of us have to talk. Whether they're men who like sex, or transsexuals who want to live their lives. Some of us have to speak, and tell our side. And like anyone who writes, we have a responsibility to make it good. Thanks for living up to your part.
Oh, and I'm in the Halifax area, too. Maybe we've passed each other on the street and never known it.
Posted by: Kelseigh | December 13, 2003 05:27 PM
Hey Phil,
long time reader.
i think if someone, such as yourself, blogs his life, then as you say, it is open to discusssion and dissection, Indeed, we do live in a relatively small city, so people talk, and the possibility of meeting up with someone who doesn't like you can be magnified. I used to write a column for a gay and lesbian mag, and it included details of my personal life. One time, a reader and a friend objected to my posted opinion of a friend of theirs. It caused a little havoc, but i think, we, as writers, bloggers, posters, whatever, know our responsibilites or if not, thet are brougt to our attention rather quickly. as such, our friends often know what we do, and know they might end up as written words. It's like when truman capote wrote his book on the NYC elite. Hello! you're hanging with a writer. Nothing is sacred. Deal. You hang around with fireeaters, someday, you might get singed. We live with it every day, and chose to live it as such every day as well. Kudos to you for doing what you want, how you want, when you want. That takes balls. I applaud you for writing about who sucked on 'em.
Posted by: simon | December 17, 2003 09:21 AM
I'll take the risk of quoting a Biblical character in the comments of a "sex blog" and raise the same question Pontius Pilote asked Jesus, "what is truth?" No matter how accurately we describe our personal experiences which include other people, it's still just from our point of view. If the idea is to draft a post which is the blogging equivalent of consensual reality, or to homoginize our experience with those of other participants, it's either going to be too general (like a horoscope) or unrealistic.
The sex writing I enjoy most has a good mix of things I can easily identify with and also some unusual, specific details that most people wouldn't have noticed, but make the images seem so real and yet completely novel. I don't want to read about anything, sex or otherwise, that doesn't make me see something common from a new point of view (whether I agree with it or not).
So I go out of the way to keep my lovers anonymous in my blog, and found after a while that the only way to do that was to keep my online writing away from my meat space friends. I'm not concerned about my privacy. I just don't want to feel pressured to modify writing openly about the way I experienced a moment to make it palatable to peer review.
I write truthfully about what happens in my life from my point of view, and the more original my viewpoint, the more interesting my writing becomes, in my opinion (which is all that matters on my blog, after all).
The few people that have unexpectedly found themselves in my blog have thought I wrote truthfully and positively about them, but still felt strange seeing their personal life in a public forum. The thing is, I don't write about their lives. I write about my life and everyone else is just an anonymous extra.
It may come off sounding like I'm full of myself, but actually I'm keeping the unspoken agreement for discretion in a situation where a lover has a reasonable expectation of privacy. I don't kiss and tell about the other person. Much like you, I change names, locations or other unimportant but identifying details so that when I kiss, I am only telling on myself.
Posted by: wKen | January 6, 2004 06:37 AM
what do you think of my blog? good expressive writing or not?
Posted by: burbman | January 14, 2004 05:38 PM