English writer embarrassed by sex blogs

Guardian Unlimited writer (and Little Red Boat blogger) Anna Pickard asks why people feel compelled to blog their sex lives – real or imagined. She admits to an English embarrassment over having our privates become so public, but I think the real question is buried several paragraphs down:

And how come they all seem like they're having better sex than me?

Isn't that the fun of writing sex? Not to make people feel like your sex life is better than theirs, but to indulge in all the best parts? I always put some realism into my erotica but I try to do it in a sexy way, figuring that people will respond to the realness but aren't reading sex fiction to get turned OFF.

Yet at the same time I think that's a common concern, if not outright fear: everyone else is doing it better, having more fun, and having sex more often than we are. We go online seeking to learn about how other people have sex so we can reassure ourselves that we're normal (or fringe, whichever you'd rather be).

And we blog the sex we want to be having.

Back to Anna ... this got me laughing:

I know some sex bloggers - I've been to the pub with them, they're nice people and incredibly normal and yet, all the time, I sit there and look at them and know too much about them, and blush. The mystery is removed from the friendship, and I can do nothing but glow hotly, like a boiled plum (in the face). When you can list the foreign objects that have been inserted into the lunch companion you've only met briefly, twice, it's difficult to think about anything else.

Is that what it's like to meet me, I wonder?

Anyway, it's a fun piece and worth a read, a good reminder that we need not take everything so Seriously.