This blog is a bit of a meta-blog about blogging. If that’s not your thing, don’t worry. Normal posts on filth and angry feminism will resume shortly.

*Update* – Vagenda has responded to this and agreed to proactively ask for link backs. Still no guarantee of full name credit, but certainly much better than it was before.

The Vagenda, if you haven’t heard of it, is a blog written by a huge collection of people, and run by Rhiannon-Lucy Coslett and Holly Baxter. It’s a varied mix of really heartfelt stories, funny articles, feminist ranting, and almost anything else you could care to think of that’d fall under the category of ‘popular feminism’. It’s naturally a mixed bag, but I want to say up front that I like some of the stuff that’s published there. I even wrote for it once.

However, something about it really frustrates me: when I find an article that I like, I usually want to find out more about the author. I want to view their personal blog if they have one, or read other articles they’ve written. But I can’t.

Not because these writers are all anonymous (although some of them choose to be), or even because they never link through to their own blogs (occasionally they do), but because the Vagenda has a policy of never naming their writers. Unless you’re a famous journalist like Hadley Freeman, they will only credit you with initials. 

Who the hell is ‘JD’?

Don’t believe me? Take a look:

This is a great article on the morning after pill. It’s written by RW.
Here’s one on Chris Brown, by DB.
This one is credited to ‘MW’.
This one is credited to ‘RP’.

When I wrote for the Vagenda, I asked them to publish the post under my blog name – girlonthenet – they said they don’t do that, and instead published just the initials ‘GON’. They did include a link to my blog, though, so I still got referral traffic and probably picked up a few new readers, so it was a good thing for me to do.

But there are hundreds of writers who have blogged for Vagenda and seen no return whatsoever – no traffic to their blogs, no one googling their name and coming across their awesome piece then paying them to write something else, not the warm fuzzy feeling you inevitably get when you see your name on a popular website. If any of these people want to go into writing as a career, they can’t even use their Vagenda experience on a CV. Jane Doe has no way of proving that the article credited to ‘JD’ is hers, beyond pointing at it and saying “but it is! Honest!”

Pay versus promotion

There’s a huge debate about the ethics of not paying writers, and simply expecting them to write in order to gain ‘exposure’. I appreciate that if you’re not making money, you might not be able to pay people. I also think that if you are making money, not paying people is deeply unethical. If you expect writers to produce something of value for you, you have to give them something of value back. At the absolute least you should acknowledge that they’re a person with a name.

Recently The Vagenda began a Kickstarter with the aim of raising money to revamp their website and – if possible – pay their writers. This is a good aim – if their blog is making them money, paying their writers is the ethical thing to do.

But while they’re not paying cash, at the very least they can help talented writers gain the exposure that’s so important. On the Vagenda Kickstarter page they say:

“We already have a huge pool of awesome contributors from around the world and we’d really, really love to be able to pay them or shower them with gifts, even if it’s just a little, for their amazing work.”

Well, you can start by crediting them. You don’t even need a Kickstarter for that – it’s free. Offer your writers a byline, author bio, and link to their personal blog if they want it. If you don’t have any money yet, that’s an easy thing with which you can shower them.

Vagenda initials-only policy

I emailed Vagenda and put this issue to them (the full text of my email, and their reply, is below in the comments). Naïvely, I half expected them to reply by saying ‘blimey, you’re right. We should add credits.’ But instead they explained why they do this. I don’t think the explanation is good enough. Here are their reasons, and my thoughts:

Many of our writers would like to keep what they write separate from their work

Understandable, of course. But ‘many’ is not ‘all’. I’m 100% sure that some of their writers don’t want to keep their Vagenda articles separate from their other work. The choice to have your work properly acknowledged is being taken away from all writers because some writers might choose otherwise.

It also stops people pitching us puff pieces/PR stunts

Annoying though it is when people do this, it’s one of the hazards of running a popular blog. I suspect that the initials-only policy does little to stop people pitching anyway – I get emails from PRs all the time, despite never publishing the guest posts/sponsored links that they suggest.

It protects people when they’re writing personally/it prevents writers getting abused on Twitter

On the surface this seems like a nice reason – protecting the people who write for you from getting abuse. However, criticism is one of the potential hazards of writing, and it comes hand-in-hand with praise.

I fully understand why some writers might want to remain anonymous, but others might choose to take the rough with the smooth. The people who contribute to Vagenda are more than capable of making this choice for themselves. Warning writers that they might get abuse is one thing, refusing to credit them ‘for their own good’ is quite another.

It also sits at odds with this:

We link people when they ask

So they won’t add your name in case you get twitter abuse, but if you ask them nicely they’ll add a link to your blog. Vagenda – you’re either protecting people by keeping them all anonymous or you’re not. Which is it?

