What Our Friends Thought.

After much, much, much, MUCH fucking debate, we told some friends about this blog.

"That's fucking AWESOME."
"Why didn't you tell us sooner?"
"Fleshbot???"
"The fucking Hairpin???"

We've had this blog going for almost two years now. So the fact that not a single friend knew about it is pretty shocking, even to us. We actually assumed some of our friends knew about it. Between Camille Crimson, Fleshbot and Cindy Gallop all talking about us at points, it only made sense that a friend jerked it to a video of ours.

Apparently not.

Here's how it all went down:

• Our first year or so was spent figuring out just what we were doing. Exploring each other. Exploring ourselves. And finding a very lovely, forthcoming and devout group of readers.
• When Camille Crimson (someone followed by a few friends) first wrote about us, we cleaned up our blog, cropping photos that made us feel like we'd revealed too much.
• In August 2011, Fleshbot found our first video and posted it. We reviewed our blog again, making sure there was nothing in there that would tip anyone off. Because shit, a LOT of our friends read Fleshbot. As they should.
• In November, Sophie Delancey reached out about attending the Fleshbot awards in NYC and maybe we should meet? We'd never met a person in real life with these personas. It was scary. It was fucking lovely.
• We talked about possibly revealing our identities and what that entails. And whether we were comfortable with it. And what might our lives look like if we did.
• We decided we were going to tell some friends. It was time. We were meeting some of our most sex positive friends for dinner that week and planned to just drop the bomb. Dinner came. Dinner went. We chickened out. It never felt right. Probably just because we weren't ready.
• We took it as some sort of sign. Like maybe we were actually somehow ashamed of the whole thing. Given this "sign", we decided to remain Anon and keep on trucking. "We'll just see what happens," we said.
• Cindy Gallop reached out to us around Christmas. It was SURREAL. We got to meet her at The Black Apartment!!! We had no one in our lives to tell this to. It KILLED us.
• We met with Cindy and her team from Make Love Not Porn, as detailed in Violet's Sex Diary: Part 2. Again, totally surreal and amazing.
• The next day, as we browsed the stats of our blog, we noticed a hell of a lot of traffic come from The Hairpin, one of our favorite websites (if you don't read it, change that). Yet another huge, surprising event that we wish we could tell our friends about, yet...
• Ultimately, after meeting with these lovely people in person, not to mention getting written about in one of our favorite websites, all people that are very much like us in their outlook and values, what we were doing with this blog felt more and more normal. Acceptable. Hot. Fun. Interesting. Needed.
• And so it went. We mentioned that we should probably tell some of our friends. Not be chickenshit this time. See how it goes. We chose the friends to tell. It was a different couple of friends this time.

We met up for trivia at our favorite local. We got a little drunk. The conversation (as it does) turned to sex. Specifically female masturbation. Our friend mentioned how much it upset her that guys found her frequent masturbation "hot". Which is another way of saying unexpected. And atypical. When in reality, it's anything but.

As she was about to expound on this point, I took a deep breath and said, "okay..."

Violet knew EXACTLY what that meant.

"Guys, we run a pretty popular porn blog."

And then came the reactions you saw at the top.

To say it was welcome would be a MASSIVE understatement. To say it was unexpected would be very much the same. Though why it was unexpected is beyond us.

These friends, like many of our friends, weren't really surprised to hear that we enjoy fucking.
They know we enjoy fucking.

They weren't surprised to hear that we write about that enjoyment.
They know we enjoy writing.

They weren't surprised to hear that we were filling the pages with photos and videos.
They know we love taking photos and making videos.

But the real key factor here was that somehow, during these endless hours of debate, we made ourselves believe that our friends would judge us for acting on these desires they already know us to enjoy. That they would ask us, "WHAT? WHY?" rather than celebrate our doing so, which is just what they've done.

On our way home from the bar, so relieved, so pleased, so blown away by the positivity and open-mindedness of their response, Violet turned into a puddle of happy tears. This meant that aside from really liking us, our friends really know us. And that feels pretty special.

So far, it's just the two of them. At times, we feel a bit guilty for giving this information to them and asking them, as well, to hold it inside.

We think we'll probably share this project with other people, in time. The amount of work we put into this blog, combined with our passion for what it stands for, makes us feel like we're really doing something right.