And so ends another year of blogging at the Reverse Cowgirl. Thank you so very much to everyone who read the blog this year. I know who you are and will be sending you a cheese loaf shortly to show my appreciation. What a year it was. My new best fucking friend is Rex Sorgatz at Fimoculous who listed this blog at #20 on his infamous annual "Best Blogs of 2007 That You (Maybe) Aren't Reading " list. As a special gift to Rex, I will be sending him a hooker in a box via UPS; expect that after the New Year, Rex. No, seriously, folks. It was an odd year in blogging for me, I suppose. I laughed. I cried. I posted dirty pictures. I suppose it's like all the rest, now that I think about it. In any case, I feel pretty good about it. There were a great many things going on in my non-blogging life that I felt like I couldn't or couldn't write about on the blog, and I hope there's less of that next year. Nothing says "you suck" like a sex blog that isn't frank. There were times when I got obsessive about Sex in America, Porn, and Fashion. I think my favorite post of the year, and one of the most read, was "Girl Can't Help It," a "review," if you will, of a blog of a girl who just so happens to be a porn star. Generally, there are three things I try and look for to decide if something is appropriate for this blog. It should be related to sex in some way. It should be interesting and new in some way. And it should be beautiful in some way. In F. David Peat's "The Alchemy of Love," the physicist writes: "[W]hen a mathematician becomes stuck and is not clear about what to do next the best advice is to do the most beautiful thing possible." And I think in my own way that's what I try to do a little bit of every day. In Seth Godin's "Money for Nothing (and Your Clicks for Free)," the author writes that blogs should be useful, updated, and unique. Surely, this blog is the latter two. But is it the first? And does it matter? Is Boing Boing "useful"? Or is its value in something more abstract, that feeling of wonderment we get as we make our way through the blogosphere's virtual Wunderkammers? In late 2002, I launched Reverse Cowgirl 1.0, and the world of blogs was a very different place back then, especially when it came to sex. The ruler of all sex blogs was Daze Reader, and the competition among sex blogs wasn't, well, stiff. Now, sex blogs are everywhere, porn is your neighbor, and it takes "2 Girls 1 Cup" to shock the masses. It's a new world. In 2008, I hope to be embarking on a new project that will ask me to reveal more of myself than ever before. (And no, to the guy Google Image searching "naked pictures of the reverse cowgirl," that's not what I mean.) For those of us who work in sex, more often than not the final frontier lies inward. Next year, I hope to reveal more of myself, my real self, here, along with the usual Reverse Cowgirl fare. I'll be taking a vacation from blogging until after the New Year. I'll return to these pastures on January 2. In the meantime, I'll leave you with the wise words of sex writer and blogger Melissa Gira and her thoughts on The Pink Ghetto.
So, in this context, I could say I’m only doing this--this sex thing on the Internet--to get somewhere else in my career, as a stepping stone to some supposedly elevated ground as real writer, a real journalist, a real contributor to society. Sex is a commodity, that’s for sure, but it’s only really socially acceptable to traffic in temporarily. Where once upon a time, the story of sex for women was from virgin to whore, in the story of the business of sex writing, there’s the chance for all us soiled doves to reclaim our purity by renouncing sex, relegating sex to "that crazy thing" we wrote about to get our start, revising not just our resumes but our passions.
What if sex is where you want to go, not just your rent as you get there? (Hey, it’s been my rent, too, Not knocking that for a millisecond.) What if sex is your work, not limited to prostitution or porn or what we think of as sex work, but as your medium? What is so less noble about thinking sex rather than money, rather than politics, religion, or art? Sex being so fully embedded in the human experience, I want to put out there that there really is no way to engage the culture on "what really matters" without looking at sexuality.
Producing sexual media, theorizing and studying sex, and educating about sex are not some marginal activity, or at least, they should be thought of as such no longer. For us working sex, refusing to be ghettoized for our labors and loves doesn’t mean "rising up" from the gutter, but resisting the idea that sex is in some gutter at all.
