In this original Blue Blood interview, Forrest Black and Rachel Kramer Bussel have just eaten a whole lot of delicious cupcakes. Forrest Black interviews the writer/editor about her Cupcakes Take the Cake blog. They also discuss her naughty themed anthologies which include Spanked: Red-Cheeked Erotica. Writer/editor Clint Catalyst has a cameo appearance. And I helped eat the cupcakes.

As you all have no doubt noticed, we’ve been working on some video stuff on BlueBlood.net here. It is still in beta, but we are making it live for your viewing pleasure. Feel free to point out anything which is not working perfectly yet, because we know Blue Blood TV is in beta.

We’ve been really enjoying putting together our first segments and I’m really excited to share them with you all. For the most part, Forrest Black has been directing and I’ve been producing. We’ve mostly been taking turns shooting, kinda the same as we do for still photography. We’ve gotten some behind-the-camera assists from the always enjoyable Michelle Aston as well. We are fortunate enough to have the incredibly talented Tim Skold on board for the project to do the Blue Blood theme music. As this is Blue Blood, you probably all know who Tim Skold is, but I’ll give you a quick overview, just in case. I first came across his work when he was in a band called Shotgun Messiah, which I thought was a great name for a band. Other bands he has been in include Kingpin, KMFDM, Marilyn Manson, and Skold. His eponymously titled Skold album is one of my favorite CDs of all time, one of those rare records I can play all the way through, enjoying every single song over and over again. Anyway, I’m really thrilled about doing this video series thang, and the way it is all coming together, and feeling very creatively inspired.

Our video section is just starting out, so, when it becomes a fabulous gigantic internet phenomenon, you can say you were in-the-know when. We’ll be both highlighting videos we think are interesting and bringing you original programming. I just posted our Deathrace Jason Statham interview and Deathrace director Paul W. S. Anderson interview. Coming up this weekend, I interview musician Andy LaPlegua of Combichrist. Forrest Black interviews writer/editor Rachel Kramer Bussel about her Cupcakes Take the Cake blog (and sex.) Forrest Black and I (and a lot of our unsavory pals) attend the Coilhouse magazine launch party and I interview editor Nadya Lev. And there is tons more to come. Feel free to message me or Forrest Black directly or in public (or sidle up to one of us in a nightclub and whisper) about what you’d most like to see us do because we are just getting started.

I know, I know, some of you were probably assuming I was about to announce the launch of a giant adult video section, probably in the members area over on sister site BlueBlood.com. Over the years, just about every major mainstream adult video company, both in Porn Valley and beyond, has pitched yours truly and Forrest Black to do the pr0nz vidz for them. I’m not saying that nobody could ever make me an attractive offer on that front, if we really were on the same page with a company which wanted to make something great. But it has been my experience that these huge multimillion dollar companies will come at us saying how much they want something gothic or punk or alt or tattooed, and then turn around and say that they figure the budget can be small because they can underpay talent with tattoos or black lipstick.

One of my personal rules is that I will work for free or cheap for someone who does not have an office, if I like them and I believe in their project. If someone has a big ol’ office, I expect a pro rate and I expect the same for those I work with. If someone owns one or more buildings, I expect them not to start being cheap when it comes to my subculture and my friends and my collaborators.

But, honestly, it really boils down to art. The thing about artists is that they do not always do what is the commercially perfect thing to do. Artists do what they feel like doing. What I really felt like doing was discussing the meaning of alternative culture with Nadya Lev and what appalling horror movies are fun to sample with Andy LaPlegua.

I hope you guys like what we’ve been making because I enjoyed the creative process and I’d like to make you more videos soon.

Rachel Kramer Bussel has a new collection of stories out. This Cleis Press anthology is called Spanked: Red-Cheeked Erotica. Rachel is an extremely accomplished anthologist of erotica and a vocal enthusiast of spanking.

