The merging of data and creativity has long been a north star at Comscore. Now, with the help of artificial intelligence technology, the intersection of art and science is expanding to include new possibilities such as helping marketers shape or create video, images and text content, or predicting a consumer’s digital behavior.

Another year of the NBA Finals has come and gone, and for the first time in history, the Denver Nuggets are NBA Champions. The five-game series didn’t just make a splash in the NBA history books though, as the series garnered strong ratings and viewership across linear television. 

In the lead up to this year’s Prime Day, we took a closer look at the transactions, visits, and unique visitors in recent years to spotlight some key shifts in consumer behavior.

Once every four years the world’s best women’s soccer players battle it out to honor their countries and chase the title of world champion. 

El sábado 1 de julio de 2023, tuvo lugar el evento más destacado del mundo del streaming. Ibai Llanos, el reconocido streamer, youtuber y presentador español, organizó 'La Velada del Año 3', un emocionante encuentro que reunió a varios streamers, youtubers y artistas de España y Latinoamérica en un ring de boxeo ubicado en el estadio Cívitas Metropolitano de Madrid. El evento fue todo un éxito, con una gran multitud de fanáticos entusiastas que disfrutaron del espectáculo en vivo, mientras que muchos otros lo siguieron a través de Twitch.

Nos últimos tempos, a América Latina experimentou um rápido crescimento no uso de CTV, graças à ampla variedade de conteúdo e à expansão das plataformas de streaming de vídeo. Embora na América Latina o consumo tenha crescido consideravelmente, atingindo mais de 150 milhões de espectadores, o equivalente a 41% da população digital latino-americana, quando olhamos para os cortes de consumo por país, identificamos grandes lacunas na região, que representam oportunidades de crescimento em cada país.

Picture this: The leaves are starting to change, the days are getting shorter and school is back in full swing. These telltale signs can only mean one thing. Fall has arrived.  

Wimbledon 2023 wrapped up with a men’s final tennis masterclass, and social media didn't miss out on the action.

It’s a critical time for the industry, and we’ve seen a real boost for the theatrical movie business, with the double release of Barbie and Oppenheimer globally.

Our Comscore Markets Interactive Map, enriched with data from the American Communities Project, provides a more granular view of local audiences extending to the county level. Broadcasters and cable networks can feature their local reach down to the community level, and advertisers can fine-tune their channel mix to reach their best audiences.

It’s a critical time for the industry, and we’ve seen a real boost for the theatrical movie business, with the double release of Barbie and Oppenheimer globally.

If you took away one thing from this year’s UpFronts it was likely about the growing popularity of connected TV. 

From June 2022 to June 2023, there was a 22% increase in the number of females aged 18-24 who visited a sports website or app, more than any other age and gender breakout¹. This is happening as women's sports are becoming more mainstream, with new leagues, more investment, and increased screen time. It's also a major trend to watch during the 2023 Women's FIFA World Cup.

How can you improve your negotiation skills even if you HATE to negotiate? Here 7 of my best tips to help you get what you want… #1 Ask Yourself These 2 Questions… You might think that in order to negotiate better you have to strong-arm people. Like… You walk into the room and DEMAND to […]

Ahh!! The last couple of months have been CRAZY busy… So, I stopped taking breaks because I thought I could get MORE done. The problem? My productivity completely tanked. Something needed to change. And I had a lot of questions… Like, how do breaks help or hurt your productivity? How do you take an effective […]

If you sell physical products online, there’s nothing more frustrating than customer returns. Best case, it’s just annoying. For you AND for your customers. Worst case… You have to deal with people that EXPLOIT your policies. These people have no intention of buying. It’s borderline stealing. The good news is: I just read interesting new […]

So, people keep asking me, “Derek, are you alive?” Yes. I’m alive. But I’ve been missing in action. Why? I co-founded a company called Truvani. We create high quality supplements made from real food products. So far we launched 4 products. 1. Daily Turmeric Supplement 2. Organic Chicken Bone Broth Powder 3. Chocolate Plant-Based Protein […]

People love to ask, “If you were starting from scratch in 2019 with no budget, what would you do?” And I always say the same thing. GET A JOB. If you’re thinking about starting a business, and the first thing that pops into your head is, “How can I do it without spending a dime?” […]

Today I’m pumped to share the unusual story behind how Marc Ecko turned his love of street art into a billion dollar clothing company. You see, like most artists, he got the “itch” early on, but he abandoned his craft for a much more stable career move – pharmacy school. He didn’t last long though, […]

So, the year was 2011. I had just given a speech at Marie Forleo‘s live event. And everyone seemingly loved it. (She even got me to moonwalk on stage…) This was one of my first speaking engagements about business and entrepreneurship. And I was a little stressed out about it. Social Triggers was new. I […]

So, one of the first rules of “Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” is, “take each item in one’s hand, and ask, “Does this spark joy?” If it does, keep it. If not, dispose of it. …and while I love Marie Kondo’s rule, I think you should take this one step further. Don’t just apply […]

So, I ran a mastermind group. One of the members was struggling with content creation. She said: Our blog posts are informative. But how do we make them more engaging for our readers? What did I tell her? I shared my “3 sentence rule” for making boring content more engaging. Here it is… First of […]

So, I have some BIG news… I am quitting online courses. (And don’t worry. If you already invested in one of my courses, you won’t lose access. The website will still live on. I’m just done selling them after one final enrollment period). “Why? ARE YOU CRAZY!?!?!” No. I’m not crazy. “IS THIS A SCAM? […]

Something for if you’re stuck overthinking something: Very few decisions are permanent. Almost all decisions can be reversed, altered, or adjusted.

When your attention goes to many things, no real progress is ever made. Not all opportunities are worth pursuing — especially if it means being pulled away from something that is currently working.

We know that clarity cures busywork. We also know that action brings clarity. When you’re stuck and lacking clarity, take action and just get started. But don’t get lost doing busywork disguised as procrastination.

Some excellent advice that I fully endorse: Ship early and often; don’t overthink it; set tight constraints; and more. ★

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In order to accomplish your goals you need: (1) a clear goal; (2) a winning action plan; and (3) consistency. Take away or invert any of those things, and you’ve eliminated the possibility of succeeding at your desired outcome. Here’s what they look like when inverted: (1) unclear direction; (2) random acts of productivity / […]

When you’re feeling overwhelmed, ask yourself why. (It’s usually one of two reasons.) Are you: (1) on the verge of something new? Or (2) is life showing you that something needs to be cut out? If you’re on the edge of breakthrough with a big project, then sometimes the answer is to keep working and […]

The past 12 months I have gotten extraordinarily nerdy on backpacking gear. And one of the things I ended up splurging on was the best headlamp I’ve ever owned. Two things I love about this thing: (1) how very thin and lightweight it is; and (2) its dedicated buttons for the white and red lights. […]

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There are 3 things you need to accomplish your goals: (1) a clear goal; (2) a winning action plan; and (3) consistency. For things where you are just getting started, you may not yet know what your winning action plan is. When this is the case you need the right blend of iteration and feedback […]

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A few symptoms of an unfocused life include things like: reacting to daily fires; feeling unsure about the future; lacking any margin / breathing room; unclear goals; no plan forward; procrastination. Compared to a focused life where you are in control; clear long-term vision and goals; easily able to make decisions with confidence; thriving (even […]

You’ve no-doubt heard of the Law of the Vital Few. It’s the 80/20 rule, which states that roughly 80-percent of the results come about from just 20-percent of the energy. But, if you were to take your 80-percent results and apply the 80/20 rule to them a few more times, what you end up discovering is […]

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I loved this Superorganizers interview with my friend, Josh Kaufman that dives into how Josh does research, reading, writing, and uses Ulysses. And how he has a separate computer that is only for doing focused work. ★

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No: “Where is the one thing that will fix all my problems for me right now?” Yes: “Will this thing give me one new, good idea I can use right now?” Invest in things that will help you fix a small problem so you can get a little bit better at what you do. Find […]

When you get a dopamine hit from the false first step of simply buying a product or watching a video that you hope will help you, but you stop at that point without ever taking action or applying anything new to your life. ★

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How many priorities do you have in your business and life right now? If you’re struggling to gain traction, perhaps its your lack of focus that’s causing your lack of growth.

