Raunch versus prude: contemporary sex blogs and erotic memoirs by women

Abstract

This article analyses two contemporary erotic memoirs by women, Belle de Jour's (2005) Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl and Abby Lee's (2006) Girl with a One-Track Mind, both of which began life as blogs. Situating them, briefly, in relation to previous erotic memoirs and fiction by women, I examine their transition from blog to book and consider the impact of new digital technologies upon female sexual self-narration. I examine the texts in the light of recent popular feminist writings on the sexualisation of girls and young women, and analyse both the books and original blogs' engagement with feminism, and their treatment of romance, lesbianism and the regulations governing female sexual conduct. This article evaluates the extent to which the boom in women's erotic memoirs (in book or blog form) is symptomatic of a persisting belief in sexuality as the truth of identity. Sexuality, as it is figured here, is still being positioned as ‘the secret’, as the essence or core of subjectivity, which perhaps explains why the memoir, as an attempt to communicate and constitute a ‘self’ through writing, has for women increasingly become the erotic memoir. This article concludes by asking to what extent this is both an undervaluation and an overvaluation of sexuality for women.

Keywords:

• sex blogs
• erotic memoirs
• female sexuality
• feminism
• subjectivity
• self-narration
• romance
• lesbianism

Notes

1. On ‘pornification’ and the ‘sexualisation’ of culture, see, for example, Attwood (2009a), Levy (2005), Paasonen (2007a), Paul (2005), and Walter (2010).

2. Andreas Kitzmann argues that the web ‘paradoxically blurs and maintains the conventional distinctions between the public and the private’, and he proceeds to theorize a category that he labels ‘connected privacy’: ‘a privacy whose space is permeable’ (Kitzmann, 2004, pp. 59, 91).

3. Incidentally, the term ‘slag’ featured as the third most popular term of abuse in schools, according to a recent survey by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers – the top two were ‘gay’ and ‘bitch’, respectively. All of the top 10 ‘names’ had gender/sexual connotations (see Winterman, 2008).

4. For the blogs and/or further information on these authors, see: http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com/; http://www.girlwithaonetrackmind.blogspot.com/; http://stephanieklein.com/; http://www.suzanneportnoy.com/; http://sleeping-around.blogspot.com/.

5. See, for example, Jenny Angell, Call Girl (Avon, 2007) and Madam (Avon, 2008); Nikki Gemmell, The Bride Stripped Bare (Harper Perennial, 2005); Sienna Lewis, Intimate Adventures of an Office Girl (Ebury, 2009); Ellouise Moore, Girl in High Heels: Intimate Confessions of a London Stripper (Ebury, 2008); Rosa Mundi, Vocational Girl (Quercus, 2006); Tracy Quan's call girl series of novels, which includes Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl (Harper Perennial, 2005), Diary of a Married Call Girl (Harper Perennial, 2006), and Diary of a Jetsetting Call Girl (Harper Perennial, 2008); Miss S., Confessions of a Working Girl (Penguin, 2007) and Extra Confessions of a Working Girl (Penguin, 2008); and Amber Stephens, The Secret Diary of a Sex Addict (Avon, 2008).

6. Despite the apparent homogeneity of these titles, alternatives are arguably available – both in the form of new ‘gigolo’ titles such as Luke Bradbury's Under Cover: The Adventures of a Real Life Gigolo (Avon, 2008), Golden's Gigolo (Hodder, 2008) and Andrew Rosetta's Whatever She Wants: True Confessions of a Male Escort (Ebury, 2009), and in the provision of alternative perspectives on female sexuality offered by Jane Juska in A Round-Heeled Woman (Villard, 2003), which details the sex life of a woman in her 60s, and Carrie Jones's Cutting up Playgirl (Old Street, 2008), which is subtitled ‘a memoir of sexual disappointment’.

7. The American edition of Girl with a One-Track Mind, titled Diary of a Sex Fiend and published by Skyhorse Publishing in 2007, also uses the back cover blurb to compare the book to Sex and the City.

8. At the time of writing (July 2011), Margolis continues to blog at http://www.girlwithaonetrackmind.blogspot.com/, whilst Belle's original blog is no longer accessible and http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com/ has become simply a marketing site to advertise her books and announce media appearances. So, whilst for Margolis, blog and books continue to coexist in an uneasy relationship, for Belle the latter have eclipsed and replaced the former (although she now writes a ‘sexual politics’ blog at http://sexonomics-uk.blogspot.com).

9. As an example of the disparity in dates between blog and book, the post on ‘large men’ appears as Friday 29 July 2005 in the blog, but is dated Saturday 26 February in the book.