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Sex and Relationship forum

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Tryphena Absent

01:51 / 10.08.05

Am I the only person who finds the prospect of a forum like this utterly terrifying?

A lot of long term members aren't going to post threads in a sex and relationships/personal lives forum because frankly a lot of them are together. Their partners are on barbelith or read barbelith or they have close friends and simple acquaintances on barbelith so any personal information that they regard as intimate is not going to be posted here. How many of us would be happy with other members of barbelith who we go to the pub with knowing about our sex lives? So, basing this on my own experience of the board, presuming that half of the London crowd don't want me to know anything about their specific relationship with [insert name here] or their masturbation fantasies, roleplay, BDSM acts etc that's 20 prolific posters who aren't contributing specific personal information to the proposed forum just off the top of my head. When I extend that to the number of people who know at least one other person on the board very well and would be embarrassed with that kind of content it leaves me with some new members and the odd person here and there.

So that leaves me imagining a forum where people talk about their tragic love angst and imminent marriage/baby/funeral and those subjects, for me, are the primary content of conversation because they're basic conversational matter. Thus I think that we'd be doing conversation a disservice by opening this forum because it would be left with Lateshift, barbequotes, links and the odd information thread here and there. No threads about a person's mood if we extend the remit to a personal space because that would go in the new forum. Go and look at the front page of conversation and think about the content of the forum and I think you'll see a very boring space without any of the personal threads.

Tryphena Absent

01:52 / 10.08.05

Just to clarify it's the potential number of angst threads I find terrifying.

02:28 / 10.08.05

I think a sex forum would inspire people to talk more about their sex and lovelives than the conversation forum ever could. It's like an open invitation to vent about things that a lot of people normally are afraid to open up about. And I think the fact that it's a Barbelith sex forum would make it even more intriguing and useful.

Regrettable Juvenilia

07:36 / 10.08.05

I have a slightly different take on this than Nina: since a lot of people on the board are in touch with each other off the board in different ways (online and off), I can't imagine them/us ever wanting to post about our own sex lives here when we could discuss it with people in such a format that it doesn't run the risk of being read by people they/we don't trust...

08:58 / 10.08.05

How many of us would be happy with other members of barbelith who we go to the pub with knowing about our sex lives?

The people I drink with know more about my sex life than anyone else. I kinda thought that was true for most people.

I think Flyboy’s closer here. The 20 prolific posters Nina talks about might well prefer to keep these kinds of conversations in the pub, where they more traditionally belong, rather than commit their thoughts to print and have them published on the web for all eternity. That, I think, could be a problem, but I don’t know if it’s prohibitive. In one sense that’s fine and as it should be – there are all kinds of things that I won’t talk about here for various reasons but so far, to my knowledge, no thread has ever been scuppered by me or anyone I know not contributing to it (I’m gutted to say).

Like I said, I think there are ways around the anonymity thing where it’s important. There might be other ways to calm other anxieties. Certain threads could be set to self-destruct after a certain amount of time, for example. But I might be wrong about all of this. It could be that people in general are much more reluctant to talk about sex than I imagined.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

10:29 / 10.08.05

The more I think about the more I think it would be just a bad idea. The limits I feel comfortable at in disclosing my sex life are quite comfortably bound by the Head Shop thanks.

Going back to Whisky Priestesses criteria:

a) have just come out of a relationship and want to talk about it A LOT

This sounds extremely boring but also conversation material. Why create a forum for endless "I'm so glad I dumped her/him" posts? Get your own blog/LJ...

b) want to skip straight to the juicy stuff

Why should I have the slightest interest what someone is doing with him/her?Are we going to call this thread 'Poster's Wives'? And why, after this board has been going for almost half a decade has no-one else felt a need for a forum so they can talk dirty?

c) want to avoid any mention or whiff of love, sex and so forth, and need a safe space in the Conversation, (i.e. someone who has been in the a) category, given a month.)

I'm not even sure that I understand what this means but I think the answer would be that if you want to talk to Barbelith but don't want to talk to Barbelith then get a blog or LJ, get it listed in the list of Barbeloid's blogs and take it from there.

If there is a case to be made it's not done so here and I think the potential for harm is a real one.

Tryphena Absent

11:58 / 10.08.05

The people I drink with know more about my sex life than anyone else. I kinda thought that was true for most people.

Actually my point was that everyone at a barbelith gathering would know, not the people you chose to talk to and barbelith as a forum expects detail not little snippets thrown (unsubtly) into a conversation.

12:35 / 10.08.05

You know, the more people shudder and sweat at the prospect of this forum, the more I ache to know the things they fear becoming public. You’re all filthy, must be.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

12:51 / 10.08.05

My main objection's fairly selfish- I don't tend to talk about sex a great deal, so I probably wouldn't spend much time there, and I can't help but think the Conversation would have been a much poorer place robbed of Steve and the like.

