This week on NSFW Sunday: sex writing, keeping your toys clean, and pretending you’re in Better Than Chocolate.

Sex bloggers: As part of the ongoing Murdoch British tabloid scandal, Dr. Brooke Magnanti, who blogged and published several books about her life as a London escort, has said that Sunday Times reporters tried to track her with a trojan:

“Very early on in blogging as Belle de Jour, I had an email address associated with the blog. It was with one of those free email providers and not very secure. Later, I wised up a touch and moved to doing everything through Hushmail. But for some reason I kept the old email up and running, and checked it occasionally.

So on the day of the book’s release in the UK, I logged on to a public library computer in Clearwater, Florida, and had a look at that old account. There was a new message from someone I didn’t recognise. I opened it.

The message was from a journo at the Sunday Times. It was short, which struck me as unusual: Come on Belle, not even a little hint? There was an attachment. The attachment started downloading automatically (then if I remember correctly, came up with a “failed to download” message).

My heart sank – my suspicion was that there had been a program attached to the message, some sort of trojan, presumably trying to get information from my computer.”

Zoe Margolis, author of Girl With a One Track Mind, tweeted that similar thing happened to her.

Women writing about sex: In the Guardian, Monique Roffey writes about (non-fiction) writing about sex:

“Anyone who chooses to write about sex will attract stinging criticism from the moral right and so, relatively speaking, sexual memoirs are still rare. And they are mostly written by women.”

On sex columns: Via Emily Nagoski:

“The ubiquity of sex writing that neglects actual helpfulness or accuracy and focuses exclusively on entertainment just makes life harder for anyone whose job it is to untangle the sociopsychological knots that popular culture, including these columns, create in people’s sexualities.

People really, truly want to know how to be better lovers, understand what their partner wants, and how to be more attractive to their crush object. People arestarving for this information. It’s why they read the columns, at least in part. I can’t be the only person who, at 18, read these kinds of things ravenously, only to be left bloated and disappointed. It’s like giving candy to a starving person: hell yes it will taste good and it might even make them feel full, but it won’t actually nourish them.”

Or maybe: you want to write about sex yourself. That book’s by Susie Bright, the queen of sex writing. Once upon a time our Autostraddle editor-in-chief wrote about sex, true story.

Google+: If you post nudity or sexually explicit content on Google+. your Google account can be suspended. Violet Blue says:

“I don’t think a lot of people realize yet that the default photo and image albums are Picassa, which has zero tolerance for nudity or borderline content, and does not offer users content rating controls (such as the ability to mark things as “moderate” or “restricted”) to remain within the Picassa/G+ content guidelines. I have already seen artists (in one case, a painter) trying to creatively set content advisory warnings for their work. I also see people expressing they’re glad that ‘because of Circles’ they won’t have to worry about mom seeing their nekkid photos by accident, like on Facebook.

This worries me very, very much.”

Cleaning your sex toys: It’s important. Here’s how to do it.

Monogamy: A new installment in Salon’s an ongoing series on monogamy talks about why it’s hard to find a researcher to defend it, jealousy, and social versus sexual pairing:

“Sexual monogamy isn’t a different system, it’s just a different component of it. It’s expected in species that pair bond, but rarely do any of them actually do it. Humans can, but it really all depends on our decision-making and whether we want to. So we’re really a weird beast in this case.”

More monogamy: On Tuesday, Dan Savage appeared on the Colbert Report to also talk about monogamy, and how it can doom relationships.

Sex and art: Maybe you like having sex and maybe you like painting and maybe you want to do both at the same time, just like in Better than Chocolate.

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