This Book is Awesome: “How to Be a Woman” by Caitlin Moran

Kate Sloan

Within the span of about a month in 2014, three different people said to me, “You have to read Caitlin Moran’s book. You would love it.” All three recommendations came from people I trusted, people who don’t say “You would love it” unless I, specifically, would actually love what they’re talking about. So I filed away the name of the book, determined to get to it eventually.

Then, when I was in Montreal on vacation, an opportunity presented itself: my travel buddy wanted to spend a whole morning in a coffee shop chillin’ out, and I hadn’t brought a book, so we stopped in Indigo to load up on entertainment. My eyes fell on How to Be a Woman and I thought, Yes. That.

I knew this was a book about feminism, but I was not prepared for how funny it is. It is laugh-out-loud, snort-coffee-through-your-nose funny. My friend must have thought I was a weirdo because I laughed so often in that Montreal café that I started to draw concerned looks from the other tables. I couldn’t help it. Caitlin Moran is fucking hilarious.

Moran – a British music journalist – has a lot to say in this book about feminism, about girlhood, about life as a woman. Her main thesis, so far as I can tell, is that society makes womanhood out to be easy and automatic, when actually a lot of work goes into performing the role of woman “correctly.” Whether it’s getting your period for the first time, or figuring out how to walk in heels, or negotiating body image struggles, there’s basically no part of being a woman that is as effortless as it’s supposed to be. And it’s incredibly comforting to have that affirmed by such a smart, funny, clever woman, so articulately and emotively.

There’s a lot of sharp contrast in this book. I cried with laughter while reading Moran’s essay on deciding what slang term for “vagina” to use around her daughters (“cunt,” she thought, was maybe not super appropriate for a toddler), and then I just plain cried when reading about Moran’s horrific childbirth experience. Every inch of this book is equal parts relatable and instructive, equal parts funny and painful. That is so hard to do and I admire Caitlin so much for her candor, her ability to open up about these difficult topics and to do it in a way that’s so engaging and keeps me nodding along, like, “Yes! I know that feeling!”

A personal sore spot for me at the moment is my relationship with food, and how it relates to body image. My heart hurt with recognition when I read Caitlin’s chapter about fatness, fitness, and food, in which she posits that the reason so many women struggle with food addiction is that it’s a way of getting “high” without inconveniencing other people. It gives you a momentary rush and release, on the same spectrum as drugs or booze, but it doesn’t require anyone to drive you home, hold back your hair while you puke, or keep your intoxicated shouting under control – since women, above all, are taught not to inconvenience others. That was a freeing and eye-opening revelation for me, and certainly gave me some food for thought (if you’ll pardon the pun).

It’s pretty rare that I read a funny, silly book like this and actually want to read it again, not only to re-experience the laughs but also to re-absorb all the wisdom contained within. But How to Be a Woman, I can already tell, will be a bible of sorts for me as I continue growing into the woman I’m going to be. Caitlin Moran has seen and done it all, has made a great number of mistakes she wants other women to be able to sidestep, and so this book feels like a cross between a Tina Fey-esque funnyfest and a concerned letter from an older sister. It’s so, so wonderful, and I think you would love it.

Sex Blogging Secrets, Part 3: Building a Readership

Kate Sloan

The third part in this series is on a pretty important topic: amassing some readers for your blog, now that you’ve got it all set up and you’ve started putting content on it. It would be a shame if no one was around to read your brilliance, so let’s get started on building your merry band of fans!

Content is king

If you’ve ever spent time with people who work in media, blogging, publishing, and so on, you’ve probably heard the phrase “Content is king” – because it’s true. If your writing sucks, is boring, is littered with errors, or just doesn’t contain anything worthwhile or unique, you won’t do nearly as well as you potentially could, even if your blog is hella fancy-looking and your social media game is strong.

The best kind of content for gaining readers is anything shareable. What kinds of blog posts make you want to show them to your friends, link to them on your Facebook or Twitter, and tell people about them in conversation? That’s the kind of blog post you should be writing if you want to build your audience.

