been living under a rock? A blog. It’s like if you put your diary online and invited people to comment on it. Not for the faint of heart, Fiona.”
I considered his words. “I’ve never fainted in my life. Really.”
“I mean, I love these lines.” Kevin picked up the poem I had submitted for that night’s class. “You could turn this bloggy. Easy as pie.”
Kevin wrote down some website addresses, and I took the subway home. The year was 2003. I spent the weekend taking notes on Gawker, Dooce, Belle de Jour, and The Daily Dish. By Sunday afternoon I figured I had read enough. I downloaded Movable Type version 2.6 onto my iMac and, after an all-nighter of mouse manipulation and profanity, became a blogger.
Because I was a little bit chicken and because I didn’t quite trust that Kevin totally knew what he was talking about, I did not use my name. I called myself the Last Romantic.
On the blog I described the project like this: “The Last Romantic aims to record in Full Truth the Sex Life of a Young Woman in a Great City, the woman being myself, the city being New York. Or, in other words, the process of providing myself with a sentimental education, unsentimentally.”
My first post, an earnest and semi-erotic poem about kissing a man with a mustache, drew 7 hits. My next post, a wryly detailed account of oral sex with the same mustachioed man, titled “Ticklingus,” drew 288 hits. I was hooked. I could say anything in a few short paragraphs, and anyone with a computer could read it. I told only Kevin when I posted something new, and yet week by week, month by month, my audience grew.
Before The Last Romantic, dating had always seemed like a purpose-driven exercise—date men, sleep with men, to find one man—but now it became process-driven. There was no one man, I realized, waiting at the end of this rainbow. The project itself served as both pot of gold and rainbow. I applied all the five-cent homilies I’d ever heard about the journey and the destination and not investing in the outcome into this, my sex life. And it was so interesting! What was more interesting than personal foibles and predilections related to sex? Because related to sex meant related to self and self-esteem and esteem of others. How a person behaved on a one-night stand spoke volumes. After I warmed up to the basic project mechanics (flirtation, initiation, fulfillment), I liked to shake it up. I would play a woman searching for commitment, or one heartsick from a bad breakup, or (once) a prostitute, or (twice) a virgin. Dabbling in the emotional specifics varied my partners’ responses and, most interestingly, changed my own physical outcome in ways that always surprised me.
Of course, the sheer number of encounters required that I look beyond the men themselves, their personalities specifically. They became for me a sequence of responses, physical, emotional, behavioral. Perhaps I should have taken anthropology in college as well as women’s studies, because the project seemed a melding of the two. Gendered in its consciousness and goals. But those who read the blog didn’t really care about the theoretical underpinnings, what I believed about gender expectations and sexual politics, the traps of marriage and motherhood, the need for women to claim their own personal freedom and expression, sexual and otherwise. Young women read my blog about sex because my experiences matched their own and my words provided confirmation that they—the furiously typing, horny, sexy female they—were not alone.
On the night of Joe’s engagement party, I had been writing the blog for ten months. I had 5,188 followers, averaged fifty to seventy-five comments per post, and was on the way to becoming the unlikely sexual guru to a certain group of single, primarily heterosexual young women with Internet access and complicated love lives.
Since the blog began, I had slept with seventy-six men.
* * *
“Hello? Hello out there?” said Kyle Morgan. He rapped a microphone. A small platform stage had been installed against the wall facing the windows, and Kyle now stood upon it, looking down at his party guests with the amused expression of a calm and indulgent host. Kyle had a louche authority about him. As vice president of Morgan Capital under his aging father, he was the de facto man in charge, the one who enforced the rules, but also the one who most frequently broke them.
“Children. Children, please,” Kyle said over the din. “It’s