twitter

Mourning Twitter, a Hellsite for the Ages

Kate Sloan

I’ve been very depressed this last week, and I’d be lying if I said it had nothing to do with the imminent demise of Twitter as we knew it. There are other factors, of course, but Twitter is a big one.

It’s been hard explaining this to people whose brains aren’t as broken by Twitter as mine is. I’ve been a user of the site since 2007, when I was 15 years old. I have never been an adult in a world without Twitter, and never really considered the possibility that I would have to. So it’s disorienting, to say the least, that an inept and egomaniacal billionaire is dismantling the site I’ve long considered my digital home-away-from-home.

Don’t get me wrong: Twitter isn’t perfect and never has been. Abuse has always run rampant on it, including a lot of homophobic, biphobic, misogynist and antisemitic abuse, which has felt viscerally frightening to me as a queer Jewish woman. It’s been a hub for disinformation, doomscrolling, and unsettling DMs. It has enabled racists, excluded sex workers, and let hate speech abound unchecked. And that’s just listing a few of the things that were (and are) wrong with Twitter.

But it’s also the place where I met my spouse, and my best friend/podcast cohost, and several other good friends and past partners. It’s the place where I’ve connected with editors, clients, and sources. It’s the place where I’ve shared my silly thoughts, my hot takes, my pain, my fury, and my joy.

The linguist Gretchen McCulloch argues in her book Because Internet that sites such as Twitter are the digital equivalent of a hallway at a high school or in a college dorm; they’re a place where casual, ambient socializing happens – as opposed to socializing that you have to specifically seek out and plan – and they therefore allow you to connect with people you might never have met otherwise. This feels very true to me – where else but Twitter could I chat with Tokyo-based game designers, London escorts and Texan law professors about current events in the course of a single hour?

Twitter was also, notably, one of the more sexually permissive mainstream social media sites. True, I know many people who got shadowbanned or outright kicked off the service for posting about sex work or BDSM, but nudes and porn are specifically allowed on Twitter and that automatically made it feel like a more welcoming place for me and my sex-nerd pals than, say, Facebook or Instagram, where we still have to self-censor with bastardized “words” like “seggs” and “secks” just to keep our accounts up-and-running.

I also maintain that Twitter is one of the best dating sites for demisexuals like me, because it allows you to get to know someone through their words first and their face second (if at all). I have far more Twitter crushes than Instagram crushes (or even IRL crushes) because I crush on people’s brains first and foremost, and Twitter made it easier than any other site for me to connect with people whose brains made my own brain tingle.

I loved Twitter, despite its many shortcomings and mistakes. I won’t be jumping ship immediately, especially since self-promotion is a big part of how I stay afloat professionally/financially so I can’t afford to leave the place where my biggest platform is. But if you’d like to follow me elsewhere – which I’d really appreciate, since I love y’all – here’s where to keep up with me:

  • This blog, obviously. I’m more convinced than ever that maintaining a self-hosted personal blog is the way of the future, given how many social media websites keep betraying us.
  • I’m @girly_juice on Instagram and that’s where I’m most active aside from Twitter.
  • My newsletter, where I send out a little essay on love, sex, and other random topics every week to my premium subscribers (it’s $5/month or $50/year). If you can’t afford a premium subscription, you can still sign up as a free subscriber and you’ll get free dispatches from me a couple times a year or so.
  • On Mastodon, which some people think will be Twitter’s major replacement, I can be found at @girlyjuice@mastodon.social – go follow me!

I love you, I’m glad you’re here, and I’m trying to look forward to whatever comes next.

 

This post contains a sponsored link, ’cause a girl’s gotta eat. As ever, all writing and opinions are my own.

12 Days of Girly Juice 2018: 8 Classic Tweets

Kate Sloan

I hit 9,000 followers on Twitter recently! Hoping to get to 10K in 2019. My crew on there is such a beloved part of my day and I enjoy sharing my weird thoughts with them. Here are 8 of my favorite things I tweeted this year…

I still cry with laughter whenever I think about this exchange, honestly. Bless my FWB.

My Sir really knows what I like to hear.

This was one of my most popular tweets of the year. Lots of replies mentioned that this multi-cake feast would involve a lot of Google Calendar scheduling. #polyjokes

Some of my favorite tweets this year were conversations between me and my Sir, or just hilarious things he’s said – see, for example, these classics about bottoming skills, lube in butts, wax play, sext grammar, stand-up comedy, and croissants. This Johnson/Dodson joke really cracks me up, though, because it is exactly the kind of joke that only someone I adored would make: a silly pun necessitating nerdy niche knowledge. I love this boy.

I am probably as cynical about casual sex these days as I have ever been in my life, and this joke really captures that.

