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Sex, politics, and the blogosphere

A few days ago I linked to the blog The Bad Date Club, a group blog where young women write about how awful their dates are. I’d hate to be one of their dates and then find out I was publicly humiliated on their blog.

Yesterday at Libertarian Girl, which is also a blog I recently linked to, the blogger is taking a lot of heat for posting intimate details about her date . She also wrote a followup post responding to some of the comments.

People hoping for detailed voyeuristic descriptions of the sexual tryst will be sorely disappointed; the post is mostly about how she felt about the man. Nevertheless, some of the comments she received have been downright mean, even going as far as calling her a “slut.” I think that one commenter on her blog correctly pinpointed the source of the animosity:

Is Libertarian Girl the next Jessica Cutler? Like Jessica Cutler, Libertarian Girl lives in Washington, DC and her sexual partner is a staffer for a congressman described as “conservative ‘pro-life’ ‘family values’ Christian.” But the similarity seems to end there. Jessica Cutler wrote about having sex with six partners over a two week period, including middle aged men who paid her for sex, one of whom was the Chief of Staff of a government agency, appointed by Bush.

In comparison, all that Libertarian Girl did was have sex with one person, for free, who is approximately her own age. This doesn’t really seem like the stuff of scandals, although if bloggers are bored enough they can turn it into one. Perhaps the big story here is the fact that people are trying to make this into a big story.

Some liberal blogs, like skippy the bush kangaroo and TBogg have picked up on the post on account of what they perceive as the hyprocrisy based on the description of the politics of the congressman that the sexual partner works for.

Meanwhile, David tried to give her some fatherly advice, which I’m not sure she really needs.

People are still trying to figure out what's appropriate to post to one's blog and what should be out of bounds. Certainly other women have posted a lot more details about their personal lives than what I read in Libertarian Girl's blog. But Libertarian Girl has gotten a lot of publicity for a relatively mundane post on account of her blog getting a previously respectable amount of traffic. And some of her previously loyal readers were apparantly imagining that she had virginal qualities that she actually never possessed.

posted Monday, January 17, 2005