Angst in Blogland

Angst in cyber-world. There's a fuss about one of the blogs on the best sex bloggers list. It was the blog that came first, a blog by a high class call girl (allegedly) and was eventually removed from first place because of the protest. If you follow the links you can read a pretty vitriolic accusation here. And a really good post by Remittance Girl on the virtual execution of this virtual call girl.

A long time ago, one of my early online friends told me that you have to assume that everyone you meet online is a man, probably 18 to 30, and just looking to jerk off. And I certainly found that in some groups there was some truth to that.

I did meet women in online chat rooms that I found out later were men. Actually, I wasn't that bothered by it. They weren't people I had much invested in and my sense of betrayal was fairly limited. I was amused and intrigued and wondered about their reasons. I wasn't hurt.

Actually I had one insanely hot cyber session with a girl that I later found out was a man. Did it wreck it for me? Ummm, no, but it did shift my sense of what had happened.

I have assumed that people who write blogs are middle aged women. Some are younger, some older, some men even, but a huge preponderance seem to be those MAWs. And I have no idea of stats or facts or trends or anything else on this. Maybe it's just the blogs I read, but I think they are overwhelmingly written by just who I said.

People write blogs in order to connect, to communicate. We want the community that we build of like minded people.

And the world sort of takes the blog and the blogger at face value. What do you know about me? Only what I tell you, and perhaps what you read between the lines, if you read closely enough. You know that I say I'm a woman, middle aged as I said, you know tons about my feelings. Or about the feelings I say I feel.

But you don't know if any of that is true. And how much do you care? For those of you that read my blog all the time, if you found out I wasn't who I say, what I say, how shocked would you be? Well depends what it was, right?

Like if you found that I was 25 or 75 instead of 50, would that make a difference? It might not but you might wonder why I had misrepresented. And you'd see what I wrote differently.

If you found out that I weighed 10 pounds more than you thought you probably wouldn't do more than raise an eyebrow. Women lie about their weight all the time right?

If you found out that I was a man what would you think? And I could be a man, there are no pictures of me here. And if there were, would you be certain they were me? Yeah, that would shift your perceptions of me and what I say. But why and how much?
The real answer is that  it would probably depend on how close you felt to me and how much you had relied on the specific image that you had held of me and how much I was changing it.

In the example that I started with, The Princess Diaries, the blog that won first place in the 100 Best Bloggers List this year, apparently the blog was written by a high paid call girl, who turns out to have maybe been a middle aged man. Which is different I grant you. But how important is it? I think it became more important because someone was envious and started a trash talking campaign. But of course I don't know that.

The internet permits anonymity. And you really have no idea if anything you read on my blog, or anywhere else on the net, is fact or fiction or opinion. You just don't know. I think you read here for entertainment, to be amused or intrigued or for my story. And if it's my story that draws you here, you are drawn whether it's fact or fiction.

I like to know whether things are true or not. I really do. But in some ways I also don't care. Unless I'm doing research I read what interests me, what entertains me.

I find it creepy that someone has gone to so much trouble to prove who the blogger really is. They could be ruining someone's life, a vindictive and pointless act. It's disconcerting. I know there are people here who don't like me. I can only hope that no one ever combines motive and means to hurt me that much.