The first time I became aware of Marie Calloway was in the late Fall of 2011, when I was serving as Editor-in-Chief of The New York Observer and the paper’s media reporter, Kat Stoeffel, pitched a profile of a young pseudonymous writer who had made a name for herself on sites like Thought Catalog, Tao Lin’s Muumuu House, and via her own blog, wherein she posted stories about sex she’d had with various people she met online.

To be honest, my first thought was, meh. Since the invention of blogging there had been a parade of attractive early 20-something women chronicling their sex lives online, and after a while, the obligatory posts about one’s first threesome begin to blur together. The novelty of the scenario for the writer is not nearly so novel for the reader — and neither were the attendant hyperbolic assertions that being young and female and writing unapologetically about casual sex was a universally positive manifestation of a vibrant third wave feminism, which I thought gave the genre too much credit. Writing about casual sex in graphic terms while being young, female, and attractive was not inherently provocative anymore, nor was it particularly interesting unless it was accompanied by other factors that lent originality to the practice. … Read More