Spotting this image on tumblr brought a wry smile to my face. Those that have been around the femdom blogverse a while may recognize it. For those that don’t, this is Ms Marie with her husband in their basement. She wrote an excellent femdom blog 7 or so years ago, and I still occasionally see photographs from it surface on tumblr and twitter. One day her blog just vanished. As far as I know, she never posted or commented again.
Sex blogging is a strange form of interaction. With casual acquaintances we typically share a narrow and very shallow view of ourselves. It’s a personality puddle. With good friends we deepen and also broaden that sharing. Maybe a lake or sea rather than a puddle. By contrast, sex blogging is a dark water filled mine shaft. We share intimate personal details and yet retain this incredibly narrow focus. Readers know things that our closest friends aren’t aware of, but also don’t know things we’d casually drop into a conversation with a slightly annoying work colleague. It makes the transitions – when life changes and bloggers stop or move on – all the more strange.
I often think of bloggers I used to read and (in some cases) swap comments with – Ms Marie, hmp, scott & Em, D from Dumb Domme, Saratoga, Suzanne, Axe, Bitchy Jones, Disheveled Domina and many others that have currently slipped my mind. In some cases I know a little bit of the context around why they stopped. In most I’ve no idea. I hope they’re OK and don’t regret what they shared with the world. I hope they know that at least one of their readers appreciated their posts and still reflect back fondly on them.
“Sex blogging is a strange form of interaction. With casual acquaintances we typically share a narrow and very shallow view of ourselves. It’s a personality puddle. With good friends we deepen and also broaden that sharing. Maybe a lake or sea rather than a puddle. By contrast, sex blogging is a dark water filled mine shaft. We share intimate personal details and yet retain this incredibly narrow focus. Readers know things that our closest friends aren’t aware of, but also don’t know things we’d casually drop into a conversation with a slightly annoying work colleague. It makes the transitions – when life changes and bloggers stop or move on – all the more strange.”
That’s very insightful, and mirrors what I’ve noticed, myself, over the years. I’ve ven kept some of my favorite bloggers on my blogroll, long after their blogs themselves have disappeared. I really miss the acerbic wit of Bitchy Jones, the dry humor of Dishevelled Domina, and the wry observations of Suzy Wears the Pants.
And like you, I’ve had many exchanges with those other bloggers you’ve mentioned, and it’s funny that we all know some intimate details, but don’t know the names of their children or spouses, or where they live.
It’s a strange world, isn’t it?
A strange world indeed. We all show different sides of ourselves to different audiences, but sex blogging has to be one of the most extreme examples of that. You get this incredibly narrow view into one aspect of a story that you’ve missed the beginning of and which normally ends with no warning at some seemingly arbitrary point.
Like you, I miss a lot of the bloggers I used to read and swap comments with.
-paltego
I too, remember Ms Marie very well. Her interactions with her sub were always creative, intelligent and often, rather severe.
From comments she made, I think they had young children and lived in quite a small rural community.
My guess is that a point was approaching, at which it would become impossible to keep their ‘Kink Planet’ interactions out of sight from their kids and be sure that their confidentiality was protected from neighbours and friends.
Perhaps we may hear from her again someday when they can once more enjoy a wild private life and are safe to share their adventures?
I really hope it was simply a desire for privacy and that they continued to enjoy their kinky exploration offline. I always appreciated Ms Marie and her comments. Unfortunately it often seems that when bloggers suddenly disappear its down to major disruptive life events or relationship issues. Hopefully that wasn’t the case here and, as you say, maybe she’ll resurface at some future time.
-paltego
With sincere thanks to all the BDSM bloggers who have lightened up our lives over the years with their thoughtful commentary, debate and media content and references.
Absolutely. I’ll second that! I wouldn’t have started blogging myself without other great examples to follow. I may not have even explored kink without the impetus that reading about others provided.
-paltego
I often reflect on how those were the glory days of blogs, written with thought and decent length articles. Before the cheap thrill of twitter and Tumblr etc.
I miss it.
I have to admit that I like twitter and tumblr. I don’t think this blog would have survived without them as a source of links and images. But I do agree that they’ve had a big impact on the number of quality bloggers out there. Lots of people who might have written blogs now will just tweet, and the number of blogs and long form articles has fallen dramatically. That’s a shame.
-paltego
“But I do agree that they’ve had a big impact on the number of quality bloggers out there. Lots of people who might have written blogs now will just tweet, and the number of blogs and long form articles has fallen dramatically.”
I’m dating myself, but I used to frequent certain Usenet groups that were pretty chatty. Eventually, many of those users migrated over to web boards and Yahoo groups, in part because the interface was cooler, trolls were often moderated/banned, and you could post pictures (the Usenet groups were text-only). Then people started migrating to MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, etc. Those of us who enjoyed writing found Blogger and WordPress, but even that became limiting as our friends tended to be on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr – and now Snapchat and Instagram.
I was going to say you’re not that old, because I used usenet as well. But then it struck me that maybe that just dates both of us! Mostly I used it for techy software stuff and videogame groups. Although the binaries section was a rich source for porn before the days of tumblr and torrents.
Arguably the greater number of options these days means more choices and more alignment with what people really want. But I do feel a little bit like a fan of radio at a time when television has taken over. When it comes to my own tweets, I spend longer editing them trying to get them down to the character limit than actually writing the original text.
-paltego