Should You Blog on the First Date?

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.

Shortlink:

Posted by Amelia G on March 20, 2007. Filed under Blue Blood. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry