Lovin’ Our Bloggers – 2

Something I learned from the recent Love Our Lurkers day is that a lot of my “lurkers” have blogs of their own, most of them ones that I read, myself. Seriously, at last count I subscribe to close to 300 blogs; ones that I particularly enjoy, I list on my blogroll, separated by category, with my most recent finds being listed up at the top. I subscribe to many others via their RSS feeds (I use Google Reader, simply because it’s convenient).

Because I’ve got the links set up in categories (and because I link to so many awesome writers), I know that many of my readers use my blogroll as a link aggregate. So, for those of you who may have recently discovered Edge of Vanilla (or for those of you who haven’t taken the opportunity to explore much beyond my own posts), I wanted to take some time to show some love to the people that have inspired and entertained me. So, in no particular order, here’s an introduction to some more of my favourites.

Nemo is another blogger that I know from other venues. His blog is called Tease, Denial, & CBT, reflecting some of his particular interests, which appear to be Sexual Teasing, Orgasm Denial, and Computer Based Training.  Nemo’s posts are a mix of idle musings and captioned pictures (which seem to feature attractive women, sexual teasing, but not much in the way of Computer Based Training, as far as I can tell). Nemo, himself, appears to be happily married to…

Mistress Ivey, who writes a wonderful “How To” manual on Becoming a Mistress. Ms. Ivey’s blog should be required reading for any couple who are just starting to explore chastity or even basic BDSM. She approaches her topics (generally sexual teasing, male chastity, orgasm denial, and ruined orgasms) with sly humor and good information. Her articles are always well-written, and are aimed at newbie or vanilla-ish women.

I can’t remember how I ran across Amai, but how can you not follow someone refers to what she enjoys as “Fundom”? Dommesticity is still a fairly new blog, but Amai has filled it with interesting perspectives on the nature of dominance, submission, and the range of sexualities that revolve around them.

Delving into Deviance is written by Dev, a woman who is not an expert. She admits as much, so that wasn’t a dig. Dev writes on kink from a slightly different perspective: don’t go there looking for erotica; instead, go there to have your own perspectives on kink broadened a bit.

For yet another foray into the meta-philosophy of kink, spend a few minutes at Lab Coats & Lingerie. The co-authors, Fizz and Professor Chaos, are self-identified as “queer, fat, poly, dominant, switchy, and agender,” and “pansexual, dominant, disabled, and femme.” You can just imagine what kinds of topics their blog covers.

Like him or loathe him, you can’t deny that Maymay puts a huge effort into arguing for what he believes to be sexual social justice and equality. He has a number of projects, but he writes mainly at Maybe Mainmed. You can’t read one of May’s posts quickly; there’s a lot to them, so much so that you might start off agreeing with him, and then find yourself disagreeing by the end of the article.

Selena and Dymion (mainly Dymion) write the erotic blog Domination, Submission, and Love in Life & Dreams. Just stop reading this right now, and click the link already; I’m not going to tell you twice. Okay, are you back yet? See what I mean?

I have a thing for older women, so rounding out this installment is DDD (short for Dick Dyke Dick), whose name reflects her transition from het to lesbian and to het. DDD is a woman of a certain age who writes with abandon, and blatantly shows off her ridiculously well-maintained body several times a week.

Once again, I hope that you, my dear readers, will take the opportunity to look at some of my own favorite reads, and perhaps leave a comment there to spread the love. Meanwhile, I’ll be back at EoV Labs working on the next installment.

Lovin’ Our Bloggers – 1

Something I learned from the recent Love Our Lurkers day is that a lot of my “lurkers” have blogs of their own, most of them ones that I read, myself. Seriously, at last count I subscribe to close to 300 blogs; ones that I particularly enjoy, I list on my blogroll, separated by category, with my most recent finds being listed up at the top. I subscribe to many others via their RSS feeds (I use Google Reader, simply because it’s convenient).

