I Don’t Care What You Look Like When You’re Not Fucking

Debauchette is just getting more and more almost-famous and not just-internet-famous, which, after four years of reading her, I can only say, Finally, pained and beautiful sex writing gets some attention. It all makes me nervous that she’s going to have to sell a book or pull up camp again, move the blog elsewhere. It all makes me envious that there’s still so much that can only be said for being a girl without her face in her sidebar.

This is my obsession: that all writing about sex is taken as an authoritative voice because the vacuum that ought to contain hundreds of voices is still so deafening and boring; that what “sex writers” are asked to sell is their ability to be sexy by some standard of sexy that’s easy to sell; that combine that cult of personality with the promise of delivering the “truth” about sex and you get a whole lot of nothing.

It’s not that maintaining privacy affords more opportunities to tell a bigger story, which it does. It’s not that we can’t tell the truth so long as our face is on it. It’s that when your face is on it, your career in sex itself is riding on who and how you fuck. How few sex writers do keep their personal sex lives out of their writing, or don’t sexualize themselves even when getting the story (substitute here for: giving advice, doing education, making a movie, teaching a class) isn’t even about that?

Right now, then, for the record, I’m not fucking. I did yesterday, and it was his skinny hips like the boy in Debauchette’s story that made me start in on this piece in the first place. That I straddled them as soon as I filed my stories to my editor for the day doesn’t make me any more right about the porn case I was writing about, or about any of this, but I’m putting it here all the same.