Reading Bitchy Jones's Diary: sex blogging, community-building and feminism(s)

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Notes

1. A seminar in the Critical Sexology series (http://www.criticalsexology.org.uk/) consisting of presentations of some of these responses took place at Queen Mary, University of London on 5 March 2010. Participants were Lisa Downing, Kaye Mitchell, Meg Barker, Ros Gill, Alex Dymock, Caroline Walters and Kitty Stryker, author of the blog Purrversatility (http://purrversatility.blogspot.com/).

2. The compound acronym denotes the activities and identities involved in the following: bondage and discipline; dominance and submission; sadism and masochism.

3. For Foucauldian- and feminist-influenced critiques of the emancipatory, empowering and subversive potential of sexual confession, see Gill (2003, 2006); Mitchell in this volume; Barker and Gill in this volume; Handyside in this volume. It is worth noting that Attwood (2009) has argued, conversely, that sexual confession may have genuinely liberatory potential for female subjects, given that women have historically had the expression of their sexualities silenced and suppressed.

4. Other blogs that have served or continue to serve, to some extent, this function are: Let Them Eat Pro-SM Feminist Safe Spaces, which offers feminist analysis of BDSM from a pro-BDSM perspective, often quite academic in tone (http://sm-feminist.blogspot.com/); the now defunct Subversive Submissive, which shares the perspectives of a US-based anarchist submissive working through her submission in light of her politics (http://subversivesub.wordpress.com/); and The Pervocracy, a US-based liberal feminist sex blog by a BDSM-er (http://pervocracy.blogspot.com/).

5. This is Bitchy's humorous shorthand term for female dominants.

6. This post no longer appears online in the abridged, archived version of Bitchy Jones's Diary.

7. For a BDSM blog that has an avowedly educational purpose and also contains erotica, see for example, Clarisse Thorn (http://clarissethorn.com/blog/), the blog of a US-based sex educator.

8. This said, the reception of these cultural products has not been universally positive. Postdoctoral medical researcher Magnanti's blog and book have received criticism for their alleged idealisation and glamorisation of the world of ‘high class’ sex work (see Knight, 2009), while Margolis's blog and book attracted violently intrusive media attention that accrued to the unmasking of the blog's author in 2006 (see Girl's own accounts of her outing and of her court course against the Independent on Sunday for calling her a ‘hooker’ at http://www.girlwithaonetrackmind.blogspot.com/). Striking in Margolis's case was the simultaneously prurient and punitive attitude of contemporary media culture towards a woman who owns up to enjoying consensual, non-monogamous sex without feelings of shame or self-loathing (and the assumption that such a woman must be a ‘hooker’).

9. On this point, however, Bitchy Jones's Diary is not wholly unproblematical. While her argument that the pro-dom figure functions culturally as the public face of femdom may be accurate, occasionally Bitchy's critiques of sex workers who adhere to – and claim to find pleasure in – this role have been accused in blog comments of denigrating a group of differently marginalised and stigmatised women. (This is despite Bitchy's astute assertion in the post entitled ‘Wind me up: Watch me go’ that setting ‘sex pos’ women against their ‘all-sex-is-rape’ sisters, and perpetuating those cardboard cut out stereotypes of feminists, ‘is the biggest trick the patriarchy devil ever pulled’.)