I find that how-to posts do very well, because people are apt to share them and a lot of stray Googlers stumble onto them. Product reviews are also good because they get a lot of search engine traffic. Lists (top 10, top 5, ways to do something, new things to try, questions to ask, etc.) also do well because they’re easy and fast reads. (Not everything you write has to be dumbed-down and brief, obviously, but it can be a good initial draw sometimes.)

Giveaways

One of the big ways I built my audience initially was by running giveaways. They attract a lot of attention because a) everyone wants to win free stuff and b) you can use a service like Rafflecopter to make sharing/re-posting mandatory for contest entrants, so that your post (and therefore your blog as a whole) will get shared around a lot.

You can ask a sex toy company or retailer if they’d like to provide you with a product for a giveaway. I’ve often found that companies can be very generous in this way if they think it’s going to boost their web presence (a lube company hooked me up with a big box of products for my first giveaway!). If you can’t find anyone to offer a product, you could always buy/provide one yourself – the publicity may be worth it to you. (If it’s not, no worries; just build up your readership in other ways, and you can revisit giveaways later, when your bigger audience will make companies more likely to offer you products.)

Whatever you offer in a giveaway, make sure it’s a product that’s actually relevant to your blog. A sex blogger could do a giveaway of Modcloth skirts or an iPad mini or whatever, but she’ll tend to gain and retain more followers if she gives away some kind of sex-related product, because the contest will attract people who like the kind of content she’s producing.

Social media

Everyone’s on social media these days, so it should come as no surprise that online networking is a big way for you to build your readership. I know that I am a hell of a lot more likely to check out someone’s blog if they’re regularly sending me thoughtful or funny replies to my tweets, or if they have interesting things to say in my comments section.

When I first got my blog, I followed a ton of other sex bloggers and various other folks in the sex industry, and I spent a lot of time responding to them, joking around with them, asking them questions, and so on. It got me noticed by some of the big players in that space, and some of them started retweeting me and even linking to my posts. This widened my audience considerably.

However, there’s a caveat, which is: don’t be a spammy asshole. If you’re going to interact with people, do it from a place of genuine interest. If your entire intention is to get yourself noticed and advertise your blog, that will come across in the things you write, and trust me, it feels gross to be accosted by someone like that online. (If you don’t find other sex bloggers interesting enough that you can interact with them like a normal, pleasant human, you might not be a good fit for sex blogging.)

Treat your readers well

This is one of my fundamental philosophies in everything I do online, and I think it has served me very well. People will feel better about reading your blog, and having you in their online social spheres, if you treat them well. Simple, but so easily forgotten.

I don’t mean that you have to suck up to everyone in your Twitter mentions, and I don’t mean that you have to be sweet to the assholes who send you abusive or rude messages. Here’s what I do mean: if someone leaves you a thoughtful comment, leave them an equally thoughtful reply. When you get an email from a reader, a sex toy company, a potential advertiser, or anyone else, respond with warm respect and common decency. If readers ever help you come up with ideas (which mine do, often, because I like using Twitter to find sources or resources), thank them – publicly.

Just generally: be a good person, and give credit where credit is due. You owe a lot to your readers; don’t forget that!

Other tips

For the first year or so of my blog’s existence, the majority of my readers (and thus the majority of my income!) came from my interactions on Reddit. While being very careful not to spam or annoy people, I would occasionally leave a link to one of my blog posts in relevant discussion threads. For example, if someone on /r/sex wanted a sex toy recommendation, I might link them to my toybox page, or to a specific toy review. Or if someone on /r/askwomen wanted tips on dealing with a vaginal infection, I might link them to my post on that. You get the picture. (If you do this, please check the rules of the particular subreddit first – some of them have rules against “self-promotion,” affiliate links, etc.)

