Yesterday it was 40 degrees Celsius in Melbourne and for some (possibly related) reason, my internet stopped working. I decided to amuse myself by watching one of the movies I’d downloaded recently and hadn’t gotten around to watching, I chose Liberal Arts because I like Elizabeth Olsen. I wasn’t expecting to love it but I thought it might be a way to fill in a couple of hours and maybe it would be a little bit sweet or fun or something because although I obviously have a cold, dead heart sometimes I do like to have a little smile. I should have known what I was in for from the start, I mean when is a movie written, directed by and starring a white 30-something dude from a sitcom good? Let’s be real. But I was actually a little surprised by how pissed off I got while watching it. It got me thinking a lot about older men and younger ladies and sex and the whole social construct of virginity. Now be warned – there will be spoilers in this so if you care about that (you probably shouldn’t) stop reading, go watch Liberal Arts and then come back and chat.

A quick overview of the movie – Josh Radnor (aka Ted from How I Met Your Mother, I will probably just call him Ted whenever I talk about him because that is all he will ever be to me) plays this mid 30s dude named Jesse who lives in New York, works in admissions at NYU and is generally pretty sad and lonely. He goes back to his old college in Ohio to see an old professor he’s buddies with and meets Zibby (Elizabeth Olsen) who is 19 and free and interesting in the way that only manic pixie dream girls can be. There’s a mutual attraction, she makes him a mix cd of classic music (pretty much a rip off of the whole Shins thing in Garden State or the mix cd Kirsten Dunst makes in Elizabethtown), they become pen pals blah blah blah. It’s basically about how Ted misses being young, college was the most fun he ever had, and he kind of wants to try to relive that time by hooking up with young Zibby but he also kind of thinks he should accept getting older. Zach Efron makes a couple of appearances as a stoner hippie guy, probably the best/most likeable character in the movie so good work Zefron.

Anyway, the scene that bothered me the most was when Ted and Elizabeth Olsen are about to have sex; she tells him she’s a virgin and he freaks out. It’s a common movie trope, the girl who is ready to give herself to a guy (vom) and he freaks out because he doesn’t feel worthy and tells her she should wait for somebody more special or something. I’ve seen it in about a zillion movies and tv shows. Here’s a good example:

(Shoshanna from Girls)

It got me thinking a lot about the idea of virginity and how it’s portrayed in society/life/films etc. I’ve seen this exact scene in a lot of movies and always felt annoyed by it but I’d recently read this quote which kind of made it click in my head as to why it annoyed me so much.

“What does virginity mean to a queer person, who may never have vaginal intercourse in her/his/hir life? What of a lesbian who chooses to never engage in any sort of penetrative sex act her entire life, does she remain some sort of super, extra virgin? If a straight man receives a blowjob, he will in all likelihood still consider himself a virgin, but a gay man receiving a blowjob may have a more complicated understanding of what it means for his sex life. In many ways, our conception of “virginity” erases or invalidates queer sex.” – Sex Pos Grrrl

The whole situation of an man telling a (usually younger) lady that she should wait for somebody special is completely condescending, as though these older men somehow know the worth of sexual experiences and of a ladies’ body better than she does. As though these silly virginal girls just can’t understand the power and importance of sex unless they have had penetrative penis in vagina sex, regardless of any other sexual experiences they might have had. It makes me think of another really great quote I read on tumblr a while back (give me the proper source if you have it!) – ‘I think the concept of virginity was created by men who thought their penises were so important it changes who a woman is‘ (And yes, I know dudes are considered virgins too but not in the same disgusting purity ‘gift’ bullshit way girls are). This idea that p-in-v sex is the be all and end all of becoming a sexual being or whatever is a load of shit. Sexuality is a fluid thing and I hate this idea that those who have had p-in-v sex are somehow wiser or have a greater understanding of sexuality that those who haven’t.

