Girl on the Net

What does it take to be a sex blogger? Do you have to be a wildly kinky adventurer, ready to fuck a new person each night and spend your weekend testing new butt plugs? Fuck no. Let’s tackle some common sex blogger myths, and in the process give a vague nod to the fact that this month marks my SEVEN YEAR blogging anniversary.

You don’t have to have ‘been around’ to be a sex blogger

I’ve not slept with hundreds of people. Sure, my ‘magic number‘ seemed like a lot to me when I was in my mid twenties, I proudly identified as a ‘slut‘ and was delighted to have found so many generous people who were willing to spend their time and fuckjuice on me, but since I started this blog most of my sex has been with one person. If you’re thinking of starting a sex blog, or writing about sex, let me assure you that what matters isn’t the quantity of people you’ve shagged: it’s the number of thoughts and ideas you have about sex.

People who are monogamous, single, have low sex drives, etc, have loads to contribute to the conversation around sex and relationships: please don’t write yourself off because you think there’s a certain magic number of sex partners you have to fuck in order to get your ‘sex blogger’ badge.

You don’t have to be ‘kinky’ to be a sex blogger

I’ve heard people say to me before that they’re probably not kinky or ‘adventurous’ enough to be a sex blogger. To which I’d reply: who exactly gets to tell you what is and isn’t adventurous? It’s not like there’s a hazing ritual where you have to take a spanking, try out a chastity device, sit on three different butt plugs and drink someone’s piss before you’re allowed to put ‘sex blogger’ in your Twitter bio.

Although some of my blog posts catalogue adventurous things I’ve done, many of them – like the sex cinema post, for example – wouldn’t actually happen today. That cinema closed down many years ago, likely even before I started the blog, and since then I’ve got with a different guy who probably wouldn’t be into that kind of thing even if the cinema was still running.

If you look at what I actually write, most of the ‘action’ is pretty samey: I fuck. I suck dick. I wank. I fantasise about shit. I sometimes use new sex toys. I don’t often go to fetish parties or swingers’ clubs or wear latex or hang from reinforced ceiling joists while my partner licks butter out of my arse crack. I’ve been sex blogging for years off the back of curiosity, horniness, and the joy of finding things that press my specific buttons. Your specific buttons don’t have to be kinky for you to do the same: sex blogging isn’t about making sure you tick as many ‘fetish’ buttons as possible, it’s about all the different ways people’s buttons can be pressed.

You don’t have to have sex to be a sex blogger

I didn’t want to lead with this one because I needed the first two to do the ground work first, but here it is: you don’t have to have sex to be a sex blogger. You can be a single person with a whole heap of fascinating fantasies and ideas. You can be an asexual person with storming opinions on the way we talk about sex in culture and the media. You can be a virgin (virginity is a very loaded and sometimes unhelpful word but I mean it here to refer to someone with no partnered sexual experience) who writes kickass erotica, or has passionate or funny insights into sex.

You can be any of these things and you’d make an exceptional sex blogger, and there are plenty more examples I haven’t even thought of. That’s partly why sex blogging needs you: no doubt you can think of examples that I can’t. Your experiences and ideas and insights make you unique and bring something that none of the rest of us may have thought of.

You don’t have to post nude photos to be a sex blogger

Have you ever seen my nipples? The vast majority of you probably haven’t. At least not really. The closest I’ve ever come to showing my nipples is in the photo on this post about piss play, which I wrote back in 2011 – very shortly after I started the blog, when I had a few other semi-sexy photos taken to illustrate my posts. I’ve ranted before about the pressure that some bloggers feel (mostly thanks to eager/demanding readers and search engines which want all your blogs to have images) to get their kit off and post more of themselves than they feel comfortable with. The truth is that you really don’t have to post nudes if you don’t want to. A picture might speak a thousand words, but so does a fucking blog post, my friend.