By now, you may already be aware of Ashton Kutcher's campaign against the Village Voice, sparked by an article critical of the substance and message of his anti-trafficking adverts. The Voice has form on this one: their earlier article about dodgy stats that get bandied about in the trafficking discussion is a must-read.

The usual disclaimer... I am (as indeed all of Kutcher's critics are) opposed to trafficking in any form, including child sex trafficking. But we must not let emotion exclusively carry the day; it achieves nothing. The Voice hits the nail on the head when they sum up anti-trafficking efforts: "an emotional reaction, based on good intentions, but grounded in bogus information."

The problem of bogus information is this - campaigns such as Kutcher's conflate all sex work with child sex trafficking, and child sex trafficking with all trafficking. Approaches that do so not only encourage criminalisation legislation that harms consenting adults, but also obscures the real victims. How? By using vastly inflated numbers for one kind of trafficking, and pretty much ignoring everything else. Actual children being actually trafficked for actual sex are rarely, if ever, found by the kind of scatterhsot brothel raids and streetwalker crackdowns so many seem to consider "succeses" in the anti-trafficking effort.

Please, please stop kidding yourselves. The raids you hear about are not successes. They are vast wastes of time, money, and manpower. And many groups receiving funding meant to help victims of trafficking seem instead to be lining their own pockets. There is undoubtedly work to be done eliminating trafficking of men and women for any kind of labour. It almost certainly isn't the approach anti-traffickers think will work.

Kutcher’s response against the Village Voice has included tweeting advertisers on Backpage.com, accusing them of supporting slavery. So far, so "concerned". And then this tweet:

Like a lot of people, Ashton Kutcher seems to have some pretty confused ideas about sex work. To be in a position of wanting to help people, yet still falling back on ridicule and stereotype when talking about them, is inexcusable. Someone who says,

"I’ve spent the last 2 years meeting with every expert on the issue of Human Trafficking that I can find, reading countless books, meeting with victims and former traffickers, and studying effective international models to combat trafficking."

Maybe Ashton should have made time for a little bit of victim sensitivity training in there somewhere? (Not that he's known for politically correct tweeting, mind. He seems to channel the spirit of Littlejohn every now and again.)

Kutcher's response has been strongly supported by the Family Research Council who are regarded by many as a hate group. The FRC is one of the main contributors to the Witherspoon Institute’s “research” on pornography that conflates the adult industry with trafficking. That report contained significant input from Patrick Fagan of The Heritage Foundation – you know, those people whose work inspired Reagan’s covert Cold War military actions.

The Witherspoon report encourages celebrities to “use the bully pulpit” and abuses suspiciously similar dodgy statistics as Kutcher’s campaign. And while it doesn't name particular celebrities to be promoted as faces of such bullying, a similar document from Abt Associates does - it specifically names Kutcher's wife, Demi Moore.

I know a little about what it's like to be asked to comment on issues you don't necessarily have expertise in. Sometimes, journalists and television shows approach people like me to provide commentary rather than, say, academics in the relevant fields. It's unfortunate but it's a fact of media life. And I do try, by following academic discussions and talking with friends who are professionals in, say, sex education or the porn industry, to at least not come off as too much of an ignorant tit. I would shudder in horror, though, to ever be described as a "leading player" in the debate around trafficking or related issues. Something that Kutcher and his wife Moore seem to have no problem with. The strategy clearly works, with significant numbers of Kutcher's followers joining in his Twitter tirade, and the man himself being promoted as somehow more of an expert on the issues than, ya know, actual experts.

Not bad for a guy whose credentials, according to his Twitter profile, are: "I make stuff up."

The Voice article pointed out that it's not known how many of the millions, if any, raised by Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher's campaign have actually gone to helping victims directly. With their charity having only been launched 5 months ago, and apparently no financial reports as yet available, it's hard to know when that pointed question will be resolved. I'd like to add another dimension to that question: how many of the millions raised by Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher could be coming from groups such as the Family Research Council?

The well-meaning Twitter fans following Kutcher's lead probably don't realise they're being taken for a ride on the facts front. It can actually be very hard to sort the real from the fake when people keep repeating made-up stuff as true. So I guess my question now is, why are Kutcher’s millions of fans seemingly totally okay with this movement's possible links to the far-right hawkish Christian lobbyists? And when will the likes of Kutcher and Moore realise they're the ones being used, not by evil evil sex traffickers, but by conservative groups with a frightening agenda?

This is not about sex, and not about The Sex Myth. This is about the old blog, and the growing scandal in News International's paper the rules they played by. And as Prince Humperdinck so eloquently put it, I always think everything could be a trap.

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.

Now, I understood the papers regarded all of this as a game. There were accusations that the anonymity thing was a ruse to pump sales. It wasn't. I was really afraid of losing my job and my career if found out. But I knew the rules they played by. And as Prince Humperdinck so eloquently put it, I always think everything could be a trap.

I did several things:

1. Alerted library staff that I thought there had been a virus downloaded on to the computer, so they could deal with it.

2. Phoned a friend who knew my secret. I explained what happened. He agreed to log in to that email account from where he lived, halfway around the world, open the email and send a reply, so they would have competing IP address information.

3. Alerted the man who owned the .co.uk address pointing to my blog, someone called Ian (who to my knowledge I have never met). He confirmed he had been contacted by the Times and asked if I was indeed in Florida. He told them he didn't know (which was true).

Point 3 is the part that makes me think my suspicions were correct. I hadn't replied to the message from the computer in Florida, so why would they have a Florida IP address? They did get a reply from "my" account, but it would have had an IP address from Australia.

(It's been suggested on Twitter that this could also have been because of a read receipt or embedded images. However, if my memory serves - and it usually does - the service I used did not send read receipts and I had images/HTML off as a matter of habit. There could of course be other explanations for what happened, but it is certainly true that the Times were trying hard to find me. Thanks for the comments, I hope this answers any concerns.)

It is with some interest that I have been following media reports of the alleged conduct of Ashton Kutcher, a well-known campaigner against sex trafficking. As has been pointed out elsewhere, the "problem" his advocacy claims to address is certainly hugely overstated and possibly being manipulated by people who are at least as interested in money and credibility as they are in philanthropy.

Interestingly, on Quora, which Kutcher has called "the smartest place on the internet" (you know, because academic journals and research forums are where the dumb kids hang out), there was a question not long ago which asked, "Why is it so common to include voluntary prostitution in the category of sex trafficking?"

