Fake and/or crass pornography excluded (i.e. what you'd find in alt.sex.stories.moderated or "Letters to Penthouse"), there is a lot of honest-to-mingus sex writing out there. I felt compelled to write this node because of this specific blogger whose ostensive theme is her misadventures as an entrepreneur, peppered with the usual unproven career advice, but who has written more about her sex life than I'd feel it would be fair to the three and a half sex partners I've had. (I must confess --for a few minutes I entertained the idea of starting an anonymous blog on my own sex life, but I already write two blogs and curate a tumblelog and there's never enough time to maintain the three of them). The aforementioned writer evidently writes about sex as a hook; it's good SEO, it gives her the mystique of a hard-boiled, life-savvy, outspoken type A personality who will face things as they are -- and even the emotions attached, when any. I mean, hey, I'm okay with a woman enoying the kind of superficial sexual experiences many men do, but it nevertheless comes across as too strong, possibly because of the pervasive gender stereotypes that reach spaces in the male psyche that are yet to be explored and healed in wake of the sexual revolution.

I actually tended to take whatever advice she gave with a larger grain of salt than usual because of the somewhat unusual, sex-inclusive approach to a career/entrepreneur personal journal. But I was doing some thinking (I'm always taking information in, but sometimes some minutes slip by when I'm not reading anything) and realized that the reason why many people are so much at ease about spilling their sexual misadventures online is that sex is really secondary, and people manage to be frank about the details -- who gave better oral than whom and what was the secret sauce that the current partner won't -- because they are in their current relationship situation regardless of the relative quality of the minute details involved. In other words, if I was to write periodically about my sex life at different points of time, including now, I'd end up having significant remarks on my ex-es, but there's no extra-sexual feelings about it -- not even a nostalgic feeling, just a remark of whatever little I've learned about sex and my sexuality over my rather ordinary life.

Maybe writing in such a frank, deadpan tone about sex feels taboo because at the time sex was related to feelings, and mentioning the minutiae would signify that such feelings have not had proper closure. Sixty or one-hundred twenty seconds of reflection made me realize that while sex is better when feelings are involved (I've had the other type), you never enter a new relationship tabula rasa regarding sex -- you're never a virgin again, and that's okay: just because the romantic feelings that triggered sex leave no hangover, it doesn't mean that your sexual learning wasn't valid -- au contraire, your new, this-time-it's-the-real-thing-I'm-sure significant other benefits from a more experienced and honest partner in bed.

Mixing salacious bits of one's past to a blog that serves a professional sources still feels somewhat icky somehow because it feels like cheap bait, which is part of the reason I've taken the time I usually only take to write to my own blogs to E2; I try to "keep it real" and make a big ethical fuss (I have never linked to my blogs in my writeups) about cheap shots, but maybe it's a pointless taboo to keep sex with your current partner as the only use for your previous sexual learning (I imagine a therapist uses it all the time, even if ever so indirectly). Maybe the mathematical "scrap notes" (things I've half-learned and need to erase from my whiteboard to work on new stuff) posted on my blog could be construed as cheap shots by the same logic -- they are just some of the more trivial things my life has been about, and while they might be completely orthogonal to my main "program" (in the Lakatos meaning of the word) with each of the blogs, they are part of the stuff of which a human life is made, and a human life is what it takes to accomplish loftier goals, like the aforementioned blogger startup or my own mathematical and philosophical objectives. Maybe you just can't separate flesh from spirit.

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