Although Rachel’s books sell well in their category and she generally has a couple of them charting on Amazon, she hoped to increase her visibility and sell more copies of Spanked. So she commissioned an outfit called What That Noise Productions to make her a book promo video. She posted the video to a number of sites and Vimeo and Flickr both removed it. Although the subject matter is a bit naughty perhaps, there is no nudity or anything like that in the video. At the time of this writing, Vimeo had simply responded to her queries by telling her she violated their terms of service. Flickr had not responded at all.

I know, from personal experience, that Flickr seems capricious at best. There is some truly terrible photography on Flickr, of some extremely explicit material, posted purely to promote quite pornographic sites. I spent a lot of time browsing Flickr before making Blue Blood profiles on there. I was very careful to precisely conform to the way other regular posters placed their photographs on Flickr. The BlueBlood.com profile quickly grew to have more than three thousand friends. Flickr sent a warning, but they refused to clarify what exactly Blue Blood was doing that wasn’t fitting with the Flickr community standards. Eventually, after failing to answer multiple emails from us, Flickr deleted the entire BlueBlood.com account, despite the fact that clearly thousands of Flickr members liked what Blue Blood was posting there just fine.

When someone polices unevenly, it is always difficult to discern the reasons for sure. I don’t know if Flickr and Vimeo are just money-losing propositions for their corporate parents and can’t afford to have anything on there use serious bandwidth. I don’t know if more popular posts are simply more likely to get attention, good or bad. I don’t know if they just make most normal uses officially against the rules just to allow them to have an excuse to remove whatever they feel like. Whatever their lame internal rationale for this bit of unfairness is, you can view the book promo video for Rachel Kramer Bussel’s Spanked: Red-Cheeked Erotica here now.

I’ve mentioned the most excellent writer/editor Rachel Kramer Bussel’s In the Flesh reading series here before. Kicking off during this week’s Book Expo, local editor/writer Carly Milne started curating a left coast version of In the Flesh.

The event was at a Venice couple-oriented adult store called Freddy and Eddy. Freddy and Eddy has the adorable slogan “where couples can come” for their brick and mortar location and I’ve been meaning to check it out forever. I keep getting invited to cool readings there, but it took Rachel’s extra dollop of coolness to get me to venture out to new territory and I’m so glad I did. The reading area is a spacious beautiful patio out behind the well-appointed and very pink store. I enjoyed chatting with one of the owners and the smart sexpert folks who had gathered for the occasion.

Although the video above is what Rachel read at Freddy and Eddy’s, the clip is actually from the most recent right coast In the Flesh reading event. (People say left coast for Cali all the time; can you say right coast for New York?) At the California one, the theme was Survival. The first reader was Willam Belli who is an incredibly charismatic trannie whose reading, about an odd hook-up with a tattooed hottie, connected so much with the audience that it came across more as performance than reading. The way this piece tied into the theme of Survival was more punchline than actual fit, but it was very entertaining. Esteemed anthologist Maxim Jakubowski read a piece about how relationships have soundtracks, which I think is a very true insight. Stan Kent dressed like a rockstar and read an excerpt of a series of novels he has written about a gothic punk girl who can relive the sexual experiences of whoever wore the shoes she has put on. Naturally this leads her to serial kill serial killers. Stan Kent so totally seems like someone I would know that I’m shocked to have never even come across his work before. Shana Ting Lipton is a writer whose work, given her credits, it seems likely I may have read before, but whose byline I was unfamiliar with. She introduced her stuff saying it was going to come across G-rated by comparison and then read a really beautiful and creative piece about exploring her sexuality in the Netherlands which, having spent some of my formative years in Europe, really spoke to me. I’ll definitely be looking for more by her. I unfortunately missed the reading by the evening’s organizer because we were coordinating the Blue Blood limo service for Rachel and Jackson West from Silicon Valley dough gossip blog ValleyWag. Rachel Kramer Bussel herself read the piece from the video, about what Erica Jong would term a zipless fuck in an airport. The idea being that it was about surviving a horrible layover in the Atlanta airport. Having spent a lot of time there, I felt it definitely fit the survival theme.