It’s useful if you can offer something on your blog that no one else is offering, or that no one else is offering in quite the way you do. If you’re thinking of writing a blog post on a particular subject and you know other bloggers have covered it, ask yourself: what will make my post shareable over other people’s take on the same topic? It might be a different perspective, a different method, whatever – just some kind of unique take. Always keep that in mind.

Good post titles are imperative. If you’re bored by the title of a post, you’re unlikely to click through and read the rest. So make your titles damn good.

A fun way to expand your reach is to write about topics that cover your niche area (sex) as well as another niche area. Some of my most popular posts do this: I interested makeup fans with my blowjob-friendly lipsticks post, for example, and I crossed into the self-love/self-help space with my post on receiving desire when you feel undesirable.

Be a good citizen of the internet. That means sharing other people’s stuff, writing about other people, linking to them, supporting them, interacting with them. Blog readership is not a pie whose pieces you have to guard jealously for yourself; supporting your community of bloggers is good internet karma, increases the likelihood that they will help you in return, and just feels good to do.

Bloggers: how did you build your audience?

5 Nifty Things You Can Do With a Speculum

Kate Sloan

I have an impulse-shopping problem when I go to sex shops. When I was dating a dude, I used to spot Tenga Eggs at the checkout counter and throw a couple into my purchase without even thinking about it. Now that I’m single, I tend to impulse-buy things for myself, instead. Like, most recently, a steel speculum.

I went to Come As You Are to pick up a book I needed, and they had an affordable speculum in the display case by the checkout, and, well, I can’t be expected to resist something like that, can I?

I’ve been playing around with my speculum and I have suggestions for what to do with yours, if you have one – or what you’d be able to do if you bought one. (C’mon, I know you’re thinking about it.)

1. Look at the inside of your vagina. (Or a partner’s vagina.)

As you might have inferred from, y’know, my entire blog, I’m a pretty sexually exploratory person. I know my body better than most people know theirs. But prior to owning a speculum, I had never seen the inside of my own vagina.

It’s not exactly an accessible area. It stays closed unless you’re actively holding it open, which is hard to do. You can get a marginal glimpse of the inner walls if you’ve got a clear glass dildo, a mirror, a good lighting setup, and endless patience for experimenting with different angles. But that’s not ideal, obviously.

I was stunned by how beautiful and strange-looking my vagina actually is. It’s like an underground cave made of cotton candy. Gorgeous and creepy and fantastic.

2. Take vagina selfies.

I take selfies that feature pretty much every other part of my body. Why not my vagina, too?

If you’ve got a speculum, an adjustable lamp, and a camera or cameraphone, you can take vagina selfies too. I used my iPhone and one of those clip-on reading lights. It takes some experimentation – I found it difficult to hold my phone in such a way that it wouldn’t block the light – but when you get it right, the photos are worth the trouble.

These aren’t the sexy kind of selfie that I’d send to a flirty beau. The inside of a vagina is actually more alien-looking than it is appealing, if you ask me. But it sure is interesting to pore over those photos. Sometimes I pull mine up on my phone and just stare and stare, transfixed. That’s inside me?!

3. Medical play.

Doctor-patient scenarios get me a little hot and bothered. I’ve never had a partner who was into that kind of roleplay but it’s something I look forward to trying in the future.

I don’t really know what this kind of play would entail, exactly, but with an imaginative and open-minded partner, I’m sure even a cold, clinical-looking speculum could become sexy to me.

4. Gradually dilate your vagina.

For people with vaginismus or other vaginal tightness issues, I’d imagine a speculum could be a helpful tool. It opens wider in a way that’s very slow and gradual, so you can adjust it to a setting that’s comfortable for you and maybe push your boundaries a little more each time, until you can accommodate whatever width you’re trying to get to.

I’d recommend checking in with your gyno before you try this, and combining the speculum with clit stimulation so it’ll hopefully feel good rather than weird.

