Just Marissa's Sex Life

Wow, this has been an exciting and eventful week at Ask. I think I'm speaking not only for myself when I say I'd like to thank Laurie, Key, Nigel, and Anonymous Stalker (Dude With No Penis) for the fun you've provided in the last few days. It's been a veritable cornucopia of schadenfreude.

In all honesty, Just Me...Marissa was one of the most difficult blog reviews I've ever done. Reading it was literally the emotional equivalent of having an eating disorder and being assigned to review a pastry shop.

On to content...I like the blog design, Marissa. Do three things for me, okay, sweet britches? Get rid of the calendar, you don't need it, you already have an archive list. Make your archive list a drop-down one. I don't use wordpress, so I'm not sure exactly how this is done. Do a search of "drop-down archives wordpress" on google, and see if you can figure it out. It will be cleaner and neater. Lastly, you have already created topical buttons underneath your header. Create another one called "Blogroll" or "Links" and move it up there. That will make your sidebar clean and minimalistic so that it doesn't distract from your writing. You only post one post per page, so you need to shorten your sidebar for aesthetic purposes. You don't want it dangling way down below your post like a nasty bit of toilet paper stuck to your pants after a big job. It just looks sloppy. Capiche?

I'm going to use your review to address sidebar issues just for a second. Your sidebar is the primary navigation tool of your blog. It also is the place where people are going to look first (because we're programmed by standardized blog formats at this point) to see who you are and why you're blogging. If you are using your sidebar for other purposes besides navigation and to explain yourself, you will ultimately find yourself in a blogging Catch-22, where there are so many busy distractions on the page that your reader will have difficulty focusing on your priority--the content. You've done relatively well at keeping your sidebar free of annoying blinky twinklies, and for that, I commend you. Clean it up a bit more and I think your blog will look even better.

I have one other template related issue, and I think it is some kind of janky wordpress bug related to the template you've chosen. When you look at the individual post pages, it took me a while to realize, because I had to scroll down so far (because of your exceptionally lengthy sidebar dangling below your post), that your posts even had comments. I think that reducing your sidebar size will fix this bug, and you should do it for that reason alone. Comments are how your readers engage with you. Making the comments difficult to find reduces that interaction.

Now, last but not least, the part of the review I've been dreading: the content.

Clearly, you are a gifted writer. I was immediately hooked in after the first post, and read for a long, long time. And, after reading for a long time, I found another clear issue: Your blog lacks soul.

For the uninitiated, your blog is a story, told in chapters. The way you've done it is confusing, but having the chronological navigation tool helps immensely. Reading in those chapters quite extensively, I came to the heart of the matter. Namely, that there is no heart. You're the sexy tin woman.

Your blog delves deeply into your sexual journey, and you write erotic prose quite well. But, after reading a dozen or more posts, I realized I'd found the ultimate irony: You are willing to show us the very inside of your vagina, but you won't show us your heart.

Sex is all well and good, but for me at least, if there is no emotional connection, it gets old. Reading your blog, at this point, Marissa, is like reading a well-written but trashy romance novel. You write sex like nobody's business. But really? The plot is just an excuse to connect the sex scenes. At this point, for me, your blog is like watching Debbie Does Dallas. Oh, another penis. Another blowjob! And another penis. And whoo hoo! another blow job. *yawn* Ah, fuck me, another penis.

At this point, while you are trying, there IS no story, it is just one sex scene after another. There is no emotional connection to the protagonist. For instance, while you delve deeply into how you felt when your ex-husband watched you have sex, you never tell us why that marriage ended, even though you tell us after that you miss the compatibility you had with him. So, ultimately, after a while, your blog rings hollow.

You can write. I'll give you that. And I'm sure there are a ton of other sex bloggers who read your posts and love them. But, as I told Honeybell last week, just naked isn't enough for me. The blogs I get addicted to are the people that I start to care about, deeply and personally. And you didn't give me enough, emotionally, to feel engaged with you. Sadly ironic, because of all the bloggers I've read, you and I have the most in common.

So, perhaps this reveals more about my biases than about your blog. All reviews, though, are inherently biased, because they are rooted in personal opinion. Here is my bias: I find a person's emotional journey far more interesting than their sexual journey. And, I would like to encourage you to go there. In fact, as someone who has walked in the same set of shoes: I think you need to. I think it will help you heal.

I give you two stars for the well-written sex posts:



But, I give you



for the lack of soul.