As Rachel also has a fabulously successful cupcake blog, the cupcakes for the evening were appropriately provided by Westside gourmet cupcake spot Schmerty’s.

Speaking of Rachel Kramer Bussel, some of you who get various newsletters already know this, but Rachel did a really kickass interview with yours truly for the October 2007 issue of Penthouse Variations. It was a really good interview because Rachel asked really thought-provoking questions.

Oddly enough, you can order a subscription to Variations through Amazon, but you need to hit the newsstand in the next couple of days to get the October 2007 issue with the BlueBlood.com photos and Rachel’s and my brilliant words. Due to the way newsstand distro works, November starts the first week of October. Sort of. Then again, if you end up with the November 2007 issue of Penthouse Variations, then you will have the lovely Justine Joli on the cover and that is always a good thing too. The October edition says “DEEP INSIDE BLUE BLOOD’S CUTTING EDGE GOTH SCENE” on the cover, though, so you should be able to pick it out okay.

(By the way, NSFW unless you work in my office.)

The In The Flesh Reading Series is hosted and curated by the fabulous writer and editor Rachel Kramer Bussel. It is a New York event, held the third Thursday of every month and features authors, of work ranging from erotic poetry to “down and dirty smut”, reading their work.

The upcoming event is on October 18th, 2007 at The Happy Ending Lounge. This is going to be Virgin Night and will include first time readers at the series and, hopefully, first time audience members. There will be fifty giveaways of first time reader Colette Gale’s debut novel Unmasqued: An Erotic Novel of the Phantom of the Opera. Gale’s book is, as you can probably surmise from the title, an extra erotic retelling of the story of the Phantom of the Opera.

The giveaways are due to the largess of the New American Library. NAL is a division of Penguin Group which publishes over four hundred books a year. NAL was more of less founded in 1948, spun off from the British parent that year anyway. NAL started off publishing work like D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover, so they are strong in the literary-yet-naughty department.

In addition to NAL author Colette Gale, first time readers for the upcoming In The Flesh night are scheduled to include Jasmine Clemente, Jane Lockwood, Sean Manseau, Robert W. Cabell, and Steven Padnick. The most recently past event included readings from Andrew Boyd (different Andrew Boyd from the one from BLT and Scurvy Dogs, Polly Frost, Marie Lyn Bernard, Todd Levin, Jessica Cutler, and of course the curator herself.

Due to the wonders of modern technology and YouTube, we kicked off here with the most recent reading by Rachel Kramer Bussel and I’m going to leave you all for now with the readings by Samara O’Shea and Todd Levin. None of us may ever need to leave the house again.

My mother’s generation had a saying about how you could go anywhere so long as you had a little black dress. I’ve been working on putting this to the test this September. Every year, I tend to feel kinda gothic during the summer and I perk up as soon as it is Fall. I don’t know if this is some sort of Reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder (Disorder is such a judgmental word.) or if I just really like school to be in session, whether or not I am attending it. My birthday is also in August and I tend to use my birthday and New Year’s as times to make adjustments designed to perfect my existence. This Fall, I’ve made a commitment to get out and enjoy what Los Angeles has to offer. So I bought a lot of little black dresses and have been trying new things and enjoying it a lot as it happens. The only weird thing about doing so much which is brand new is that it creates a bit of social anxiety.

The feminist blog/site Say Object referred to me saying,

“One of our favorite feminist thinkers, Amelia G of BlueBlood.net, recently weighed in on the “Captivity” billboard controversy, and some of what she says suprised us (plus, Girl clearly did her research).”

Writer/editor/cupcake fetishist Rachel Kramer Bussel and I were chatting about the Say Object mention and she told me they were having a party.

