Beast of Eden

Since half the sex bloggers I know have an Eden Fantasys story to tell, I thought I’d add to the mix.

Back in May of 2007 (OMG, who the hell blogs for that long, anyway?) I received a nice email from Eden Fantasys asking if I’d want to be part of a link exchange. I’m sure most sex bloggers have had a similar email, since their marketing model seems to be to get as many people in the sex blogging community to give them some buzz. And look, that’s not a bad thing.

The email said, in part:

We would like to establish a relationship with your site for better serve our and your visitors. This can contain simple link exchange, and I hope our customers will appreciate if we can give them a note about such quality resource. We will also appreciate a link from your blog to our site.

We are also looking to expand our essays section as well as other editorial content. EdenFantasys.com needs people who can write well and be creative with our products; which requires a great deal of sexual expression and awareness. If you are interested in becoming a reviewer or writer, please email at Partners@EdenFantasys.com and submit a writing sample or link to your blog.

Apparently I overlooked this, or perhaps didn’t take it seriously. I get inquiries like this about once a month; I’d like to believe it’s because of my kick-ass writing, or my great personality, but I’m not that naive.

But still, it’s nice to dream.

Anyway, EF followed up a few months later with another note (emphasis is mine):

[...]

We would like to establish a relationship with your site for better serve our and your visitors. This can contain simple link exchange, and I hope our customers will appreciate if we can give them a note about such quality resource. We will also appreciate a link from your blog to our site. If you need our info:

URL: [redacted]
Title: Sex toy novelty

We also have a lot of other ways of partnerships, that you can find on our site.

Please mail us your decision, or any other ideas, as we are definitely open to any good ideas-such as promo actions, events, interviews and so on.

Being an inveterate attention whore with a constant need for ego stroking, I put up a link to their web store in October of 2007.  A few days later they responded:

Hello, Tom, thanks a lot for your link. What is your desired title and description to reciprocate?

Can I also ask you slightly change our link from  ’Eden Fantasies’ to ‘Adult toy novelties’?

I can’t remember, but I must have set the link title (what you see when you hover the mouse on the text) to something else. Also, note that my grammatically-prone fingers typed it as “Fantasies”.

I fixed the link, and a few days later got a short note:

Thanks , Tom. your link is also up at http://www.exalte.com/LinksList/194.
Good luck in your blogging,

And here’s what I didn’t notice at the time (my head being too full of visions of more ego stroking from the hordes of readers who would soon be fawning over my HNTs:  my blog link was not going to be hosted on the EF site, but on a site that they had set up solely for links. The Edge of Vanilla would not be associated with EF itself in any way.

That will teach me to read more carefully.

Anyway, that link stayed up for over a year, during which time EF had some number of out-clicks. In the meantime, I ran across the issues that AAG had with EF (waves to aagblog). During a routine link purging, I discovered that I did not have any visitors from EF (having forgotten about exalte.com, which is understandable, sine I didn’t have any visitors from that site, either), so I deleted the EF link.

A few weeks later, I got a note:

Some time ago we exchanged links. Our link was available on your blog http://vanillaedge.wordpress.com/. Now I had not found it. Have you removed it ? Please advice me of this matter.

Ooops. Did I do that?

I’ll go check – I might have accidentally removed the link when I was doing some housekeeping.

And since I’m generally polite, I sent another note later on:

Just out of curiosity, I checked my blog stats to see how many referrals I’ve had from Eden Fantasies. While I’ve had a number of outclicks to your webstore, I didn’t see any reciprocal traffic. I then went to the Eden Fantasies web site, and spent the last five minutes trying to find a page that has links to other blogs and personal web sites. I don’t even see anything listed in the Site Map.

Could you explain to me where I might find those links?

Which they did:

As we usually use ABC exchange – we put reciprocal links to our other sites Link directories

And he included two linking websites, one of which was exalte.com; the other was a blog that was an obvious shill for their website. At this time, the issues that AAG had written about came back to me;  I declined to respond and they removed my link. At the time, I wasn’t angry, although I do remember being annoyed.

