Introducing...Your Salon Blogs Tour Of Wanton Carnality
There's a race going on. You can track the results on the Salon Blogs Rankings Page.
In the Transcendance Lane, we have the Real Live Preacher. Preacher features compelling and well-written tales from the non-spiritual life of a spiritual person (or vice-versa). The Preacher made an instant splash in the Salon blogs community, and has built a large and dedicated following. What was and is striking about Preacher's emergence is the tidal wave of comments that accompanies anything he posts. (As an aside, my wife speculated about whether Preacher really was a "he" at all; had I just made an assumption? A re-read of certain pieces found references to a wife, so I'll stick with the masculine terms...)
If people contacted their elected representatives like they contact the Preacher, we would truly have a representative Democracy. Preacher can literally write a story about wiping someone's ass, and we will line up to remark about how special it all is. (And, of course, it WAS well-written and compelling, as usual...) Regardless of what Preacher's intention's were when he started his blog, what has developed is a readership that not only wants to read what Preacher has to say; people want to respond to it, be a part of it. He has helped develop a community. Preacher's comment pages are a meta-blog all their own. That's remarkable.
Preacher's hit rates seem to hover somewhere between 100 and 300 per day; good hits. But now there's a new contender in this race, to be found in the Prurient Interest Lane: A blog called "Instant Message...Married With A Girlfriend". I clicked on it out of curiosity, just to see what the heck it was. Basically, it's one man's story of how he got into an internet relationship that wrecked his life. He's drawing it out, nice and slow, but making sure to give us plenty of tantalizing information to keep us hooked.
And judging from the hit rates, we are hooked. In fact, take another look at that Salon Blogs Rankings Page; what you'll see today is that the competitors in the Prurient Interest Lane and the Transcendance Lane are very close to each other. We seem to be reading each with the same frequency, at least for the time being.
But where the hit rates are currently similar, the comment rates are vastly different. "Instant Message..." has posted 10 times as of this writing, for a total of four comments; Preacher would get around 150 comments or more on a similar amount of material. One of IM's comments put it best: "This is crack for voyeurs". Yep.
What's it all mean? Maybe nothing. IM's posts aren't nearly as inviting of comment as Preacher's, but I wonder if there is something more to it. For as much sexuality as there is to be found in our electronic worlds, there is precious little discussion or self-revelation. Even IM's documented relationship(s) are thus far a study in a lack of openness and honesty. I'm not throwing stones here; I'm not exactly a graduate of the Shel Silverstein School of Sexual Openness myself. All I'm saying is that the juxtaposition between the two sites, and the way people are responding to them, is very interesting.
Which Reminds Me...
Reading IM, and seeing those hit rates, made me think that maybe I need to have more sex in my blog. (I'm only half-joking.) What is it about sex? I mean, I know there's that whole Biological Imperative thing, and I know there's the whole mass media sex image thing. No question, those are two prime cultivators of our sexual appetites. But I sort of resent the implied notion that I can't conjure a sexual thought of my own volition, that only the procreative urge and Victoria's Secret commercials make me think about sex.
One need look no further than the Grand Pubah of Salon Blogs, the Reverse Cowgirls' Blog. This blog has crazy hit rates. Of course, I've always assumed that many of her hits were for people doing searches on Google for things like "bukake", who happen to end up on her blog, when that's not really what they were looking for. But that still proves the point, essentially. There are just scads and scads of people out there doing sex searches. It is both our national obsession and our national shame. We must read it and think about it, but we can't talk openly about it as a society, except through a fantasy filter like the internet. How sad.
You know what I would love to see? I would love to have access to what the people at Google have access to, in terms of what the most popular searches are. Search pages must surely be the most reliable mirror for our society around, at least that part of society that has the income and time and inclination to get online, which is an awful lot of us.
Google can tell us what we are looking for. Google knows that some percentage of us are looking for Brad Pitt photos, or a site about a casting fetish, or internet swingers' sites. Google knows that we like our teens in pigtails, our Anna Kournikova off the court better than on, and our amateurs to be over 40*. Google knows all of this about us. None of us are talking about it. But Google knows.
What Google doesn't know, and can't know, is what people think about where Google points them. What do those sites mean to people? Unfortunately, thus far, the IM site isn't giving us that insight, either, and maybe that's for the best. Preacher's site does give us that chance through the comment function, just as the IM site does, but more of us are acting on that chance with the Preacher. I wonder why?
*None of these are in any way related to any actual searching I personally may be doing. These are merely the searches of a mythical everyperson, of whom there are apparently hundreds of thousands. Strange; I'll post my comments about what I think about the existence of God on preacher's site, about the very fiber of our being, but I don't feel as comfortable revealing a slight fetish for redheads...
11:12:52 AM 
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