Understandably, people are looking back at the last ten years and thinking, mostly, how the fuck did we get from there to here? Remember where you were and how you were at the back end of 2009?
We were in the last few months of the last Labour government, but it wasn’t all sunshine: it was a year that featured two bouts of mega snow, for one thing. Mind you, it was still early days of surveillance culture, so it was still possible to draw a big cock on a flat roof… In the world of adult entertainment, the battle against the censorship of ‘extreme porn‘ was still going on.
Ten years ago, on a personal level, I was writing about sex in a rather small-scale way. I had a young child, 
so less of a social life, but the top-shelf magazines that had kept me mostly fed and housed for the previous couple of decades were still, just about, surviving.They began to fade out over the next few years – just before the explosion of 50 Shades fever. People were saying at the time that it was all down to the Internet.
It’s perhaps worth noting that, ten years ago, the sex blogger/sex writing community that features so heavily in my writing world was barely there. Cara Sutra had started up, and there may have been one or two other pioneers at the start of the decade, but most came along a year or two later. Facebook and Twitter existed in 2009 but Instagram and WhatsApp weren’t running (which may or may not have been why I had to do such a lot of digging to find a pic of myself from ten years ago). Self-publishing was beginning to be seen as a more feasible option, following the launch of Amazon’s Kindle and the rapid rise of ebooks, but people still tended to be a little suspicious of it.
Where to from here, though? No one knows. We have a lot to worry about in general: climate change and the rise of fascism being more dangerous now than they were last year or the year before. Whether those of us with a sex-positive, diversity-friendly outlook are high on the priority list of the authoritarians (at least in the UK) might not be immediately troubling, but it’s difficult not to feel a general raising of your anxiety levels when you look around you.
A new year and a new decade are imminent. Let’s walk forward as boldly and as brightly as we can, for as long as we can.