Now, I don’t make any money with this blog; I write because I   am an inveterate attention whore with a constant need for ego stroking don’t get many chances for free expression in my daily life, and I happen to enjoy writing when I get the opportunity. Bloggers (for the most part) get their payment in link love: we exchange links with blogs that we like, which means more people can potentially stumble across our blogs, which could lead to more links, etc.  While I did agree to the link exchange with EF, I felt a bit cheated. Yes, this is entirely an ego thing — if I’m providing hits for your site, then why can’t you provide hits for mine? Obviously thousands of people were visiting EF, but hardly anyone visited exalte. It just didn’t seem fair.

Of course, I had another opportunity just eight months later:

I just wanted to say thanks for the support of one of my new fav bloggers Bad Bad Girl on her HNT post.  She is awesome and I love working with her.  I clicked over to your site and really was enjoying the read.  It is a great site and your perspective are terrific.  I would love to talk to you more about working with Eden Fantasys.  I would love to see your voice and ideas in our forums and participating in our online interviews.  We can also discuss doing product reviews on your blog and more if you are interested.

I would be really thrilled to hear from you either way.  So keep up the awesome work and have a great weekend.

Email anytime.  I pasted some links below for you to check out as well.

Short memories over there, I guess.

I don’t hang out at the EF web forums, so I missed the drama that unfolded last week. But I’ve been combing through my old emails, and I discovered that out of the dozens of link exchange proposals I’ve had over the years,all have offered to trade links on their site, and only one other site expressly stated that they do not engage in reciprocal links at all.

Personally, I don’t care what EF does — it’s their damned site, and they are free to link or not. But I do think that they are taking advantage of the spirit of the sex blogging community, and for that they rightly deserve the disdain that’s being heaped upon them at the moment. Let’s hope that they learn from this.

Record sign-ups at Ashley Madison

Last week, momlogic blog reported that the extra-marital hookup site, Ashley Madison, has noted that the day after Mothers Day is typically the second largest day for women to sign up (the day after Valentine’s Day being the first). This year was no exception, and in fact, passed expectations.

From momlogic:

31,427 Women Signed Up to Cheat After Mother’s Day

Momlogic has exclusively learned that 31,427 women signed up for AshleyMadison.com yesterday — which is over ten times the average number of women who typically sign up on any given Monday.

Ashley Madison took a sample survey of the women who signed up yesterday, and found that:

• 67 percent identified themselves as stay-at-home moms.
• The average age was 36.
• Over two-thirds had been considering an affair before Mother’s Day.

That’s a hell of a lot of disappointed women.

I wonder what the statistics are for the day after Fathers Day?

Mothers Day Affair

I guess I should spend more time choosing those cards at the drugstore.

From Momlogic:

Why Moms Cheat on Their Man the Day After Mother’s Day

AshleyMadison.com, the dating website for married people, tells momlogic exclusively that Mother’s Day is the second-busiest day of the year for female member signups.

On a typical Monday, between 2,500 and 3,000 women join AshleyMadison.com. But on the day after Mother’s Day last year, AshleyMadison.com saw close to 24,000 new signups. They anticipate that 30,000 women will join this year on May 10 — the day after Mother’s Day.

This “day after” trend is nothing new to AshleyMadison.com: Their biggest day of the year for female signups is the day after Valentine’s Day, and their third-biggest day is the day after New Year’s.

Why are holidays like these such turning points for women? Noel Biderman, president and founder of AshleyMadison.com, says, “Because they have expectations — expectations that their partnership will be celebrated and even romanticized — but that is often not what transpires ….”

But even if your guy comes up short, Dr. Golland warns moms to think before they cheat. “Cheating on your spouse will only further complicate a challenging situation — and add more carnage to your marital problems,” she says. “The damage created by an affair is very difficult to repair. That is not to say that repair after infidelity is impossible, but to rebuild the trust after such a traumatic event is hard. Statistics show that many marriages do not survive this level of betrayal.”