Moreover, do the authors know they have to ask for a link? Why aren’t they proactively offered the option? I think the right way to deal with guest blogs is to ask the author exactly how they want to be credited – what links they want included, which name they’d like to put to the piece, etc. Let’s not forget that the writer is doing more than being ‘given an amazing opportunity’, they are providing valuable content for free.

We also have an arrangement with the Guardian whereby, if they want to cross post anything from the Vagenda, the writer gets a byline and a picture on the Guardian website.

The Guardian credits its writers. It protects anonymity where people ask for it, but when they don’t, it will appropriately credit the person who wrote the piece. Which is exactly as it should be. The fact that Vagenda editors want to protect the women who write for them, except if their piece is popular enough to get picked up by the Guardian, seems odd. Presumably Vagenda writers can choose whether they want to be credited by the Guardian, so why can’t they choose to be credited on the article they wrote for Vagenda?

Finally, I should highlight – as Rhiannon did in the email she sent me on this issue – that neither of the editors claim author credit on the blogs they write. They’re only credited using their initials, like all the other Vagenda writers. This would be a good point if they were just as anonymous as the ‘RP’s and ‘JD’s of this world, but they’re not – they’re incredibly well known. And, ironically, they’re well known because their full names are credited on the articles they write for other publications – Guardian, New Statesman, etc. These other publications are acknowledging a truth that the editors themselves don’t seem to have grasped: that writers deserve credit for their work. They have names.

So what exactly is the point of this, GOTN?

I love some of the articles on the Vagenda, and I got a fair amount of blog traffic when I wrote for them. I know that the site itself invites mixed opinions, but I’m not in any way saying ‘Vagenda is awful oh God make it stop’. What I am very loudly and clearly saying is that it needs to rethink this ‘initials only’ crediting policy. Given that the blog wouldn’t exist without the army of writers who contribute to it, the very least the editors should offer them is the option to put a name to their work.

In the words of the Vagenda editors themselves, publishing just initials at the bottom of each article

“makes writers difficult to distinguish from one another”

So, a heartfelt plea: Vagenda, even if you can’t pay right now, could you at the very least give the talented, interesting and occasionally fucking superb people who write for you some credit? They have names.

Full text of the email exchange between me and Vagenda in the comments below. Feel free to tweet at The Vagenda editors (please keep it civil – they get a lot of shit on the internet and I’m hoping to persuade them to change their policy, rather than subject them to a torrent of unnecessary rage) and let them know if you think they should change the way they credit people.

I’ve written a book.

It sounds so simple when I write it down like that, but it’s actually taken a bloody long time, because I kept having to break away from writing it to fuck the people who are in it, and masturbate vigorously while thinking about them. I am incredibly excited about this, and I really hope that some of you are too.

It’s not just a random collection of blog entries, or a fictional depiction of my most torrid and disgusting fantasies: it’s a memoir.

I wrote it for the same reason I started this blog: because despite pioneering work by countless women, we’re still a bit weird about sex. We still refer to ‘female masturbation’ in hushed tones, as if it’s something unusual and rare. We hear that men think about sex every six seconds while women will feign headaches to get out of it. I see men being portrayed as one-dimensional sex-driven automatons and women as the grudging servants of their sexual desires. I don’t recognise these women, or these men, and I never have.

Everyone’s unique, and has a different take on sex. This book’s about my take on it, and it’s written for people like you, who have unique takes on it too. I’m wrong a lot of the time. I’m ranty, irritating, occasionally amoral and I use the word ‘fuck’ far too often, but I’m honest.

I wrote this book because since I started writing my blog people have emailed me and said “I wish I could be so open” or sent me filthy fantasies of their own. I wrote it because I didn’t just want to tell people what I’d done, but to explain why I’m glad to have done it. Why I’m not cowering in a corner regretting the number of guys I’ve done and the variety of things I’ve done with them. Why I’m not ashamed.

So if you fancy reading a ranty, sexy memoir, please do buy my book when it’s out. All of the pertinent info is below, and I’ll update you soon with links to where you can buy it when it’s released. I just wanted you to be the first to know.

Girl on the Net: My not so shameful sex secrets

It’ll be out around the end of May, published by Carina UK – the new digital imprint from Harlequin UK.

If you’d like to get an alert when it’s available, please subscribe via the box at the top right of the blog. If you’re a blogger and you’d like a preview to review, just drop me an email with the subject heading “I’d like to review your book, GOTN” (or something similar) and a link to your blog, and I’ll send a list of people on to my publisher.

Thank you, you are all amazing

Finally, a massive thank you – when I first started this blog (back in September 2011, for those who like history) I was worried about a number of things. Would people be mean to me? Would they out me? Would they ignore the blog on the grounds that I am a tedious pervert?