Kutcher stepped in, as did others, in defence of the idea that foreign-born women voluntarily choosing to enter sex work - such as, say, myself (and yes, one of them did mention me specifically) are trafficked. Also people being transported over state and international borders, or something.

When you hear the word "trafficking", maybe you imagine a foreign child being kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery. Not only is that not accurate, it's also not what the lobbyists against sex work even seem to believe themselves. But it is an assumption they appear happy to exploit. As the Quora discussion shows, Kutcher and people like him claim that "trafficking" includes people going into sex work willingly and migrating willingly. In other words, equating consensual sex work with involuntary slavery. Actually a lot of other "rescue industry" types buy that as well. It's a stand with a lot of errors of logic, but it's their platform, they defend it, they own it.

Right. Now, let's check out an article from the Daily Mail dated 03 October 2011 (no link since Istyosty has gone now, HuffPo covers it and so does The Frisky, also it's screensnapped below). It includes quotes from someone who not only claims to know the person Kutcher allegedly cheated with, but who also appears to indicate that the presence of girls like her at celeb parties is, shall we say, not entirely without reimbursement.

Here's the bit in the Mail that caught my eye:

Naumoff, who arranges for good looking girls to be shipped to certain hotspots,  also told the newspaper: 'Sara’s a great girl. My job is to round up hot girls and bus them into clubs in San Diego or Vegas.

The girls get free booze, food, whatever, and they attract rich and famous guys to the clubs. It’s a two-way street. The girls get to meet rich men and the guys get what they want.’

Which is? ‘Sex, obviously.’

Is Naumoff paid to do this? If so, by whom? The Mail doesn't say.

You could be charitable and interpret this as kind of an introduction service. But then again, some of the men in question are already married. You could alternatively think this setup sounds an awful lot like people being reimbursed for travel and sex. Which might not only count as prostitution to some people, but trafficking as well. If you were the sort of person who was inclined to see things that way.

Me? I don't believe anyone who enters any kind of quid-pro-quo relationship, be it sex for money or naked hot tubbing for a drinks tab, and does so willingly, is trafficked. So far so sugar daddy. But read the Quora opinions, and consider what's being quoted in the Mail, and ask yourself whether you think this alleged situation would tick the rescue industry's boxes for "prostitution: trafficking" or not. Whatever would the missus think?

Today in the Guardian, features writer Kira Cochrane has produced a story that is already being widely quoted on the numbers (or lack thereof) of visible women in the media. "In a typical month, 78% of newspaper articles are written by men, 72% of Question Time contributors are men and 84% of reporters and guests on Radio 4's Today show are men. Where are all the women?"

On the one hand, this story is decently written and based on a sound idea. Not least because rather than write an article on lazy assumptions of representations, it goes to the bother of looking at whether the actual numbers match up with the perceptions of the author. This is a good place to start in any conversation about representation and is often overlooked in media or social commentary.

That said, there is a huge difference between "counting numbers" and "producing statistics". Or, indeed, evidence. My problem is not with the article per se, which after all is simply a feature for the Life & Style section of the Grauniad, but rather with the reception it's had on Twitter and elsewhere as if it is le dernier cri in proof. The article is an improvement on most other articles of its kind. But it is also at best a beginning of something that could, and should, be examined further in a way which is compatible with well-designed research.

But the widespread acclaim indicates there is a danger of not taking the piece any further, and adopting its conclusions wholesale as if it was a well-designed in-depth study. It's not (yet). It could be. For example, the article starts with "In a typical month" - to be unimpeachable, you must establish in what way the months selected were "typical".

Because the numbers match so closely with the author's a priori assumptions, care should be taken to assure the reader that the shows selected do not comprise a skewed sample. (Actually, this should be done anyway.) We need to know what the spread of shows on television and radio are that are considered topical, political, or sufficiently serious. Why was Question Time included, and Loose Women excluded? I don't think one is especially more in-depth or topical than the other. Why is Have I Got News For You considered, which is a comedy show, and Moral Maze not, which is a serious radio programme featuring many regular women panellists and guests? Or the Radio 4 News Quiz, hosted by Sandi Toksvig and featuring many women as guests? What about Women's Hour?

Size, as ever, matters. What are the audience sizes for the shows, since clearly that is important? So, too, does sampling. Since it's presumably not practical or useful to count all appearances on all media, there needs to be a way of assuring that the ones considered in such a study comprise a representative sample of media, audience types, and audience sizes. This is something almost no examination of media topics outside academia bother to do (and many inside don't do it either). But if the shows can not be shown to be representative, the stud's conclusions could be accused of being skewed, and the results not taken seriously.

The title of the article, with its unexplored "why?" also presents the danger of interpreting an outcome as if it is the same as the opportunity. Why, indeed, should there be more women on Question Time, when the percentage of female MPs is only 22%? This surely this is a problem that needs to be addressed at root level (why are there not more women in government, considered for such positions, or running for them?) and not by whingeing about token women on politics shows.

The reaction to women going on some of these shows can be extremely negative, which makes other women considering whether to appear think twice. Remember when Fern Britton appeared on Question Time, and the furore over her opening her mouth on topics other than what we thought she should talk about? I was asked to go on QT last year and turned it down because I expected much the same reaction. Would a similarly placed man in media have had the same dismissive reception as Britton, particularly from women like Amanda Platell perceiving them as "lightweight"?

Similarly, the format of the Today programme on Radio 4 is extremely off-putting. Would you like to be shouted at for two minutes first thing in the morning on a show that prides itself on manufacturing controversy, or have a reasonable discussion over on Women's Hour? That, incidentally, is the question more-or-less as it has been put to me by the PR folks at Orion in the past. Come on, it's not even a contest which most women (and men) would choose given the option.

Age is also part of the mix. As one twitter correspondent (@petehague) commented, "I think that the entire debate misses the point that experienced commentators represent past gender policies ... i.e. if you want to get a professor of economics on TV, your selection is influenced by undergraduate gender balance decades ago." And not only the undergrad balance, but especially the percentage making it through study to professorships. David Starkey and his ilk are still rocking up peddling their schtick because, well, the women with the best and most cogent arguments to counter him are not at his level of academic or media experience yet. This phenomenon is almost certainly at work outside the academia bubble as well. And given the continuation of the trend in which women for various reasons choose family or life balance over single-minded pursuit of their careers, it may well never happen.

Finally, we must ask why it is women in media, even ones like say, Laurie Penny, who seem committed to an ideal of being a political writer, end up doing pieces about dating and handbags. Is it because when such assignments are offered, writers would rather take the job than turn it down? And does this, over time, contribute to an impression that anyone who has done so is destined to "lack gravitas"? There is a pink ghetto even - no, especially - at the Guardian. Isn't it ironic that Cochrane's piece is in the Life & Style section, rather than, say, Comment Is Free? On the same day when a man's thoughts on his Movember 'tache does get a spot in CiF?

So in short, while I broadly agree with Cochrane's thesis that it would be nice to see more women on shows like Question Time and Have I Got News For You, I'm not sure the critical applause is warranted. Yet. And I don't think it constitutes "proof" much at all apart from being about those shows on those days. Interesting? Yes. Generalisable to all media at all times? No. The difference between anecdotes and sampling is subtle (perhaps too much so for most media) but crucial.

