Anonymous blogging

So Belle de Jour has finally come out.
She revealed herself to one of her greatest critics, Times writer India Knight in an interview with the paper that was published this week.

Here is what she stated on her blog.
“Belle and the person who wrote her had been apart too long. I had to bring them back together.

So a perfect storm of feelings and circumstances drew me out of hiding. And do you know what? It feels so much better on this side. Not to have to tell lies, hide things from the people I care about. To be able to defend what my experience of sex work is like to all the sceptics and doubters.

Anonymity had a purpose then – it will always have a reason to exist, for writers whose work is too damaging or too controversial to put their names on. But for me, it became important to acknowledge that aspect of my life and my personality to the world at large.

I am a woman. I lived in London. I was a call girl.

The people, the places, the actions and feelings are as true now as they were then, and I stand behind every word with pride. Thank you for reading and following my adventures.

Love, Belle”

Apparently, India Knight had written a damning piece on her “Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl” book, claiming that Bella was a man. Heaven forbid!
This journalist, together with other writers and bloggers had thought that her style of writing was, wait for it, too “good” to be a woman. It’s like jumping a few centuries and going back to George Eliot.
“Good” isn’t really the correct word. What the collective group of conspirators were suggesting was that no woman worth her salt would ever admit that there was an enjoyable side to her work as a prostitute. It would only take the nerve of a man to suggest such a thing and by doing so legitimise, albeit not by law, this most ancient of professions.

According to Clive James on his Radio Four “Points of View” programme on Friday night, there were hoards of people determined to out Belle. Some even suggested that she was a famous writer such as Martin Amis. Other people went to such lengths as to trawl through regular bloggers to try and match the style of writing, once more convincing themselves that this woman was no woman but some perverted bloke doing his bit for male sexuality by ‘pretending’ that women enjoyed sex.

I do not know enough of Belle de Jour’s work to make a useful, literary comment. I have looked at mere snippets of her blog and have dipped into her book. Maybe after my comments on writing about female sexuality, which by a quirk of synchronicity was written on the day that Belle dropped her anonymity, I should read more of her writing.
Yet, Belle does not take away from the point that I was trying to make regarding the normalisation of female sexuality.

Just as I do not want the world to think that sex is all about the gratuitous dirtiness as described in Charlotte Roche’s “Wetlands”, neither do I want the world to think that the only way a girl can truly be sexually liberated and fulfilled is to become a prostitute, even a safe and comfortable courtesan who earns £300 an hour and is managed by an agent.

What I think women want is a writer who is a normal human being with a healthy interest in sex, who understands what it is like to not have an adventurous and fully functioning libido and who has seen the light as far as the potential to enjoy her sexuality.
Well, I would say that wouldn’t I, but as I said in my previous blog, I am not professing to be the housewives answer to sexual liberation. I just think it would be really good to have a real person write about real or certainly imaginable situations that are not so fantastical that they defy belief or are not so obvious as to be linked to the sex or pornography industry.

My purpose for writing is not to titillate though I sincerely hope the reader is occasionally turned on by my imaginations or reminiscing (who knows which is the truth). My purpose for writing is to explain that real women with real lives can actually have real desire and real need for sex and that real desire and need for sex is perfectly normal, perfectly acceptable and perfectly life-giving.
My purpose for writing is to show women that there are a multitude of sexual experiences that we could be having if only we were free to express our sexuality without the implication of it all being a bit tawdry. My purpose in writing is to acknowledge that I am not alone in feeling sexy and that together we must blast this myth that sexual excitement is a domain of men and apparently well-paid call girls.

Sex is normal. Sex is exciting. Sex is actually the peak of existence, and ten years ago, I would have laughed at that and suggested that fifteen minutes consuming a bar of chocolate was far more preferable. Nowadays, I do think about sex quite frequently and I am almost, I said, almost proud of the fact. Right now, it is approaching Sunday evening and I haven’t had sex for a few days, not even a wank. I would really love to be having a damn good finger fuck at the moment. I would really love to have some time to sneak away and play with my sex toys. I would really like to talk sexy talk to my lover. I want sex. This is my normality.

So, it’s time to move on. It really is time to think about talking more naturally about sex and trying to encourage women to explore and celebrate their sexuality.
Belle de Jour or should I now say Dr. Brooke Magnanti together with the likes of Abby Lee/Zoe Margolis, author of “The Girl with the One Track Mind” have done huge amounts for women in accepting the fact that there is nothing abnormal in women enjoying sex.
Abby Lee is particularly interesting for me because she reports real experiences. She is not a hooker. She is not a nymphomaniac. She is not a flighty twenty something who goes out in search for a lay each night. She just likes sex.

Ms. Lee is a woman who started to write about her sexual encounters in her mid thirties. She has certainly helped me to relax into an orgasm with my dildo. She has also excited me with her writing about having a finger fuck in the middle of a busy London street, oblivious to the people walking by because she is so caught up in the moment of the sexual delights. She isn’t writing to shock. She is writing to celebrate the joy of being a woman.
What I am not sure that she does is fully explore the holistic nature of sex. She concentrates on the earthy, the raw but not coarse aspects of sexuality. I am still looking for a writer who truly shows the all-embracing nature of female sexuality – where there is acknowledgement of the mind, body and soul working in glorious synchronicity to ensure that sexual experiences are the most pleasurable, the most cerebral, the most emotional, the most divine experiences one could have in life. I’m not sure that it is even possible to explain this fully, but I will continue to try.

And I will read more of “The Girl with the One Track Mind” and will enjoy explaining to the readers, with reference points, precisely what this reading does for the lubrication levels of my pussy.

