Mike Judge’s Office Space is a hysterically brilliant piece on the soul-sucking nature of certain sorts of employment. The scene where they smash the fax machine is one of the most inspiring moments in American cinema ever. Viewpoint character Peter Gibbons, played with perfect comic timing by Ron Livingston, decides that, rather than quitting his job, he will simply stop going. He and his next door neighbor Lawrence, played with deadpan humor by Diedrich Bader, discuss what they would do if they had mad money. Lawrence’s only unrealized ambition is to have a threesome with two chicks.

Peter Gibbons: What would you do if you had a million dollars?
Lawrence: I’ll tell you what I’d do, man: two chicks at the same time, man.
Peter Gibbons: That’s it? If you had a million dollars, you’d do two chicks at the same time?
Lawrence: Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I were a millionaire I could hook that up, too; ’cause chicks dig dudes with money.
Peter Gibbons: Well, not all chicks.
Lawrence: Well, the type of chicks that’d double up on a dude like me do.
Peter Gibbons: Good point.

Mainstream porn overflows with girl/girl sex, but it is all of the sort where the women are supposed to be into it because they are just soooooooo overheated and no man is handy, not because they like women. The male consumer can fantasize that all he has to do is show up with a taste of the real thing (i.e. cock) and that would just make those ladies’ day.

I find the whole issue difficult. On the one hand, I know that site members often enjoy girl/girl pairings, even if the women pictured would not normally have sex with one another in the natural course of events. So there is certainly money in shooting lesbian sex, but I suffer from the punk rock problem of not being particularly fiscally motivated. Something which puts even more social pressure on me to shoot faux lesbian interactions is that many altmodels believe that their ticket to fame and fortune is being photographed fondling the breasts of a model more internet famous than they are. You might be shocked at how much static I have received from mostly straight models for declaring a moratorium on fake lesbian shoots for BlueBlood.com. If two people want me to photograph them having sex, as an artist, I am only really inspired to shoot them if I believe they are truly into each other and would be making love whether or not there was a camera in the room.

When I was fourteen and had a youthful fixation on heterosexual couplings, I was troubled by the mainstream porn my friends were able to get ahold of in Israel where I went to ninth grade, because there was always some sort of lesbian scene in every flick. I have the vague notion that porn movies may have been illegal in Israel, so this probably limited what my underage unsavory pals were able to get their hands on, but I still viscerally recall my discomfitted response to the chick in Flesh Gordon being forced to eat hairy muff. Yes, I played Dungeons & Dragons and watched science fiction porn. (Probably no surprise there.)

As an adult, my take on sexual orientation is . . . let’s just say different from what it was as a teen. I really don’t care about whether someone’s genitalia are innie or outie; I just want something real, something genuinely passionate, something with a true human connection.

Back in the early 90’s, when I would be interviewed about Blue Blood magazine in print, I would always say it was erotica and not porn and point out that I was a woman and women can only produce erotica. I thought I was kidding. But there is a certain oddness to the approach mainstream porn has to human sexuality.

Every year, AVN or Adult Video News, has an awards show for porn videos and porn performances from the preceding year. The first time I ever came across this particular awards show was some time after fantabulous writer-cum-video-director David Aaron Clark had written the first issue of Blue Blood in print up for the late lamented Scew newspaper. Forrest Black and I went to meet him and Mistress Shane after they finished up at the AVN awards show in Vegas. DAC and Shane were mostly being entertainingly curmudgeonly about the enormous breasts in teen prom dresses wandering around the casino, but I was un-jaded and wide-eyed at the time. I’ve still never actually attended an AVN award show. Admittedly, I don’t particularly care for that variety of video media, so much of it would really go over my head. But I’m still fascinated by the culture which surrounds it.

Yesterday sexpert blogger Violet Blue covered Syd Blakovich and Madison Young’s red carpet walk at the AVN awards. Now a good-looking pornstar can generally get work if she is willing to have sex with other females on camera, even if she will not have boy/girl sex that way. There is almost the sense that a pornstar who only does women is somehow more of a nice girl than one who does men in films. Offhand, I can’t think of any major video porn star who has sex exclusively with men on camera.

So you’d think that people would just find it hot if Madison Young brought Syd Blakovich as her date to the AVN Awards. The talented Julie Simone shot some stuff of Madison Young which will be appearing on BlueBlood.com soon and I already covered extremely sexy badass Syd Blakovich’s Ultimate Surrender triumphs on here. So you can pretty much take it as a given that I think Syd Blakovich and Madison Young dating would be hot.

Violet Blue reports that AVN apparently didn’t want Syd Blakovich, in her cool steampunk outfit, to walk the porn red carpet with Madison Young. WTF? Someone would have to check with Summer Cummings and Skye Blue to see if this is actually the first time a girl/girl couple has attempted to take that red carpet stroll together, but, whether this is the first or the zillionth time a woman has brought another woman as her genuine date, it is messed up that an industry which insists on girl/girl sex would balk lest anyone think it was genuine girl/girl sex.

I mean, is it really excessively feminist to request that Porn Valley not whine if the women, they want to fuck each other, actually enjoy fucking each other?

PS I’ve seen a bunch of sex blogs, Violet Blue’s Tiny Nibbles included, posting pics of Gianna Lynn and her AVN awards dates. With how much some folks yammer on about porn crossing over to the mainstream, as though sex were somehow totally separate from all other areas of life, you’d think somebody in smutville would have noted that Gianna Lynn’s dates were UFC contract winner Ryan Bader and former Arizona State University
 classmate and fellow MMA fighter CB Dollaway.