Because I’ve got the links set up in categories (and because I link to so many awesome writers), I know that many of my readers use my blogroll as a link aggregate. So, for those of you who may have recently discovered Edge of Vanilla (or for those of you who haven’t taken the opportunity to explore much beyond my own posts), I wanted to take some time to show some love to some of the people that have inspired and entertained me. So, in no particular order, here’s an introduction.

Domme Chronicles. I wasn’t going to include Ferns on this list, figuring that if you weren’t already smart enough to be reading her, then you don’t deserve to have me mention it. Ferns is one of those bloggers that I actually wish she could live next door so she could drop by for a glass of wine in the evenings and ramble on about life, the universe, and everything. A self-described “‘Dominant Woman,” Ferns writes about domination without letting one forget that she is, first, a woman. The close-knit community of commenters shows that she doesn’t have a sex blog; rather, it’s a blog for sexy, thinking people.

The Pleasure Principle is a fairly new discovery. You know who Hedone is. She’s the sassy girl who sat in the back of the class making zingers at the teacher — but who didn’t get detention. She’s the co-worker who makes the off-color comments in meetings — that make the stuffy boss crack up. She’s the very kinky girl that you did take home to mother — and your mother loved her. Hedone writes about her adventures, mainly with a lucky guy known as Kinky Gent, and frankly, I’m glad that she doesn’t live next door, because she’d probably egg Mrs. Edge on to to some things that would even scare me.

I get a lot of out-clicks to A Reluctant Bitch, probably because (given the nature of most of my links) one imagines her as someone who is slowly becoming a dominatrix. I hope that readers aren’t disappointed to discover that Jz is really an attractive, independent woman who has discovered a passion for being bound — by ropes, but not by convention.

If you’re here because of a search on male chastity, then you’ve also discovered Denying Thumper. Thumper is one of the few — very few — “chastity blogs” that has managed to stay fresh and interesting. I don’t always agree with him; hell, I don’t even always understand him. But there’s no question that Thumper is writing from a special, deep place, and you simply can’t doubt his honesty and emotional openness.

The name of the author of Tales of a Domme, for me, conjures up the vision of a house where the flogger might be in the broom closet, the strap-on harness is holding a loose cabinet door, and the husband is in long term chastity only because she lost the keys. I’m sure that Dishevelled Domina isn’t really that disheveled, but it’s amusing to imagine. Her blog is fairly new, but she’s an excellent writer.

After spending an eternity leaving insightful comments all over blogland, I was very glad that Stabbity finally decided to start blogging on her own. First of all, just her name alone kicks ass. But that wasn’t enough for her. Oh no. Now, whenever I think of Stabbity, I envision Demi Moore’s character GI Jane. Why? Because in my mind, you’ve gotta have some serious brass balls to call your blog Not Just Bitchy, a reference to the sadly AWOL blogger Bitchy Jones. Stabbity, however, does manage to pick up where Bitchy left off. In fact, I’m betting that within a week of this, she’ll have a post up to the effect of “Yeah, thanks for the sentiment, Tom, but how is correlating bravery to male appendages supposed to be a fucking compliment to me? Stop being part of the goddam problem!”

Rounding out this installment of bloggers is Celtic Queen and Celtic Queen’s Sub, both of whom I’ve gotten to know not from blogging, but from the Chastity Forums. Over the last five or six years, I’ve run across literally dozens of “pink blogs,” that is, blogs written by men hoping (usually without much luck) to convince their wives into a FLR. This couple lives that way,  and apparently rather successfully.

I hope that you, Gentle Reader, take the opportunity to peruse the aforementioned blogs, and perhaps to even leave a comment or three on the ones that you enjoy. Meanwhile, I’ll be making up a list of some more favorites.

Inured Circle

Anybody who has the slightest interest in male chastity by now probably knows about Sarah Jameson and her Male Chastity Blog. She hasn’t been blogging much lately, although she seems to be trying to develop a male chastity marketing empire. In addition to her ebook and audiobook  Be Careful What You Wish For, she has released a couple of follow-up books on T&D: Why He Wants You to Say No, and How to Drive Your Man Insane With Desire, all of which were good reading, and approach this kink from a mainly vanilla perspective (as opposed to the more domminatrixy tones of the Lucy Fairborne book). All of these are slim volumes that an interested guy could hand over to a vanilla partner.