Often, we hear that men cheat because they aren’t getting enough sex at home, especially after women turn their attention toward the kids. This situation presents an question: are the men who aren’t celebrating and romanticizing Mothers Day doing so because they resent the lack of attention from their wives?  If so, this becomes an interesting dynamic in which it seems that everybody involved becomes disenchanted.

The article continues:

Last Mother’s Day, momlogic spoke with a woman who said that Mother’s Day ended her marriage. “I knew Mother’s Day was off to a bad start when my husband informed me the night before that the holiday had nothing to do with him and it should be between me and the kids. In the morning, I was handed a cold cup of coffee by my husband. My card and gift were left downstairs. The card and gift had been bought hours earlier, after my husband asked me, “So, what do you want, anyway?” No thought, no advance planning, no special effort put forth at all. It was so disappointing. I chose to sleep on the couch that night. My husband chose to move out. Mother’s Day essentially marked the end of our marriage.”

Mothers Day ended her marriage? Sounds to me as if it were already on life support. That’s not just a wife vs. mom problem, her husband was already checked out of the relationship.

Some advice follows, though:

Is there any way to help ensure that you won’t be disappointed on Mother’s Day by your partner? Psychologist Dr. Michelle Golland says that you have to speak up! “I think it is important for moms to share with their husbands what they would enjoy for Mothers Day,” she says. “If you want a day off or breakfast in bed, say so. I told my husband what I would enjoy to do, and I of course will reciprocate for him on Father’s Day. For some reason, we WISH our partners were mind readers. But guess what? They aren’t! So share with them what really matters this year to you.”

I keep telling my wife what I want for Fathers Day, but for some reason, that threesome with Angelina Jolie and Pamela Anderson just never materializes.

Know what I think?

I think that we should make sure to love and appreciate our partners 365 days each year, not once a quarter because of some holiday. That goes for Valentine’s Day, Christmas, birthdays, and even Sadie Hawkins Day. Let’s stop letting the greeting card companies run our lives, and take charge of our relationships for a change.

Young cougar attacks boy

One of the problems with “S” humor — sarcasm, satire, and snark — is how insidious it can be; often, many people can’t tell the difference between satire and actual opinion.

That’s why I had to call your attention to the headline (with article excerpts) that I ran across.

Another Female Teacher Attacks Male Teenage Student With Sex

Female teachers grow more and more disgusting, as they continue to attack their minor-aged male students with sex.

It seems the realm of teaching is being plagued by a new breed of pedophile: female teachers who like to prey upon our young sons of America. Last year, our astute leader and friend, Pastor Jack Gould, revealed this dangerous new trend of liberal female teachers attacking young boys with sex.

These teachers have a sick, festering desire to corrupt the minds of the pure and innocent. They exploit a young male’s burgeoning sexuality — meant to only be fully released during the confines of wedlock, to his wife — for their own sick desires.

[...]

Reports detail how this young man shamefully came forward to speak of how this teacher raped him in her car, using both her secret parts and her mouth to do unfathomable acts upon his body. This young man was so emotionally scarred, ashamed and in so much pain, he allegedly did not even want to take the stand during the trial.

The thought of what horrors this young must have faced as this teacher forced him to copulate in her car, using his body for all of her lustful desires, is truly disturbing. What’s even more frustrating is the thought of how these liberal courts tend to let these teachers get away with such things with only a slap on the wrist.

It is a wonder that young men are even able to graduate high school and go on to college, as a man should do. We find more females in college now than young men due to things like this: how can our sons make it to college when they are being raped at such an age, one where they should be protected by law and not abused by a system of biased corruption.

[...]

We must let these diseased women know that as a society, we do not condone their sex attacks and will uphold the law to ensure their threat is removed for good.

And just in case you thought this was an isolated incident, here are more examples of the constant threat to our young men:

Vajazzling, The Newest Threat To Your College Son

Sexy Liberal Teachers Are Attacking Your Children with Sex

Submitted without comment, but feel free to add your own.