If you’ve ever tried to hunt down my Real Life Identity, you probably know one thing for sure: my name is not Sarah. Sarah is the name I used in my books, and it’s the one I use when talking to journalists about sex blogging, if they aren’t comfortable calling me ‘Girl’ or ‘GOTN’. It’s the helpful comfort blanket I wrap around myself to maintain my anonymity: a tasty morsel of reality with which to distract people who might look further. But there comes a point when ‘helpful’ nudges into ‘deceptive’ territory. Notably, when I’m shagging someone.

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Today’s guest blogger has a moving and pretty heartbreaking story about relationships, privacy and sex blogging. It’s a really powerful, personal piece and it touches on a lot of things that I have worried about as a sex blogger, and that I suspect many other bloggers in similar situations worry about. She also talks a little about her relationship – which has a DD/lg dynamic, using the honorific ‘Daddy’ to refer to her partner, similar to the kind Cara Thereon wrote so beautifully about here a few weeks ago. If you’re likely to find that triggering, please don’t read on, but if you’re curious about it she’s kindly included more links to other bloggers who’ve written about this sort of play, so you can find out more if you’d like to.

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I bet sometimes Clark Kent wants to punch Superman. And I know this because I would happily punch Girl on the Net if she weren’t also basically me. I don’t hate her all the time, or even most of the time. But right now I hate her. And this is not the same thing as self-hate: it is richer and deeper and more intense. A purer kind of hatred, because GOTN isn’t me. She isn’t even real, so I can revel in the delicious satisfaction of hating her in the same way I can hate Voldemort.

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When I introduce myself to people, I use a different name. I have quite a few – I like them. One of them I wear so often it feels more comfortable than my ‘real’ name – I wrap it round me like a blanket, and it makes me feel safe.

Unfortunately, one of the questions I’m asked most frequently is: “is that your real name, though?” Like somewhere deep in my heart there’s a secret and special name, and the people I’m speaking to will be elevated above the status of mere acquaintance and into, I don’t know, God, if they can determine what the deep and immutable truth is. Problem is, knowing my real name doesn’t give anyone special powers, it just gives them a fact. And hand-in-hand with that fact comes a fairly big problem for both of us.

When I first started blogging I decided that anonymity was the best way to go – for a whole host of reasons, but primarily employment. We still live in a world where talking about buttsex on the internet and holding down a job at a company that gives a shit about your social media life is, if not impossible, at least tricky. As time wore on, there were more reasons, and then more. Recently, Kilted Wookie wrote a post about anonymity on his sex blog and it got me thinking about a lot of stuff. The primary thing was that there are far more reasons to be anonymous than I’d considered when I first began.

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