5. Monitor your G-spot.

If you insert your speculum sideways, it’ll open up horizontally rather than vertically, giving you access to the top wall of your vagina where your G-spot is. This makes it a lot easier to touch your G-spot as well as to look at it.

Like a lot of sexual anatomy, the G-spot swells when stimulated. If you use your speculum to check out your spot before a play session and then again afterward, you may be amazed by how much it’s changed in size and texture. Bodies are so cool!

Do you have a speculum? What do you use it for?

What Aesthetics Turn You On?

Kate Sloan

Isn’t it weird how attraction works?

There are sometimes specific reasons you can point to: clear answers to the question, “Why am I attracted to this person/quality/feature?” And sometimes the answers are less clear.

It can have to do with our formative experiences. I’ve had a thing for fauxhawks, particularly dyed-purple ones, ever since my first girlfriend at age 15 rocked one in the Facebook profile photos I pored over during many a lovelorn late night.

It can have to do with what makes us feel sexy. I know my predilection for staring at 1950s-inspired lingerie is all about my hyper-femme identity: when my eyes roam all over babely pinup models in product shots, I get turned on not because I want to fuck those women but because I want to be those women. And I know I feel beautiful when I wear what they’re wearing.

The line gets blurry a lot. I have occasional days when all I want to wear is impeccably tailored pants, beautiful silk neckties, crisp collared shirts, and shiny lace-up brogues – and I’m not sure whether that comes from my own gender fluctuations or from a fundamental desire to fuck people who dress like that. It makes me happy to tart myself up like a dapper dandy from time to time, so I don’t question it too much.

I have a vision board (also known by its technical name, “a corkboard with a bunch of pictures pinned to it”) which I created to evoke the feelings of my ideal relationship, and how my ideal partner would make me feel. It’s covered in pictures of cute people (boys, girls, androgynes, and others) variously wearing geek glasses, plaid flannel, leather jackets, V-neck cashmeres, Pucci bowties, and sharp blazers.

But I also get dark stirrings of something like lust when I see feminine ladies rocking thigh-high socks, bouncy pigtails, tight striped sweaters, fit-and-flare dresses, perfectly-applied red lipstick, platform wedges, and/or neat little hair bows. I’ve never particularly wanted to date or fuck a rockabilly femme in real life, but they own permanent property in the fantasy-visuals sector of my brain.

Oh, who knows why we like what we do?!

What aesthetics turn you on? What clothing, accessory, or hairstyle makes you want to climb someone like a tree? And do you know where those feelings come from, or are they just sorta random for you?

Image credits, clockwise from top left: Beautiful illustration by Cameron Stewart. Leather-and-gingham street fashion photo via Costin M. Photo of Andy Samberg and Joanna Newsom (babeliest couple ever?!) from the Independent Spirit Awards via People StyleWatch. Screencap of Olly Alexander from the God Help the Girl movie (watch it, it’s visually and sonically stunning). Santiago and Diaz illustration by Celeste Doodles.

Sex Blogging Secrets, Part 2: Creating Good Content

Kate Sloan

I’m back with more sex blogging tips for y’all!

Overall guiding principles

When it comes to blog advice, I worship at the altar of the Blogcademy. There are two tips they emphasize that I’d like to share with you today, to set the tone for the rest of the content-creation stuff in this post.

The first is that you should think of your blog like it’s a magazine for a certain kind of reader. Cosmopolitan, for instance, isn’t just fashion or just beauty or just sex advice – it’s all of those things and more, because the Ideal Cosmo Reader is interested in a broad range of things, just like we all are. You’ll run out of ideas fast if you limit your blog to only one topic (like sex toys) or only one type of post (like erotica stories), so instead, try to pinpoint the sort of reader you’re writing for, and write all the various different things they would be interested in. (My Ideal Reader is a feminist sex geek with a sense of humor. Kind of like me!)

