The Hedonist's Case Against Sex Blogging

And I couldn’t help but wonder: when had I stopped thinking about Mr Big when writing to you, & started thinking about writing to you when I was with Big?

A deliberately private woman is much more of a threat to society today than what 200 years ago a deliberately childless woman was, but in the exact same way. Such a woman…for whom being public should be so fulfilling and obvious, yet she rejects it—she causes other women, and men, to question if privacy might be valuable—enhancing—if they shouldn’t also be private.

Edward Teach/The Last Psychiatrist, Sadly, Porn

The “self-sexualized girls of Substack” discourse is leaving out a very important player. In Kryptogal’s very funny note about the whole phenomenon, the dramatis personae are: Annoyed Women, Modest Hotties, Modest Uggos, Confident Substack Hos, Insecure Substack Hos, People Who Like Women, Dummies, Guys With Dick In Their Hands, Distinguished Gentlemen, Incels. Who’s missing? The people who make money from these girls self-sexualizing without themselves self-sexualizing—the people who run and own the platform.

I like this platform! I like the people who run it, and I like freedom of speech. I don’t feel particularly jealous or resentful of the self-sexualized girls of Substack. It’s possible to look at what they’re doing as taking a disproportionately big slice of a limited attention/money pie; it’s just as possible to think they’re bringing more users to Substack, so that I benefit from their sexual openness kind of unfairly, without having to put any skin in the game¹ myself. I can harvest even more of the benefit, with very little exposure, by participating in the discourse about it. This isn’t real life, where real bodies are obviously more or obviously less sexually desirable and sexually available; the self-sexualized girls of Substack are not getting attention (on Substack) from unmediatedly incarnating their sexualities, but from referencing their sexualities, & although this isn’t exactly fair, I can benefit similarly by referencing their sexualities too.

I’d rather reference theirs than mine, because there’s no particular reason that the algorithm would reward you for describing doing things that feel good to you or your partner. The current trendy example is Lily Phillips, whose recent gangbang was not apparently that fun for her or for the men fucking her, as Mary Harrington points out, “There was even less intimacy on offer than the men wanted.” But the main example I’m going to use here is this 2021 Atlantic essay about The Tyranny of the Female-Orgasm Industrial Complex, which I feel a little better about examining than any of the essays I see around here, because I think the author is less likely to see my examination & also because she definitely already got a much bigger ROI on putting it out there than most of the girls here do, but which is otherwise exemplary.

The author describes trying (almost) everything in her, spoilers, unsuccessful quest to achieve orgasm. The piece reveals what I don’t think she even notices she didn’t try:

If, like me, you can’t resist the urge at cocktail parties to recount your sexual adventures…you will soon find yourself inundated by a flood of orgasm-related advice.

Okay, adding my voice to the flood of advice: what if the thing that would make her come is something that she wouldn’t want to talk about at cocktail parties, or, like, have published in the literal Atlantic? The whole thesis of her article is that her apparently sex-positive social milieu can’t fully accept that she can’t orgasm, that her anorgasmia is something that makes her feel “deficient and ashamed,” social emotions by the way. You might be like, uhhh, she talks about being kinky, attempting to masturbate with the handle of an immersion blender, and hiring a sex worker, what could possibly be so taboo that she’d be unwilling to discuss it?

But taboo is only one axis along which someone can be ashamed of their sexuality. Three common sexual fantasies women have (citation: Twilight sold really well) are: the fantasy of being a very young, inexperienced woman who is being initiated into sexuality by a man much older than her; the fantasy that the sex is causing, or caused by, or in any case happens in the context of, an unbreakable pairbond between the sexual partners; & the fantasy of getting pregnant. Only the first fantasy is particularly taboo, but one can easily imagine reasons that it would be painful and difficult for a thirty-nine year old childless recent divorcée to mention any of these to a cocktail party aquaintance—even if it was just a fantasy for her and she didn’t really want those things, it would open up painful speculation.