One of the reasons that Sarah is not blogging much is because she has taken to writing almost-daily inspirational emails to people who have signed up for her Male Chastity Lifestyle email list. Reading like quick “life coach” missives, the short emails from the “Male Chastity Lifestyle” urge the readers (mainly men, I think) to stop wasting time, and to sit down and talk to their partners about what they would like to see in a relationship (especially in relation to being locked up). Personally, I’m getting tired of the word “lifestyle,” but that’s a private rant for another day.

Now she and her husband Jon have launched an actual newsletter. Yes, that’s right: what emails used to be when they were printed and sent to your post office for delivery. The newsletters will only be available to The Male Chastity Lifestyle “Inner Circle” subscribers and upon request, will also be available as a PDF for people who would prefer to read them on a Nook, Kindle, phone, or other e-reader. Personally, I suspect that more people will choose the e-reader option, if only so as not to have to explain anything should somebody accidentally find the stack of newsletters. Yes, you can explain a stack of Playboy or Penthouse mags around the house, but for most people, it’s still difficult to explain anything much kinkier than that.

I have a copy of the first newsletter (yes, in PDF), and except for the fact that the subject matter is, you know, locking up your junk, really looks like it could be any other professional lifecoaching newsletter. Sarah starts off writing on why she started this:

[...]it was becoming unmanageable, and I felt it was unfair on people who were serious about male chastity to be giving my time and energy on wannabes and people who are too lazy to read the blog and follow simple instructions like, “read the blog and FAQ before sending me a message”.

So that’s why I created this newsletter and the Inner Circle — so I could focus on giving my time and attention to people serious about male chastity and the topics that interest them.

She promises in the future to address questions in the newsletter itself, presumably because Dear Abby typically doesn’t deal with such matters. And just like in her MCL emails, she keeps reminding readers that they need to work on the relationship first, that male chastity is not a fix for marriages that have communication issues. Se then follows up with some tips for approaching one’s partner with the idea.

A nice addition to the newsletter will be a regular feature by  her husband Jon, who promises to write about his experiences in long-term chastity, how he deals with it, and his thoughts on going for even longer terms in the future.

It surprises many to learn I’m not “suffering” despite not having had an orgasm since New Year’s Eve, and I’m not perpetually climbing the walls and howling at the moon.

In fact, life goes on as normal (as Sarah has written many times), and I go about it normally. Meaning, I’m not constantly thinking about sex or my orgasm (or lack of it).

[...]

However, what I have found is my libido has gone through the roof and I am on an absolute hair-trigger in terms of sexual arousal. Meaning, I can go from cold to ready to orgasm in about three seconds flat, with as little stimulation as a long, passionate kiss. Which is a nice place to be.

So much for not suffering.

So, how do you get to read more? Yes, you have to pay for the newsletters. Sarah has always been very upfront about her Libertarian outlook, and while she’s not charging much, some people seem to be upset that she’s charging anything at all. Several people have written to me (which is funny, because I’m not Sarah’s business partner), asking about the Inner Circle, and whether or not it’s “worth it” to subscribe.

The answer is: I don’t know. I couldn’t possibly make that decision for anybody.

I will say, though, that Mrs. Edge and I had to work out pretty much everything for ourselves, and it took the better part of 10 years because there simply weren’t the resources available, and we certainly couldn’t ask our friends for advice. But we did spend money on several good books on BDSM and related sexuality, and we found those resources to be worth it at the time. If you are looking for a good digest of real-world (as opposed to wank-fest fantasy) advice, especially as something to pass along to your partner, then you might consider Sarah’s Inner Circle newsletter a good value.

Lovin’ Our Lurkers

Okay, if you read blogs then you know that today is Love Our Lurkers day.