So Tuesday night, although I knew I was eventually headed to the West Side to help Blue Blood hottie Superna celebrate her birthday, I started all the way on the East Side at The Echoplex in Echo Park. The first event on deck was the The Conversation which was the opening act for Yo Majesty at Lady Party 911. Apparently comedians Jessi Klein and Jessica Chaffin do a weekly show called (I think) The Pages where they intellectualize tabloid fodder in a humorous fashion. The duo moderated The Conversation for this event where the topic was Punishing the Princesses. Basically the idea was to do a feminist deconstruction of why, as a society, we put people like Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Lindsey Lohan on a pedestal and then knock them off it. The panelists were Tracy McMillan who I kind of think maybe writes for television, but I’m not sure. Then there was Jen Sincero who was apparently booked because she wrote The Straight Girl’s Guide to Sleeping With Chicks, although Don’t Sleep With Your Drummer is the books of hers I’m familiar with. It would be most accurate I guess to say I’m partly familiar with it, as I was enjoying reading it but was in the middle of it when Blue Blood exhibited at Erotica LA and a couple of members of Jen Sincero’s entourage stopped by my booth and acted so weird that I never got back to reading it. Rounding out the panel was Nina Hartley who, at least for me, I thought needed no introduction. For the event she was billed as Porn Queen Nina Hartley.

Jessi Klein and Jessica Chaffin were good moderators and kept The Conversation flowing. They have a sort of intelligent sex-obsessed vibe that strikes me as sort of Sex and the City, despite the fact that the closest I’ve come to seeing that show is watching a spoof of it on Saturday Night Live. Tracy McMillan says that she thinks masculine energy is all about going out into the world in a hunting sort of way and that feminine energy is about being receptive and gathering things in a powerful way. She says that she thinks Madonna has evolved from seeking masculine power and energy to seeking the feminine side. I think that I am secretly a man. Jen Sincero explained that she wrote her The Straight Girl’s Guide to Sleeping With Chicks because she found herself thirty-five-years-old and in a relationship with a woman for the first time. She said that she interviewed a lot of people for the book and that the people her own age she interviewed were very caught up with issues of sexual identity, but the younger people had more of the attitude of why wouldn’t you just sleep with whoever you feel like. Nina Hartley surprised me by being really awfully cool. I sort of thought I knew who she was in a general way, but she had really interesting insights. She is definitely not just another pornstar with an unconventional relationship and a publicist who claims she is smart. She is very well-spoken and was able to make interesting counterpoints all evening to an audience which was not necessarily porn-familiar or even porn-friendly. At one point, the panelists were talking about some reality show chick who had nude photos of herself posted to the internet and, while deconstructing whether the photos were more simply nude than prurient, someone mentioned that the girl was seventeen. Nina Hartley expressed horror and the other people on stage were like seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, what’s the difference? From a professional performer’s perspective the issue has to do with what is legal and I thought she handled that and other issues really well. The most interesting point she made was when they got to the topic of blowjobs. Apparently, some teen perv researchers recently did some sort of study (yeah, sure, a “study”) of how girls as young as twelve are just handing out the blowjobs these days and boys are not reciprocating. Nina Hartley said that, when she was fifteen, the notion of boys not reciprocating would have been totally uncool, but that she was interested in penises and would have been interested in giving blowjobs. However, she did not know that she could be alone with a boy and have limits on what she would do and she did not feel ready for intercourse.

Now you would think that, having had the site responsible for the event call me a favorite feminist thinker, I would not be experiencing any social anxiety, but that would be inaccurate. I figured I would be just kinda incognito and get to see other people talk. Only my good friend Lange kept hitting me on my cell during the talk because he had gotten to the club for the Superna birthday party an hour early. My cell phone is set so it is really loud when being turned off. It sings an entire song before powering down. I generally only think of how annoying this is at times when it would be even more annoying to play with the cell phone settings. So I just kept hitting mute and texted him where I was. I think the ringing makes the people sitting near me glance over at me and it turns out that one of them is Julia Rubiner with a super different haircut from the last time I saw her at a party at her house. Julia was kind enough to help write some Blue Blood About Us stuff when I was totally hyperventilating and blocked on writing it. I actually would have worked with her a bunch more, only all of her publicist pals were apparently part of the same pact to put a media blackout on Blue Blood projects. Whatever. It was nice to run into her.

