Sex sells, but it doesn’t spell

As an emin­ent blog­ging type per­son who is on the A-list — oh sorry, that should read “on a list” — I often receive emails from com­pan­ies wish­ing to take advant­age of some of the passing trade that might be provided by you, my huge ret­inue of ardent, swoon­ing and no doubt excep­tion­ally moist readers.

Without fail, I always respond to such requests by per­son­ally con­tact­ing the company’s mar­ket­ing man­ager and telling him or her to shove it where the sun doesn’t shine, though I gen­er­ally put this in rather more polite terms:

“May I respect­fully sug­gest that fol­low­ers of An Unre­li­able Wit­ness are not merely anonym­ous fod­der for your cheap and taw­dry garden gnomes / leather fur­nish­ings / dec­or­at­ive awn­ings / wind-up mech­an­ical ger­bils? (Delete as applic­able.) Besides which, I do not place advert­ise­ments on my site for less than £10,000 a week. I get nearly as many hits as Dooce, you know. More or less. If you round it up to the nearest half a mil­lion. Now kindly sod off, do not darken my doors again, and take your link exchange and mar­ket­ing oppor­tun­ity with you, you hor­rible little person.”

How­ever, in an extraordin­ary volte-face, today I received an elec­tronic missive from another such com­pany, and have decided to take pity on their request and give them the ran­cid, foul-smelling car­bon monox­ide of pub­li­city that they so desire from my humble inter­net pres­ence. Why? Well, it’s because they con­tac­ted me per­son­ally. Me alone. Nobody else. None of you other cheap, second-rate blog­gers who would advert­ise your grandmother’s spare kid­ney on your site if you thought it would earn you a paltry couple of quid. No, just me. They clearly appre­ci­ate true genius when they see it, and were so moved by my obfus­cat­ory, impen­et­rable writ­ings about eye­lids that they even addressed me by name, hav­ing no doubt per­used each and every entry from begin­ning to end. Assum­ing, of course, that they were read­ing one of the entries that actu­ally has a begin­ning and an end — which, as some com­menters have fre­quently poin­ted out, is very rare in this unre­li­ably wit­nessed world. Oh dear.

Any­way, to busi­ness — because, after all, busi­ness and mak­ing money is clearly what this par­tic­u­lar com­pany thinks my site is all about. You’ll have noticed how it’s cur­rently abso­lutely burst­ing at the seams with unsuit­able and com­pletely irrel­ev­ant Google ads, after all.

The grimy, back-street out­fit we are con­cerned with is called Eden­Fantasys, and — well, I’m sure you’re ahead of me on this one, aren’t you? Yes, sadly their name imme­di­ately presents a prob­lem to someone quite so gram­mat­ic­ally and lin­guist­ic­ally anally retent­ive as myself. Not only would I strongly advise Eden­Fantasys that they may wish to split their company’s title into two sep­ar­ate words, as the Eng­lish lan­guage inten­ded in the way wot she is wrote, but it might also be for the best if they could spell ‘fantas­ies’ cor­rectly before they try to sign me up to their latest inter­net advert­ising campaign.

Note for Eden­Fantasys mar­ket­ing depart­ment: You’ll observe that I gave you a link in that pre­vi­ous para­graph. That’s the only one you’re get­ting. I hope it brings you many hours of joy, hun­dreds of hits from the many sexu­ally frus­trated read­ers of An Unre­li­able Wit­ness, and at least £1.72 in clear profit, seventy-five per cent of which I will then expect to be imme­di­ately paid into my off­shore bank account. Thank you.

The email from Eden­Fantasy (heav­ens, it wounds me to the core every time I have to type that flag­rant mis­spelling) is titled Won­der­ful blog! — oh, you’re too kind, far too kind — and begins thus:

“Hello, I came across your blog http://www.unreliablewitness.com/ — very nice and inter­est­ing. It was a pleas­ure to browse your blog. You have very express­ive and inter­est­ing writ­ings on your blog, and I wish you all the best in your fur­ther blogging.”

Nice and inter­est­ing. Oh please, damn me with some more of your faint praise, why don’t you? Still, it was ‘nice and inter­est­ing’ of you to print the URL in full, though it might have made the tone more wel­com­ing and informal if you had bothered to at least write out the full name of the site whose cus­tom you are pur­su­ing. Fur­ther­more, Eng­lish teach­ers as far back as my spotty days at primary school have always taught me never to repeat words too often in close prox­im­ity. Blog. Blog. Blog. Blog­ging. I shall say no more.

“I am Chris Wil­li­ams, from EdenFantasys.com com­pany, may I hope that you’ve already heard about it.”

Chris, it’s an abso­lute dis­pleas­ure to make your acquaint­ance. I’m afraid that I haven’t heard of your com­pany, no. Silly me. Sadly, the most excit­ing online shop­ping I do these days is when I loiter for slightly too long, per­haps in a slightly sus­pi­cious man­ner, in the fresh fruit and veget­ables sec­tion of my vir­tual Tesco supermarket.