If I were in Portland for NYE, I can guarantee that I would be at Darklady’s Empire of Pleasure New Year’s Eve. If you’ve ever read the words in an adult publication, you are most likely familiar with Darklady’s work. She is a successful prolific journalist and sexpert and knows so much about so many of my favorite things. She describes her areas of expertise as “adult entertainment industry, free speech, internet technology, and alternative sexuality” and I’d have to agree that is deliciously accurate.

What you may not know is that Darklady Productions, Inc. also produces a series of good events for the perverse. We’ve got a little taster gallery of event photos from her Burlesque-a-thon themed 2008 Portland Masturbate-a-thon and her 2007 NYE Masquerade. I’m always down for wearing giant hoop skirts which knock everything over, although, because I don’t have a real hat head, sometimes crowns can be difficult to fit. Tiaras work fine though. Yes, I’m planning an outfit in my head for an Empire of Pleasure themed event I probably won’t be in town to attend; I work too much, but it sounds really fun. Darklady described the theme, saying:

“The snows are melting and Darklady’s Empire of Pleasure has physical, emotional and spiritual warmth to spare. Pay homage to empires past, present and future while lovingly indulging your senses in celebration of life and the coming New Year. Darklady’s Empire of Pleasure pays homage to days past, present and future that shape us. Whether your favorite “imperial” spreads like butter or starred Shaka Zulu, the Son of Heaven, the Chrysanthemum Throne, Imperium Romanum, Stormtroopers or genuinely Byzantine thinking, Darklady invites you to lovingly indulge in a celebration of the senses and New Year.”

They will also have giveaways from Big Teaze Toys, Topco Toys, Taboo Video, Stockroom and Astroglide too if you count the fact that Astroglide is sort of sponsoring the play room. They take their play seriously in the Pacific NW. Plus all you can eat Mediterranean buffet. Mmmmm.

You can get more info at Darklady’s site and RSVP to Darklady@darklady.com.

The sexy lead-off picture for our Darklady photo gallery is of her and Dale the Nail from this year’s Portland Masturbate-a-thon, photographed by Bryan Grimes. Darklady and I were chatting about her party and just random stuff going on and this photo made her think of a great story she shared:

“It’s so weird about Dale and I. We were punk teens back in the 70s/80s and hung out downtown — then dropped out of contact until after 2000 when we discovered I was writing throwing parties and writing about sex for a living and he was hanging from hooks and creating weird “guerrilla art.”

Nice to know we didn’t all grow up to become accountants and housewives.“

Amen to that, sister.

A few years back, a number of members of Blue Blood sites started writing in to say someone was making dolls of various Blue Blood hotties. As I recall, Mistress Domiana and Fetus de Milo were two where there were specific dolls folks felt were based on photos Forrest Black and I had shot of them. Maybe there were other girls; it didn’t seem at all significant at the time, and the Bratz have changed enough over time that the Jury in their recent court battle (more on this soon, even though it is not technically a sex trial) asked whether they could find for the plaintiff in the first generation Bratz and against for later ones. To the best of my knowledge, neither I, nor Forrest Black, nor anyone I’ve photographed has ever met any of the brass at MGA Entertainment, the company who launched Bratz as their primary toy line in either 2001 or 2002, depending on who you ask. I guess MGA Entertainment is headquartered in Van Nuys, which is at last geographically close to Hollywood, if not culturally. So who knows.

Blue Blood hottie April Flores got in her prototype this week from Topco. The prototype is of the Wild Fire Celebrity Series Voluptuous CyberSkin Pussy. So that appears to be working out, but I’ve never really found a ton of business value in that type of merch, so I never gave much thought as to whether Bratz were or were not inspired by Gothic Sluts or whatever.

Some folks who did give it a lot of thought and were positive Bratz owed them an intellectual property debt were at the doll manufacturing and marketing powerhouse Mattell, home of Barbie. Now we could start comparing Barbie and Bratz. We could discuss how generations use fashion to define themselves. We could hear opinions from parents who feel Barbie (which they played with) is classic and wholesome and Bratz (which their kids want to play with) just teaches little girls to be whores. We could go into the radical feminist view that both Barbie and Bratz give girls unrealistic ideas of what a woman’s body will and should be like, setting the stage for adult eating disorders, antidepressant abuse, promiscuous sex, and excessive submission to the patriarchy.

Those might all be valid views, but the case, presided over U.S. District Judge Stephen G. Larson, this week was not, as many people supposed, about the ways Bratz is or is not similar to Barbie. The Bratz concept was developed by someone while he was working under exclusive contract for Mattel. His exclusive contract specifically stated that all such creations devised while in their employ were property of Mattel. This is a pretty common type of agreement for development teams. The idea is to prevent someone, especially someone with tons of access to proprietary info, from cashing their future competitor’s checks, while coming up with what they intend to market as a hipper and more current version of their employer’s product. Basically, this type of employment contract is explicitly to prevent precisely what the Bratz creator did.

So Judge Stephen G. Larson found in favor of Mattel. Mattel and MGA Entertainment have a couple of months now to decide whether to make Bratz and perhaps MGA a Mattel subsidiary, sell Bratz to MGA, license Bratz to MGA, or force MGA and all wholesalers and retailers to return any remaining My Hip Little Hoochie Barbies Bratz and then stack them up in the parking lot at 16380 Roscoe Blvd., pour newly less expensive gasoline on the clubby doll pile, and light it up.