You may be wondering why this matters on an issue in which most people are in agreement. It matters because if an argument is seen to be slapdash or half-baked, it throws the conclusions into doubt regardless of how worthy they are. It matters because for there to be change it's important to know the real and not imagined extent of the problem. And it matters because if something is worth doing, it's worth doing right. There's a germ of an interesting idea in there. The real question is what is to be done with it?

The Telegraph have now printed an extract and the first interview about The Sex Myth. Positively chuffed to see "be an ally" in print. (Especially on Friday the 13th, which is fast becoming the date when sex work allies are urged to speak out.)

If you'd like to find out more about the book, and would like your copy of The Sex Myth signed, why not join me in London or Nottingham next week?

It was slightly surprising - but not altogether unexpected - that on the weekend when my book The Sex Myth has its first excerpt and interview in the Telegraph that "feminists" would immediately take objection. Interestingly though the shape this appears to have followed, rather than an actual criticism of work I have done or books I have written, is a number of nasty "terrible skin" remarks about me from lady columnists who really ought to know better.

It speaks volumes about the preoccupations of critics that when faced with a woman whose attitudes, thought processes, and life experience are almost orthogonal to their own their first response is to criticise her looks. I am not conventionally attractive, but to paraphrase Steve Martin: when presented with all this, that's the best you can come up with?

Last year I wrote a commentary on the ubiquitous blogging that was going on surrounding the bullying of feminist bloggers. As I pointed out then, bullying does not only happen to feminists, and some of the people who were getting group hugs out of being the victims of trolling have themselves trolled other people. (Top tip: just because you write above the line doesn't make you not a troll. @'ing someone in to your insults of them on Twitter? Does.)

So to make explicit in case it was not clear: I will never ridicule someone I disagree with because of their looks. If you can't craft a sensible argument against someone's thoughts and actions and have to go for the low-hanging fruit instead, you have failed at rational discourse. And arguably also failed at feminism.

I wrote previously about the experience of having facial scars on my original blog but have since taken that content down. However Emily Hornaday archived it and so I reprint it here. If you are someone who is going through a rough time confidence-wise, please know that while haters never, ever change, how you feel about yourself will. It really does get better. (Update: I have also written about this theme for Guardian Weekend magazine.)

mercredi, janvier 13

Let me tell you about the best gift I ever received. And it's not a bit of sparkly jewellery, or a shiny car, or even a thoughtful trinket of affection.

I'm talking about my scars.

I had terrible acne as a teenager. By the age of 16 it was so bad a dermatologist said it was the worst she'd ever seen, which, ya know, is not super encouraging. At the hospital where I volunteered mothers pulled their children away from me, convinced I was plagued with something contagious. Strangers avoided making eye contact.

It was so bad I could not wash my face without bleeding. Many mornings I woke up stuck to the pillowcase. And oh yeah, it was only on my face. Not one blemish anywhere else on my body. To this day, I still never have seen a photo of anything like it - apart from some daguerrotypes of smallpox patients.

It was a very long, and very expensive, journey to improving my skin - remember, this all went down in America where having a disfiguring condition you have no control over is not covered by health insurance, and duh, there's no NHS.

Long story short a lot of Roaccutane and Dianette did for the acne. And more importantly here's what I learned:

1. Beauty is fleeting. Thank fuck for that.

I had a narrow escape from being just another boring blonde - not to mention an early release from the cycle of self-hatred and frantic desperation that plagues many women as they age. Corollary 1a: The larger part of how people perceive you is how you present yourself.

2. People can be hurtful to strangers. That's their problem.

My best childhood mate had spina bifida. She walked on sticks and refused to use a wheelchair for reasons I only started to appreciate years later. Looking like a medical oddity gave me, for a very brief time, a very small taste of what she encounters every day of her life. It made me pity people who equate someone's appearance with their value as a person. This generalises magnificently to strangers judging you for, in fact, anything at all. Corollary 2a: The most vocal critics are often the most insecure.

3. Other people have things you don't. Big deal.

There is no such thing as the Most Beautiful Woman in the World (sorry Buttercup). Who cares? What is considered desirable is not especially worth getting hung up on. You may not be a six-foot Amazon so will never have legs up to your neck - but for all you know, that same supermodel would give her left arm to have your hair. This concept generalises to wealth, success, talent, and intelligence as well. Corollary 3a: Envy of other women's looks is a zero-sum game, and uses far too much time and energy to be bothered with.

4. Quality of love is not a function of attractiveness.

Elizabeth Taylor, for instance, has been married eight times. Beautiful people have dry spells and get their hearts broken like everyone else. The most worthwhile and loving relationships in my life all happened after my skin problems. And for what it's worth, I've been fortunate to date some pretty nice, smart (and attractive) men in my time. See Corollary 1a above.

5. Confidence doesn't come overnight.

It also doesn't happen in a vacuum; it requires nurturing. As with anything else worth having it's work. But let me tell you, it is so worth the work. A mate recently told me about a magazine 'happiness quiz' in which one of the questions was, "are you comfortable with your body, and do you exercise regularly?" If you can see why this should not have been a single question, you're on the way. Corollary 5a: Confidence happens when you let it happen. No one gives it to you, which is great, because it also means they can't take it from you.

6. When someone says I am beautiful, they really, really mean it.

There is something about knowing someone sees you, quirks and all, and likes what they see... something rare and kind of overwhelming (in a good way). 'Beautiful' is one of those words (a bit like 'awesome') that has lost meaning in being overused as a generic affirmative. We call all sorts of people beautiful in one sentence and tear them down in the next. I'm happy to be different enough that anyone who uses it to describe me sees more than just hair and makeup.

Perhaps one of the biggest "sex myths" making the rounds these days is to what extent experiences like mine are (or are not, as it is claimed) representative of sex workers in general.

(Of course, I personally make no claim to be an "average" sex worker and certainly not to speak for prostitution as a whole. I would love to see more and more voices claim the title of sex worker publically so we can demonstrate once and for all what a diverse group it is.)

But when it comes to studies and statistics, this is an issue that comes up a lot. Addressing the question of how representative a sample of people is of a population in general is one of the cornerstones of good study design. It's one of those things that, if wrong at the start of a research project, is a devil to try to correct in retrospect. In many cases it's impossible.

The Sex Myth discusses at length how this affects virtually all studies relating to prostitution. A large number of researchers assume street-based sex workers to be the majority of sex workers, which has the tendency to skew (and sometimes fully invalidate) their results. Because they often recruit research subjects via outreach or addiction programs, their sample is necessarily biased towards sex workers whose lives are chaotic.

Streetwalkers may often be the most visible face of sex work but it's far from the whole story.

So how representative is the cliche of the drug-addicted streetwalker leaning into a punter's car anyway? This is in some ways difficult to answer. But I highly suggest if you are interested in the topic to check out Maggie McNeill's excellent summary of what we do know. She makes the case far more succinctly that I ever could here, here and here. Go on and read those then come back when you're done.

In general, the data seem to agree that in most Western countries the percentage of sex workers who are streetwalkers is about 15%.

That's an aggregate estimate from a number of studies in a number of countries, most of which put the streetwalker population at between 5% and 20% of prostitutes. Of the remaining percentage, the splits of incall/managed vs outcall/escort vary by location and factors unique to those places. To see an example of what this looks like, you can check out the New Zealand sex worker breakdown here (scroll down for tables).