13:54 / 10.08.05

Some of the objections being voiced here seem a bit strange. There seems to be an underlying assumption that the minute a sex forum opened up (like a flower,) people who are presumably otherwise perfectly capable(ish) of managing their 'on-line' identities would suddenly throw caution to the wind and start posting all kinds of embarrassing personal confessions they'd later regret. I'm really not sure why that, at least necessarily, would be the case. Anyone who wants to spill out over the sides to whoever's around on the internet has already got ample opportunity, surely ? Why would a sex forum in particular exacerbate the situation ? I mean the fact that 'I'm' not especially keen on discussing the various extreme right wing paramilitary groups I'm a member of IRL in the Switchboard doesn't invalidate that as a forum, so...

And while granted, a lot of people probably would just lurk, take the piss or log on ghoulishly in much the same spirit as a coachload of OAPs at a WWF smackdown, it's not, let's face it, as if that doesn't go on elsewhere.

Finally, a sex forum wouldn't necessarily have to be all about 'sharing' in any case, would it? If it's ok to to talk (relatively) dispassionately about New Labour, Kid Flash or the Great God Pan, it's difficult to see why the same wouldn't be true of say, I don't know, waxplay.

13:56 / 10.08.05

On the Steve issue though, I wholeheartedly agree.

14:25 / 10.08.05

Oh the Steve threads are pure Conversation, always would be. Which is why I disagree with Nina about this:

So that leaves me imagining a forum where people talk about their tragic love angst and imminent marriage/baby/funeral and those subjects, for me, are the primary content of conversation because they're basic conversational matter. Thus I think that we'd be doing conversation a disservice by opening this forum because it would be left with Lateshift, barbequotes, links and the odd information thread here and there.

I agree that Legba’s idea of extending the remit to cover mood and personal space would be going way too far, but if it were strictly ‘Sex & Relationships’ then by my reckoning the current Convo front page would lose, at most, just one thread – Tom Tit’s ‘Countdown To A Baby’. If we go on to page two, you’d only add to that my ‘Significant Other’ thread, and possibly Barbecrush (but that’s pushing it. More likely you’d get a companion piece – ‘Barbecrush – The Flyboy Rules’). Page three: ‘Wedding List Dilemmas’ and maybe ‘Codes Of Honour’. So, yeah, the Conversation would lose something, maybe one thread in every 30? It lost threads to Games and there seem to be no regrets about that.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

17:11 / 10.08.05

Yes, and so far G&G is a roaring success...

Tryphena Absent

23:54 / 10.08.05

So, yeah, the Conversation would lose something, maybe one thread in every 30?

Yeah almost every reason to read Conversation. As of the front page at 01.47 we'll be left with Lateshift, Martial Arts, The Slug I just saw on the porch, ban me, barbelith's new friends, gardeners, barbequotes, Look Outside... some of those are entertaining but anything emotional will be wiped from its fair pages. And if none of the emotion threads are going to go into this new emotional forum then what the hell is?

Basically Smoothly if you're so willing to talk about your sex life and react happily to everyone else's I think you should bloody well give us an example of what you're going to write in this new forum right now. And it better be revealing or we're going to think you're a simple voyeur who wants to read filthy details about everyone else.

08:15 / 11.08.05

I’m not sure, Nina. Something about my voyeurism maybe. Or how emotional things aren’t necessarily sexual things. Although I’d certainly want to bring you into the discussion, so perhaps a thread about how wanking is better than sex because no one has to see you naked. Or how a speculum-fingered uncle left me incapable of even *talking* about sex.

11:09 / 11.08.05

Hmm. My problem with the idea of a Sex & Foreplay forum is that what I'd mostly want it to do is talk about the mechanics of sex - it would be a good place for threads like this one, on strap-ons, or this one, on female ejaculation - but, like Nina says, due to the non-anonymity of (a) not being very careful about posting potentially identifying details and (b) knowing posters off-board in a variety of ways, I probably wouldn't want to go into the level of detail that would be required to make the forum useful.

Whisky Priestess

11:20 / 11.08.05

It has come to my attention that my initial post sounded more than a little flippant. However, something that basically started off as a drunken what-if is beginning to make a lot more sense to me thanks to other people's comments in this thread, so I reckon I should step in to defend my original notion.

OK, two further things occur to me initially (this may be a piecemeal defence cos I'm supposed to be working).

One is that people are swinging wildly in their assumptions of what it will contain - one minute it's going to consist entirely of gruesomely detailed tru-life confessions, which is bad cos all the people who know each other IRL won't be able to look each other in the eye when they discover who uses Pot Noodle as a sex aid - the next it'll be full of porn, or crush threads, or whatever.

