Filthy Gorgeous Things: Secrets

Image by Frédéric Fontenoy for the article /Behind Closed Doors: Kink and the Belle Époque.

October is nearly over, but I finally got to looking through this month’s issue of Filthy Gorgeous Things — the month’s theme is “secrets.” Next month’s theme is “euphoria” and I’m really looking forward to it. I think FGT is the highest quality erotic magazine online, period. Tasteful while explicit, provocative, packed with the Internet’s cutting edge sex writers, erotic artists and photographers, and it always has features that are fascinating and arousing… they’re doing it right. Smooth as a pale thigh, unforgettable as a firm crop. It’s a subscription magazine and not cheap: sadly it’s not *all* free, but some of it is. If you have the money, it’s worth it. Take for example this piece authored by one of my favorite sex bloggers, and one of the nicest, most genuine women I’ve met via the Internets, debauchette. Here’s a snip from her “secrets” piece The Life of a Pseudonym:

I’ve used pseudonyms for seven years. Over those years, those names have changed, often, sometimes over the course of a conversation. In the beginning, it was strange having a fake name. I was acutely aware of its hilarious fakeness. I knew my real name – people in my life called me by my real name – so any other name seemed paranoid and absurd. But over the years, after a steady stream of names, I’ve become nameless. My name’s become fluid and arbitrary, detached from the thing it references, from me. I am who I am, but my name’s ceased to matter. Or it did, until recently.

I guess I was predisposed to namelessness, because I’ve always preferred anonymity in my day-to-day life. I live in a city because I can move through crowds unnoticed. I like strangers and strange places and transitory stopping grounds, like airports and train stations and subways.

It started slowly in the beginning. I was given a stage name for fetish work, which felt silly and unnecessary until I had a brush with a client who tried a little too hard to pry into my private life. I learned quickly how important it was that I keep my private life separate from the sex world, so from that point on, I created a thick, sharp boundary between the two. That created a split in my life, which would deepen and expand over time. I met clients who knew me as Cassidy, and I dated men who knew me by my legal name. It was simple to keep those lives separate, because I was only Cassidy in hotel rooms and the occasional fetish studio. When I left, I became myself again; I lived with my real name, I carried it with me.

When I went on to work as a call girl, it was similar, at first. There was the same separation between the identities, defined by time and space, this time between the licit and illicit. In a hotel room, I was Marie, or Molly, or Maxine, but when I left that hotel room, I was myself again. I slipped out of my dress and into a pair of jeans and a tank top, and I was back to who I was. My legal name, however, was becoming a liability. (…read more, filthygorgeousthings.com)