These might all be valid courses of action.

So I just got back from voting. I went to the polling place where I voted in the primaries and I wasn’t on the roster. They gave me a provisional ballot, but I find those things alarming. They also gave me a slip of paper with a list of phone numbers to call to find out what was up with my voter registration. I thought that perhaps my polling place had been changed to my work address from my home address or something like that. Basically, I did not want to submit a provisional ballot, if I could drive across town to another polling place and do a normal one.

The poll workers told me that I did not need to call because my vote would absolutely, definitely, no-question be counted. I called the registrar election day number anyway. A nice woman named Karen went over everything and told me that actually she couldn’t find me in the voter rolls. She gave me a more official State of California Registrar of Voters number to call and told me I should definitely call next week to get it all straight, but that it was doubtful I’d get through calling today.

I was literally shaking at the idea that my vote might not count, so I was going to be sitting in front of the polling place, with one eye on my ballot inside and the other on my finger hitting redial on my Blackberry, until I got through. There was no cell phone reception inside the polling place and it is illegal to remove the ballot from the polling location. Happily, the voice prompts and wait time for the California number were user-friendly and pretty prompt, given that it is election day.

Another nice woman named Whitney helped me this time and she told me that actually I was not currently active in the voter rolls because my registration was flagged for lack of birth location. I had changed something minor on my registration before the primaries, so there was a recent registration form, even though I’ve been voting in the same district for approximately eight years. I actually voted at the same polling place in the primary, but, at that time, they had not processed the new info on my new registration. Of course, I did fill out my birthplace when I registered again, but I was born overseas to American parents, so it is probably that whoever was doing the data entry just did not feel like looking up how to enter a European birth. At any rate, Whitney updated my information and activated my voter registration.

The significant thing here is that, because my registration had been flagged, my vote would not have been counted, if I had not gotten through to the registrar. So, for those of you with the polls still open, please call your local voting registrar, if there is anything off about the way you are or are not listed in the voter rolls. The poll workers will assure you that your vote will be counted, but it may take a little extra effort on your part for that to be true. Please make it.

As a bonus, lots of American businesses are offering presents for those who vote. Here are a few links to free stuff for Americans who perform their civic responsibility:

Ben & Jerry’s will give voters a free scoop of ice cream today between 5pm and 8pm. Krispy Kreme will give those with I Voted stickers a free star-shaped doughnut today. And from now until November 11, Babeland will give those with proof of having voted a free sex toy. Starbucks is giving away a free brewed coffee to anyone who tells them they voted. I don’t think they are requiring proof, like the other vendors, so I guess you can just claim to have voted there, but you really should vote and they do have a kind of inspirational commercial.

I’m going to be honest and say I love coffee, but I love an iced latte with organic non-dairy milk and artisan-roasted gourmet beans. The ice cream site has a nifty store locator feature right on the election promo page, but the nearest location is in the Valley and I’m in Hollywood. Also, I remember when everyone was excited that they opened one of those ice cream shoppes near my college and I found their ice cream overly sweet. One of my neighbors owns a doughnut shop across the street from where I live, so, if I feel like eating high carb and high glycemic index, I think I’ll just give him the few cents a doughnut costs. A sex toy seems like a better gift, but I get tons of cool sex toys free for product placements and reviews as is. So none of the free stuff is really jumping out at me.

I voted because it matters to me as a patriotic American to vote, because it is my responsibility as a citizen. And I did the follow-up necessary to make sure my vote would be counted for the same reason. I voted.

Tim Faulker at ValleyWag summed up the Hans Reiser trial best, saying, “There’s nothing funny about a murder trial. Unless there is.”

It has been a while since we did any sex trial coverage at Blue Blood, so I guess we’re due. So here is the set-up. Hans Reiser is a well-known but unpopular Linux programmer. Well, he is probably a Linux programmer, but there are bitchy San Francisco tech scene rumors that he actually hired cheap Eastern Bloc coders to do all his work for him. At any rate, there are some Linux file systems which bear his name, whether or not he earned it. And, let’s face it, the SF tech world has a rich history of dudes who take credit for other people’s work. I don’t think most of those people are murderers, so that is not, in and of itself, damning in a murder trial. Given that Hans Reiser went off to college after 8th grade, I’m thinking he probably at least supervised his Russian coding teams. I’d say that he was not on trial for whether he deserved his personal kudos, but he actually kind of was. His attorneys William DuBois and Richard Tamor repeatedly alleged that Han Reiser was only on trial because people hated his personality so much. Heck, his lawyers pointed out that they couldn’t stand the guy. I’m not sure whether I’d choose to be represented by counsel who disliked me so intensely, but Hans Reiser admits he is a little iffy in his choices on who to associate with.

Apparently, whether or not one wishes to mail order, Russia has bride catalogs where marriage-minded gentlemen can flip through and select the woman of their dreams. Hans Reiser started dating one Nina Sharanova who promptly became pregnant. Hans Reiser’s father, Ramon Reiser, told him that he should not marry the woman, partly because Hans says Nina conceived on their first night together and she was an OB/GYN by training and he felt a gynecological doctor could have practiced proper birth control, if she wanted to. Once Hans and Nina tied the knot, Ramon Reiser suspected his son’s Russian bride of using her new CFO position in the company to embezzle funds.