I’m not saying that she definitely hasn’t tried fantasizing about these things (she’s open enough about her sexual history that it takes a minute to realize she actually says nothing about her fantasy life, interestingly), or that these fantasies would definitely get her off. I’m just saying that I think that, if you know you’re going to be talking about your sex life at cocktail parties, or in the Atlantic, or on your Substack, you might be less likely to check whether you like something that’s not on brand:

I noticed after several years of [radical transparency] that I wasn't as in touch with my true feelings. At first I thought my total honesty policy had purged me of a lot of the messy and conflicted feelings I used to have. But there was something suspiciously shallow about these more presentable feelings. I now believe that, because I scrupulously reported almost anything to anyone who asked (or didn't ask), I conveniently stopped being aware of a lot of my most personal and tender feelings…I had calloused my feelings by overexposing them, and made them my armor. When my real, tender feelings went underground, the "transparency" only got more intense, because I was left free to believe more flattering and shareable things about myself in the gap, conscience completely clear.

I finally think I understand what's wrong with oversharing. It's not that it's uncomfortable for the listener…it's that oversharing is a defense mechanism that protects the oversharer from criticism or disapproval at the expense of self-intimacy. It's exposing parts of yourself that will chafe and blister under scrutiny. It's a particularly insidious way of wearing a mask, because you believe that what you're doing is taking the mask off.

I now think privacy is important for maximizing self-awareness and self-transparency. The primary function of privacy is not to hide things society finds unacceptable, but to create an environment in which your own mind feels safe to tell you things. If you're not allowing these unshareworthy thoughts and feelings a space to come out, they still affect your feelings and behavior-- you just don't know how or why. And all the while your conscious self-image is growing more alienated from the processes that actually drive you. Privacy creates the necessary conditions for self-honesty, which is a necessary prerequisite to honesty with anyone else.

(hat tip to @CherrySin13 on twitter for finding this essay for me)

Back to the female-orgasm industrial complex essay:

After listening to my story, Kerner hypothesized that my particular problem was an inability to quiet the restive, self-conscious parts of my brain. “To what degree are you staying in an observational place in your own experience[?]”….He told me about a 2006 study by the Dutch neuroscientist Gert Holstege in which 12 women reclined with their heads in a PET scanner while their partners brought them to orgasm; much to Holstege’s surprise, the scans showed a dramatic drop in activity in the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, parts of the brain associated with anxiety and inhibition….Yet he also admitted that this—willfully disabling one’s amygdala—is easier said than done.

Smyth may be pretty self-conscious, but I guess I must be even worse, because for me personally if I were writing that paragraph about myself, I would probably notice at that point that I was writing an article about my sex life. I don’t feel comfortable with my understanding of neuroscience, but since it’s already been brought into the arena, it’s worth saying that the prefrontal cortex isn’t just associated with anxiety and inhibition, it’s also associated with personality expression/identity and language use. Willfully disabling the amygdala may be easier said than done, but disabling the prefrontal cortex is definitely easier done than said.

…for me, faking it was instantly empowering…men began to see me as I saw myself, as I knew myself to be, which is to say, no less carnal than the next person, and perhaps even more so.

Katharine Smyth identifies her social/sexual problem as being specific to female orgasm. To me it seems like an especially poignant and ironic instance of the superego injunction to enjoy. This is an idea that will make more sense if we don’t think of the superego as morality or conscience or parents or God—all material that the superego can take, and which in fact it used to take pretty often—& think about the superego not in terms of the particular content it took when Freud was writing, but in terms of overall structure and function. As TLP points out in Sadly, Porn, “id” is Latin for it and “ego” is Latin for I; in German the id & the ego are the Es & the Ich respectively, even more straightforwardly “it” and “I;” we’ve got third person and first person, so what’s missing is second person, which is to say, not a given person’s internalized father figure or God figure but their internalized you:

You walk down the street and think, “I’m nothing, I can’t even get a girl.” Is that the criticism your Dad would make of you? “I’m 30—I’m not going to take that cubicle job that implies that I am only good enough for a cubicle—wouldn’t it be better to be unemployed & wait for the world to discover me?” Never mind the impossible logistics—who are you talking to?

…If we accept that Sie(=German formal “you”) is the authority, the one that judges you for doing and for not doing, you need only take a minute and figure out who your Sie is…

With which the “superego injunction to enjoy” makes much more sense. It’s not a religious or patriarchal authority saying “Enjoy!” (although I see more and more religiously-branded “enjoy your marital sex life!” content too…) but the desire to be seen as someone who enjoys. And unfortunately any identity desire, any self-branding desire, gets in the way of enjoyment.

1. lol