I don’t understand how young ladies can be expected to feel any agency over their own bodies and their own choices if they are being constantly told (especially by older men) what sex has to mean to them, what virginity is, which sexual experiences are big/important and which aren’t. Now obviously nobody is obligated to have sex with anybody else and there’s a million different reasons not to have sex with somebody, and maybe somebody else not having had p-in-v sex is a dealbreaker for you. Sure, cool, that’s fine – but there’s a way to communicate that without telling the other person what importance they should place on this one sex act, and without pushing all of your moral judgements about sex onto them. It’s a bit of an off-shoot of slut shaming, holding up this idea of female virginity as a measure of purity, and as a gift that should be given to one special man. As though having p-in-v sex for the first time in a spur of the moment situation or with somebody you’re not in love with would somehow be a huge and horrible mistake. I just hate the way girls are constantly being told how they should feel about sex, what their ‘first time’ should be like and even what sex is when really these are things that are highly personal and should be figured out by each individual. Maybe you’ll feel like you lost your virginity when you have your first orgasm, or when you have oral sex, or anal sex, or maybe you’ll feel like kissing somebody was the singular most important sexual experience you’ve ever had, maybe you’ll never feel like any sexual experience you’ve had is any bigger or greater or more ‘life changing’ than any other and all of these scenarios are completely normal and completely ok. I don’t think it’s at all helpful or healthy to hold up this idea of one size fits all sexuality, it’s so heteronormative and dumb.

In 2011 I’d been blogging for a year and I was averaging about 30,000 hits per month on Fat Aus. I was also reading a lot of blogs by professional bloggers who had sidebars full of little advertisements (or ‘sponsors’ as they usually liked to call them) for small businesses and other blogs. Plenty of these bloggers had a similar sized readership to mine and some of them actually made a living solely from their blogs and that sounded like a pretty fun job so I decided to give it a try. I didn’t plan on being a full-time professional blogger but I thought it might be a good way to make a bit of extra cash for doing something that I enjoyed. I checked out the sponsorship or advertising pages on blogs that were a similar size to try and gauge what the going rates were (which was actually kind of hard, apparently most bloggers don’t like being up-front with their rates or traffic stats and I couldn’t be bothered sending emails pretending to be a potential advertiser to find out), set up an ‘advertise here’ link and not too long afterwards I started getting emails from small business owners and other bloggers who wanted to buy an ad space.

At the height of my short career as a blogger who earned money from her blog (I just can’t refer to myself as a ‘professional blogger’ without seriously cringing) I was earning a few hundred dollars a month. Most of my advertisers were people with small businesses and a couple of other bloggers but I started to attract a bit of attention from bigger businesses who were interested in appealing to the niche readership I supposedly attracted (in all honesty I think that the readers of Fat Aus, even back then when I posted almost exclusively outfit photos, are a pretty even split between plus sized and straight sized people). I began receiving lots of emails from PR companies (often addressed to the always lovely and individualized ’Dear Blogger’) usually wanting to know my rates for a ‘sponsored post’. A sponsored post is when a blogger writes an entire blog post that is just an advertisement for a brand or website and the going rate is usually somewhere between $50 – $300. I had never bought or ordered from any of the brands or websites I was being asked to write about, and most of the websites didn’t even offer postage to Australia so I didn’t feel that sponsored posts were something I could post on Fat Aus without feeling really unethical so I turned them down. I also received a lot of emails from websites asking me to write posts for them about fat fashion for ‘exposure’ (aka for free) which I turned down. I’m not completely opposed to writing for free but I would only do it if it was for a website that I felt a personal connection with, not for exposure for my blog. I felt that the advertising I was offering – an image on my sidebar with a link directing to the advertisers’ website, was different to writing sponsored posts because the reader was free to ignore the ads if they weren’t interested in them. As a blog reader there is nothing worse than getting excited for a new post from one of your favourite blogs only to click-through and realise you are reading an advertisement for something you are not interested in (ok, there are a lot of things that are worse but I still hate it).  In the past I have accepted free clothes in exchange for reviews from a few companies and although I only accepted things from brands I liked, I still don’t think I would do it again. I don’t think that a review of something that was given to a blogger for free is ever going to be completely unbiased – if I accepted something free to review, hated it and wrote an honest blog post about it I would surely end up on some bloggers blacklist somewhere (which is something I always keep in mind when reading those kinds of reviews on other blogs). When I come across a product or website I really like I often do tweet or blog about how good it is because I want others to be able to enjoy it too but I only want to do these things on my own terms. Similarly to this, I do still engage one type of advertising on Fat Aus – the ASOS Affiliates Program. I only use it to link back to items I’ve bought from ASOS and I just think of it as making back a little money from all the money I spend on there (if somebody clicks through from a link on my blog and buys something I get 5% of what they spend), its advertising but I can use it on my own terms.

