The Week Of Shame – a beginner’s guide to writing about your sex life on the internet…

“And I bet you think this song is about you, don’t you, don’t you?”

Before last week, I had never given a second thought to the decades-long controversy surrounding the identity of the subject of Carly Simon’s most famous song, ‘You’re So Vain’. However, after I wrote a six hundred word article about the walk of shame, that all changed.

Hashed out in forty five minutes, I never expected anyone to give it a second glance. Yes, I would go so far as to say I thought it was quite funny. And no, I hadn’t made the huge mistake of confusing ‘your’ and ‘you’re’ (something that people on the internet tend to get extremely cross about) but at the end of the day, I was just a little fish in a big pond – a blonde nobody armed with a laptop and journalistic aspirations.

So as the number of hits reached quadruple figures and friends started sharing it via Facebook and Twitter, I started to panic just a little bit. I had just written a page long article about my sex life, and everybody was reading it.

The owners of the beds and the houses and the less than satisfactory heating systems – the people who had put me in the taxis and on the buses, all of them, I think it is safe to say now, are fellow students. This isn’t the biggest of universities, and I pride myself on associating with members of the opposite sex who can actually read. I knew that they were going to see what I’d written sooner or later. And although I wouldn’t want to divulge details, I will say it turned out to be sooner.

The anonymous university blog ‘Sex at Oxbridge’ is read by thousands of people every day. But the thing is, it’s just that – anonymous. Not wanting to undermine everything I had written about the walk of shame not being shameful, I could hardly follow suit.

It wasn’t just the aforementioned who I got mixed reactions from, however. It seemed that many people from various parts of my life had something to say about what I wrote.

There was criticism (‘we’re not all as easy as you, love’) and there was support, (‘wonderful article darling, well done, love, Granny.’) There was indifference, (‘what’s the UEA Drop?)’ and my personal favourite, from my ever optimistic father, ‘it’s amazing what you can write about without firsthand experience…’

In short, I’ve come to realise two important things. One, in a generation of Perez Hilton fans, everyone secretly loves reading about themselves on the internet (or at least likes to think they are) and two, I’ll leave the saucier stuff to the anonymous bloggers. I say this because due to the success of my first piece I’ve been lucky enough to secure a weekly column for the Drop. While I might not continue to blurt out every detail of the more intimate areas of my life, I will continue to share my thoughts and views on other typical student experiences. I’ll leave the political diatribes and film reviews to the experts and keep writing about what I know. After all, I’m just a lowly fresher who walked home in one shoe once and wanted to inform others how to avoid making the same mistake. What do I know?

You can read the 'Walk of Shame' piece here: http://www.ueadrop.co.uk/en/photos/feature/2012-03-13/978/the-walk-of-shame.html