I’ve been pleasantly surprised on all counts, and bowled over by how kind you’ve all been – reading the blog, sharing it around, leaving thoughtful and interesting comments, emailing me your thoughts, stories and cock pictures, and above all not telling me to sod off. Thank you so much to everyone who has ever left a comment, liked a post, retweeted something, or just told your friends to read it. It genuinely means a hell of a lot.

Please keep doing it, because without you I am not a successful sex blogger: I’m just a girl, sitting at a laptop in her pants, masturbating over stories I tell for my own amusement.

All the sexy firemen, stripping police officers and naughty nurses leave me cold. I understand why uniforms are hot, but the idea that someone who has one of these jobs is necessarily hot just because they wear a uniform that is in some way vaguely similar to something you can buy in Ann Summers is frustrating and bizarre.

Some nurses are hot. Some firemen are hot. But the qualities of the sexiest jobs have, in my opinion, very little to do with the uniform. I say this because I fancy computer programmers – boys whose ‘uniform’ consists mostly of scrubby jeans and a coffee-stained hoodie. I cannot get enough of them.

It’s not a fetish in the strictest sense of the word (I have successfully orgasmed with men who wouldn’t know their YAML from their ‘oh no seriously now I’m going to have to Google YAML so I don’t look stupid.’), but it’s certainly a bit more than an itch that occasionally requires scratching.

What’s so sexy about programmers? Well, their quick fingers, for one – typing frantically into the mysterious Matrix-like black box with the same intense focus as a boy playing a particularly tricky Xbox game.

Then there’s the mystery itself: I have no sodding clue what they’re doing. The brackets and squiggles and dots mean about as much to me as the Chinese alphabet, and they are all the sexier for it.

Finally, there’s the brains. Ah, brains. The most desirable thing about a human, not just according to zombies but to other humans too. Not everyone has them but the majority of people like them, don’t they? I’ve never heard someone saying, of a potential squeeze: “Well, he’s lovely, but he’d be lovelier if he was as dumb as a bag of bricks.” Or “she’s hot, I just wish she didn’t know her 13 times table.”

Universal hotness

I think you might agree with me on at least one of the above points. You might not get wet at the thought of male programmers (and even if you did you’d have to step back and sit on your hands because I think you’ll find they’re all mine), but the hands-mystery-brains trilogy is surely common in many people’s lusts.

To experiment (like they do in science, only involving far less peer-review and a hell of a lot more cider) I asked the good folk of Twitter what they thought were the sexiest jobs. Here is but a tiny selection of their answers:

Hands-related jobs

Bass players and guitarists were the most popular, which explains why they get so many groupies and dribbling, wide-eyed fans. Lots of people suggested something along these lines, or other jobs that involved strong or dextrous hands – clearly from the ‘quick fingers’ school of arousal, and I cannot possibly argue.

@girlonthenet Bass guitar player, no question.

— Innocent Loverboy (@innocentlb) March 18, 2013

 

@girlonthenet something meaning they work with their hands – rough calloused hands…. *sigh*….

— Charlie (@The_Lady_Sybil) March 18, 2013

Mystery-related jobs

Onto mystery, and despite the diverse offerings here, I maintain that much of what’s sexy in this stuff is the mysterious nature of it. I find all of the following occupations hot, not because they are sexy per se, but because I know nothing about them, and so the idea of having a guy teach me how to do them, with gentle patience and occasional discipline, slicks my knickers like butter in the microwave.

@girlonthenet mathematician. Or chef.

— Katherine Stephen (@katobell) March 18, 2013

 

@girlonthenet Jobs that involve speaking more than one language.

— Suze(@SuzeMarsupial) March 18, 2013

Brains-related jobs

Quite a few people gave very brains/ideas-focused offerings.

@girlonthenet Doctors. Because, doctors.

— Kate (@ginandting) March 18, 2013

I particularly liked the lady who was so into brains, and also in such a kickass-brainy job that she aroused even herself:

@girlonthenet the sexiest job to have is being a barrister. I am strangely drawn to myself. :)

— Emma Dixon (@EmmaDixon_Green) March 18, 2013

I wish this could happen to me. Sadly all of my self-arousal relies on ‘quick-fingers’ style hotness.

Anyway, I reckon my hands-mystery-brains trilogy covers off pretty much all of the things for which I could gain an immediate and shallow attraction to someone, and it has the added bonus that I think most people would identify with at least one of those things.

Even if you don’t fancy musicians, if you like the quick-hands of coders you can probably appreciate why someone else would want to lick a cellist. Even if barristers aren’t your thing, your penchant for brains might make you moon over a mathematician. And as for the mystery, well – who doesn’t fancy fucking Batman?

Hands. Mystery. Brains. Did I forget anything?

Oh yeah, one more, which was actually more popular than any of the categories my rubbish brain came up with on its own: passion.

@girlonthenet Musician. Someone who does it because it is who they are, it’s not just a job & they commit to every note. ->

— Sally R (@arthurstodgyn) March 18, 2013