Note: I wrote a piece for My Name is Me. It was not selected1 so I will share it with you below. After you’re done, please go read this post.
I would love to live in a world where the wearing of a button which proclaims “I love butt-sex!” attracts no more attention in the grocery store than would one throwing support behind Team Edward. Unfortunately we do not yet live in that world, or at least I don’t.
As a teenager I was the strange bookish kid in a teenytiny town where any oddity was seen as a moral failing of oneself and one’s entire family. When that family overflowed with unchecked mental illness and sexual abuse, and when psychiatric help was impossibly far away, and when pastors and school counselors could not be trusted to keep confidentiality, the only options I saw were gouging lines into my legs with supersharp embroidery scissors or transferring dire thoughts out of my head and onto paper. A series of spiral-bound journals stacked up; these I would sort through from time to time, committing the oldest to flames. Even then I had plans for my work’s anonymity. I’m keeping these for a friend, I practiced saying in preparation for the day my mother would stumble upon my cache. Or It’s only fiction.
Eventually I broke free but the journals kept on coming. I’d write a stack then burn a stack, a pattern repeated through college, through my early married life, through the births of two children. But when that second child was a year old and my marriage was a tragedy wrapped in a pretense inside a torrent of seething resentment, I decided the content was too hot for paper pages. Thus was born my blog. Into it went not only the anger and frustration of dealing with (by then) three tiny children and a checked-out husband, but also all the sex I’d pushed down due to ridiculous, crappy parenting and throughout my entire marriage.
Lost amongst billions of other web pages, why, I thought, would anyone read mine? I’d forgotten one crucial fact: People like to read about sex, especially if it is written well — and once separated there was sex a’plenty, written as well as you’d expect from someone who’d spent her formative years hunched over notebooks with pen in hand. My readers cheered me on through new-found singlehoood, through dates, through explorations tentative and audacious in areas I’d previously only imagined — or seen in porn. The bolder my writing became the gladder I was that I’d made the decision to write anonymously, because while I was most sincerely enjoying my sextoys, my silicone lube and my buttsex, I felt fairly confident that my neighbors would not be so appreciative.
I am absolutely comfortable having shared nearly six years of my adventures with the world, but if those exploits were tied to my legal name they would cease to be shared. They would instead forced upon the people who share my name, and that’s just not fair to them. Should my pre-teen be teased in math class because her mom is, by society’s standards, a great big slut? Should my former husband have to endure speculation about his role in his ex-wife’s sexuality? I’d love it if everyone in the world were so secure with hir own boundaries and the boundaries of others that they could differentiate between my informed sexual choices and what those choices say about the character of the people in my life (read: little to nothing). So many of us can’t do that. We assume that the sins — the perceived sins — of the mother somehow pass down to her daughter. Or up to her parents.
I count among my friends and associates in online anonymity: educators who have too many times been confronted by parents angry that they helped their children receive honest, comprehensive sexuality information; BDSM enthusiasts whose exes would erroneously assume that an affinity for rope magically transforms one into an unfit parent; and sex workers who face online attacks that have grown even more relentless in the wake of Porn WikiLeaks. Sexbloggers, especially female sexbloggers, report falling victim to a phenomenon wherein people assume those who write about sex are also widely (and indiscriminately) available for sex, which is quite often the opposite of the truth. I know parenting bloggers who simply don’t want that one unbalanced reader to show up at the playgroun. These people have the right to speak truth about their lives without fear of harassment.
We all do.
Maybe some day I will be judged not on the sexual acts I practice (or with whom I practice them) but instead only on the quality of my character. Until then, I’ll talk about my colorful dating life (and buttsex) anonymously. I’ll be aag.
- small sob [↩]