A gentleman named Sean Sturgeon was the Maid of Honor at the Reiser/Sharanova wedding and dressed in drag for the occasion. Sean Sturgeon was a childhood friend of Hans Reiser’s and loaned him the proceeds of a mortgage on his condo when Reiser’s company Namesys could not make payroll, possibly due to Nina’s embezzling. Sean Sturgeon and Nina Reiser do ecstasy together and Nina is irritated when Hans Reiser refuses to do it with her. According to endless court documents, Sean Sturgeon and Nina Reiser began a sexual affair which included lots of BDSM sex.

Hans Reiser accused Sean Sturgeon of everything under the sun. He said he didn’t need to pay his childhood friend back the bridge loan he had received. He said the man had MPD. Although he knew about the affair for three years before going into divorce proceedings, he said he was really concerned about the drugs and sadomasochism involved in his wife’s relationship with Sean Sturgeon. Why can’t San Francisco people ever just admit to plain old-fashioned jealousy? They always have to complicate the issue. You have to love legal papers which include the phrase, “lewd tattooed drug addicted BDSM pimp/whore” to describe someone’s oldest friend. Hans Reiser’s court filings made much of Sean Sturgeon having carved the word rage into his arm. Sean Sturgeon dismisses the incident, pointing out that Hans saw him cut himself at the time and it happened in the mid-90’s when lots of people were doing that sort of body modification where they lived.

The court documents in the custody battle also included the entertaining query, “Should the government be keeping me from showing my son how to direct brave goblin suicide bombers against their elven oppressors?” Apparently Nina had been freaking out at Hans for some time about playing Battlefield Vietnam and Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic with their young son Rory. Hans Reiser had well-reasoned thoughts on which games he allowed his son to play. For example, he felt that a game like Grand Theft Auto was unsuitable because there were no penalties for killing innocents. More creepily, he seemed to feel that it was important for a boy to develop his killer instincts and that these video games would assist with this and prevent the child from otherwise being made soft by his upscale suburban surroundings.

After Hans Reiser and Nina Reiser split up, she had a relationship with Sean Sturgeon for a while and told him that wolves mate for life and he was her wolf. A bitter custody dispute over the Reiser children Rory and Nio left Nina with primary custody and, after wholly-unsubstantiated and somewhat doctor-disproved accusations of sexual child abuse, Sean Sturgeon was not allowed to visit her when her kids were around. Eventually Nina and Sean mostly broke up, although Sean continued to give her occasional financial support and drove around with a decal of two wolves pathetically on the back of his car. For her part, Nina started a relationship with Anthony Zografos, a potentially richer dude who appeared more suited to raising a family.

Now this is the point where it would have just been a San Francisco divorce, had things stopped here. We could all have shaken our heads in dismay at the way the court system responds to reports of things we consider normal and commonplace, such as body mods or kinky sex or violent video games. Only things did not stop there. On Labor Day of 2006, Nina Reiser disappeared. Although no body was found and phone records show that Hans Reiser tried to call his ex days after her disappearance, the husband is always the first one police look at. He was arrested and held without bail for the past two years. That is a long time to be behind bars when the authorities can’t even produce the corpse. Law enforcement’s strongest pieces of evidence were very small amounts of sloppily-processed DNA evidence found in places where it really could have gotten there a number of ways and the fact that Hans Reiser had purchased two murder-related books in the week following his wife’s disappearance. The books were David Simon’s Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and Jonathan Goodman’s (no relation to Judge Larry Goodman) Masterpieces of Murder. I’ve never read either book, but, heck, I’ve watched every single episode of the Homicide: Life on the Streets TV show, as well as David Simon’s The Wire and Generation Kill. Seems like flimsy evidence. Especially when one considers that Rory and Nio’s grandmother spirited them off to Russia and there were questions of whether she would let them come back to the States to testify. Hans Reiser asserted that Nina Reiser, possibly abetted by a lover, stole from his company and then went home to Russia and had her mother bring her kids to her to neatly solve their custody dispute. Just to add to the confusion, in the middle of the proceedings, Sean Sturgeon confessed to being a serial killer. He placed his victim count at eight and a half because he was not sure whether the ninth victim had died or not. He swore, however, that he loved Nina and only murdered people who abused him as a child and was willing to take a polygraph or “truth serum” to prove his honesty.

The State of California felt there was enough to hold Hans Reiser on, but also felt that it was going to be a difficult trial and a long one with great expense to the taxpayers. So Hans Reiser was offered a plea bargain. The deal was that he would confess to killing Nina, tell them how he did it and show where he hid the body, so her loved ones could get closure. In return he would get three years with credit for time served while awaiting trial. He turned down the plea and a jury found him guilty and he was sentenced to 25 years to life. His attorney’s went around saying essentially that they were not allowed to introduce proper evidence that Nina Reiser was a dirty slut and that their client was just railroaded because he was such a thoroughly unlikable dickhead.

A lot of people in the open source community felt that Hans Reiser got a really raw deal. Sean Sturgeon swears he murdered eight or nine people and the police do not even arrest him, because there are no bodies. Hans Reiser swears he did not murder one person and is convicted, even though there is no body. Seems wrong.

Only this week, Hans Reiser made a new deal with Judge Larry Goodman to change his sentence to 15 years to life. Then he lead investigators to where he had deeply buried his wife’s body and gave a detailed account of how he punched her and then cut off the blood flow to her brain until she was dead. The only embarrassment he shows in his sworn testimony is that he felt he used a somewhat amateurish chokehold to kill her and that his old martial arts instructors might be disappointed in his murder technique. Doh!