“My boyfriend trash-talking shitty men” is one of my favorite genres of comedy.

I want this printed on a T-shirt and I want to wear that T-shirt all of the time.

This is what I aim for with most of my writing. It’s what I hope to continue to aim for in 2019. Auld wang syne, am I right?

5 Tools I Use to Write About Past Experiences

Kate Sloan

You may have noticed that I write a lot of personal stuff. Stuff about my sex life. Stuff about my relationships. Even stuff about my childhood.

Friends reading my work often remark that I “must have a good memory” because I’m able to recall surprisingly specific details – like the exact wording of something a partner said to me, the exact outfit I wore to a particular event, or the exact number of seconds that elapsed between text messages.

It is probably true that I have a better-than-average memory for romantic and sexual events, developed due to a combination of obsessive anxiety, an intense passion for this subject matter, and plain ol’ practice. But I also have plenty of tricks up my sleeve that help me remember details when my brain didn’t cling onto them to begin with. Here are a few resources I rely on, that you might also find useful for your personal writing…

Journal entries. I’ve journaled regularly for over 10 years, as a means of coping with feelings, processing events, and identifying patterns. My journals aren’t exhaustive – I don’t write down every single thing I did on a given day, just what felt emotionally significant to me that day – so they’re not always good for cross-referencing minute details, but they are a good record of big emotional arcs in my life.

For example, the last time I thought I might be falling in love, I went back and looked at old journal entries from previous times I’d fallen in love. I wanted to check if the “symptoms” were similar, if the timelines matched up, etc. to see if my present-day feelings were really love or more like infatuation. Nerdy, right?

My journal entries tend to contain the details that really stood out to me about a particular event – so, maybe I don’t write down the name of the specific cocktail I drank on a great date, but I am likely to record stuff like how nervous I felt, what my date’s eyes looked like, and what they wore (if I liked their outfit!). These are all useful pieces of information for a blog post or essay later on.

The “advanced search” functions on Twitter and Flickr. Searching your tweets or your backlog of images is a breeze with these two services. I tweet and take photos far more often and more exhaustively than I journal, so I’ll often search my tweets or photos if I need a small, specific piece of information.

For example, if I know I tweeted 5 minutes before a date started and then again as I was leaving the date’s house later that night, I can check the timestamps on the tweets to figure out how long we were together. I often refer to Flickr if I need to know what I was wearing on a particular day, or other visual details like what a place looked like or what lipstick I wore.

If you use Google Chrome, you can set up custom search engines to make this process even quicker. I have the short-codes “TWT” and “FLI” set up in my Chrome for Twitter and Flickr, respectively. So if I want to find a tweet of mine containing the word “party,” say, I can just type “twt party” into my address bar and hit enter – or if I want to find a Flickr photo where I was carrying my Kate Spade purse, I can type “fli Kate Spade.” It makes information-hunting much more efficient, so I don’t lose the momentum of my writing!

Text message histories. The availability of this technique depends largely on your texting medium of choice. For example, Facebook Messenger’s search function is pretty good, while the Signal app doesn’t have a search function at all (and you lose all your texts if you delete the app!). iMessage’s built-in search function is pretty terrible – it’ll only show you one result for whatever word or phrase you enter – but can work if your search term is specific and unique enough. (e.g. I had no trouble finding the conversation I wanted to find when it contained the phrase “Daddy, per se.”)

If you are the type of person who texts a close friend (or a partner) immediately after anything notable happens, texts can be a great source for your initial impressions of events. For example, when I journaled about my first time having sex with a new partner in summer 2017, I wrote at length about how romantic and beautiful the encounter was… but my texts to Bex immediately upon leaving that date tell a slightly different story: “HE IS SUCH A DOMLY SERVICE TOP AND HIS DICK IS ASTONISHINGLY GOOD!!”

Selfies. Like many millennials, I take a lot of selfies. The timestamps on them can often provide useful information if I’m writing about a particular day/event, and I also like to check what I was wearing incase that’s a detail I want to mention.

Occasionally I plumb the depths of my selfies folder when I need more subtle info, like “How long did that boob bruise last?” or “How much did that blowjob smear my lipstick?”

My sex spreadsheet. Every year since 2016, I’ve debated whether I really need to keep a sex spreadsheet for another year, and I always come to the same conclusion: yes I do, because it’s indispensable when I’m writing about sexual encounters.

My journals, texts, and tweets only contain what felt significant to me at the time; they don’t always contain the logistical facts I might need when writing about a sexual interlude down the line, like “How many orgasms did I have on May 8th, 2017?” or “How many blowjobs did I give in October of last year?” or “What sex toys did I use most with partners last summer?” You never know what kinds of details you might want to reference in a piece of writing, so I like having the flat facts at my fingertips incase I need ’em.