Once The Conversation was complete, I got back in my car and drove like a bat out of hell, just long enough to get kind of turned around and lost in Echo Park. Fortunately, my cell phone features the primitive form of GPS where you call your friends and make them MapQuest where the fuck you are. I have nice friends.

I make it over to The Viper Room and meet up with the rest of the Blue Blood posse. The entire downstairs lounge is set for a Superna takeover and she is getting ready to play an all acoustic set with a new drummer. Uber-scenester Casper, of Coyote Shivers band fame, makes me and Forrest Black feel very welcome and we appreciate it. Last time I bought Superna shots, she vomited blood, so I don’t get her any birthday shots, but everyone else does. After her performance, she and Scar spend most of the rest of the night making out.

We hear that Fred Durst is filming a reality show in the upstairs of the club shortly. That seems like the perfect surreal end to the evening, so we all trundle upstairs. Fred Durst is gracious and nice, although I get the sense that, like me, part of him is really into being where he is and part of him is just crawling out of his skin with so many people around, looking and maybe judging. The band on stage for the reality show has a kind of an 80’s hard rock Pat Benetar sort of thing going and I like them, although security requests that I not shoot while they are on stage and I comply because I am considerate like that. When folks are nice to me anyway.

The thing people who are not extremely shy sometimes don’t get about me is that, it is already kind of painful to leave my house. Once I’ve exited the building, it is no more uncomfortable for me to talk to a rockstar than it is to chat with someone I vaguely know. It is all over the agony threshhold in a way and it is all interesting and stimulating in a way, so it is sort of all the same to me. I’m actually most comfortable with total strangers and with people I know very well. People I sort of know make me the most uneasy.

In closing her set, Superna mentions from the stage that people who want to see her naked ass (which must be everyone!) should go to BlueBlood.com. When I go into the bathroom, someone has put a Blue Blood sticker up in one of the stalls. I’m not sure how much longer I’m going to be able to maintain my anxiety level, if the universe is going to be so sweet to me. I hope my art doesn’t suffer.

The sex blogger panel at SXSW was entertaining and provided food for thought, but I’ve been having trouble writing about it. I finally realized that the problem with writing about sex bloggers is the same problem bloggers have writing about sex: Specifically, sex and sexuality are very core to self, so even the most gentle critiquing of someone’s sexuality can be terribly hurtful. If any sex bloggers are wounded by what I say here, I apologize, but please keep in mind how you feel when you write about sex with a date who doesn’t like your review.

I attended the Do You Blog on the First Date? panel because Rachel Kramer Bussel was on it. With credits including Penthouse, Bust, and Punk Planet, I think of her more as a writer writer than as exactly a blogger, but she does blog very diligently about both her life and cupcakes, so she absolutely has blogging cred. Yes, I said she writes about “cupcakes” and that is not slang for some depraved sex act you are unfamiliar with. Sometimes a cupcake is just a cupcake and I can’t help loving quality food porn; it is hardwired into my system. And apparently I know now that I am not alone in my longings. Rachel Kramer Bussel’s writing is intelligent and raw. She manages to be very self-aware without injecting pounds of that fakey emo I-don’t-really-mean-it irony. No mean feat and a breath of fresh delight in the current online writing landscape. Especially in the blogosphere.

So I showed up to hear Rachel speak and found out about the other sex bloggers on the panel along the way. The moderator was Mikki Halpin who was a good SXSW selection because of her tome The Geek Handbook: User Guide and Documentation for the Geek in Your Life, although she is also a contributing editor to Glamour and known for her It’s Your World–If You Don’t Like It, Change It book of advice to teens on how to engage politically. Unless there is more than one Mikki Halpin writing from New York City, in which case I feel less informed, but that doesn’t seem super likely. She once was on People’s Court because someone’s mom sued her for putting their picture in her zine. She says Judge Wopner threw it out because the woman was bringing son on national TV, only she didn’t mention what the nature of the photograph was.