“This is the typical behavior of a socialist, atheistic Open Source developer. When one has a lack of respect for intellectual property and God, then murder is sure to follow.”
–TurkBack, Wired

The biggest problem with the astroturfing style of marketing is that it makes everyone very skeptical of everything; it makes it very difficult to believe in anything. If a star willingly gets naked on camera, there will be some puritanical types who will think ill of them for it. Yet most people who enjoy being in the spotlight and being immortalized have a hankering to be in the spotlight and be immortalized even when they are, ya know, doing it. I have frequently run into famous people who want me and Forrest Black to shoot artistic nudes of them, but who do not want anyone to see the finished work. As an artist, it is important to me that people actually see what I create, so we have, to date, declined private commissions of this sort. A combination of following the various sex tape scandals, and my own personal conversations with people who wanted to get naked on camera without the social repercussions, has lead me to assume that most sex tapes are released with the knowledge and consent of the parties involved. That way, they can get the erotic attention and the victim sympathy.

The problem with this is that some people actually want their private lives to be, ya know, private. I have come to believe that actor Verne Troyer genuinely feels his privacy is being invaded with the current sex tape clip making the rounds and, at the request of his manager, I am having the honestly barely PG-rated clip removed from BlueBlood.net.

Late this evening, I received an email from someone named Ray Hughes who said that Verne Troyer was his client and who attached a PDF of what appear to be court documents pertaining to a temporary restraining order or TRO. A TRO is something issued by a judge to stop something potentially damaging from continuing while the court determines whether that thing is actually damaging. I couldn’t find any web references connecting anyone named Ray Hughes to Verne Troyer and I actually couldn’t find anyone named Ray Hughes listed as an attorney in Los Angeles. I could easily have blown it off until Monday and spent the evening watching a canceled science fiction series on DVD with pals, as planned. Instead, I read the court documents, which seem to be from a suit against Kevin Blatt, Sugar DVD, and TMZ and sent the following email back:

Hello Ray,

Although I may have shaken Kevin Blatt’s hand at a party, it could have been his brother’s hand, as I sometimes get the Blatt siblings confused. That’s as close as I’ve gotten to Kevin Blatt, TMZ, or SugarDVD, so I don’t think I could easily be characterized as falling under the category of agents, servants, employees, officers, directors, representatives, attorneys, successors, or assigns of Kevin Blatt, TMZ, or SugarDVD, or those acting in concert with them. The video I have displayed is embed code from YouTube which runs off of the YouTube site. Beats me whether the TRO would apply to my situation or not and 10 o’ clock on a Friday night is not the ideal time to get legal advice.

Nonetheless, acknowledging that I have not had benefit of legal counsel and admitting no wrongdoing and waiving no rights I may have, I will express my initial gut response to your request. I believe that my article on BlueBlood.net was respectful to Verne Troyer. It was certainly intended to be respectful of him and his accomplishments. If Verne Troyer genuinely feels his privacy was invaded, I will cause the references you request to be removed and issue an apology. It is difficult, in today’s virally-oriented marketing environment, to ascertain who truly wishes to keep their sex life private and who deliberately released their naked ass to the public and just pretends concern so no one dings them for being naughty.

I guess it might be possible to figure out contact information to verify via the court on Monday, but, if you could please forward me your response from an email for a recognized law firm before then, my opinion, pre-counsel, is that I can probably accept that as sufficient proof that Verne Troyer is truly concerned about invasion of his privacy. When you email me from an official email address, which I’m assuming you will, can you please advise me whether it is the YouTube video clip embed or the link to TMZ or both which you wish to have removed.

Best, Amelia G
http://www.blueblood.net

Ray Hughes emailed me back a hour later, explained that he was Verne Troyer’s manager (not attorney as I’d assumed) and that he always did business from his Gmail account, but he did CC an email which appeared to be for a Tracy B. Rane at McPherson & Associates, although he indicated that he’d just as soon not involve the attorney. I guess Verne Troyer’s lawyers don’t work on the weekend either. However, the court documents attachment references McPherson & Associates as where to send whiny-ass reasons why it is vital to the public interest to be able to keep naughty Verne Troyer video live on the interwebs. Verne Troyer is listed on the McPherson & Associates web site as a client. I popped over to TMZ to see if they had any mention that they were, ya know, being sued and found the following:

Verne Troyer has filed a $20 million lawsuit, claiming TMZ violated his rights by publishing and airing portions of his sex tape.

In the suit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in downtown L.A., Troyer claims TMZ violated his privacy rights and infringed on his copyright and trademark by running portions of the tape on TMZ TV and TMZ.com. He also alleges TMZ violated his right of publicity and misappropriated his name and likeness.

Troyer says the tape was stolen and ended up in the hands of Kevin Blatt, the guy who distributed “One Night in Paris.” Blatt is also named as a defendant.

In addition to damages, Troyer wants an injunction prohibiting further dissemination of the video.

Calls to TMZ were not returned.

I know that a lot of people are inclined to flip any papparazzi from TMZ the bird and nobody wants to pick up the phone to give TMZ a comment. Apparently, TMZ won’t even answer a press query from TMZ.

So anyway, the sex tape video clip has been removed and my sincere apologies to Verne Troyer for any distress my post may have contributed to. I want to be clear that I may not be legally required to remove the clip embed and I am definitely not legally required by any law or settlement to apologize for posting the video. I want to apologize because I feel very strongly that someone who wants their privacy should be allowed to have it, unless there is news which is important to the public interest. It is rarely vital to the public interest that we all be able to watch other people have sex. Not that watching other people have sex can’t be perfectly entertaining, when all parties consent.

