The Wedding Photography Blog was picked up, via Design | asides, to feature in Designers Who Blog, but I didn’t mention it here when it happened because my friend Fudge said the photo of me they used makes me look as if I’m just about to sneeze. Now I’ve got over this, you can see it too.

By recording the warped fabric of the wall behind me, the published banner that incorporates this photo reveals the power of my reality distortion field. This is appropriate now because, as a “designer who blogs”, I’ll have to wear a roll-neck sweater and use a Mac. [I’d better get over to the WedPhotBlog tonight and post something or the ongoing silence will become embarrassing.]

Fudge also txted me to say how sad she was for shameless sex-blogger Girl With A One-Track Mind that she had been outed by the Sunday Times. Shrewdly, GwaOTM has got herself a sympathetic interview in the Guardian today. There, she and the article’s author, Zoe Williams, attack the “new” sexual prudery. This is ironic since that the same section of the same newspaper provoked me to write this about the “mainstreaming” of the Playboy bunny. Here’s a great quote from The Girl herself that’s practically a précis of the last 12-month’s worth of posts in the PooterGeek “Sexual Politics” category:

She is really trenchant on the sorry-arsed, calorie-counting era that the Bridget Jones fixation ushered in. “Without attacking the writer, when I flicked through that originally and saw that there was all this obsession with weight, I just didn’t relate to it. I know so many women focus on that, but it just isn’t a priority for me. And I draw a correlation between being sexually uptight and certain eating disorders. Because, literally, they can’t let anything pass their lips. They can’t enjoy anything, I can’t imagine them enjoying sex. I can’t count the number of friends I’ve heard saying,’I’d rather be underneath in bed because then he won’t see how fat my stomach is.’ That’s the last thing you should be thinking about while you’re having sex!”

“It’s not coincidence that when you look on any shelf in the newsagent, [at] all the women’s magazine covers, everybody is either too fat or too skinny. Jesus, can’t we think of anything else as women? And all the men’s mags are ‘fuck this bird!’ For God’s sake, the guys are sexualising, and the women are having control issues with food. It’s just obscene.”

She laughs in the face of chastity as a virtue. She thinks women’s magazines are touting ideas that are honestly dangerous to young women.

It’s not just over matters of public politics that Lefties these days ally themselves with religious reactionaries; it’s over the personal and sexual, for example in this uncharacteristically Victorian piece by wardytron over at Harry’s Place recently. (It was another couple of illiberal essays by Harry himself that provoked me to write the follow-up to my original Playboy bunny article.) As Jackie Danicki put it when linking to wardy’s contribution:

“Oh, I do like this: A self-described leftist (one I’ve met and liked, as it happens) going on about how ‘we’ should make it difficult to get hold of ‘pornography’. In what bizarre universe is this guy ‘liberal’ while someone like me – who is strongly pro-gay marriage, pro-easy availability of pornography, against the stupid drug war, and stridently anti-authoritarian – is often described as ‘conservative’? If he’s a liberal, I’m a Prada handbag.”

Bobbie Johnson asks a good question about anonymity, but my problem with The Girl is that she has destroyed other people’s sexual privacy without their consent. There’s nothing immoral about enjoying sex, but the unauthorised kiss-and-tell is ethically one of the lowest literary forms.

I admire public figures who, like Ted Hughes, remain quiet in public about what happened in private between them and their former lovers despite others’ spiteful and ignorant speculation and, no doubt, the temptations of cash offers from the papers to reveal all. I hope I would have the strength and dignity to keep my mouth shut if one of my ex-es talked about our personal affairs to the press or wrote about them in a book. This would of course require me to have achieved something that made me worth writing about and then to have had sex with someone, so I should be safe for a while yet.