A Sex Blogger's Credo

If you are ever the madcap, slightly insane kind of person ever to aspire to keeping a long-lasting sex blog, know that there’s an unannounced, unheralded side effect: an overriding sense of obligation.

I never get a sweet sense of glowing satisfaction from the project (though I should, given its volume and longevity). Always I have a nagging sense of something left unfinished. Maybe I feel I've got an entry in me that hasn’t been written, or an encounter that hasn’t been catalogued. There always seems to be a deadline approaching (self-imposed), a memory to be recorded, a challenge to record something done before in a new manner. There are only so many different insertion points in a sexual act, after all. Finding novel ways to discuss inserting tab A into slot B becomes a daunting task.

I get pressure from the outside, too. Readers ask for more entries about one particular person. They want to hear less of the mushy stuff. I get encouragement to show sides of myself that aren’t always what I consider my core, while I’m squelched from sharing other aspects. When I’m not writing, readers have a way of letting me know I sure as hell should be. Long-term readers demand my attention; I owe them, they feel, because they've stuck around so long. The new readers make themselves known as well. They write in with the same old questions, the ones I’ve answered a hundred times before, the ones that make me grind my molars when I see them asked again. I owe them the answers, they seem to imply. Just because they’ve taken the time to read.

When I’m not thinking about the writing, there’s always the pressure to have the raw experiences (pun intended) to generate material. In the sex blog business, that means fucking. I have to consider which fuck will be next. Who makes the cut for an individual entry. There are trysts to arrange, travel plans to make. Maybe I desire one of those evenings where all I really want is to lie there and be serviced while I ponder what happened the night before on How to Get Away with Murder—but I feel obligated to make the sex spicy, make it fun, make it worth reading about. I have to exercise my powers of observation, to remember the conversations, to take note of what the guy did that stands out. Not only does sex become a form of work, but I’m having simultaneously to be the moonlighting writer who’s making constant mental notes so he can scribble it down later.

Since the day I started writing my sex blog, it's provided me one interesting and unexpected opportunity after another. Over the last three years, though, I think I’m honest in saying I’ve experienced more disappointments than fringe benefits. I’ve been stalked in my everyday life by a reader. I’ve been harassed by multiple others. One man left me nearly for dead. Most hurtful of all, however, have been the readers who’ve opened up just enough to care about them, only to abandon me when I’m inconvenient or inessential. I wrote beautiful tributes to one because no one had ever seen him with such esteem; my essay about him made him glow. But he found find my admiration awkward in the entry that followed, then without warning demoted me from the lover he needed in his life to someone he used to know.

They come to me for validation. They leave without returning it.

Then there are the readers who make promises. They want to meet. They want to perform unspeakable acts for me that will make my toes curl. Any fantasy of which I can dream, they promise to fulfill. So I allow myself to be led on by pretty faces and prettier promises, and it’s months and sometimes years later when it registers that they never intended to do any of the things they pledged to do so well.

To many, the sex blogger about whom they’ve fantasized is essential and exciting in the heat of an eroticized moment. In the next, he’s an afterthought. An unsightly stain.

I'm resilient, but my feelings aren’t bulletproof. I grieve for the vanishments. They’ve left me emptied out and lonely. The never-ending obligation of keeping the blog afloat kept me marching stolidly onward for many a year, though. I thought I was fighting the good fight. I thought that if I did what I do best, my spirits and fortunes would turn. I thought if I stuck to my core beliefs, I’d recapture the love of writing the blog again, even though it had been beaten out of me time and time again.

Then at the beginning of this year, I relieved myself of obligation. Write only when you feel like it, I told myself. Forget about the sense of always having to provide, of always being the good sport or the reliable one. Forget about the fan mail, the comments, the fleeting pride in notoriety. Stop thinking you owe people anything, I told myself. It’s okay to ask yourself what they owe you, for giving so much of yourself, for putting it all out there publicly.

I felt petulant and stubborn at first, but gradually I began to relax into my neglect of duty. It’s taken months, but gradually I’ve come to realize that it’s okay to let go. It really is. Beautiful flowers wilt beneath the harsh sun all the time; lush fruits wither on the vine. For several years I accomplished what I set out to accomplish. For a handful of time I opened myself wide to opportunity and had the blessing of sharing so much of myself with an audience I loved. Few people ever really achieve that dream.

Am I letting go completely? I don’t know, to be honest. The urge to share has always been a part of my life. Tomorrow I might honor the impulse to write about a random blowjob. Perhaps it’ll be weeks before I make another entry. I can’t see into the future well enough to know when, or if, I’ll write again. I will say that for the last few months I have so very much enjoyed not feeling obligated—not by anything, or anyone.

