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Sex blogs and social subversion

Zoe Margolis has a lot to say about sex. Having it, wanting it, fantasising about it, and most of all, not denying that she has a lot of it. In her famous and now published blog, Girl With a One Track Mind, she writes about her variety of sex-related experiences with complete frankness and clarity. Intercourse, oral sex, threesomes, masturbation, it’s all there, with no explicitness left out. As Zoe herself says, “it’s graphic, but then, that’s shagging for you – it’s a sticky thing, no matter how you approach it.” But there’s one f-word she makes no apologies for using – feminism. She is unafraid of calling herself a feminist, and clearly sees her writing as more than one blogger writing about her (albeit incredibly interesting) sex life. On behalf of the Women’s Campaign, I invited her to speak at the Moser Theatre in Wadham to an audience of men and women, and interviewed her on her blogging, and social attitudes to sexuality.

I ask Zoe how her sex-blogging differs from the huge volume of sex-related writing out there in our sex-saturated media. “I had to try to create a different space, because I thought women’s magazines were incredibly restrictive in terms of how they portrayed women and female sexuality – it was always about making yourself the object of desire to men, rather than about owning that desire and desiring men. The other alternative to women’s magazines seemed to be the idea that you get liberation through selling your body for sex. I wanted to be able to talk about sex in a really open and honest way, and say “Yep, I want sex, I have my own desires and I’m happy about that, you can call me what you want – I don’t give a shit.”” She certainly was called a whole range of names, from “slut” to “seedy” to “shameless”, and those playground epithets appeared in newspapers as mainstream and respectable as the Times. “The only reason I still have confidence, after all that, is because I get emails from young women saying the book helped them. I think well, that’s what it’s all about – letting young women look at their sexuality in a different way.”

It’s clear that spreading the message that women can be active in sex and in their desire is very important to Zoe. “It’s not said often enough or loudly enough, but there are a lot of us out there, I know. When I first started writing, I got thousands and thousands of emails saying “we feel the same””. But it’s even more astonishing that this is not a mainstream idea for women’s media. “I recently pitched an idea to a very well-known women’s magazine, about masturbation for women, about owning your pleasure, and they said – can’t you just write a piece about how to give your man pleasure in bed? It’s always about positioning women’s desire in terms of men and not in terms of their own pleasure. It’s so undermining – I wanted to be able to say, I have my own desire, and I want to express it myself.” Surely, I say to her, this bizarre view of passive desire is counterproductive on the part of women’s magazines – surely women want to know about pleasure as much as men do, because pleasure is so central to a sex life? “I hope more women begin to realise that the way sex is talked about can be so undermining of female pleasure. If you take it all in, it’s almost like brainwashing, and you start to see yourself as an object rather than the subject of desire.”

I ask Zoe how she thinks the mainstream discussion of sexuality is changing. She isn’t optimistic. “I’m desperate to separate out the conflation between sexual desire and the sex industry, which has started to emerge. My work is about making it easier for women to express their desires about sex, rather than trying to persuade them to become a stripper or sell their bodies. There’s the freedom to sell your body, but that’s not the same as the freedom to express sexual desire. The sex industry is often falsely talked about as liberating – it may be liberating in a financial way, but it’s not liberating in a sexual way, and those are very different things.”

Zoe talks on a whole range of issues, from the way female bodies are always presented in the media from a male point of view, to the lack of pornography made for the female perspective, to the need for better and more open sexual education in schools. There is a real feeling that Zoe is saying things that are both true, revealing and important about the way we treat sexuality in society, and the men and women in the audience burst into applause several times. Towards the end of the talk, one audience member asks how we, in the student community, can create a better social attitude of understanding one another’s sexualities. Zoe responds, “I say aural sex is the most important part of sex – the ability to listen to what women and men want and need. People don’t listen enough and talk enough. Men want love as much as women want sex, but it’s unmasculine or unfeminine to admit to those things. By talking about them honestly, we can challenge those stereotypes, and have better relationships, both sexually and emotionally. We need spaces to do that in, in which we can be open about our wants and needs.” This is why Zoe’s writing is not just about one woman and her sex life – she is trying to show us an alternative voice, a voice that says that women desire sex in so many different ways, and it’s okay to talk about that.

 

Zoe Margolis is the Author of Girl With a One Track Mind: Exposed, published 5th March 2010 (Pan Macmillan £7.99)


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