Then there was Melanie Boyer who does a dating blog called About Last Night for the Alt Weekly from my old stomping grounds, the Washington City Paper. She has great hair and big jangley earrings and lists a nice writerly assortment of life credits ranging from a Masters in International Training and Education to being a Peace Corps volunteer. She was kind enough to give me a turquoise pair of her signature boy short panties featuring her bird logo on the front and the line “a little birdie told me, About Last Night, dispatches from the morning after” inside.

Next up was Emily Listfield who does the Sex and the Single Mom blog for Redbook of all places. For some reason, I was surprised to see that Redbook was technologically ahead of the curve in the magazinosphere. I found Redbook also annoyingly on top of their pop up advertising technology and keep in mind what far reaches of the web I, uhm, surf. Emily Listfield is best known for her novels which genre-wise fall somewhere between chick lit and noir and I definitely intend to check them out.

I’m less surprised to find out that Glamour has a dating blogger Alyssa Shelasky. After all, Glamour and Wired share a corporate parent. Prior to blogging about her dates for Glamour, Alyssa Shelasky was a staffer for Us Weekly and before that apparently was so impressive a PR pitchwoman that journalists not only wrote about the products she repped, but also wrote about how awesome she was at getting them to do so.

Now you all know the cast of characters, so what are the ethics of blogging about dating? Melanie Boyer, of The Washington City Paper, said she initially thought she would get permission from each of her beaus. She says she believes men think they know the score when they don’t. So now her rule is to tell them what she does immediately and then the gloves are off once she is not seeing them any more, although she never uses names and attempts to be minimal enough on details that her guys are not easily identified. Still, she has more or less accidentally busted out at least two cheating lovers with her blog. Alyssa Shelasky, of Glamour, says that she tries not to humiliate people and to be friendly, nice, ethical, and kind, but sometimes she finds herself saying, “I would have thought you’d be flattered by that and instead they hate your guts and they’re going to therapy.” Rachel Kramer Bussel, of Penthouse Variations, agrees that people tend to “freak about little things.”

In addition to the ethics involved with the responses lovers and potential lovers may have to being blogged about, there are possible repercussions for third parties and other people’s opinions can come into play. Alyssa Shelasky worries about her parents’ response, so she won’t write about more than kissing. She initially thought her readers would be impressed if she talked about partying with Paris Hilton, but she quickly understood that they wanted to see her vulnerable, emotional, human side. Then again, she says she pretty much quits her job whenever she gets hate mail, so being her editor is probably kind of hellish. Emily Listfield’s blog is precisely about being sexual and being a single mom, but Redbook readers apparently can get a bit perturbed about her having sex at all. She understandably feels that her thirteen-year-old daughter shouldn’t know about her mother’s love life and has her friends lie such that “it gets very complicated to have that many realities out there.” She jokes that when your offspring turns thirty is the appropriate age to tell your child you blog about sex. Rachel Kramer Bussel has the luxury of blogging more for herself and thus having more control and says she will remove comments which are just mean and not constructive. She explains that “people really personalize whatever you write about and then they get affronted” and feel like they have to defend themselves.

The combination of invading the privacy of a writer’s romantic partners and having to stand behind whatever is blogged in the moment can be painful. Pretty much everyone on the the Should You Blog on the First Date? panel said they either wish they had blogged anonymously or were considering blogging anonymously. Emily Listfield feels that the anonymity of the women who comment on her blog entries gives them the freedom to really share about themselves and she feels that is a wonderful thing. Having her own name on her words makes Emily Listfield feel that her blog may be “destroying her life.” Alyssa Shelasky explains that Glamour wanted a face for the blog, someone who could promote on television and so forth, so being anonymous was not an option. She did enjoy it, however, when she got a MySpace account, despite feeling like, at twenty-nine, she was too old for it, and was surprised by the really really personal messages she received privately from readers. She felt like it was almost a group therapy evolution which made her like her blog more. Melanie Boyer says that the paper wanted journalistic integrity, so she had to use her name. Although she got a thrill from the whole “there’s that fat nerdy girl from junior high and now she’s a sex columnist” thing, she has found having her name on her blog inconvenient. In almost the same breath that Melanie Boyer makes the very astute observation that “anonymity erases integrity,” she expresses her own longing for anonymity. She doesn’t say whether she thinks her integrity would stay strong in such a situation. Rachel Kramer Bussel has considered doing an anonymous sex blog because she made the interesting observation that her friends who blog more anonymously than she does can be much more detailed without the same fear of upsetting those they blog about. It “makes you reconsider what you say when your name is on it,” she explains.

