While I’ve never tried sex blogging as such, I did have a nice sideline last century and the beginning of this one which involved writing about trips to various fetish and swinger clubs, with free rein to not any actual activity I engaged in there. I don’t recall anyone ever complaining, to the magazines these exploits of mine appeared in, that anything I wrote wasn’t true, or that I wasn’t real. I didn’t tell any lies, as such, because the reviews I wrote were supposed to be about the clubs themselves: I would write about the décor, the facilities, the club’s rules and attitudes.
The magazines already carried substantial Readers’ Letters sections, so this (from a review of a now-defunct venue in the Midlands) was about as explicit as I ever got.
“I am happy to say that almost everyone is obliging about posing for pics. Some folks, in fact, are more than obliging, and I am never averse to being invited to drop both camera and my underwear once the happy snaps are taken. A good time was indeed had by all, and I do believe that I might have won something in the raffle if I hadn’t been intimately engaged when the tickets were being drawn, but you won’t hear me complaining.”
From time to time, people did mention that my reviews ‘could be ruder’ (in terms of sexy bits, not negative aspects of my adventures) but I always pointed out the potential authenticity issue with that sort of thing. While I can and do write loads of very explicit sex scenes in fiction, I could never actually guarantee that there would be any sexual activity involving me to write about when I visited a particular club. Partly because of time and money (I had little of either) I generally only managed to visit one club per month, and would have to produce some kind of emphasise-the-positive-but-don’t-fib chunk of text whether the place had been rammed to the rafters and fabulous, or whether I’d managed to pick an unlucky night where there were only a handful of warm bodies on the premises and we all sat around talking about house prices.
I invariably went along by myself, and some nights I didn’t encounter anyone who was either sufficiently appealing or sufficiently available to do things with. So I could write about watching other people fucking and sucking; sometimes there would be an item of play equipment that was unusual enough to merit several speculative paragraphs on its own (one club, I recall, had a Dogging Suite which consisted of an old van in a gloomy basement, surrounded by plastic trees…) And I got into the habit of restricting any mention of stuff I had done myself to a couple of cheerfully euphemistic sentences.
It was obviously acceptable enough to the various editors, as my reviewing career spanned nearly 20 years, overall. But I think I’m happy to stick with fiction, these days.