I do want to take this opportunity, however, to make a few positive points and state the things I firmly believe—the very beliefs that prompted me to begin this sex blog, in fact. A sex blogger’s credo, if you will. I’ll begin with:

1. Your sex life is worthy of recognition. Your sex life is worthy of thought, examination, and celebration. The Puritan impulse is so strong in so many people, even today, that they shun the very notion that it should be aired or shown the light of day, much less be put under the microscope. It’s ‘just sex.’ To them, it’s as deserving of discussion as nose-picking. It’s something done in a dark corner with people’s eyes averted, then hastily cleaned up.

Nonsense, I say. Our sexual dreams and desires occupy so much of our head space, so often. It’s okay to experience desire. It’s human to yearn for more sex, for better sex, for intimacy. Hunting for sex in all its forms, then wanting more, is what we as people spend vast chunks of our life doing. What we rarely do is talk about it, or share those experiences.

But here’s the thing: if we don’t discuss them, if we don’t share, they’re lost forever—and we are lost forever. We are telling our successors on this planet that we were above such things, that they never played a part of our lives, our relationships, the choices we make on a daily basis. If we don’t communicate, we let ignorance prosper.

It takes a brave heart to talk about one’s sex life—especially to do so in public, with everyone watching. But doing so is not only bold, and truthful, but noble. It’s shining a light in those dark corners. It’s shouting, I am a sexual being, and I worthy of being heard. Do so, and a handful of people might recoil in disgust, but there will be multitudes who yearn to join your voice with their own. They will silently cheer you on.

2. Your sex life is a beautiful gift, and it is yours alone to cultivate. Sex is amazing. It can take form in the quiet intimacy between two lovers. It can become the red-hot, heart-pounding bliss of animal fucking. You can have as much of it as you like. It’s a hobby that optimally doesn’t cost more than the overhead of travel and a bare minimum of equipment. You can have it pretty much anywhere you want.

But here’s the thing: I see so many poor fuckers who just let all those beautiful opportunities slip by; they think that sex is something that happens to other people. Never to them. They want good sex. They masturbate constantly and have very specific fantasies they’d love to make reality. But they aren’t willing to take the steps to make anything happen. They won’t take the risks for the sex they spend so much time craving. They pace their self-imposed cages like trapped animals, longing for freedom—though they never recognize that the doors to those cages have always been open to them.

You have the power to make your sex life what you want. You have the power to shape your relationships—your marriages, your friendships, the relationships you have with lovers—however you want. A marriage doesn’t have to be loveless and sexless; it doesn’t have to be monogamous. But you have to take the steps to reshape it into something mutually satisfying for both of you. You have to make yourself heard.

I’ve never known anyone, even the most depraved of sensualists, who went to the grave bemoaning the fact that they enjoyed their life too much. But my email boxes are full of messages from people who never have sexual enjoyment in their lives.

Time slips like water through our fingers, friends. It’s up to you to make your life one that you’ll be happy to have lived.

3. You are a beautiful person. You. Yeah, you! You’ve got qualities that no one else does. All the stupid shit that you think prevents from having the best sex of your life? Fuck those. They only hold you back if you let them.

Listen up. I’m a man of many physical imperfections and extremely modest looks. I’m not a twink. I’m an old fart. No one is ever going to pick me out of crowd and take me home because I’m on Grindr with a photo of my oiled-up physique. But I have had sex, and I continue to get offers and have sex, with incredibly beautiful men whom I might say were ‘out of my league,’ if I truly believed in the concept. Why? Because despite my moles, my paleness, my lack of tone and the fact I’m never going to be on the cover of Details, I put myself out there and make my best qualities work for me. And work, they do. My confidence shows.

Do yourself a favor and once in a while forget the many imperfections about which you beat yourself up daily. You’ve got amazing qualities that are going to attract someone. You might have the best smile in the world. You might give the best blowjobs. You could be witty, or the best Call of Duty player, or have a great garden where you could fuck outdoors. Celebrate those things. Be secure in those things. They’re going to be what attracts someone into your bed, as much as a six-pack.

4. The only thing we really owe each other is kindness. And kindness should be reciprocal. Does this need explanation?

Let’s recap.

You are a beautiful person.

You’re worthy of the sex you want to have.

When you have it, honor and celebrate it. And treat each other well.

Of all the lessons I’d want anyone to learn from anything I’ve written here, those are the most valuable.