Authenticity, confession and female sexuality: from Bridget to Bitchy

Abstract

Bitchy Jones's Diary (2006–2010) was the pseudonymous blog of a female British blogger, who wrote about her life as a sexually dominant female, and criticised aspects of both mainstream and BDSM culture.1 The blog's title and the author's nom de plume were both deliberately adapted from Bridget Jones's Diary, a popular novel from 1996 which was later followed by a sequel and two films. The views of female sexuality expressed in the blog are to be understood as the antithesis of those presented in the novel. In this article, I take seriously the suggested connection between Bitchy and Bridget Jones, suggesting that these two female diarists have more in common than Bitchy might wish to acknowledge. Both use a variety of rhetorical strategies to create the impression that they are giving an authentic account of a marginalised subject position, and use this ‘authentic’ voice to denounce mainstream and subcultural attempts to exclude as worthless or irrelevant aspects of their sexual tastes, practices and experiences. I investigate the feminist potential and risks of this use of the authentic as a political weapon and conclude that, while claims to authenticity are problematic, the very fact that we debate these varying subject positions opens up new ways of thinking about female sexual subjectivity.