Yes­ter­day, this piece got posted on Metafil­ter.
In case you don’t want to click through, here’s a screen­cap:

The basic gist was this:

There’s a group of girls that blog about their life/art/fashion trends.
– Is this a move­ment?
– Are they friends?
– Is there a name for this?

My first thought was in fact, OH NO! WE’VE BEEN OUTED!

The truth is, we are actu­ally a secret soci­ety of lady blog­gers.
Our entrance require­ments are strict, and we are as secre­tive about it as the Freemasons. 

But there’s an easy and clear way into our lit­tle club: KNUCKLE TATS.

Myself, Nubby, Gilda & Marie

In all seri­ous­ness, the sim­ple answer to the ques­tions posed on metafil­ter is this:

We are friends!

The more com­pli­cated answer is a bit more inter­est­ing.
Look­ing at everyone’s com­ments really made me think about the qual­i­ties that we all have in com­mon, and I do think there are unique things that we share. 

Iden­tity is a curi­ous beast, and when you add the inter­net into the equa­tion, things start to get strange.
The line between myself and my work is nearly invis­i­ble; I do this on pur­pose.
Sim­i­larly, The way I rep­re­sent myself online is the way I rep­re­sent myself in my real life.
I see this blog an an ongo­ing project in doc­u­ment­ing the twists and turns of my life.
There are things that I share on here that are dif­fi­cult to make pub­lic in a pro­fes­sional con­text, like the fact that I work for a porn com­pany!
This how­ever, is of lit­tle con­cern to me. I can’t hide who I am when I meet peo­ple, and I shouldn’t have to hide who I am online either. The fact is that I love myself, and the best thing I can do is be myself wher­ever I go!

It’s really hard to put your­self out there in such an open and pub­lic way some­times, but all the ladies in our inces­tu­ous lit­tle group do it every sin­gle day. 

When I first met Nubby, Gala, and Marie in per­son there was no ques­tion that we would be close imme­di­ately.
I knew this because I real­ized that I already knew them as well as I know some of my long time IRL friends.

Many of us were long­time live­jour­nal blog­gers (I started in 2000!) and orig­i­nally met each other there.
These days, LJ seems to be a sink­ing ship of sorts, and we’ve all moved onto our own domains.
At this point, many of us have been read­ing each other and inter­act­ing for sev­eral years. 

The Soci­ety Speaks

Marie says: “I love this acci­den­tal col­lec­tive of lady­blog­gers. I think it’s a won­der­ful notion to have a bunch of cre­ative women who inspire each other and other ladies. Pos­i­tiv­ity on the inter­net is a pow­er­ful thing. And I am all about GIRL POWER.”

Nubby & Gala say: 

gal­adar­ling @nubbytwiglet Haha. Wak­ing up to that Metafil­ter thing was weird. Like, obvi­ously we’re all friends, are they not reading?!

nub­bytwiglet @galadarling We’re all friends, but are we a move­ment?! So strange.

gal­adar­ling @nubbytwiglet I don’t think so. It’s just per­son­al­ity brand­ing, which is old news, I guess it’s inter­est­ing because we’re cre­ative girls.

I say:
We believe in what we do, and we are not afraid to be vul­ner­a­ble.
We are authen­tic.
& yes, we are friends.