About Blogging

First of all, apologies for not posting. I have regular readers, and when I don't post for a week, they become terribly disappointed. Both of them.

Or maybe they're both figments of my imagination and I have no readers at all. How vain I must be to think that anybody is interested in my opinions. :)

And apologies for not checking and posting comments. Unfortunately, when I'm too busy to post, I'm often busy enough that I forget to check for comments. It's rude of me and I'm very sorry.

I actually have a back log of posts on the subject of bias, but I've been too busy to post material that already written. Yea, that busy.

When I started this blog, I decided that I wasn't going to worry about readership. I know how to set up the blog so that I can track visitors and view readership stats, but I haven't done it because I don't expect to develop a following. I don't write the sort of blog that attracts attention. My posts aren't sexy, and I don't have stories about sex. I don't focus on the bizarre or extreme aspects of sex work. I don't condemn, or try to provoke controversy, or try to show why one group of human beings is inferior or dumber or more hypocritical than another. Or at least, I don't do that most of the time, although I probably slip occasionally. No, I'm just a regular fucking voice of reason, and isn't that boring?

Aside from occasional lapses into sarcasm, I'm more interested in understanding people than judging them. By that, I don't mean that I think I know what it's like to be a sex worker. I have been part of a sector of society different from the one I occupy now as a college educated knowledge worker. I've seen college students visit my previous world for a summer, and leave thinking that they understand it all. Belle de Jour wrote that if you haven't been a prostitute, you have no fucking clue, and I have no reason to think that that doesn't apply to me. As far as the instant empathy that comes from shared experience, I don't have it. So I don't speak for any group of sex workers that I write about.

I have been close to, and had conversations with sex workers and ex-sex workers. Not a lot, but enough to recognize that our similarities far outweigh our differences. I know that certain aspects of sex workers' behavior are singled out for derision, and yet these same behaviors are found in everyone. I know that finding work is not as simple or straightforward as it is portrayed, and that chance and circumstance play a larger role in our careers than we want to believe. If you compared Malissa Farley with the average sex worker, you would probably find that they found their professions in similar ways, and that they engage in similar patterns of thought.

As for me, I'm opinionated, prone to jump to conclusions, and probably hypocritical more often than I realize. I'm always sure that I'm right, even when I haven't taken the trouble to thoroughly study the subject I'm opining on. I've done some study on the subject of sex work, but I'm not an academic expert. I blog in order to talk about the things that I have in common with sex workers, which includes some aspects of human behavior that aren't very pretty. My motivation, and the thing that gives me the strength to be honest about myself, is my religious faith. Being a Buddhist doesn't give me any special insight into humanity, but it does give me a kick in the ass.

So the only thing I have to offer a reader is a fairly normal human being trying to make sense of other human beings. And in the process of doing that, I expose my own weaknesses and stupidities. If that were enough to attract a large readership, we'd all be celebrities, wouldn't we?