The Blowfish Blog

OTAKU MAnKO: Blogging, Social Exhibitionism and Realtime Pervs

On the opening night of the San Francisco Fetish Ball weekend before last, some friends and I ducked out of the chaos of the fetish art gallery show at the DNA Lounge and hit the pizza restaurant next door. While we were swilling beers and bonding over the superiority of pizza with jalapenos, one of my friends observed something: That events like the San Francisco Fetish Ball — or any other in-person BDSM event — take on an eerie irrelevance in a world where everybody knows everybody online. You can put your whole damn life on your website or MySpace profile, as can anyone, and “meet” a dozen people and read a dozen blogs in the time it would take to wander through a fetish-themed gallery opening feeling awkward and insecure.

It seems like a cliché to say that the online world is the new social arena — but it takes on special interest to me, because sexual intimacy and exhibitionism go so well and so badly together for me.

Ten years ago I didn’t have a Live Journal and I had never heard of MySpace. I knew people mostly from the San Francisco world of sex-positive sex-ed, sex parties and pervy arts. In 1998 I was at least as social as I am nowadays, but I then tended to meet writers and artists on the printed (or photocopied) page before I ever met them in person. But writers are a small percentage of the people attending science fiction conventions, and an even smaller percentage of the people you met with their clothes off at a BDSM gathering in the woods. Most of the people I met either had day jobs outside of the pervosphere or were going to school for their second PhD, this time in Human Sexuality so they could teach Integrational Fisting Studies to a commune of transhumanist hippie punchfuckers in Humboldt county. Either way, most people were strangers to me until they walked up to me and said “Hi, I’m Spontaneous Starflower, want to smoke a joint?”

On the other hand, my writing was sufficiently well known that I frequently met people who knew the ins and outs of my erotic imagination intimately; they knew (or thought they knew) I was into necrophilia, guns, straight razors, anal sex, strippers, cocaine, unicycles, phone sex, the pleasures of physical intimacy after eight shots of espresso, and the Mile High Club. People I met at cocktail parties would make sultry references to old stories I’d forgotten I wrote.

The exhibitionist part of me loved this; a big part of what drew me toward being a writer in the first place was a desire to share my fucked-up adventures with other people. But the anti-exhibitionist, reclusive, user-hostile part of me found it creepy and weird that people knew me before I knew them. It was a love-hate thing; I adored and despised feeling like I had no privacy.

Many writers I know are like this; their desire to share their stories with other people is only enabled because they are intensely private people — but their intense privacy is only survivable because they are able to express themselves through art. For me, it kind of freaked me out to know that someone sitting across from me in a bar knew the most powerful details of my sexual fantasies. It partly satisfied my need for intimacy — but only party. And it made the three feet between us seem like a void I could never cross.

In my experience, writers who tend to write about their own lives are more likely to be comfortable around other people than those who primarily write fiction. But though I write a lot of personal nonfiction, I was never one of the former. I only started writing about my own life because I loved to write so much I had to stop making shit up or I would run out of things to say. I was always a reluctant gonzo journalist, and when I discovered I was part of my own story it was like one of those frozen moments at 3:45 am when I realize that no, I am not having a threesome with Queen Elizabeth and my college Environmental Studies professor — I am having a dream.

Now, when I am social, at least in the land of pervs, the playing field is much more level. Blogging is the order of the day; lots of people without public blogs as such still have MySpace pages or Live Journals with friends-only posts about their sex lives. My writing is still out there, but I also read an enormous number of websites. I’m probably as likely to know the details of a local perv’s sex life as he or she is to know mine. It seems to happen at every event, reading or party in the sex-ed, sex-positive arts scene in San Francisco: I meet at least one person whom I’ve never met in person before, but I know what her boyfriend’s come tastes like or that he recently installed eyebolts on the roof of his ‘82 Honda Civic. Whether it’s the Fetish Ball, a class, or a poetry reading, I spot people I know more about than they know about me.

Which is why such events feel strangely awkward nowadays, and I feel less like a writer than ever. It’s not that I feel uncomfortable knowing intimate details about someone’s sex life; it’s that the pleasures of reading someone’s sexual fantasies or realities are so intense, and realtime social interactions so phenomenally awkward for me. What I get out of reading personal blogs, journals and other confessionals is a quick path to a (sometimes) profound sense of intimacy with the writer — an intimacy that is neither comfortable or appropriate with someone you just me.

Ultimately, that sense is no different than the intimacy I once felt when reading Townsend or Califia or Hunter S. Thompson — writers who spoke deeply to me when I was at a formative stage in my life. But there’s a real-time aspect to the blog — someone can have crappy or marvelous sex from 10pm to midnight, and at 12:45 I’ve been profoundly affected by it if the person happens to be moved to blog about it and I happen to be sitting at my computer. It’s almost like being there. It breaks the literary psychodrama’s fourth wall even further that on reading about the person’s sexual experience, I can leave a comment (be it “Weird,” “Lame,” “Beautiful writing,” “Thinking of you,” or “Tell him he needs to buy you a new chandelier!”) and get a response back almost instantly.

Yeah, it’s almost like being there. The voyeur part of me loves knowing the intimate details of someone’s sex life in realtime. It’s an incredible taste of sexual intimacy — even if it makes the six blocks or five thousand miles between us seem like a void I can never cross.

Thomas Roche is the Public Relations Manager at Kink.com, an instructor at San Francisco Sex Information, and blogs about sex, drugs, and cryptozoology at www.thomasroche.com.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 18 March 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.