Why I Shield My Identity On The Internet

Getting more well known has both upsides and downsides

When I joined Medium about 18 months ago, I made the conscious choice to shield my identity with an avatar and a nom de plume. Part of the reason is that I wanted to write very openly about my sex life but still wanted to have some privacy. The other reason is that I have heard a lot of horror stories of women who speak up publicly about equality and culture getting stalked, harassed, doxxed, and otherwise driven out of their regular lives by trolls and haters. I wanted to minimize the chances of that happening to me.

In the early days of my writing adventure, I didn’t have that many followers and wasn’t that well known. Other than the routine misogynistic troll, I didn’t have to deal with too many problems from readers/commenters. Even so, I have had to block a handful of people, and have reported several others to the Medium staff for rules violations. Rather than amend their out-of-line comments, each of these men chose to leave the platform instead and that was just fine by me. I’m grateful to have a place to express myself where standards of basic civility are actively enforced and there is a limit to how far hateful people can go. Even so, I’ve always been glad to have the extra layer of anonymity as a buffer.

Now that my readership is getting larger, I’m becoming a lot more publicly visible. The other day I got an inquiry from a sex toy website asking if I wanted to promote them and from a TV production company asking if I wanted to test for their new show on polyamory. It turns out the show was only looking for UK residents and I haven’t had time to pursue the details of the sex toy website, but I’ve also recently just gotten my first truly snarky comments about my polyamorous life and writings about it. I guess, by some metric at least, I have apparently arrived as a writer!

I think Mr. Snark was looking to get back at me for pointing out the other day on another thread that I found it fascinating how he thought the women in his life getting sexually harassed was somehow about him. He’s come after me in a couple of other places as well, and I’m anticipating that I’ll probably have to block him sometime soon. Shortly after our first exchange, he started following me, and I see now that it was probably for the purposes of hate-reading and harassing me. Here’s what he wrote about my piece on having a life and love-affirming party with our lovers, Tamara and Lane:

“I don’t know, it just seems like a bunch of pretentious old yuppies desperately trying to recreate themselves as sexually exciting while eating fancy food and getting drunk in the daytime. The fact that you feel the need to histrionically brag about it afterwards doesn’t help.

I also noticed that you included a picture of attractive women at the beginning of this article. Am I amiss in assuming that you look nothing like them?”

First of all, how I live my life is none of your business and if you don’t like hearing about it, then don’t read. And secondly, I made it really clear that the entire point of the story was to illustrate how erotic energy helps me balance out the stress of everyday life. It was published in Sensual Enchantment, which celebrates the enchanted nature of life, love, and sexuality, for heaven’s sake!

Although it’s not unreasonable to say that this was a sex party, it was also a whole more than that. It was a way to really more deeply connect with some of the people in our lives who make it more fun, more enjoyable, less stressful, and more full. Erotic energy is life force energy, as is laughter and celebration of the simple but good things. I can’t wait until we get to do it again!

But my sex life doesn’t have to only be for lofty purposes. Sometimes it’s just for dirty fun purposes and I don’t need to justify that either. I’ve published a fair amount of erotica, and other sexually explicit stories, and although there has been a healing quality to being able to reclaim my sexual self from the world in part by doing this, I also just really like sex and I like to talk about it. Sue me!

But the really lovely thing is that overwhelmingly, doing that has gotten me positive responses. About once a month I get an email from someone, quite often male, who thanks me for sharing my journey, for being authentic, for demonstrating that polyamory can work, and for expressing that sexuality is something to be embraced and enjoyed.

At least two people have told me that they got a Medium membership specifically so that they could read my stories. Besides being incredibly flattering, hearing that kind of thing just warms my heart. It makes me feel like I’m really on the right track. Knowing that sharing myself in the way that I do has touched other people’s lives for the better is just the cherry on the top of having a place to express myself, process my life, share my point of view and connect with others.

But as nice and prevalent as the positive feedback is, I still sleep better at night knowing that most people don’t know my legal identity, or even what part of the country I live in. I go out of my way not to publicly give away too many identifying details. And to the handful of Medium friends who I do have personal contact with, but who know me as Elle, that’s not because I’m hiding my real self from you. She (small pun intended) is my real self. Elle is all of me — the one that doesn’t have to wear any masks for the world. In many ways, I identify with her more than my given name. I’m interfacing with you from my most authentic self, and that speaks to the affection and respect I have for you.

I’ve never aspired to be well-known in any capacity that would truly compromise my privacy, and so far it’s working out just fine. Being a writer (who doesn’t have to do any kind of public appearances) means that I get to say what I want to say, and still feel pretty secure in that. I don’t know what the next 18 months will bring, but overwhelmingly, I’m enjoying the journey and that is what matters most to me.

© Copyright Elle Beau 2020 Elle Beau writes on Medium about sex, life, relationships, society, anthropology, spirituality, and love. If this story is appearing anywhere other than Medium.com, it appears without my consent and has been stolen.