Now, I know you’re lurking. I mean, I get like 700 to 800 visits a day, and twice that when I, you know,  happen to actually post something, so I know somebody is reading this blog. WordPress doesn’t allow me to get too detailed with the statistics, but I can surmise that a number of hits are from people quickly searching on  male chastity or orgasm denial related keywords. Some of the numbers are from RSS feeds. Many come from Keyheld, the chastity blog aggregate that we set up last year. Some of you clicked in from blogs that I happen to follow.

But a lot of you just seem to drop by, and some of you seem to hang around for a bit.

Before I plead with you to add fuel to my already overblown ego, let me just say “Hey, thanks for stopping by.”

If you’re so inclined, please tell me a little about yourself.

If you’re too shy for that, then maybe you could tell me how you found this blog, or why you keep stopping by.

And even if you’re not so inclined, here’s a piece of eye candy for you to enjoy.

 

But nobody doesn’t like…

I haven’t checked my LiveJournal account in so long that I’d forgotten that I had one. I’ve been busy lately, and over the last few years have had to narrow down my online activities so as not to interfere with work, exercise, family, sleep, and the various other little hobbies and projects that I get  sucked into doing  involved with. And for that matter, I would have thought that anybody who knows me would have tried to contact me on this blog instead of the LJ account, which hasn’t had a post in a couple of years.

So I was surprised to see a message notification the other day, and after half a dozen tries to remember my password, I logged in to read this message:

I am Miss Sarahleigh. I saw your profile, and I thought that you might need some goddess worship in your life. I AM perfect. In every way, shape, and form. I am smarter than you, and more successful. You, are just a pathetic loser. If you are interested in this, message me. We will make arrangements.
Miss Sarahleigh

Wow! This is exactly what I’ve been looking for in my life. I mean, how could I possibly pass up such an opportunity?

Oh, wait – it’s because I’m not interested in being  scammed  suckered  financially dommed.

Well, because I’m a gentleman, I certainly wasn’t going to leave her hanging, so I sent off a response as quickly as I could.

Dear Ms. Saraleigh -

Thank you for taking the time to submit your application to be my personal Goddess. While I have many such offers, I try to respond personally so as to make sure that each applicant understands what is involved in the process.

I am sorry to say that your application, although brief, suggests that you may not be considered for the position. However, in the interest of assisting a first-time applicant, allow me to offer up some constructive criticism in case you decide to apply in the future.

First of all, insisting that you are perfect in the second sentence is coming on a bit strong. While we appreciate assertiveness, there is a fine line between a bold applicant and a rash one. This impression was borne out by the somewhat imperfect use of punctuation (specifically, periods and commas) in the next several sentences. This made for an amusing coincidence because in those next few sentences, you assert that my intelligence might be in question, at least, with regard to your own. While I’m sometimes embarrassed that I did not opt for the tougher business classes in graduate school, the fact that I’m still the “go to” guy when my friends and family have questions on a variety of subjects would suggest that I am of at least average intelligence.

As to the matter of being successful, I can’t imagine in what context you mean. I am a fit, healthy, attractive man with a moderate income from his own business; I have a loving family, respectful children, appreciative friends, a fairly well-respected blog, and can tie a knot in a cherry stem with my tongue. I can’t imagine what more “success” would be like.

Again, thank you for your interest. We wish you every success in your future endeavors.

Best regards,

Tom Allen

I’m hoping that she learns from this experience, but judging from the two entries on her own LiveJournal, I suspect that she won’t appreciate my feedback.

Do you suppose I could have worded it better?

I’ll Tumbl for you

Having grown up well before the internet, I often wonder on how the hell any of us ever managed to look at porn back in those days. I mean, there always used to be some around; the older brother of a friend who left used magazines, a found stash near a playground, or maybe somebody’s father’s supply of Playboy or Penthouse hidden behind the tools in the garage. But the really good stuff was usually hard to come by, and those of us living in small towns often had to make do with the Sears catalogue, newspaper ads, and movie posters.