What this tells us is that studies recruiting their subjects only from street-based sex workers, and in addition doing so through crisis centre referrals, can never claim to represent sex workers at large. That would be about as ridiculous as reading my previous books and using that "data" to conclude all sex workers love pies and pints. They can at best be said to be a study of those people at that time which makes the results non-generalisable.

Promising studies do exist which try to address the problem of imbalance of numbers in counting sex workers. While it's hard to generalise 'sex work' from what is necessarily a very diverse group, I found this study from Suzanne Jenkins at Keele [pdf] to be a useful example of how we can begin to build a better sex worker survey. Note for example that it includes male and trans sex workers: a lot of studies ignore these groups altogether. While the mainstream heterosexual female sex worker is still in the majority, writing gender and sex diversity out of the story only serves to promote a narrow ideological viewpoint that paints all sex work as abuse of women by men. A viewpoint which is not true.

As you may know a bugbear of mine is the tendency to present scare stats about sex workers in isolation and not to involve a control group. I go on about lack of controls in all kinds of studies, not just sex worker ones, in detail in The Sex Myth if you would like to read more. So say, to take a non-prostitution example, you heard a statistic that claimed the majority of strippers got unwanted attention from clients. Presented without context it sounds impressive, but it is meaningless.

What would be a control group here? People with similar working hours in licensed establishments might be one - barmaids at non-strip clubs for example. Or people of a similar age in service industry professions involving tipping - like waitresses. Have a think: do you know any front-of-house people in food service who haven't had difficult and at times physically aggressive customers? I don't. Any study that doesn't even address the possibility that their results come from the service industry and alcohol rather than sex work per se has not fully examined the evidence in a way that should be taken seriously.

When it comes to population statistics like these getting control groups are hard. I get it. But that is, as we say where I come from, hard cheese. So there's no perfect control like a group of homeless, drug-addicted nuns somewhere we can use to see whether it's the sex that drives people to despair or not. But you still have to make an effort. And you recruit and match your controls up front, not after the fact.

Finally there is the matter of where data originates. As a scientist I know that it is damned difficult, if not impossible, to do work that is totally free of any external conflict of interest or internal hope for a particular outcome. But there are ways we can help sieve the believable from the unbelievable: if a study comes from a source with a strong ideology and a financial interest in promoting this stance it is right to question whether that affects both study design and interpretation of results. These generally fall into the category Laura Agustin has dubbed "the Rescue Industry".

There are a large number of other common problems with these studies flagged up in The Sex Myth. Bad estimation methods, lack of controls, lack of trends, avoiding peer review... and many more.

This is not to say that academic publishing is always right and self-publishing or internal reports always wrong. But there is a significant grain of salt we should take when the people who present themselves as experts on the topic of sex workers are from the same stable of folks better at generating press coverage than at reporting their mistakes.

Do I expect saying these things will please everyone? No, not at all. There are a lot of people with a big investment in keeping the myths about what sex work is supposedly "really" like alive. As well, there are people whose opposition to sex work isn't affected by the many well-adjusted people who do it anyway. It's also fair to say my particular bias is to prefer the quantitative over the qualitative: for as "Uncle Joe" Stalin so elegantly put it, quantity has a quality all its own.

But if you are the sort of person to whom the evidence is more important than the anecdote - and if you're a reader of this blog, I assume you are - then take the numbers seriously. The next time someone tries to sell you the poor-addicted-hooker myth, call it for the nonsense it so clearly is.

A number of people have asked if I would respond to the piece Julie Bindel wrote about The Sex Myth in the Grauniad. Clearly as she took the opportunity to let rip, so too must I?

Maybe, maybe not. Because the truth about Julie Bindel is that she is - shock, horror - actually decent company. You would totally have a drink with her as long as you stayed off the topics of sex work, trafficking, porn, trans issues, gay marriage and... well you get the idea. There are definitely people with whom my politics are more closely aligned whose company I have enjoyed a lot less.

But in the interest of "setting the record straight" (as if such a thing exists) here are my notes on the encounter:

- I approached Julie to ask if she wanted to interview me, in part because I figured she would write about the book anyway. Since I criticise her writing extensively in The Sex Myth it seemed fair to give her a face-to-face.

- She's prettier in person than in her photos. Not that that's relevant, or important, but she is.

- We met three times that week: once for lunch, once for the photos, and again on Sky news. The first words out of her mouth on the air at Sky were "As much as I hate to say this I agree with Brooke." I did a little mental air-punch at that one. (It was also approximately the first thing Claire Perry said when we were on the Today programme. File under: win.)

- The "offal", by the way, was calf's liver and very good it was too. Though I did wish I'd ordered the lamb sweetbreads special instead.

- The dessert was an Eccles cake with cheddar cheese ice cream. Hand on heart, I loved the ice cream. The Eccles cake was not nice. If you have occasion to go to The Gilbert Scott at St Pancras, ask them for a bowl of that ice cream.

- She thought my criticism of Swanee Hunt mentioning her father's political background a bit out of line. My reply to that is if Hunt's still trading on his name and his connections, then she has to expect that. Her extreme privilege (yes, even in supposedly classless America; yes, even when your work is deemed charitable) is a huge hurdle to overcome. Eye of the needle and all that jazz.

- Julie's a big fan of Viz, especially Eight Ace and Sid the Sexist. Who knew? Also she liked Fat Slags better when it was shorter whereas I prefer the longer ones.

- In principle we both agree that sex workers themselves should not be criminalised. After that our thoughts on sex work are mainly opposed. When I put it to her at lunch that the much-talked-about "Swedish model" and Icelandic approaches could never work in the UK, she agreed.

- Julie's piece was filed after we met for lunch on the 17th April, I believe before we had photos on the 20th. The final edits to the book were made on the 25th and approved on the 27th. First edition came off the presses May 1st. (Yes, we cut it fine.) This unfortunately means some of the things from her piece may not be the book.* I'm not sure if it is the writer's or the editor's responsibility to check reviews against the published copy, but someone should have done.

- We both think the Grauniad will cease to exist in printed form soon. Probably most people think that though, so no news there.

- She seemed concerned that I think feminists of her stripe/generation are against sex, and took pains to assure me plenty of sex was going down among the redfems in the 70s and 80s. I said "I bloody well hope so," because what would be the point of rejecting the model of virgin-to-wife-to-mother only to not get laid? However, in my experience, the lesbian-identified feminists when I was at uni in the very early 90s were not so free and easy with the sexual favours. Not that I'm bitter, mind. It wasn't a great place or time to be a woman who slept with both women and men.

- She think my husband looks like a model. As far as independent assessments of attractiveness go, that's about as airtight as they come.

- Her claim that I was 'roundly criticised' by Catherine Hakim for my educational background is a misrepresentation of Hakim's review; you can read it here. My education is in anthropology, maths, forensic science and epidemiology. I've also worked in chemoinformatics and child health research (mainly cancer). If anyone thinks that makes me unqualified to comment on academic research... with all due respect, check yo self.

- The last thing I said to her, when we were leaving Sky news: "Civilised is the new uncivilised."