(Thanks to our beloved advertiser Busted Tees for the photos in the graphic. Please do not blame them for the lewd linguistics lesson which follows.)

Will Judy: Coffee had better be the answer right now, because there’s nothing else going.

Considering initialized knuckle tattoos. Right hand: ROFL, Left hand: TLDR

Amelia G: I am not sure you are jovial enough for an ROFL knuckle set. What is TLDR?

Will Judy: “Too Long; Didn’t Read”

Shittiest, most smugly dismissive response to a post possible, worse than “Id hit it” or “tranny?”

Amelia G: It is probably good for the world that I didn’t know what that stood for and, perhaps solely as a result of this, had not noticed it before.

This conversation reminds me that I need to start a “Would you hit it?” thread somewhere.

As a linguistically informed individual, how would you deconstruct (deconstruct is my word of the week) the hit it expression. What is one hitting? Is the usage that one will smack one’s privates against another’s? Is it a more general colliding of human beings in a sexual context? Is hitting it something one does *with* someone else or *to* someone else? Is the usage supposed to apply only to men hitting women (e.g. tap that ass) or also to women hitting men (as it certainly is used in common parlance)?

Will Judy: Etymologically speaking: One of the many theories explaining the word “fuck” traces it back to the Olde Englishe verb “fokken”, “to strike”. Fokken in the sense “to strike” is still in use in German, although there is a separate word, fichen, for “to fuck”.

I think the current usage of “hit that” traces back to “hitting skins”, late 80s slang conflating beating drums (drumskins) with having the vigorous sex. “I’d hit skins with that fine thing” boiled down to “I’d hit that”.

There’s also the whole thing of shouting “Hit it!” to get something started, which goes back to time immemorial.

Amelia G: You have no idea how much pleasure and relief I am currently receiving from your explanation. Can I repost this? (with credit/blame of course)

Will Judy: You have my freely given permission.

So I guess this is just weird sex trial coverage week at BlueBlood.net. First Max Hardcore gets convicted, then Ira Isaacs gets a stay, and then R. Kelly got acquitted. Now it appears that notoriously litigious, Hot Topic-esque, altporn, membership site SuicideGirls (aka SG) has settled their most recent lawsuit. It is hard to keep track of all their legal scuffles, but this was the one against their former contractor fetish photographer Philip Warner and his collaborator altmodel Apnea.

The initial dispute between SuicideGirls and Apnea appeared to arise because she modeled with a girl named Katie for a forthcoming site, which had offered her and Katie disproportionately large sums of money for a simple nude photo shoot. Even though this new site had not launched yet and most planned sites never do launch, SG was particularly bent out of shape about the Apnea and Katie photos because Katie had also reportedly worked as SG’s accountant. This presumably meant that she was privy to very proprietary information. SG went so ballistic over this that they not only took away Apnea’s complimentary site membership, but they put a stop payment on a check they had already written to her.

The dispute between comically psycho-competitive SuicideGirls and their staff photographer Philip Warner appeared to arise when Philip posted on the internet that he was going to be adding community features to his own web site, basically making it a lot more like SG. According to AltPorn.net’s exclusive interview with Apnea, SG handed Philip a new and more exclusionary contract one day after he announced his web site intentions. He refused to sign the new more controlling contract, so one day later SG made a public break with him. SG then apparently had the hubris to inform Philip that “alternative images of beauty (dyed hair, piercing and tattoos)” were their sort of trademark and therefor his work was a violation of his noncompete and he fired back publicly saying that the images

“you describe reflect the same style that I photographed [Apnea] in prior to our participation and awareness of the suicidegirls.com site. SG has no ownership of this broad genre, it is clearly in the public domain and has been around on web sites like BlueBlood since before SG was created.”

Five weeks later, without bothering to reply to his publicly-posted letter, SG filed suit against Philip Warner.

Here is where it gets weird. First of all, Philip did not stop working with SG when they put a stop payment on the check to Apnea, but, as soon as he had a problem with them, he started asking other people to donate to his legal defense. As far as he was concerned, while Apnea’s problem might not have been his problem, his problem was apparently supposed to be everyone else’s problem. The second weird thing was that Philip presented like SG was trying to take away his livelihood, yet the gossip sites claimed he actually made his living by owning and operating rental properties in Texas and court documents assert that SG, over all the years he worked for them, paid out a bit over ten grand total. This works out to a little over $2,000 a year. That is not exactly enough to live on. The third weird thing is that the court documents for the initial complaint nowhere mention that Philip appeared to have been planning a competitive site targeted directly at SG’s slice of the marketplace. Instead they named Apnea’s solo girl site in the suit as what they were concerned about competing with. Yes, the Apneatic site domain was registered to Philip and he shot a significant portion of the content on it and he probably ran it in partnership with her. But why mention her site, especially when Philip claims his contract specifically permitted him to shoot for solo girl sites, and not mention the planned multi-girl site which seemed to trigger the falling-out? Somewhere in here, SG also licensed a bunch of their own unretouched photos of Apnea to a number of adult internet companies with the condition that they were not permitted to use a name Apnea wished to be called. Eventually SG apparently also named Apnea in their suit which was initially just vs. Philip.

