Here’s an interview with me by Bridget Freer in the Sunday Telegraph about guess what – how I gave up drinking. I think it works pretty well – you’re always going to wince a bit on seeing words attributed to yourself in print. But next time a pro comes to take my picture, I’m getting a stylist in.

And remembering the faintly disquieting #whatstigma hashtag business on Twitter, I’m still not totally happy with the d-word being attributed to me, despite its clear prevalence in so many peoples’ lives.

Which is partly why I hesitated to link to the piece here. I put it up on Facebook and got lots of lovely likes and comments. But I remember the words of various mentor figures in the last couple of years, about all the things about myself that I should hide if I want to get work as a freelance copywriter. Oh well – too late. Perhaps I’ll do a post and mention all of them!

I’ve been putting together a sequel to The Prostitution Conversation – Part One, but I keep finding myself hitting a wall. As I wandered down the alleys of sexuality, male and female, paid and unpaid, I scribbled a few things down (I tend to write longhand in cafes) and thought, ‘Hold on. I probably shouldn’t say that in a mainstream blog post with my real name on it.’

Really? Why? It’s not even personal stuff about me, after all.

People are still very, very confused about sex. It’s apparently okay to read about someone being tied up while a violent and horrible crime was being done to them, but if someone admits they were tied up consensually and liked it, cooked-up hysteria reigns, as if a crime of equal horror had been committed. The news is full of prostitution, domestic violence, the oversexualisation of children, the increase in STIs, and the failure of sex education. The dangers and predicaments that sex and sexuality can create are publicly discussed, endlessly, overexcitedly, and without embarrassment. But what about the other realities? Like the good stuff. The fun stuff. You know, the stuff that people think about all the time, even the ones that pretend they don’t. It’s apparently more taboo to discuss all that than the worst excesses of, say, Josef Fritzl.

Of course, lots of people, such as sex educators and bloggers, are doing just that. There’s plenty out there. A current favourite of mine is Quiet Riot Girl. But are you going to find anything in the mainstream media under someone’s real name? After all, remember the headache that Zoe Margolis aka Girl with a One Track Mind got when she was outed in the press? Although the majority of sex writers I know stick to pseudonyms, sometimes, the answer is occasionally yes. Catherine Townsend in the Independent, and other places, is (unless someone wants to correct me) one example. If you’re going to stick your real name on something to do with sex, you’d better be prepared to weather all kinds of labelling. As armour, you can go the media/TV route, like, for example, Tracey Cox. Or the academic/educator/campaigner route, like Dr Petra Boynton.

Anyway, sex writers are one thing. I wonder what would happen if a non-sex writer, an ordinary Joe or Joanna Journo, happened to write an explicit piece about sex in, for example, the Guardian. Could it happen?

Imagine an 800-word account of how much the author loves anal sex, (‘potting the brown’, ‘the train pulling into Colchester’ etc) which they would describe as a much misunderstood activity which is very satisfying when done right, as long as you observe the various health-related gotchas – a bit like collecting wild mushrooms or banger racing. Clearly, whether the author were a man or a woman, gay or straight, would dictate the consistency of foam in the comments. A male journalist might simply be called a rapist or a pig. And I think it would be open season on a straight person even more than if they were gay. If a straight woman were writing, Guardianista feminists (of which more anon) would be down on her like a ton of bricks.

But where does this leave me? Why should I care about blogging something explicit? I have no establishment job to jeopardise. I have written a sex column under my own name, and presented a sex-related radio show, also under my own name. I have written two novels which were kind of explicit in their own way, and a memoir which, while not containing that much sex, was a fairly detailed account of a state of mind in a life of consumption of substances, both legal and not. All under my own name. I’ve also been involved in campaigning and I don’t remember hiding my name then either. (At times, I sometimes wish I had used pseudonyms, to be honest, for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes there is more freedom in anonymity. But there you go, I didn’t.)

But now it’s different. It may be because my past output is already out there like a bunch of unruly children, grown-up now and getting on with their thing. I’ve done it and let it all go, so I’m not bothered. But a blog is realtime, it’s intimate; it’s me talking to you right now.

Oh look, another blog post that starts with a question but provides no answer. Sorry about that.

However, due to the flood of requests to start up again, here I am. Plus, I just had a wonderful holiday in Greece, and it’s autumn, which always makes me feel relieved.

I’m still on Tweet Strike, mind.