So there it is. No particular desire or need to fetch a hatchet, because who benefits? (It might also help that I have professional experience of finding common ground with just about anyone for two hours as long as they're buying.) The Grauniad is a known quantity and the "pity" angle of her article frankly unbelievable... you don't bother tearing down someone if you feel actual pity for them. You might even wonder why I bothered. To which I say: lunch? On their dime? Admit it, you so would. And so I did.

It's a pity her piece was, in the end, so misleading. I was told it would be presented as a conversation; it's a rant. She accuses me of accusing her of taking money from the far right: evidence for this claim is undisputed, and considering the libel threats that Eaves For Women put on the book the day of its release,  thus delaying its actual release by weeks while lawyers hemmed and hawed, you would have thought she'd feel free to take it to court if I was actually wrong.

The nuisance suit was dropped very quickly, of course; its fantastical claims included that I had somehow "hacked" the Eaves mainframe... by reporting details of a paper they presented at an international conference, and posted online... well, I guess it got the job done, from their point of view. Ugly but effective.

Helen Lewis, as well, gave a very misleading review. She blasts me for praising a study from Keele University, missing the entire point of why it was praised: because even given the selective inclusion of only a certain kind of sex worker, the results are still positive - which sets it apart from other, negatively skewed, studies. Point well and truly missed. She seems like a smart girl, so I can only imagine she went in with a particular result in mind: namely, punishing me for not saying yes to an interview with her. Hey, I'd already booked Juile... one in-person assassination is enough for my well-being, thanks! Usually reviewers are expected to rise above such petty machinations. (That her review contained some exact wording found in the Eaves libel threat is, I am sure, a complete coincidence.)

But as I say, no hard feelings. They have a point of view that includes taking no prisoners. Apt, I suppose, for a style of feminism that considers the police to be adequate protectors of sex worker safety. Obviously it's a view I disagree with. I'm sure they're both perfectly lovely if you don't disagree with anything they say, ever. But the tenor of so-called debate in this country lately dictates that all differences must be fought to the last. A shame for fact finding, and missing the point of the book.
Right now you're probably thinking I should go to the cinema with Tanya Gold and discover maybe she's not as bad as all that? Hey now, let's not get crazy.

tl;dr - I was expecting a snarling nemesis, what I got was a lesbian Michael Winner... hugely offensive, yet surprisingly charming, bon viveur.

Believe it or not The Sex Myth is not only about columnists, or trafficking, or even feminism: those are only a small part. Most reviews have barely touched on any of the other chapters. It also discusses the medicalisation of female desire and the denial of women's appreciation for erotica, for example. It examines the criticisms of "sex addiction" as a disease. It champions under-reported sexualisation research that is more interested in representing real families than in reflecting a political agenda. It includes citations of all referenced material so you can read them and decide for yourself. My aim is not to force people and certainly not Julie Bindel to think the way I do: it's to open up the discussion in ways we simply are not doing around these topics. It's a call for less panic, not more.

Go get it. Read it. Make up your own mind.



* [Update:  Yes, I have checked this against the email record between me, my editor, and the Orion legal bods; and yes, I have run this blog past them and got the thumbs-up. Proceed to question it at your own risk.]

Further to yesterday's post, this is a list of thoughts prompted by a request from Linkmachinego on the topic of being an anonymous writer and blogger. Maybe not exactly a how-to (since the outcome is not guaranteed) as a post on things I did, things I should have done, and things I learned.

It's not up to me to decide if you "deserve" to be anonymous. My feeling is, if you're starting out as a writer and do not yet feel comfortable writing under your own name, that is your business and not mine. I also think sex workers should consider starting from a position of anonymity and decide later if they want to be out, please don't be naive. Statistics I made up right now show 99 out of 100 people who claim 'if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear' are talking out of their arses.

The items in the list fall into three general categories: internet-based, legal and real-world tips, and interpersonal. Many straddle more than one of these categories. All three are important.

This is written for a general audience because most people who blog now do not have extensive technical knowledge, they just want to write and be read. That's a good thing by the way. If you already know all of this, then great, but many people won't. Don't be sneery about their lack of prior knowledge. Bringing everyone up to speed on the technology is not the goal: clear steps you can use to help protect your identity from being discovered are.

Disclaimer: I'm no longer anonymous so these steps are clearly not airtight. Also there are other sources of information on the Web, some of which are more comprehensive and more current than my advice. I accept no responsibility for any outcome of following this advice. Please don't use it to do illegal or highly sensitive things. Also please don't use pseudonyms to be a dick.

This is also a work in progress. As I remember things or particular details, I'll amend this post. If you have suggestions of things that should be added, let me know.

1. Don't use Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail et al. for your mail.

You will need an email address to do things like register for blog accounts, Facebook, Twitter, and more. This email will have to be something entirely separate from your "real" email addresses. There are a lot of free options out there, but be aware that sending an email from many of them also sends information in the headers that could help identify you.

When I started blogging, I set up an email address for the blog with Hotmail. Don't do this. Someone quickly pointed out the headers revealed where I worked (a very large place with lots of people and even more computers, but still more information than I was comfortable with). They suggested I use Hushmail instead, which I still use. Hushmail has a free option (though the inbox allocation is modest), strips out headers, and worked for me.

A caveat with this: if you are, say, a sex worker working in a place where that is not legal and using Hushmail, you could be vulnerable to them handing over your details to a third party investigating crimes. If you're handling information some governments might consider embarrassing or sensitive, same. Google some alternatives: you're looking for something secure and encrypted.

There are a few common-sense tips you can follow to make it even safer. If you have to bring people you know in real life in on the secret, don't use this email address for communicating with them even if only about matters related to your secret (and don't use your existing addresses for that either). Example: I have one address for press and general interactions, one for things related to my accountant and money, and one for communicating with my agent, publisher, and solicitor. I've also closed and opened new accounts over the years when it seems "too many" people are getting hold of a particular address. Use different passwords for each, don't make these passwords related to your personal information, and so on.

I unwisely left the Hotmail address going, and while I did not use it to send mail, I continued to read things that arrived there. That led to this failed attempt by the Sunday Times to out me. It was an easily dodged attempt but something I would have preferred to avoid.

People can and do register internet domains while staying anonymous but I never did. Some people registered domains for me (people I didn't know in person). This led to a couple of instances of them receiving harassment when the press suspected they were me. In particular Ian Shircore got a bit of unwanted attention this way.

Because all I was ever doing was a straight-up blog, not having a registered domain that I had control over was fine. Your needs may be different. I am not a good source for advice on how to do that. But just in case you might be thinking "who would bother looking there?" read about how faux escort Alexa DiCarlo was unmasked. This is what happens when you don't cover your tracks.

2. Don't use a home internet connection, work internet connection, etc.

Email won't be the only way you might want to communicate with people. You may also want to leave comments on other blogs and so forth. Doing this and other ways of using the Web potentially exposes your IP address, which could be unique and be used to locate you.

Even if you don't leave comments just visiting a site can leave traces behind. Tim Ireland recently used a simple method to confirm his suspicion of who the "Tabloid Troll" twitter account belonged to. By comparing the IP address of someone who clicked on to a link going to the Bloggerheads site with the IP address of an email Dennis Rice sent, a link was made. If you go to the trouble of not using your own connection, also make sure you're not using the same connection for different identities just minutes apart. Don't mix the streams.