Here is where it gets really weird. For the past year and a half, Philip and Apnea have been aggressively campaigning for charity and donations from the creative community for their legal defense. Photographers have been told they are not allowed to participate in art shows unless they promise to donate any proceeds from their own work to Philip’s defense. Models worked for free to make anti-SG legal defense posters. Philip made T-shirts and prints promoting his lawsuit and asked people to buy them in support of his legal defense. Site owners and other clients all felt like maybe they should pay Philip and Apnea slightly higher rates to help with their legal plight. Every time Philip or Apnea sold an unwanted piece of photo equipment or an old dress on eBay, they reminded everyone that all this was to pay for their legal defense and that everyone who hates SuicideGirls should contribute to their legal defense fund. I do not know exactly just how many people gave them money or exactly how much money they were given because, unlike what one would expect from a charity, there has never been any kind of public accounting of donations nor the expenses those funds covered. Certainly, a lot of people championed Philip and Apnea’s cause and tried to be as supportive as their personal situations permitted.

Here is where is gets really really weird. Today, Philip Warner and Apnea issued a joint statement, apparently written by Philip but signed by both, which said in part,

“We want to make it clear that we 100% have no hostilities towards SuicideGirls in anyway anymore, we all came to a really fair agreement over this dispute, and there were no bad people here, just mistakes and misunderstandings. If you’ve boycotted SG on our behalf, you helped us come to this agreement, so thank you but the battle is over, and we’re all friends again.”

They state that there will be new SG product authored by Philip and they include a link for anyone who wishes to join SuicideGirls. The link is an affiliate link which they explain saying,

“To help offset our legal expenses, when you sign up with SuicideGirls, please use this affiliate code so that we can use the money to pay off our lawyers and focus on Apnea’s modeling and my photography!”

Did they seriously keep beating the dead horse of their legal expenses, while asking people to join the very site they were fighting and telling everyone to boycott for its evil ways and lameness just one day ago? The very reason Philip and Apnea were able to get so much support for their legal defense was that a lot of people truly believe that SG is an evil company.

According to Apnea’s MySpace, she is currently, in 2008, twenty-two-years-old. The first nude photo set featuring her posted to the SuicideGirls site in 2003. I think people should take responsibility for their actions, no matter what their age, but I do have some sympathy for a teenage girl who entered into business with a predatory corporation. Philip’s MySpace, on the other hand, puts his current age at thirty-nine-years-old. He is a grown-ass man, and he knew what he was getting into with SG, and he still chose to lie down with dogs, and then ask everyone else to help with his flea problem. He supported SG aggressively when many other people complained of all manner of mistreatment. He asked for a hand-out when he had a problem, and now he is telling everyone it is all good because he is getting back in bed with SG. I can’t find it in my heart to have the same sympathy for him that I might for Apnea. They are still supporting SG, which is still an organization that is a blight on our scene.

I believe that SG head honcho Sean Suhl is pretty much personally responsible for most of what has gone horribly wrong with the counterculture in recent years. He helped collect alt demographics for secretive data mining corporation Experian, and they sold that info to Hot Topic, so Hot Topic could effectively shut down all the independent punk rock stores which were the cornerstone cultural centers of so many local scenes. And don’t even get me started on how Sean Suhl’s projects have made every effort to inhibit the creation of art, disempower men, and turn women into jokes.

Now, to be fair, despite the fact that I feel this way, I actually think SG had a totally legitimate complaint if they signed a photographer and a model to an exclusive agreement, promoted that photographer and model, made that photographer and model privy to a lot of proprietary information, and then the photographer and model both violated their contracts. Then again, SG was unable to win a legal case against hacker Chad Grant, even when he admitted to hacking SG’s server and having every intention of competing with SG in the marketplace in a way which he hoped would put them out of business. The court transcripts from that trial are truly hilarious and maybe SG settled this case to avoid creating another laugh riot at their own expense.

Now Philip and Apnea are having their joint statement with its affiliate link spam posted to all sorts of sites which generally never allow that sort of blatant commercial promotion. The responses so far indicate that SG may have laid off on a case they could have won, but they also managed to give Philip enough rope to hang himself. Here are a few of the responses Philip and Apnea’s incredibly sell-out and self-centered statement has received so far.

On MM, photographer Chris Keeling sums it up nicely, saying,

“wtf? I thought we had been trained over the last year or so to Hate SG? Now the OP is spamming the Forums to get us to go join SG to go see his earlier work with them? It makes me think this whole fundraising thing was just a carefully orchestrated piece of shit! I’m pissed off. They are either vile despicable people or they are not. Just because the OP can make money again doesn’t make them okay now.”

The beautiful blogger Baby Sinead adds,

“Seriously, I didn’t even send money or anything but I feel like a tool. I guess everyone has this time where they choose to sell out or keep up the fight.”

Photographer Carl J Speed II says in part,

“I’ve been a staunch defender all over the internets and my social circles, spent a lot of time convincing people to stay away from SG (members and perspective models alike), wore my Vive La Picnic shirt (that I bought) , and this just feels dirty. Lying in bed with the bad guys now doesn’t give any sense of justice about this scenario … I’m still angry. I don’t care what arrangement was reached of “what had to be said”, SG are not “okay”, this wasn’t just a fucking misunderstanding, and maybe I have no room to point a finger as I’m not in the position, but going back to those that bent you over for the last two years, where’s the principle? HOw could someone lay back in bed with the bad guys?”

Photographer Visions Of Excess posts,

“I was one of those folks who hosted an LP fundraiser – money that it seems could have been more well spent paying my rent. The OP aside, I am reminded of the charge that SG is still selling its content to porn sites. Now why would I want to support that?”

Shortly after this, because MM mods always hide SG spam threads if they get too negative about SG, the thread got locked down.