With the addition of advertising I started really obsessing over how much traffic I was getting and making sure I was keeping up with the stats I had sold ads based on. I read articles about how to be a better blogger, how to get more traffic, how to get readers involved (‘End every blog post with a question to encourage comments!’ Yeah, I see you bloggers who constantly do this and I know what you’re up to). I thought about the best layouts to display ads, I promoted my new posts everywhere, I analysed data to figure out which posts were the most popular and why, I was an obsessive blogging machine. And it worked! When I followed the tips from pro-bloggers I did get more traffic, more followers, more comments, and I felt like my advertisers were getting what they paid for – well, kind of. Honestly even when I was getting 50,000 hits in a month the amount of click-throughs on ads were never that high and that’s another reason I got rid of ads, I actually didn’t think the advertisers were getting a very good deal. That’s probably why so many companies want bloggers to write sponsored posts; readers are definitely much more likely to click on links in a blog post than on advertising images on a sidebar. As time went on I started to blog a bit less than usual, down from a few times a week to once a week and then once a fortnight and I was quickly losing passion for it (this actually correlates directly to my having less money to spend on new clothes all the time which is something I’ll write more about a bit later). What made my waning interest worse was that I had an obligation. I had sold ad spaces based on a certain amount of hits per month and when I wasn’t posting, my stats were dropping so not only was I a bit sad that I didn’t feel like blogging, I also felt guilty and like I was letting people down. I kept forcing myself to blog regularly until the time was up on ad spaces that had been paid for in advance and then I took a little break. I left up the ads on my sidebar but stopped sending monthly invoices to the advertisers and I stopped blogging while my traffic stats kept dropping.

While I wasn’t blogging I was still engaging with bloggers, reading blogs and thinking a lot about fatshion blogging, advertising, consumerism and my own ethics. My blog got the most attention when I was posting multiple times each week with a different outfit made up of new or ‘on-trend’ pieces. If I posted photos of myself wearing new clothes that had just come out from ASOS and promoted the post on tumblr, my photos would get hundreds of notes and the post would get thousands of views. This kind of reaction made me feel like in order to be a successful or popular blogger I needed to be buying new clothes constantly. I would buy clothes, wear them once for a blog post and then feel like there wasn’t much point in wearing them again since I’d already photographed them. At the time I had a well paid job and cheap rent so I was financially able to be buying new things all the time but when I moved into a new place where the rent was nearly triple what I was previously paying, I could no longer afford to shop for new clothes every month and my closet was bursting at the seams anyway. I started thinking about my value as a person with thoughts and opinions versus the image I was portraying as a fatshion blogger whose only apparent talent was putting a cute outfit together and I stopped wanting to do outfit posts. For me, being a fat person who likes wearing cute clothes is a political thing and I didn’t include that side of me on this blog for a long time due to some idea of wanting to keep my personal life somewhat private but eventually I decided that if I was going to be sharing photos of myself I might as well include some context of who I am as a person; I wanted to be a three dimensional person, not just a fat lady with cute clothes.

When I began regularly blogging again I got rid of the ads and stopped offering advertising, I stopped focusing on solely outfit photos and started writing about things I was interested in and I started really enjoying blogging again. I’m glad that I can talk about fatshion and clothing brands truthfully and honestly without worrying that if I say the wrong thing I’ll miss out on the chance to review some free clothes or worrying about losing advertisers. I like being able to go for months without buying any new clothes and not feel like I’m missing out on something. I love that I rarely even look at how much traffic my blog is getting these days. I’m interested in creating an online space for myself where I can write about anything from feminism to music to fashion because I’m interested in presenting myself as a multi-faceted person, and not as someone who is willing to sell out my ideals for a few bucks, some free clothes or ‘brand relationships’.

(This blog post was somewhat inspired by a series of awesome posts Definatalie has written lately.)