The second tip I’ve learned from the Blogcademy ladies is that your blog will be most successful if most of your content is helpful and valuable to your readers. That’s not to say there’s no place for writing about yourself and your own personal adventures, but it’s mostly going to be people who already know you and care about you that will read that stuff. Everyone else has no idea who you are and only wants to read your blog if it’ll help them in some way. That might sound sort of cynical, but actually, writing helpful content can be really fun! And it gets shared a lot more, so you’ll attract more eyeballs. Win-win!

Coming up with post ideas

Hopefully, if you want to start a sex blog, it’s because there are lots of sex-related things you want to write about. But even if that’s the case, we all still deal with writer’s block sometimes. So it’s important to have strategies for generating post ideas.

Here are some of mine:

• Read the news (online or in print) to see what’s going on in the world of sex, and respond to what you see.

• Talk to your friends (mostly the sex-positive ones, but sometimes even the less sexually open ones will give you ideas) about what bothers them about sex, what they wonder about it, weird experiences they’ve had, etc. See if anything sparks an idea.

• Write about your own past experiences.

• Write how-to guides.

• Write reviews of products you own (or can get retailers/companies to send you – see Epiphora’s guide for info on how to do that).

• Write wishlists of products you’d like to own, sexual experiences you’d like to have, fantasies you’d like to explore, etc.

• Write about your fantasies or turn-ons, or other people’s.

• Write about things you’ve learned about sex.

Whatever strategies you use, you’ll need to have a way to make notes of post ideas before they slip away (which, trust me, they will – our human brains are more sieve-like than we care to realize). I always have a notebook in my bag while I’m out, as well as the notes app on my phone. I also keep a notebook and pen by my bed, incase of sudden middle-of-the-night flashes of brilliance.

Keep an ongoing list of ideas you think are actually good, and have it near your workspace so you can refer to it if you ever feel stuck.

Regular features

Having features is a great way to make sure you don’t run out of ideas. They can also be something your readers come to excitedly expect from you, and they can become one of the signatures of your blog.

I find that features are fantastic for idea generation because they spark my imagination and I don’t have to work too hard to come up with ideas for them; I’m always brimming with sex writing tips, strange new-to-me fantasies, and sexual language pet peeves.

One of the beautiful things about blogging is that you are the boss of your blog and you make the rules, so you can try out new features without necessarily committing to them forever. Brainstorm a few ideas for features and give them a go for a while. If they help you, yay! If not, you don’t have to do them.

Planning ahead

Like most things in life, blogging is a lot less stressful when you’re overprepared and ahead of the game. I’m not always on top of everything, but it certainly helps to keep an editorial calendar and to queue up posts in advance.

An editorial calendar is just a calendar of what you’re going to publish and when. I started keeping one this year after 2+ years of just blogging whenever I felt like it – which works fine for some people but always made me feel sort of frazzled!

I keep my editorial calendars on index cards, one per month. I aim to post twice a week, so my cards are laid out in three columns so I can indicate which two posts I plan on doing for each week. It’s nice to have the dates at my fingertips because then I can plan date-appropriate content – for example, a Valentine’s Day-themed post when that day is coming up.

You’re not obliged to follow your plan to the letter, and I usually don’t – there are always lots of crossed-out posts on my editorial calendars, because I get other ideas that I’m more excited about and that I want to work on sooner. I just move the discarded post ideas back to my ongoing ideas list, and I can write them at a later date.

Queuing up posts in advance is another way to stay on top of your blog work. I find my enthusiasm for blogging often comes in bursts of a few hours, so when that happens, I try to write at least one or two posts and schedule them to be published later in the week. That way, I never have to force myself to blog when I don’t feel like it – because that never results in good content! (Fun fact: I wrote this blog post last Friday, because the day it’s being published, I’m going to be on vacation in Montreal. Pre-planning has allowed me to enjoy my vacation stress-free! Hooray!)

Next week I’m going to talk to you about one of my favorite subjects: building a readership! Tweet at me if you’ve got specific questions on that topic and I’ll do my best to address ‘em.