Over on LJ, there is some energetic conversation going on still where people like Baby Sinead are able to visibly post, “Honestly if it was all a “misunderstanding” people should be refunded,” without having her words immediately locked. User bunnie_page writes,

“Realistically, I’m thinking it’s part of the settlement that they had to retract all of the bad things they said about “Worst Website Ever”…all of that shiftiness with them not able to say WHO was suing Apnea really makes it seem like SG was suffering from all of LP’s support, and had a gag order (which obviously didn’t help), and now their trying this. If the agreement *was* actually fair I would think SG would’ve ended up covering all of his legal bills. I’m sure there’s more here that we will just never get to know. But whatever, I still hate SG.”

In Apnea’s personal journal, mxa_photo writes,

“After all the crap you guys have claimed to have been through with this case it sure looks like you are now pimping out sign ups to SG??? Congratulations on suckering everyone in with your superbly run publicity campaign and congratulations on your seemingly total lack of moral fibre.”

My favorite LJ post about the settlement so far comes from user slutbunwalla, who wrote,

“Maybe it was just a long con and there was no real lawsuit to begin with! They all drummed up a bunch of business and donations and support and sympathy but the whole time there was already an implicit agreement between everyone to keep the drama going!!! Or maybe I just watch too much LOST.”

The most tragic posts come from redchickpoet who writes,

“Me (who couldn’t afford it in the first place, but thought I was helping to support a worthy cause) —–> BIG FOOLISH IDIOT … The funny thing is, me and my guy JUST got our “Free Lithium Picnic” shirts. Well, at least I can sleep at night knowing we helped to pay for their new tattoos. *kicks myself and becomes just a bit more cynical*”

This last post breaks my heart because it gets to the core of why Sean Suhl’s projects like SuicideGirls have been so damaging to the soul of counterculture. Everything he touches seems to spew out a lot of rhetoric about things people want to believe in, yet everything he is involved in seems to end up being a disillusioning smoke and mirrors sham. Once someone like redchickpoet is disillusioned like this, she may just walk away from the whole scene. Heck, I’ve been a part of this world since before I founded Blue Blood fifteen years ago. And this sort of disillusioning nonsense gives me pause.

My father is an attorney who has never lost a single litigation, yet he still always says that the only people who win lawsuits are the lawyers. I don’t know who won the $G vs LP lawsuit, but I know that all of us in the larger community are the ones who really paid the price.

In recent years, I realize I have shied away from talking about certain topics such as feminism or sexuality or even actual products. This is kind of odd as these were certainly pretty cornerstone issues which were, not only covered in Blue Blood in the past, but were instrumental in why I wanted to do it in the first place.

I feel like feminism on the net, particularly when associated with the site genre dubiously dubbed altporn, is pretty much a mockery. The language has been so co-opted by people who don’t mean it, or even understand it, that the whole thing pretty much makes me sick. It definitely makes me want to disassociate myself from the whole thing, but do I really want to change my life and who I am because someone fake pretended to be like me? Probably not such a good idea.

One of the difficulties involved with feminist politics in 2007 is that it seems to be in vogue to attack people on a personal level, rather than to debate the issues. I see that most people deal with personal attacks by either defending their personal lives or correcting misimpressions about their personal lives. I think that people should pay attention to and debate the actual point and not deconstruct details which are merely specific to the person bringing a broader feminist or other issue up.

I think any artist has to give of themselves, to a certain extent, in order to create. But the global communication networks we live with today make it so difficult to maintain the slightest shred of privacy. Reality show programming and tabloid journalism put into the zeitgeist the notion that the world is entitled to know really personal things about anyone remotely famous. This makes me want to, not only avoid being famous, but move to a farm in Montana. The main thing which prevents me from doing this is the knowledge that it is terribly cliche for a Los Angeles person to buy a spread to get away from it all. That and the simple fact that pretty much no place today is really remote enough to truly get away from it all.

But it is difficult to talk about sex in this type of media climate while maintaining one’s personal privacy and avoiding becoming a public figure. But sharing any private moments in this world is like entering into a BDSM relationship with a room full of strangers who don’t believe in safewords. Sometimes, I believe a person should be entitled to say, hey, this is just for me and not the public. I believe in a fundamental right to privacy.

Lastly, various marketers have disseminated the notion that, if anyone you’ve heard of either endorses or slags a product, then they must be corrupt and inaccurate. These are marketers who of course utilize something called WOM or word of mouth marketing. Just one example of what this often boils down to is a solitary lonely dude posting two hundred reviews on Amazon, with sixty different usernames, of a dozen books, not one of which he read. But, if someone with an actual journalistic pedigree gives an opinion, it is often dismissed as envy because they also wrote a book or some such nonsense. Note to the world: known journalists really do tend to have more valuable opinions than anonymous posters. For real.

I could probably have written three long treatises in place of this article. My primary point here is that feminism, sexuality, and pop culture products news and reviews used to be the main things I wrote about. The current media environment is one where the producers have become cynical and manipulative and the audience has become jaded and betrayed. It is difficult to express true and heartfelt opinions, knowing that marketers may be rushing to either pirate or discredit what is said and readers may be looking for spin in all the wrong places.

So, if I sounded like a feminist, would you hold it against me? If I talked about sex and sexuality, would you feel compelled to pry beyond my comfort zone? If I reviewed products I like, would you assume it was just for the advertising dollars? If I reviewed products I don’t like, would you believe that I was just envious?

I used to be above it. Now I’m down in it. But I don’t really want to lose my voice.

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.