No, that’s not a typo. Violet Blue, the pornblogger who hates being called a pornblogger despite an entry a few week ago that started with an entry that basically said she had to step over a pile of dildos from the night before when she got out of bed (real class act that pseudonym using bore, isn’t she?) got a little ticked off at the guys from TWiT. In the midst of a conversation about Forbes’ list of Web Celebs, Leo LaPorte referred to her as “She’s that … porn person.”
Here’s her overwrought response to that remark:
To say that I’m a “porn person” isn’t just dismissive, it’s wrong. Especially if he “ran into” me once — which he didn’t. So why do men like Dvorak, LaPorte “and friends,” at the risk of their credibility and believability, still feel obligated to relegate women who are openly sexual to the status of sex work, despite reality? Especially when the culture they occupy has clearly shed these outdated attitudes — in the bio Forbes wrote, they covered the whole scope of my work, including GETV, my podcast, this column and my blogging at Gawker’s Fleshbot.com. If Forbes gets it, why can’t they?
Get what?
It’s amazing. If growing up about porn and sex is discussing it, why is she hiding from the subject that defines her online existence?
Her podcast is Open Source Sex.
In an article in a major paper, she starts it off with talking about dildos and sex toys right off the bat.
Hell, read her stupid bio at the end of the article where she gets mad at people for belittling her “profession:”
Violet Blue is author and editor of over a dozen sexual health books and erotica collections. She is a professional sex educator, lecturer, podcaster, video blogger, porn/erotica reviewer and machine artist. Violet is also a fetish model, a member of Survival Research Labs, an author at Metroblogging San Francisco; girl friday contributor at Fleshbot, a San Francisco native, and a pro blogger. For more information and links to Web sites discussed in Open Source Sex, go to Violet Blue’s Web site, tinynibbles.com.
A fetish model? An erotica writer? A sex podcaster?
And she gets pissed off at being called “that porn person?”
For what?
Hell, even she admits that her job empowers her and people are too hung up on sex:
The days of having to maintain more than one identity for women to venture outside the world of sex writing — or sex, for that matter — are over. So are the days of women having to maintain a professional fear of being associated with that thing that makes us so uniquely women — our sexuality.
Okay, fine. I agree people shouldn’t have to hide their sexuality. But let’s not kid ourselves. You make your living on both sides of the fence, and when you put yourself out there on sites like Fleshbot (a fun site, btw, I have no problem with them or the work they do) or your own pornblog, you have to accept the fact that some people will identify you that way. If you want one identity, congratulations. You’ve got it.
Anyway, she wants to start TWAT; This Week About Tech. Seeing TWiT as an old boys show, she wants to start TWiT for girls. Violet Blue, you’re one ignorant idiot. While your show may be all girls, TWiT isn’t. People like Molly Wood and Veronica Belmont pop in from time to time, not to mention Amber MacArthur and TWiL, which is hosted by Denise Howell (a woman). If Leo’s remark is high schoolish, how much better is it to make your own club? I’d say not much.
Of course, another moron jumped into the fray. Brian Lam at Gizmodo (the hack stats fluffer who announced an iPhone, tagged it with Apple and then was shocked, SHOCKED, that people mistook his post for an Apple announcement), of course, takes Violet Blue’s side:
The joke to launch a competing, all-girl, podcast run by Blue should worry Laporte. Blue doesn’t just write about sex. She knows tech, too, having been associated with the monster bot engineers over at Survival Research Lab for 10+ years, and lectures at Universities repping the EFF. Which do you think would be more successful in the long term? A tech podcast with the youthful Violet and company breathing life and charm into tech stories, or Laporte’s weekly recap filled with hyperbole, and abrasive, outdated, good old boy attitudes?
Lam, you’re an idiot (wow, there’s something I haven’t said in a month). If Violet Blue had 22 million hobbies, she’d still be known as a pornoblogger and sexpert. She identifies herself as such first in her bio. If she wants to get past people identifying her as a pornoblogger and wants to be more identified as a geek (cough) maybe she needs to make that more prominent in her bio? How can she expect the rest of the world to take her as more than a pornoblogger if it’s the first way she identifies herself?
She can’t.
Your persona is whatever you craft it into. You made yourself a pornoblogger. Live with it.
[tags]violet blue, leo laporte, twat, twit[/tags]