Our dissolute list means…

Hyacinth and I have, to my knowledge, the only two blogs with “dissolute” in their title. (Don’t tell me I’m wrong, please. I like believing that.)

We started blogging at around the same time, and though she currently is monogamous, and her boyfriend (“the Neighbor”) only just found out about her blog, we have a lot in common, particularly with respect to our basic sensibilities and tastes. Not sexually – intellectually, intellisexually. We share a frustration at the sex blog landscape, and even more, at the sex blog curatorial landscape.

This isn’t to take anything away from some of the great efforts out there to make sense of the panoply of sexually oriented web sites – Rori and Molly all have done good individual work in compiling lists of blogs and ranking them in some form or fashion. Kinkly has started its own effort in recent months. Jane’s Guide offers thoughtful, opinionated, if dated, reviews. I like all these efforts, and I’m grateful to have been included in each of them at one time or another.

But each has one or both of two characteristics I’m not crazy about: opacity, a lack of clarity as to how they’re compiled, how entries are ranked; and over-inclusiveness, a tendency to include web sites that are visually hideous, poorly written, or simply not blogs about sex (i.e., sex toy reviews).

I have nothing against sex toy reviews, or blogs with painfully distracting layouts, or misspellings and grammatical errors in every post. I just don’t want to read them.

I offer, Hy offers, a few other folks out there (look at my blogroll for a few) offer something different. And/but I find it challenging to discover consistently interesting writing on the topics of sex, sexuality, and relationships, presented articulately, attractively, professionally.

For this reason, we are launching “The two dissolutes.” Once a month, each of us will present to you one smart, interesting, hot, thought-provoking post we think, on the basis of your enjoying our blogs, you might appreciate our calling to your attention. We’ll offer a little blurb about the post, setting the stage for you, explaining what moved us about it. And we will each react to the other’s selection, and thoughts.

We also will compile a sort of joint blogroll, a discriminating list of our favorite blogs. We don’t mean to “compete” with any of the other lists out there, but rather, to do something new, different.

If you see (or write) a blog you think we should know about, please tell us in the comments either here or on Hy’s blog. If you like what we’re doing, tell us. If you have suggestions as to how we might improve, please tell us.

And check back early next week for our first entry.

(A caveat: Hy is self-professedly lame at following through on projects like this. I’ve threatened to humiliate her publicly if she fails to follow through, and, while this is a far more compelling project to me with her, I reserve the right to post with or without her, should she neglect the commitment she’s made to do this with me. She may need a little encouragement from you in this regard as well.)