And if you need awesome images to go with your work (because Google likes pictures and you won’t get search rank without them) then why not consider hiring an amazing illustrator? Or chatting to one of the sex bloggers who does take amazing photos (like Molly, or one of the other amazing photographers who regularly take part in Sinful Sunday) and asking if you can license some of their work?

You don’t have to write to be a sex blogger

This one’s just the other side of the coin above: sex blogging is about starting – and joining – conversations about sex. And if you prefer images to words there’s plenty for you to do here too. Lots of ways in which you can contribute, and show off the things that you love, without having to write achingly long thinkpieces on sex robots or BDSM.

This is the shortest section, though, because I have absolutely no idea how to go about it: I’m a words person, so I leave the pictures to people who are good at that stuff. Maybe you’re one of them?

You don’t have to test sex toys to be a sex blogger

This one’s always been my biggest frustration, and it’s partly because if you start a sex blog, as soon as you get reasonably popular, you’ll be beating sex toy companies off with the proverbial stick as they all pop up in your inbox clamouring for you to test their latest invention or join their affiliate scheme.

If you’re starting a sex blog because you’d like to make money, then you absolutely should consider this. It’s phenomenally tricky to get sponsorship and cash from ‘non-adult’ companies if you’re a blogger: avenues like Google Ads, Amazon affiliates, and just plain partnerships with non-adult brands are incredibly difficult. Weirdly, even though I know that every single one of my readers will buy soap, shampoo, clothes, and all the boring-ish things that get us through life, it’s remarkably difficult to get soap, shampoo and clothing companies to actually put their ads next to something which talks about bums. So sex toys and condoms it is.

But that doesn’t mean you have to test sex toys. You can write your opinions about sex toys, use them in sexy stories or include the ones you love in your favourite blog posts, or you can even give space on your blog for the occasional press release or bit of sponsored content if you want to make more cash. But your blog is yours: you get to decide what it’s about. So you don’t have to wank off with a different rabbit vibe every week just because that’s what everyone else seems to be doing.

Do what you want to be doing.

What do you have to do to be a sex blogger?

The entry criteria for being a sex blogger are actually pretty easy, because they’re non-existent. There aren’t any rules about what you have to do or not do in order to be in the club. You just need to be interested in sex, and have enough opinions and thoughts on sex – and sex-related topics – to be able to write a few blog posts each week. You can write more than that if you like, or fewer, although if you drop below one each week you’ll struggle to rank in search engines. But hey! Maybe you don’t care about getting tonnes of traffic and all you want to do is join the sex blogging community, or give insight into a niche that’s not currently covered elsewhere.

Best of all, you don’t even need to know what your sex blog is going to be until you start it. You can start a sex blog with one idea and then allow it to grow and change over time as your opinions, interests, kinks, writing, emotions and everything else changes. If you don’t believe me, go check out my ‘about’ page. The first part with links to FAQs etc was written a couple of years ago, but the second half was written way back when I started this blog in 2011. It reads quite strangely today, because there’s too much gendered language in there and a kind of brash I-Know-Best-ness that characterised my writing at the start. I should probably change it, but I kind of like having a few bits of my blog that show who I used to be – the way you can sometimes see weathered timbers in old buildings poking through the new plaster and paint.

I’m enthusiastic to the point of being evangelical about becoming a sex blogger because… well, because although I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with ‘Girl on the Net’, starting this sex blog has been one of the best things I’ve ever done. I’ve been able to write about things that fascinate and entertain me, learn from incredible, inspirational people at amazing events like Eroticon (buy your tickets for next year!) and Woodhull, and I’ve even turned sex-as-a-hobby into my actual, real-life job.

You don’t have to be kinky to be a sex blogger. You don’t have to have a huge collection of toys or a million-and-one stories about hundreds of ex-partners. And you certainly don’t need to have all the answers.

If you want to be a sex blogger, all you need to do is begin.

Here is a picture of the last 7 years of my life. We’ve all got to start somewhere.