The timing of everything as it happened was key to why the papers did not immediately find out who I was. The old blog started in 2003, when most press still had to explain to their audience what a blog actually was. It took a while for people to notice the writing, so the mistakes I made early on (blogging from home and work, using Hotmail) had long been corrected by the time the press became interested.

Today, no writer who aims to stay anonymous should ever assume a grace period like that. It also helped that once the press did become interested, they were so convinced not only that Belle was not really a hooker but also that she was one of their own - a previously published author or even journalist - that they never looked in the right place. If they'd just gone to a London blogmeet and asked a few questions about who had pissed off a lot of people and was fairly promiscuous, they'd have had a plausible shortlist in minutes.

After I moved from Kilburn to Putney, I was no longer using a home internet connection - something I should have done right from the beginning. I started to use internet cafes for posting and other activities as Belle. This offers some security... but be wary of using these places too often if there is a reason to think someone is actively looking for you. It's not perfect.

Also be wary if you are using a laptop or other machine provided by your workplace, or use your own laptop to log in to work servers ("work remotely"). I've not been in that situation and am not in any way an expert on VPNs, but you may want to start reading about it here and do some googling for starters. As a general principle, it's probably wise not to do anything on a work laptop that could get you fired, and don't do anything that could get you fired while also connected to work remotely on your own machine.

3. There is software available that can mask your IP address. There are helpful add-ons that can block tracking software.

I didn't use this when I was anonymous, but if I was starting as an anonymous blogger now, I would download Tor and browse the Web and check email through their tools.

If you do use Tor or other software to mask your IP address, don't then go on tweeting about where your IP address is coming from today! I've seen people do this. Discretion fail.

I also use Ghostery now to block certain tracking scripts from web pages. You will want to look into something similar. Also useful are Adblocker, pop-up blockers, things like that. They are simple to download and use and you might like to use them anyway even if you're not an anonymous blogger. A lot of sites track your movements and you clearly don't want that.

4. Take the usual at-home precautions.

Is your computer password-protected with a password only you know? Do you clear your browser history regularly? Use different passwords for different accounts? Threats to anonymity can come from people close to you. Log out of your blog and email accounts when you're finished using them, every time. Have a secure and remote backup of your writing. Buy a shredder and use it. Standard stuff.

Another thing I would do is install a keystroke logger on your own machine. By doing this I found out in 2004 that someone close to me was spying on me when they were left alone with my computer. In retrospect what I did about it was not the right approach. See also item 7.

5. Be careful what you post.

Are you posting photos? Exif data can tell people, among other things, where and when a picture was taken, what it was taken with, and more. I never had call to use it because I never posted photos or sound, but am told there are loads of tools that can wipe this Exif data from your pictures (here's one).

The content of what you post can be a giveaway as well. Are you linking to people you know in real life? Are you making in-jokes or references to things only a small group of people will know about? Don't do that.

If possible, cover your tracks. Do you have a previous blog under a known name? Are you a contributor to forums where your preferred content and writing style are well-known? Can you edit or delete these things? Good, do that.

Personally, I did not delete everything. Partly this was because the world of British weblogging was so small at the time - a few hundred popular users, maybe a couple thousand people blogging tops? - that I thought the sudden disappearance of my old blog coinciding with the appearance of an unrelated new one might be too much of a coincidence. But I did let the old site go quiet for a bit before deleting it, and edited archived entries.

Keep in mind however that The Wayback Machine means everything you have written on the web that has been indexed still exists. And it's searchable. Someone who already has half an idea where to start looking for you won't have too much trouble finding your writing history. (UPDATE: someone alerted me that it's possible to get your own sites off Wayback by altering the robots.txt file - and even prevent them appearing there in the first place - and to make a formal request for removal using reasons listed here. This does not seem to apply to sites you personally have no control over unless copyright issues are involved.) If you can put one more step between them and you... do it.

6. Resist temptation to let too many people in.

If your writing goes well, people may want to meet you. They could want to buy you drinks, give you free tickets to an opening. Don't say yes. While most people are honest in their intentions, some are not. And even the ones who are may not have taken the security you have to keep your details safe. Remember, no one is as interested in protecting your anonymity as you will be.

Friends and family were almost all unaware of my secret - both the sex work and the writing. Even my best friend (A4 from the books) didn't know. 

I met very few people "as" Belle. There were some who had to meet me: agent, accountant, editor. I never went to the Orion offices until after my identity became known. I met Billie Piper, Lucy Prebble, and a couple of writers during the pre-production of Secret Diary at someone's house, but met almost no one else involved with the show. Paul Duane and Avril MacRory met me and were absolutely discreet. I went to the agent's office a few times but never made an appointment as Belle or in my real name. Most of the staff there had no idea who I was. Of these people who did meet me almost none knew my real name, where I lived, where I was from, my occupation. Only one (the accountant) knew all of that - explained below under point 9. And if I could have gotten away with him never seeing a copy of my passport, I damn well would have done.

The idea was that if people don't know anything they can't inadvertently give it away. I know that all of the people listed above were absolutely trustworthy. I still didn't tell them anything a journalist would have considered useful.

When I started blogging someone once commented that my blog was a "missed opportunity" because it didn't link to an agency website or any way of booking my services. Well, duh. I didn't want clients to meet me through the blog! If you are a sex worker who wants to preserve a level of pseudonymity and link your public profile to your work, Amanda Brooks has the advice you need. Not me.

Other sources like JJ Luna write about how to do things like get and use credit cards not tied to your name and address. I've heard Entropay offer 'virtual' credit cards that are not tied to your credit history, although they can't be used with any system that requires address verification. This could be useful even for people who are not involved in sex work.

Resisting temptation sometimes means turning down something you'd really like to do. The short-term gain of giving up details for a writing prize or some immediate work may not be worth the long-term loss of privacy. I heard about one formerly anonymous blogger who was outed after giving their full name and address to a journalist who asked for it when they entered a competition. File under: how not to stay anonymous.

7. Trust your intuition.

I have to be careful what I say here. In short, my identity became known to a tabloid paper and someone whom I had good reason not to trust (see item 4) gave them a lot of information about me.

When your intuition tells you not to trust someone, LISTEN TO IT. The best security in the world fails if someone props open a door, leaves a letter on the table, or mentally overrides the concern that someone who betrayed you before could do so again. People you don't trust should be ejected from your life firmly and without compromise. A "let them down easy" approach only prolongs any revenge they might carry out and probably makes it worse. The irony is that as a call girl I relied on intuition and having strong personal boundaries all the time... but failed to carry that ability over into my private life. If there is one thing in my life I regret, the failure to act on my intuition is it.

As an aside if you have not read The Gift of Fear already, get it and read it.

See also point 9: if and when you need people to help you keep the secret don't make it people already involved in your private life. Relationships can cloud good judgement in business decisions.

There is a very droll saying "Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead." It's not wrong. I know, I know. Paranoid. Hard not to be when journos a few years later are digging through the rubbish of folks who met you exactly once when you were sixteen. Them's the breaks.

8. Consider the consequences of success.

If you find yourself being offered book deals or similar, think it through. Simply by publishing anonymously you will become a target. Some people assume all anonymous writers "want" to be found, and the media in particular will jump through some very interesting hurdles to "prove" anything they write about you is in the public interest.