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This blog is about writing once more and is also about a dose of reality.
I know that the menopause is hardly the sexiest subject to write about but this is the reality of being a woman in her forties and therefore it is an important aspect that will have to be spoken of in the coming years.

It is time to make a confession. It is something that I am not entirely proud of but I have my reasons for it.
I am having a ‘coming out’ moment in celebration of Belle’s week, only mine is the exact opposite.
I am a liar. I am the classic case of “do as I say, not do as I do”.

The other day, I was out with some friends and we were sharing the usual conversations of friends catching up. How were the children? What are they all doing now? Is your health and wellbeing all positive? How are your hormones?

A friend of mine who is a stunningly beautiful woman with a great body and wonderfully quiet and contained aura, mentioned that she thought that she was starting the menopause.
Over the years, I have known this woman in a variety of capacities; as colleague, as friend, as co-worker, as employee, as parent/carer etc. We have always got on really well but I am not sure that our conversations have ever included anything to do with sex.

My friend went on to explain that she was having night sweats quite frequently. Furthermore, she was not sleeping very well – a sure sign of the menopause, according to her. She was very tearful far more frequently and felt that she had lost a sense of direction. Her periods were sporadic and she hadn’t had one for several months, even though her mood swings still seemed to be on a monthly cycle.
This all sounded incredibly familiar to me. Like me, she had put the lack of sleep down to other factors such as work stress and snoring but had read up on the subject and the nature of the sleep disturbance seemed to suggest that it could be attributed to “The Change”.

She then went on to say that the worst thing about this menopause malarkey was the decrease in her libido. She said that she had totally gone off sex and was completely disinterested in anything sexual at all. Prior to this, she said that her sex life had been fairly fulfilled and regular.

During this conversation, I had been in utter agreement with her and was nodding away in sisterly affirmation.
Then, all of a sudden, I was placed in that horrible situation whereby there was only one thing to do.
To lie.

Despite my protestations of the need to spread the word about female sexuality and heightened libidos, I sat there and allowed my mouth to reiterate that this lack of desire was exactly the same for me. Not only was I having night sweats and disturbed nights and no periods, but I too had no libido. It has sailed out of the window with the onset of these changes to my physical being and I too no longer wanted sex, to which another friend commented that, for me, this wasn’t very much difference to my thirties.
Once more, I nodded in agreement. I was not in possession of a great urge to be sexual.

As I said, I have my reasons. These people know me. They have known me for years and some of them have known about my lack of sex drive for a long time.
To suddenly admit to these friends, in my current circumstances with all that they know about in relation to this, would be a very stupid thing to do.
However, to ensure that I got the message across in some way, I did try and explain that I thought that I was unusual and I had heard it be said on more than one occasion that a woman in her forties was in fact at the height of her sexuality. Luckily for me, my gorgeous friend confirmed that for her, this was the case. When she was forty, she was at her sexual best, which was why this sudden lack of libido seemed so horrendous.

As she is nearer to approaching fifty than I am, I am hoping that this next stage of the change is not too near for the fear of losing my libido after relatively recently re-finding it, is an almost unbearable horror. I really do not know how I would cope with the loss this time around.

This is difficult.
In any circumstance, I want to express the need for women to ‘come out’ about being sexual beings, and yet, it isn’t always that easy. I was confronted with a situation where I wanted to say something entirely different to what I did, but even though my musings here on this blog are small scale, even though the alleged tales that I tell may or may not be part of my experience, even though I want people to be open and honest, sometimes you just have to accept the fact that anonymity is the right course of action.
In time, things will change.

In time, I would love to share my thoughts about gushing pussies and multiple orgasms. I would love to explain the pleasure that I get from reading and receiving sexual messages. I would love to divulge the news that I love nothing more than the overwhelming delight in feeling so sexy that I can physically feel the insides of my cunt responding to the mere imaginings of glorious sex.
I would love to tell them that three hours of sex is perfectly normal for me and that I can cum within minutes of being aroused. I want to explain that I seem to have a new sexual experience at every turn and sex seems to be getting better and better despite the fact that I feel as though it couldn’t be more brilliant.
I would love to have told them that whilst I was thoroughly enjoying their company, my sexual mind was a million miles away, reminiscing once more, reminding myself of another day spent being gloriously horny with my gloriously sexy man, who has awakened me not only to sexual experiences beyond my imagination but has enabled me to consider the essential need to enlighten the world about the life of a sexually fulfilled forty something.
I let myself and him down in being dishonest about my libido but I find other avenues to share my thoughts with phrases such as “I have read…..” or “A friend told me…..” or “In my past…..”.

All of this makes you wonder. To people who I don’t know, I am more than happy to divulge this information. People who I meet in real life can get a taste of my sexual mission as I encourage them too think about their sexuality and their response to female sexuality as long as they know nothing about my own personal life.
It makes you wonder whether there are more people like me who, for their own reasons, pretend to be less sexually enlightened or indeed sexually needy than they actually are. In which case, then maybe my mission is not as impossible as once thought.
But this still does not explain why on anonymous surveys, there is still the notion that most women do not orgasm regularly and that a much smaller minority have frequent wet and gushing ejaculations.
Mmmm, I think there is still much work to be done.

Sometimes, as Belle has suggested, anonymity gets in the way. It is an obstruction to the vital point of life in understanding and acknowledging important aspects of sexuality.
But everyone has their reasons for doing things in certain ways. In order to continue with my own journey, I need the time and space to have a little secrecy in life. I am far being ashamed of my sexuality but I guess I would just like the space to come to terms with it for myself before I divulge it to others. And I still have far more to learn and hopefully more to experience.