Raunch versus prude: contemporary sex blogs and erotic memoirs by women

Abstract

This article analyses two contemporary erotic memoirs by women, Belle de Jour's (2005) Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl and Abby Lee's (2006) Girl with a One-Track Mind, both of which began life as blogs. Situating them, briefly, in relation to previous erotic memoirs and fiction by women, I examine their transition from blog to book and consider the impact of new digital technologies upon female sexual self-narration. I examine the texts in the light of recent popular feminist writings on the sexualisation of girls and young women, and analyse both the books and original blogs' engagement with feminism, and their treatment of romance, lesbianism and the regulations governing female sexual conduct. This article evaluates the extent to which the boom in women's erotic memoirs (in book or blog form) is symptomatic of a persisting belief in sexuality as the truth of identity. Sexuality, as it is figured here, is still being positioned as ‘the secret’, as the essence or core of subjectivity, which perhaps explains why the memoir, as an attempt to communicate and constitute a ‘self’ through writing, has for women increasingly become the erotic memoir. This article concludes by asking to what extent this is both an undervaluation and an overvaluation of sexuality for women.