“Our store is selling adult toys and gifts, DVDs, erotic books, and lingerie … We even have a whole site ded­ic­ated to edu­ca­tional and funny sexy material.”

Oh, so your site is edu­ca­tional too! Well, why on earth didn’t you say, Chris? That instantly makes it all bet­ter. You’re obvi­ously try­ing to appeal to the high­brow intel­lect of the aver­age reader of my site, since they need to be quite bright to under­stand some of the long words I retrieve from the darkest corners of my well-thumbed thesaurus. Not to men­tion the ridicu­lously laboured meta­phors and hifalutin poetic allu­sions. So that’s a good call, Mr Wil­li­ams. A very good call indeed.

Sadly, how­ever, whilst my read­ers might wish to avail them­selves of your “edu­ca­tional mater­ial”, I per­son­ally have no need of it, since I learnt all I needed to know about sex from a child­hood diet of immensely risqué Carry On movies, and an early 1980s sex edu­ca­tion series for schools. This was presen­ted by a stern, white-haired Scot­tish man who, as far as I can recall from those deeply troub­ling pre-pubescent years, resembled noth­ing quite so much as a stern, God-fearing, Bible-brandishing Pres­by­terian min­is­ter shout­ing at the wicked chil­dren to refrain from all vile and dis­gust­ing acts of pro­cre­ation, or else their favour­ite pet kit­ten would be roas­ted alive by a light­ning bolt of retri­bu­tion sent by a venge­ful Lord. Both these influ­ences turned me into the well-rounded and utterly ter­ri­fied indi­vidual I am today, and thus explains why I myself shall not be tak­ing advant­age of EdenFantasy’s “free ship­ping”, “dis­creet billing” and “hot deals”.

“We would like to estab­lish a rela­tion­ship with your site for bet­ter serve our and your vis­it­ors. This can con­tain simple link exchange, and I hope our cus­tom­ers will appre­ci­ate if we can give them a note about such qual­ity resource. We will also appre­ci­ate a link from your blog to our site.”

Gosh, if I’m hon­est then a link exchange does sound rather excit­ing. I’m sure that some of the cur­rent occu­pants of the ‘E’ sec­tion on my links list would very much like to get into bed with your com­pany. Meta­phor­ic­ally, of course. In a man­ner of speak­ing. As long as you prom­ise that there will be no tongues involved. Or whips. Per­ish the thought.

So let’s talk about my link from your site instead, shall we, Chris? I have done the neces­sary intens­ive mar­ket research and checked out the vari­ous cat­egor­ies in your ‘Shop adult toys’ nav­ig­a­tion, which has led me to the con­clu­sion that a prom­in­ent men­tion of An Unre­li­able Wit­ness would be best suited to the ‘mas­turb­at­ors’ pages, since every­one knows that blog­ging is little more than verbal mas­turb­a­tion, albeit with a slightly big­ger audi­ence (if you’re lucky) than the sol­it­ary pur­suit of self-pleasure usu­ally attracts.

Plus, as any blog­ger will read­ily tell you, this pas­time involves sit­ting at home in the semi-darkness, star­ing at a com­puter screen, feel­ing a mount­ing sense of anti­cip­a­tion as you think that some sort of emo­tional release might be pro­duced from such fren­zied activ­ity, only for the messy end res­ult to be swiftly fol­lowed by crush­ing dis­ap­point­ment, self-loathing, and a des­per­ate desire for a ful­filling social life. And mas­turb­a­tion is very similar.

“We also have a lot of other ways of part­ner­ships, that you can find on our site.”

How about products branded with my site name, Chris? What do you think? I’m firmly con­vinced that a line of ‘Unre­li­able Sex Toys’ would sell like hot cakes. Sug­ges­ted products could include vibrat­ors with leaky bat­ter­ies, for instance. Or a flog­ger without tails, thereby ren­der­ing it utterly use­less and dis­tinctly lack­ing in sting­ing pleas­ure. Maybe some lub­ric­ant with a Best Before date of July 1999, which is now slowly fes­ter­ing and breed­ing harm­ful tox­ins under a thin layer of scaly mould. Or hand­cuffs where the con­nect­ing chain has been snapped in half, so that it offers no restraint what­so­ever. By print­ing my site’s entirely mem­or­able URL on each item, it would be almost guar­an­teed that the sexu­ally frus­trated and dis­ap­poin­ted lov­ers would go online and visit my site after their night of clumsy, fumbled and utterly bewil­der­ing attempts at com­mit­ting vari­ous depraved acts with their Unre­li­able products. Instant hits for me, and I don’t even need to worry about them leav­ing my site feel­ing unsat­is­fied, because they will already be in that state when they arrive here.

“Please mail us your decision, or any other ideas, as we are def­in­itely open to any good ideas.”

My decision is prob­ably unprint­able, Chris, as are the vari­ous good ideas about what you and your col­leagues at Eden­Fantasys can do with your email. Let’s just say, how­ever, that you might require some of your own branded lub­ric­a­tion. And some oint­ment in the morning.