What do you refer to when you’re writing about the past?

The 5 Essential Elements of a Good DM Slide

Kate Sloan

Ah, the delicate and controversial DM-slide! I remember nodding vigorously when I read Priscilla Pine’s essay “What Comes After Tinder?” and got to the part about Twitter. “Most of the friends I polled who were active Twitter users mentioned it as the app where they had had the most success meeting potential partners, and I know at least one person who eschews dating apps entirely because her DMs have been so fruitful,” Pine wrote (emphasis mine). “In a way, that makes sense: Twitter mimics traditional social interaction in that you can find new people via friends and observe their personalities and senses of humor over time before feeling compelled to proposition them for a date.”

It was a succinct statement of something I already knew to be true: that Twitter was the social platform likeliest to introduce me to new crushes and fan the flames of those feelings, and that Twitter was probably the platform on which I’d be most open to a stranger asking me on a date. Not proportionally, you understand – of 100 people who express interest in me on OkCupid or Tinder, I probably go out with 5 of them, whereas the same calculation on Twitter would be more like 1 out of 300 – but if I develop a Twitter crush, I’m way more motivated to turn our flirtations into an IRL date, if possible, than I am with online-dating randos. I’m already more-or-less sold on them, from consuming their brain in 280-character chunks.

Having met three romantic partners (this guy, this guy, and this guy) and three casual sexual partners (this guy, this guy, and this guy) via Twitter, I’m pretty clear on what I like and what I don’t like, vis-à-vis people sliding into my DMs. Here are 5 elements your next DM convo with a stranger should definitely possess…

Previous rapport. Like Bex says in our Dildorks episode about social media flirting, DMing someone you’ve never actually interacted with before (aside from, maybe, faving their tweets) is like going up to a stranger at a party, tugging them into a closet, and declaring, “I have to talk to you.” They’re probably gonna be freaked out and wonder what the fuck you’re up to.

Establish rapport by adding value to your Twitter crush’s life. Most of my successful DM suitors replied to my tweets with funny jokes, helpful suggestions (when requested), and supportive cheerleading – as relevant – before they dared take things to the next level by DMing me. This is important. When your name and face show up in my inbox, I should recognize them and ideally have a positive association with them from our previous interactions. Hint: if your crush has never faved, replied to, or otherwise acknowledged your public communiqué, they’re probably not interested – or you just need to build rapport for longer before you ramp things up.

A specific reason to message them. Bex recommends following up on a previous conversation the two of you had publicly – e.g. if you and your crush recently commiserated about something sad that happened on your mutual favorite TV show, you could DM them a link to a great article about the show a few days later and say, “Thought you’d like this!” Or you could DM them a link to a local event you think they’d enjoy attending, a thought you had about their latest blog post/podcast/tweet that seems too specific to say in a public tweet, or a thank-you for something they helped you with or introduced you to.

The first time my Sir DMed me, he was following up on a compliment I’d tweeted at him earlier in the day. “Hey Kate! Thanks for that compliment earlier, it made me blush,” he said. “You’re very cute yourself!” This is simple but it worked well because it gave me the opportunity to talk to him more if I wanted to (which I did) or to just say “Thanks!” and move on if I wasn’t interested. Similarly, my first DM from an erstwhile FWB was a response to me tweeting about being sad about the sexual dry spell I was going through at that time: “Sounds like we have similarly sparse dance cards lately,” he said. “Toronto’s been great for work, but surprisingly boring socially.” You’ll notice that this wasn’t a direct date-ask – he left me space to suggest we get together, if I wanted to, which I did – but was nonetheless relevant to our earlier public conversation.

Sometimes your specific reason for messaging them might just be wanting to ask them out. That’s okay, if done well. See “a statement of intent,” below.

An introduction. You might not need to front-load this into your first message if you think your crush is already aware of you and what you do, but it’s nice. Even something as simple as “Hi, I’m [name]! Long-time follower, first-time DMer” could be enough. Introducing yourself is respectful and polite. You probably wouldn’t go up to a stranger at a party and launch into a monologue without at least saying hello and telling them your name, so try the same thing in your Twitter approach.

My Sir did this in his second message to me. “I’m [name], a New York-based [job title]/sex nerd,” he wrote. “Recently found your work and your tweets and it’s all great stuff.” It was a concise statement of who he is, what he does, and why he followed me. Along with his respectful approach, it told me everything I needed to know in order to decide whether I wanted to get to know him better (I did).

