Let's ride

The Reverse Cowgirl is back

Illustration by Chris Bishop

Almost 20 years ago, I launched The Reverse Cowgirl blog. In those days, people would lol when you told them you were writing a thing known as a weblog, and the blogosphere, as we called it, wasn’t commodified but the Wild West. The RCB, as I referred to it, had what could be described as a prurient focus—after all, its tagline was: “in which a writer attempts to justify the enormity of her porn collection”—but it was also, as I write here, a way for me, a writer, to “share my crazy life working the sex and porn beat, from Porn Valley to the Playboy Mansion, and I was intoxicated by the opportunity that sex blogging afforded me: an uncensored venue where I could write and express whatever I wanted—without censorship.” I was a journalist. I wrote about sex and porn and other things. The so-called glossies—the big-name, printed-on-paper magazines—were worried my stories would freak out their advertisers. But on my blog, I could do whatever I wanted, write whatever I wanted to write, share whatever I wanted to share. The blog was successful, and I loved writing it.

My, how things have changed since then. Big business runs the web, and we’re all their little data banks. Sex is everywhere, porn has gone mainstream, and Stormy Daniels is fodder for breakfast table conversation. Eventually, as the subject of sex became less taboo, I did find publications that would let me cover—or expose may be a better word—whatever I wanted. One of them was Forbes, where I was the founding editor of Forbes Vices, and the beat I covered on my popular blog (some months my blog’s traffic was as high as 100K unique visitors a month) was “the business of sex.” I went to porn conventions, talked to a woman turning sex dolls into purses, profiled an X-rated social media influencer making seven-figures a year, and learned how strippers across the country were navigating the coronavirus pandemic.

All of which has brought me here. I had this idea—well, truth be told, a few days ago. What if I brought The Reverse Cowgirl back as a newsletter? The first person I reached out to was Chris Bishop, the artist and illustrator who created the original Reverse Cowgirl logo, and who gave it an update for 2022. (See his awesome work at the top of this post.) This time, the tagline is: “All the sex news that’s fit to print.” It’s The New York Times on Viagra—or something like that. In any case, I’m looking forward to figuring this out together. Thanks for coming along for the ride.

xox

The Reverse Cowgirl

I’m a writer and consultant | Follow Me on Twitter | Follow me on Instagram | Email