“Lover, I know we’ve been trying this chastity thing for a couple of months, but I’ve been thinking that it’s just not working for me. All that keeping track of how many days, letting you out when I don’t feel like it, and hearing you whine to be released when you’re feeling horny just isn’t what I expected. So I’ve decided that the only way this can work is for me to be totally, one hundred percent in control. From now on, I will take the keys, and I will decide how long you stay in; and believe me, it’s going to be a long time. We’re going to do this seriously, or not at all.”

This is one of the reasons that I’ve been so fascinated with Tumblr for the last few weeks. I mean, I’d known about the micro-slash-photo blogging-slash-social-networking platform for several years, but as I’ve barely been able to keep up with the current batch of web forums and with writing this blog, I’ve never looked much beyond a few pictures posted by somebody I already know (mainly Thumper, Maymay, and more recently, Dev).

I don’t know when that changed, but not long ago I found that I was spending enough time surfing to warrant actually starting my own, mainly with the idea of re-blogging the cool stuff I’d been looking at. Re-blogging is, of course, a nod to those old days when you passed old magazines along to your friends in exchange for others that they may have found. Even back in the dial-up BBS days, porn somewho found it’s way onto your hard drive, and you were expected to post it on the local BBS in exchange for anything else that you were able to download.

More importantly than the titillation though, is that the Tumblr blogging platform acts alike a tracking database so that one can usually follow the original uploader of the picture so that the credit can go where it would be appropriate. Too often  the proper attributions for interesting photos are lost, but re-blogging allows you to find the person who uploaded a picture and (hopefully) to ask them where it came from, or who the subjects are. Personally, I’m glad to see a mechanism in place to help give credit where it’s due; it’s much too easy for the credits to get lost on photos (and stories, etc.) as they get passed around the web.

All that said, I find that I’m a bit surprised at some of the pictures I’ve been spotting. I mean, I know we all have different tastes, which is fine. But my complaint about the number of pictures in certain generes echoes my thoughts on video porn. For example, what is the fascination with “money shots”, that is, pictures of women who have just had semen sprayed all over their face, chest, or other areas? I mean, damn — I know that when I’m pumping away and I’m about to have a massive orgasm, the last thing I want to do is to pull out and let loose with my hand. I don’t like that type of shot in videos, and I’m not crazy about it in stills, either.

"Now, really honey, look at it my way: for the last few years you've spent well over a thousand dollars on viagra so you could be ready for sex when *you* wanted. This year, I'm spending less than two hundred dollars so you can be ready for sex whenever *I* want."

And here’s something that I’m noticing lately that I don’t think I’ve run across before: what’s the deal with all the pictures  of men and women peeing on each other? I know, it’s my own squick, but, much like the facials mentioned above, I find the practice to be a bit degrading. Or maybe that’s just the point, and I’m not wired in a way that allows me to understand  it.

Anyway, I’m sure it won’t surprise anybody that I’ve been liking and reblogging a fairly decent variety of pictures. As I go back and look at them, it’s interesting to note what it says about my taste in what I perceive as erotic. I have some very curvy women, but I also have some muscular, athletic women. There’s a handful of pics of women wearing items in my two favorite colors: tight and shiny. There’s a smattering of cheesecake, including some scans of vintage magazine pinups. There are soem pictures with a femdommish air.  And there’s a few odd pictures of (what I find to be) attractive women of a (very wide!) variety of ages in various states of dress.

“Yeah, I know that idiot Tom Allen writes that nobody is forcing you to wear a chastity device, and that any man who wants out can just force his partner to give him the key. So, I’m telling you right now, honey: any time you want out, you just force me to give you the key, all right?”

Now, you might suspect that I’d have some pictures suggestive of enforced male chastity… and you would be correct. Since the search term “chastity captions” brings a lot of readers to Edge of Vanilla, I figured that it’s something that a lot of people might be interested in seeing, so I have a number of vaguely erotic pictures that I’ve captioned in the comment section (thereby still keeping the original picture traceability).