A statement of intent. You probably don’t wanna put this in your very first message, because asking someone on a date (or whatever) before establishing rapport is risky, scary, and less likely to work. But if you do decide to ask your Twitter crush to meet up with you, you should give them some sense of what you’re actually asking. Don’t couch your romantic or sexual intentions in a vague request to “pick their brain over coffee” or “talk about [their work].” (And hey, if your intentions are strictly professional, or even casual or platonic, you should find a way to mention that, too. Less confusion = better results for everyone.)

You can straight-up tell them you’d like to take them on a date. You can tell them you’d love to get to know them better over coffee/drinks. You can suggest a specific activity you know the both of you enjoy (e.g. going to a comedy show), ideally one that’s culturally coded as date-y. You can disclose the nature of your feelings about them so they can infer you’re asking them on a date (e.g. “I think you’re really cute and cool and I’d love to take you out sometime” or “I’ve been crushing on you from afar for a while and would love to hang out in person if you’re into that”). My Sir said, “If you’re ever in New York and want to meet a Twitter admirer in person over coffee or something, I’d love that,” which is perfect because it expresses enthusiasm, indicates a specific activity, and gives me an easy out. So many good ways to ask cuties on dates!

Some fucking respect. Twitter isn’t a magical universe where you get to treat people like garbage. Those are real humans in there, so be good to them! Be polite, take “no” for an answer, and be appropriately apologetic if you fuck up.

Make sure you keep in mind, too, that someone ignoring your DM or declining your advances might not have much to do with you. They might be busy, or stressed, or going through a complicated situation of some kind. Don’t take this shit personally, if you can help it. You’re great, and there are always more Twitter crushes in the sea!

Have you ever asked someone out – or been asked out – via Twitter DM? How did it go?

5 Ways to Fuck Up Your Social Media Strategy As a Sex Blogger

Kate Sloan

I’ve been a sex blogger for almost six years, and here’s what I know about social media: it can make or break you, both professionally and personally. I’ve built my audience through smart usage of Twitter, Instagram, and the like, but a good social media presence has also brought many additional blessings upon me: editors at big publications have discovered me through my social feeds, I’ve been offered jobs and gigs because of my tweets, and I’ve even met several partners (past and present) on Twitter. Isn’t the internet wild?!

Here are five disastrous mistakes you can make on social media that will damage your brand and your reputation as a sex blogger, sometimes irreversibly. I have made a few of these mistakes from time to time and have learned from making them, hopefully. Do not do these things!

Treat your followers badly. One of my cardinal rules in my social media strategy is to be generally pleasant to my followers – so long as they’re not being rude, inappropriate, or wilfully ignorant (in which case I sometimes call them out on that). If someone shares your work, compliments a post you wrote, or is otherwise a good and uplifting follower, you should make them feel appreciated for that. Building a strong, supportive community on social media can be done the same way you’d do that anywhere: by being kind and welcoming.

Be sex-negative. You would think sex bloggers wouldn’t need to be schooled on the importance of sex-positivity, but some of them do. I’ve seen many bloggers shame other people’s kinks, make moral judgments about other people’s harmless sexual decisions, mock certain types of porn, or dismiss certain fantasies as “gross” even if they exist only as fantasies. There’s a debate to be had about these things, sure, but I think outright shaming people who aren’t harming anyone with their sexuality is best avoided, especially if you work in the sexual sphere. No one is going to trust you to educate them on sexuality if you’ve made them feel bad about themselves as a sexual person, even if you had no idea you were doing that when you tweeted that vaguely shamey thing.

Be body-negative. Likewise, making fun of people’s bodies is not cool, especially in the sex-positive pockets of the sex industry where such missteps are particularly frowned upon. This includes stuff like fat-shaming, ableism, penis size-shaming, and so on. If you’re making fun of a particular physical trait or condition, odds are, you’re hurting the feelings of someone who reads what you write. Don’t do it!

Buy fake likes and followers. People can tell when you buy artificial likes for your Facebook page or beef up your Instagram numbers with false followers. It’s not a good look. Building your audience is a slow process, but if you’ve done your research on blogging, you already know it isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. So take the time to do it properly. Your audience will trust you more as a result.

Be inauthentic. I honestly think the #1 thing that’s helped me in my social media strategy is being real. I put my actual insecurities, fears, and weirdnesses out into the world, and it establishes a feeling of camaraderie between my followers and I. And crucially, that camaraderie is real, not just something I “put on” to achieve certain professional goals. I treasure my troupe of Twitter weirdos, and the reason many of them are so invested in me and my writing is that I show them a lot of me – the real me. It’s freeing to be so open, and to be accepted in all your strangeness!

Bloggers and blog readers alike: what do you think is most important in a sex blogger’s social media strategy?

 

Heads up: this post was sponsored, and as always, all writing and opinions are my own.