However, I think one of the reasons to have a Sex and Relationships Forum is the sort of wide-ranging variety that will hopefully thrive within its moist pink walls - off the top of my head, here are some things I would like to discuss:
- What makes a bear? (an info thread)
- The bearded lady: what do you call blokes who go/hang out with girls who are in denial about their lesbianism? (an info/terminology/discussion thread)
- Alex and Flyboy Up A Tree: the weirdest place you've ever had sex (a sex/gossip thread)
- Moving out and moving on - the social and technical problems of breaking up with your live-in lover and how to survive them (a help/relationships thread)
- Pot Noodle as sex aid: how hot is too hot? (a joke thread)

I promise to start all of them them if the forum happens, too. Especially the Pot Noodle one - is it going too far to use a Seedy Sanchez?

The other thing is that we'll never know whether it'll be a roaring success or a dismal failure unless we try (or at least thrash out our objections or reasons for lovin' it) - and surely to God sex and relationships are a bigger part of most people's lives than games and flipping gameplay, and that's got a whole forum all to itself.

I think that the reason we are all here and the reason most us choose to remain deserves its own forum. So there.

Whisky Priestess

11:23 / 11.08.05

surely to God sex and relationships are a bigger part of most people's lives than games and flipping gameplay

Spot the deliberate mistake!

This is Barbelith - what was I thinking?

11:26 / 11.08.05

I think there's too much focus on the specifics of this new forum, with regards to in being all about red hot loving. I saw it, from Smoothly's comments above, as where we could have "serious chats"* without the signal to noise ratio of the Conversation, whether these refered to bumping uglies with someone or not. If it was specifically about SSSEESEX and relationships, I'd think there might be a slow take up, for precisely the reasons identified above.

Conversation and Headshop (and the Temple, at it's best) do seem to cover a lot about these areas, though, so I'm still not entirely convinced.

*that does sound a bit "come into my office, you naughty little boy, it's time six of the best" and were back to sex all over again.

Tryphena Absent

12:24 / 11.08.05

so perhaps a thread about how wanking is better than sex because no one has to see you naked

I'm sorry Smoothly was there something specific you were trying to say there? Because I'm failing to see how not wanting to publish your personal life on the Internet equates to a fear of nudity. And I notice that you've failed to reveal anything about yourself at all, I think I'm not the person failing to put their money where their mouth is here.

And Whisky, what you're saying is that when we swing wildly in our interpretation we're correct to do so? Which means that all interesting threads really would be ciphered out of conversation? Good to know. So this is going to be a forum in which people talk generally but not revealingly about sex and their personal lives, which will contain material that we may regard as inconsistent because of its huge range and Smoothly will try to encourage other people to post pornographic accounts of their sex lives while laughing at his computer screen and failing to "return the favour".

You know, it sounds like Conversation to me.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

13:18 / 11.08.05

It also occurs to me that I'd have missed both the recent "Barbeloids having babies" threads if they'd been in a new forum which I didn't read much, and I think Conversation would have been worse off without those as well.

I think the remit needs to be much more specific if this is to be a sensible idea.

Whisky Priestess

13:34 / 11.08.05

I think it would be very very difficult to remove all the interesting threads from Conversation, and my personal favourites (and the most popular ones) in that forum don't come anywhere near the remit of the proposed S&R Forum.

Just to clarify - I am not proposing this because I want to steal anyone's toys, and I don't think the Convo will be poorer because room has been made for a new forum. I just think, given a chance, it would be a good idea and an interesting place.

If your principal objection to a Sex and Relationships forum is "Well, me and my friends wouldn't want to post in it, so what's the point?", you are quite within your rights to make that known, but I'm not sure that's enough to deal a death-blow to the whole idea. Simple answer - don't post in it. That's what I do with Comics and Temple, but I don't object to their existence just because they hold no interest for me. There are over five thousand posters registered on this board - I'm sure someone would find something to talk about.

Like the man said, "If you build it, they will come".

Ahem.

Sorry.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

13:48 / 11.08.05

Oh, I have no problem with there being one... I think I'm just worried we might lose some fun stuff from the Conversation, and also that I could foresee problems if someone had posted something which to them was daringly soul-baring and then had it shifted to Conversation because it was deemed more appropriate there. I could see people finding that a little hurtful in a way a move from another forum doesn't really do.

I think it's a good idea- it just needs to be very well defined.

*

12:47 / 12.08.05

I've been sent over here from the Grand Experiment to say what I should have said earlier, instead of sitting around on my thumbs feeling like this decision belongs to the people whom Barbelith "really" belongs to and my input isn't important.