So, if you’ve read this far, you’re probably wondering how to find this stuff.  Since I’m not very original, my photo blog is called:
The Edgier Vanilla

If you are looking specifically for chastity-related pictures, you can skip the dull, boring shots of curvy women in spandex and look for the photo tags like : chastity or denial. Other tags that might excite your interest are curvy, mature, muscle, or shiny. And yeah, there’s other stuff, too, so feel free to poke around.

2010 Retro Spective

Yeah, it’s the end of the year; the time that we traditionally are supposed to look back on what we’ve attempted,  what we’ve accomplished, and what we’ve screwed up.

First off, I hardly posted much content at all this past year. There’s some irony in that at the beginning of last year, I had to lay some people off, which meant that I had to do their jobs, leaving me less time to edit during the day – but later in the year, we had a busy period, and took in a lot of orders, which left me little time to edit during the day.

But the primary reason that I didn’t edit during the day was because the hour or so in the morning that I used to reserve for writing was taken over by my new  obsession interest in serious exercising. Three, four, even sometimes five mornings a week I’d get up early, make coffee and set it on a timer, then head down to the  laundry room home gym to pull up, push up, press up, and do a bunch of other oddly named exercises involving muscle and iron.  And as most of you know, when the weather warmed up, on the off days I doffed the sweatpants, donned a spandex shirt, and took my favorite bike on the road for five to fifteen mile jaunts. This continued until October, and now I’m back down to three to four days a week of pumping iron (unless I decide to buy a trainer so I can ride stationary in my garage).

Yeah, yeah, I know – so why aren’t I writing at night? Well, truth is, after working out in the morning, then putting in a 10 hour day at the shop, then then often as not making dinner when I get home, I usually just browse some sites, leave a few comments, and go to bed early. They say that you need less sleep as you get older, but during this past year I’ve been exhausted by 10 pm. On the other hand, at my last checkup, the doc was amazed at how well I was doing; my blood pressure was back in the normal range, I’ve put on some serious muscle, and I’m healthier than most of my friends, including the ones who are ten or twenty years younger.

TL;DR:  Sorry I haven’t written, I’ve been busy.

 

Anyway, since most of you are here to read about male chastity, I don’t want to leave you hanging; for those of you who are Jonesing for more cock-locking literature, here’s a short list of where to go.

Thumper has done an excellent job of picking up my slack, and has been writing a lot of deep and insightful posts lately.

Dev has emerged to become one of the most interesting writers on male chastity; she has an interesting perspective in that, unlike the majority of situations, it was she who introduced the idea to her husband.

Sarah, who was writing pretty much daily, has had to cut back because of some pressing work duties, but we’ll excuse her because her book has become an excellent resource for couples discovering this.

Keyheld, which I introduced recently, has the latest updates from about two dozen vanilla-oriented, chastity-themed blogs; I suggest that you bookmark it and visit often. Keyehld  grew out of the community of…

The Chastity Forums, a web board that was created by Thumper out of frustration at the lack of web boards that were not oriented toward newbs, not to mention over-run with spam. It’s grown to over 250 members in the last few months, and you will find most of your favorite  bloggers writing at least several times a week.

 

While I didn’t post much original content this year, I did have a few items of interest. According to the stats, some of the most popular posts this year were:

Chastity Therapy: A rant about the people – mainly guys – who, upon the news that any celebrity or politician has been caught cheating, immediately prescribe enforced chastity as a means to prevent such behavior in the future.

Ahead of Time: This has become my most popular story, and while it was fiction when I wrote it… well, that’s another story.

Full Scale Models: The past year saw a number of news stories on “full figured” models in fashion. Except, of course, in the fashion industry, “full figured” means “women who are normal sized.” See also Not Satisfied, Mammary Lane, and Again, with the curves.

 

And since we’re on the subject of eye candy, I posted a number of HNTs this year, some of which were actually popular, judging by the number of views and comments.

Breakthrough: Despite the love handles, this is the thinnest I’ve been in a long time.

Mirrored: More attention whoring.