In particular, if you are a sex worker, and especially if you are a sex worker who is visible/bookable through your site, please give careful consideration to moving out of that sphere. Even where sex for money is legal it is still a very stigmatised activity. There are a number of people who do not seem to have realised this, and the loss of a career when they left the "sex-pos" bubble was probably something of a shock. I'm not saying don't do it - but please think long and hard about the potential this has to change your life and whether you are fully prepared to be identified this way forever. For every Diablo Cody there are probably dozens of Melissa Petros. For every Melissa Petro there are probably hundreds more people with a sex industry past who get quietly fired and we don't ever hear from them.

If I knew going in to the first book deal what would happen, I probably would have said no. I'm glad I didn't by the way - but realistically, my life was stressful enough at that point and I did not fully understand what publishing would add to that. Not many bloggers had mainstream books at that point (arguably none in the UK) so I didn't have anyone else's experience to rely on. I really had no idea about what was going to happen. The things people wrote about me then were mainly untrue and usually horrendous. Not a lot has changed even now. I'd be lying if I said that didn't have an emotional effect.

Writing anonymously and being outed has happened often enough that people going into it should consider the consequences. I'm not saying don't do it if you risk something, but be honest with yourself about the worst possible outcome and whether you would be okay with that.

9.  Enlist professional help to get paid and sign contracts.

Having decided to write a book, I needed an agent. The irony of being anonymous was that while I let as few people in on it as possible, at some point I was going to have to take a leap of faith and let in more. Mil Millington emailed me to recommend Patrick Walsh, saying he was one of the few people in London who can be trusted. Mil was right.

Patrick put me on to my accountant (who had experience of clients with, shall we say, unusual sources of income). From there we cooked up a plan so that contracts could be signed without my name ever gracing a piece of paper. Asking someone to keep a secret when there's a paper trail sounds like it should be possible but rarely is. Don't kid yourself, there is no such thing as a unbreakable confidentiality agreement. Asking journalists and reviewers to sign one about your book is like waving a red rag to a bull. What we needed was a few buffers between me and the press.

With Patrick and Michael acting as directors, a company was set up - Bizrealm. I was not on the paperwork as a director so my name never went on file with Companies House. Rather, with the others acting as directors, signing necessary paperwork, etc., Patrick held a share in trust for me off of which dividends were drawn and this is how I got paid. I may have got some of these details wrong, by the way - keep in mind, I don't deal with Bizrealm's day-to-day at all.

There are drawbacks to doing things this way: you pay for someone's time, in this case the accountant, to create and administer the company. You can not avoid tax and lots of it. (Granted, drawing dividends is more tax-efficient, but still.) You have to trust a couple of people ABSOLUTELY. I'd underline this a thousand times if I could. Michael for instance is the one person who always knew, and continues to know, everything about my financial and personal affairs. Even Patrick doesn't know everything.

There are benefits though, as well. Because the money stays mainly in the company and is not paid to me, it gets eked out over time, making tax bills manageable, investment more constant, and keeping me from the temptation to go mad and spend it.

I can't stress enough that you might trust your friends and family to the ends of the earth, but they should not be the people who do this for you. Firstly, because they can be traced to you (they know you in a non-professional way). Secondly, because this is a very stressful setup and you need the people handling it to be on the ball. As great as friends and family are that is probably not the kind of stress you want to add to your relationship. I have heard far too many stories of sex workers and others being betrayed by ex-partners who knew the details of their business dealings to ever think that's a good idea.

So how do you know you can trust these people? We've all heard stories of musicians and other artists getting ripped off by management, right? All I can say is instinct. It would not have been in Patrick's interest to grass me, since as my agent he took a portion of my earnings anyway, and therefore had financial as well as personal interest in protecting that. If he betrayed me he would also have suffered a loss of reputation that potentially outweighed any gain. Also, as most people who know him will agree, he's a really nice and sane human being. Same with Michael.

If this setup sounds weirdly paranoid, let me assure you that journalists absolutely did go to Michael's office and ask to see the Bizrealm paperwork, and Patrick absolutely did have people going through his bins, trying to infiltrate his office as interns, and so on. Without the protection of being a silent partner in the company those attempts to uncover me might have worked.

I communicate with some writers and would-be writers who do not seem to have agents. If you are serious about writing, and if you are serious about staying anonymous, get an agent. Shop around, follow your instinct, and make sure it's someone you can trust. Don't be afraid to dump an agent, lawyer, or anyone else if you don't trust them utterly. They're professionals and shouldn't take it personally.

10. Don't break the (tax) law.

Journalists being interested in your identity is one thing. What you really don't want is the police or worse, the tax man, after you. Pay your taxes and try not to break the law if it can be helped. If you're a sex worker blogging about it, get an accountant who has worked with sex workers before - this is applicable even if you live somewhere sex work is not strictly legal. Remember, Al Capone went down for tax evasion. Don't be like Al. If you are a non-sex-work blogger who is earning money from clickthroughs and affiliates on your site, declare this income.

In summer 2010 the HMRC started a serious fraud investigation of me. It has been almost two years and is only just wrapping up, with the Revenue finally satisfied that not only did I declare (and possibly overdeclare) my income as a call girl, but that there were no other sources of income hidden from them. They have turned my life and financial history upside down to discover next to nothing new about me. This has been an expensive and tedious process. I can't even imagine what it would have been like had I not filed the relevant forms, paid the appropriate taxes, and most of all had an accountant to deal with them!

Bottom line, you may be smart - I'm pretty good with numbers myself - but people whose job it is to know about tax law, negotiating contracts, and so on will be better at that than you are. Let them do it. They are worth every penny.

11. Do interviews with care.

Early interviews were all conducted one of two ways: over email (encrypted) or over an IRC chatroom from an anonymising server (I used xs4all). This was not ideal from their point of view, and I had to coach a lot of people in IRC which most of them had never heard of. But again, it's worth it, since no one in the press will be as interested in protecting your identity as you are. I hope it goes without saying, don't give out your phone number.

12. Know when les jeux sont faits.

In November 2009 - 6 years after I first started blogging anonymously - my identity was revealed.

As has been documented elsewhere, I had a few heads-ups that something was coming, that it was not going to be nice, and that it was not going to go away. We did what we could to put off the inevitable but it became clear I only had one of two choices: let the Mail on Sunday have first crack at running their sordid little tales, or pre-empt them.

While going to the Sunday Times - the same paper that had forcibly outed Zoe Margolis a few years earlier, tried to get my details through that old Hotmail address, and incorrectly fingered Sarah Champion as me - was perhaps not the most sensitive choice, it was for me the right move. Patrick recommended that we contact an interviewer who had not been a Belle-believer: if things were going to be hard, best get that out of the way up front.



So that is that. It's a bit odd how quickly things have changed. When I started blogging I little imagined I would be writing books, much less something like this. Being a kind of elder statesman of blogging (or cantankerous old grump if you prefer) is not an entirely comfortable position and one that is still new to me. But it is also interesting to note how little has changed: things that worked in the early 2000s have value today. The field expanded rapidly but the technology has not yet changed all that much.

As before, these ideas do not constitute a foolproof way to protect your identity. All writers - whether writing under their own names or not - should be aware of the risks they may incur by hitting 'publish'. I hope this post at least goes some way to making people think about how they might be identified, and starts them on a path of taking necessary (and in many cases straightforward) precautions, should they choose to be anonymous.