Pretty much all the sex bloggers agree that the people they blog about tend to be bummed about it and that they don’t much care for being blogged about themselves. Rachel Kramer Bussell says it felt weird to be blogged about by a peer, a woman she was in the same anthology with. Alyssa Shelasky says she hated having one of her guys, BostonBoy, stating his perspective in her comments and she also hated Gawker slagging her. Then again, she says she did get called “dating whore of Conde Nast” which might be a little brutal. Although I couldn’t find that exact phrase on the Gawker.com site, I did find a place where they had re-posted Alyssa Shelasky’s engagement announcement from a relationship which obviously didn’t work out. Ouch. In fact, she says, the only guy in six months who she dates who loved the Alyssacentric blog was on drugs, a “raging cokehead,” and she also had no trouble with a semi-homeless guy she had a three week fling with. Because he had no computer.

At this point in the panel, I apparently passed Forrest Black, who was shooting the presentation, a note which read: “MY BROTHER SHOULD MARRY SHELASKY ONLY HER FACE IS NOT HEART-SHAPED.” (For the non-Luddite savvy, note passing is a sort of low tech Twitter.) My brother is not a homeless coke addict with no computer (and I love my brother) so I guess there is just something wrong with me. I just thought she was awesome, really adept at coming across sweet, but in a way where you could tell she could handle high pressure socializing. I made sure to get her cell number and email, but, alas, reading her blog upon my return from Austin, I discovered that she is already in a relationship. Drat.

Emily Listfield says that “strategy-wise” doing a date blog is very hard because some guys say they won’t read it, but she wonders if they can really avoid that. The panelists all agreed that dating involves a certain amount of deciding what to reveal when and blogging about it messes up the timing on revealing oneself bit by bit. Rachel Kramer Bussel says she finds it problematic that sometimes she is fine with blogging about really personal stuff which is at a deeper level that how well she knows someone she is dating. To be a good blogger, she feels it is very important to “go beyond the surface” and she points out that her favorite blogs to read are not necessarily written by people she would want to be faced with in person.

Melanie Boyer says “ I write every day and it has become like exhaling; it has become my way of processing things,” only reading her entries makes me want to shake her, tell her how good she looks, and give her a mirror where she doesn’t see her junior high face. But she is a little oblivious and apparently still cranky at men for slights which must be far in her past now. Once they opened it up to questions, all of the panelists, except Rachel Kramer Bussel, made some fairly sexist remarks about men and male insight. Most of them seemed to be agreeing on the preposterous claim that men don’t blog about dating, and certainly straight men don’t, until Rachel Kramer Bussel brought up Tucker Max. Perhaps realizing how they sounded, Melanie Boyer made an attempt at a partial save by pointing out that the members of the sex blogger panel all have the perspectives of totally heterosexual women. Except, just from data presented during this specific panel, this is patently not the case. Rachel Kramer Bussel says that “it’s really hard not to internalize stereotypes about sex writing” and that some people look at writing about sex as frivolous, but she disagrees. Alyssa Shelasky says “you have to own it to feel good about it, like anything else,” only one gets the impression that she isn’t planning on being a dating blogger for much longer.

So should you blog on the first date? Going by the experiences of this panel of bright female writers, I’d have to say you probably should not. The question is posed: Does a great writer have to not care what anyone thinks? Going by my own experiences, I’d have to say that is probably true. Ouch. Are all great artists destined to die alone? I guess that is a topic for another article.