I would talk in a sex and relationships forum. If I felt like I had given too much away with this ficsuit, I'd delete it and return to the board in a few months or a year with another, but that's unlikely. Honestly, people don't care enough about my sex life to make it worth trying to conceal information I would readily share with RL friends when that's the topic of conversation. I don't feel like anyone on the board is going to find what I do in bed so scandalous that they would harass me for it. I feel like I could learn a lot from listening to other people talk about their relationships— completely aside from the BDSM skillshare and kinky/vanilla sex tips I expect would occur there as well. I also think it would be nice to have a place where people were encouraged to be mature about talking about sex and relationships in a personal way, and I think Convo is not that place.

I also understand the need to keep the number of fora to a minimum, because I've seen on other boards how doing so increases the total amount of interaction.

13:27 / 12.08.05

Yes, and so far G&G is a roaring success...

Any time you feel like contributing a bit more to it in order to help it pick up, be my guest.

Regrettable Juvenilia

15:07 / 12.08.05

I don't understand, is Games & Gameplay not seen as a success? Having an average of 1 thread that's updated half a dozen times a day as yr most popular thread is quite normal for Barbelith forums, innit?

18:34 / 12.08.05

Unfortunately, another of the things that's become quite normal for Barbelith is jumping in to complain about how shit things are without having actually done anything to change that situation yourself.

20:00 / 12.08.05

I think games is finding it's feet and doing quite well. It seems a little bit confused at time, and the clash of gaming gamers and sporting gamers is sometimes very apparent. The idea of a relationship forum could be good.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

20:00 / 12.08.05

...something Barbeloids also tend to do when discussing relationships. Not sure what that means, exactly...

(incidentally, what IS wrong with G&G?)

rising and revolving

22:02 / 12.08.05

Heck, I read it at face value, not as sarcasm. G&G seems to be doing as well as just about any other forum on here. Admittedly it's probably the forum that currently falls closest to conversation in terms of being a little anecdotal, but there's also some good stuff in there.

The biggest ongoing problem I see the forum having is quality stuff sinking beneath the anecdotes. But I'm definately open to people with suggestions as to how to improve the place - either how they can, or how I can.

23:23 / 12.08.05

I know I'm as guilty of this as anybody, but it might be an idea for those with suggestions for G&G to post them to the dedicated thread here, so that we don't drag this one off-topic by accident.

Suggestions. Not useless snide comments.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

08:33 / 13.08.05

Point taken.

But I've yet to see many arguments for the forum, for the useful ends it could be done, Deva seems to think it might be quite useful, but Whisky Priestess can't seem to come up with more than a desire to start a load of joke threads. Looking at the keywords for this thread I see nothing that wouldn't fit into existing fora.

09:28 / 13.08.05

Neither can I, really. I don't think there's a case for a "safe space" argument; there's no prejudice that I can see against people posting such stuff, as I've said. I could see the argument for a specific forum about actual sex, but as Ganesh says, we don't really seem to talk about sex that much in the first place.

I think there's a bit of forumitis going on here. We want to be careful about adding forums, or we'll end up with a huge splintered rainbow that takes ages to check, as well as even more boring arguments about "should this go in here? shall we move this to here? is this appropriate/on topic for this forum?" and the need to assign more mods.

I tend to think that, unless there's a really clear case that there is a need that's not being met or a clear, agreed objective, new forums should only be added when there's a critical mass of posts on a particular, identifiable topic which are either getting lost or clogging up other forums.

09:50 / 13.08.05

Whisky Priestess can't seem to come up more than a desire to start a load of joke threads

Well a) what's wrong with joke threads, as long as they're entertaining? Not 'everyone' takes this board entirely seriously, and, as long as they're not upsetting anyone else, I don't particularly see why they should have to, either. And, b) see ER Smiths comments above. 'Spesh the last one.

There would admittedly be a certain amount of overlap between a sex forum and some of the others, but isn't that pretty much the case already? Threads which start 'Not totally sure where this should be, mods feel free to impale me on a trident, like some kind of worm,' etc are hardly unusual.

And as far as the keywords go, fisting, bloodplay and fucktoy seem, as examples, like subjects that might be a bit too extreme for the conversation, and, equally, not entirely at home in the head shop, alternatively. It might be at least interesting to think of the mooted forum as the body shop, or related. Don't some of us live in our braynes 2 much!!!eleven!!!!!!

And wouldn't it be a bit, y'know, better to be a member of an online community that was happy enough to discuss teh sex in an open, adult and frank way (so sometimes as a joke, and at other times not,) as opposed to say computer games, (also something I haven't really been involved with since the mid-to-late Nineties)?

Our Lady Has Left the Building

10:32 / 13.08.05

But joke threads are not really a good enough reason to start an entirely new forum...

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