Working it out:  I used to be embarrassed by my premature gray hair. Now I’m discovering that some of you are actually turned on by it.

 

And that’s all for 2010. Here’s hoping for a happy and prosperous 2011.

Keyheld – Chastity Resources for Lovers

Chances are if you’re reading this, then it’s because you were looking for information on male chastity, or enforced chastity, or orgasm denial, or something similar. Or maybe it’s because you’re a long-time reader, and you’ve just gotten into the habit of checking in to see if there’s anything new. And unfortunately, when you do stop by, instead of witty content, all you see are my half-naked pictures.

Well, maybe “unfortunate” isn’t correct, since apparently some of you seem to enjoy them.

Anyway, while I’ve been too busy to write much here, I have been hanging around at a web group for chastity fanatics enthusiasts. You probably already know that Thumper, having nothing else to do with all of his pent-up energy, started The Chastity Forums as a place where those exploring chastity in a more vanilla context could freely associate, exchange ideas, and offer advice to other novitiates.

During one of the many conversations there, Nipple Ring Dev thought it might be nice to have a way to see at a glance what the various other bloggers were doing. Not having anything particularly important to do that evening, I set up a blog to capture the most recent RSS feeds from what is now about 2 dozen different blogs. We also added some resources for people who might be looking for answers to frequently asked questions, where to buy devices, and blog posts of particular interest to women, newbies, etc. And just like that, Keyheld was created.

You can thank Dev for this nice little graphic.

If you’re reading this, and still looking for interesting information on chastity or orgasm denial, then bookmark Keyheld; it’s another good source of information and an opportunity to connect with other people in the community.

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.

99 Luftbloggers

So, over the course of the last month or so, both my work PC and my personal laptop have had issues, rendering me without regular access to teh intertubez. Or more correctly, without private access, unencumbered by family, friends, and cow-orkers hanging over my shoulder. Other than a few comments here and there, and a handful of web forum posts, the internet sex community has had to do without my wit, charm, and insights, not to mention my awesome modeling of humility and modesty. Sorry about that, but I’m glad to see that you’ve all kept things running smoothly.

As it happens, my laptop lost power during the middle of an update, and while everything was salvaged, I made a point to stop playing with the Linux distros I’d been, er, playing with, and to get serious about using one. This meant that even after I got things up and running, I’ve spent quite a bit of time setting up my accounts, tweaking the system, learning the ropes (Yes, they sell a Linux for Dummies book), and trying not to screw anything else up. I’m surprisingly happy, although I’ve been frustrated any number of times when I discovered that my madd DOS and Windows skillz were completely useless most of the time. But I now have a system that boots up perhaps 5 times more quickly, and runs rather snappily on my old Dell laptop. Yes, I’m dual booting, but I haven’t had to use WinXP on this machine so far, and I’ve even configured the boot menu to default to this particular Gnome distro.My next project is to get this up and running on my work PC, but I won’t get to that until my Xmas break.

But you’re not here to read about my computer problems. My laptop is running, I know which buttons to press, so  that means it’s time to stop messing around and to get back to writing. Or perhaps I should say, get back to sex blogging, which is why you’re here. Ironically, just when I was compelled to stop writing, I discovered that I was voted as one of the Top 100 Sex Bloggers of 2009. I’m thrilled, to say the least, the honor only slightly marred by the fact that I can’t gloat about this at the family dinner parties. However, my new celebrity status has made me strangely more attractive to Mrs. Edge, suggesting to me that a post about blogger groupies might be in the works.

Seriously, my sincere thanks to Aurora, and the rest of the judging staff at Between My Sheets; it sounds like they had quite a project. I’m pleased to discover that many of the bloggers were already on my blogroll or RSS feed list. I’m also happy to have discovered a few more interesting reads. Finally, my best wishes to all of the other sex bloggers (even those who did not make this list) – I’ve enjoyed the little insights into your life, and I appreciate the time that you’ve taken to entertain and educate the rest of us.

For those of you who haven’t see it yet, the top 100 list follows: