Sex Blogger of the Month: Ayzad of Ayzad.com

Each month our readers look forward to our carefully selected Sex Blogger of the Month, which we pull from our amazing list of Sex Bloggers. This month, we are featuring Ayzad of Ayzad.com. Ayzad's informative, sexy posts will both titillate and educate you. What we love about his blog is how he tries to dig into some of the fascinating, lesser-known things about sex. Want to learn more? Here are Ayzad's answers to Kinkly's 10 questions.

Kinkly: Give us three words that describe your blog.

Ayzad: Kinky, questioning and educational. Can I add “fun”, too?

Kinkly: What inspired you to start the blog?

Ayzad: Just like I started writing books to share my knowledge of BDSM in a more practical way than endlessly answering the same questions at parties and via email, I started the blog as a nice way to share my almost daily discoveries about kink and my thoughts about unusual sex with like-minded pervs and curious people worldwide. Before the blog, I had a static website (in ye olde 2003!), which provided the seed for the current site – It’s a shame for your English-speaking readers that the Italian part of ayzad.com is much, much richer than the English one! On the other hand, they can better enjoy the daily news I tweet in English.

Kinkly: What's behind the name?

Ayzad: The cool story is that in ancient Mesopotamia, ayzads were sort of fire elementals invented by the ruling priest class to keep the people drudging for them, and they were supposed to be placated through public whippings of rebels. Everyone was so awed of them that they actually denounced each other. The very early Christians thought this was a pretty efficient setup, so they re-purposed these mystical figures as their archangels. The true story, however? I just needed an original pen name that was free on Hotmail and other websites, and which started with an ‘A’ in order to be on top of alphabetical lists. About 20 years ago it sounded very cool, mysterious, and sexy – then 9/11 came and now everybody’s convinced I am a Middle-Eastern terrorist. Go figure.

Kinkly: Who's your target reader?

Ayzad: I believe I’m mostly writing for two categories. The smaller one is full-blooded kinksters eager to learn something new about their passions; a much wider one is composed of everyday Janes and Joes looking for spicy entertainment, and for funny stories to retell their friends when they meet at the coffee-maker. The trick is that most of my “funny stories” or plainly silly posts – like the endless inexplicable moments in the history of sexuality series – tend, in fact, to inject doubt into the idea that there’s little more than normative sexuality out there, and open minds. I have grown convinced that sex, like art, rarely is about itself. Yet, it represents a sort of window offering the possibility to consider other (maybe all) aspects of life under a different light. I just try to reach out for people who love having lots of windows around them.

Kinkly: What's unique about your blog?

Ayzad: Probably the mix of light-hearted fun and serious analysis of what’s behind the surface of unusual sexualities. I come from a journalistic background. This gives me a bit of an edge with fact-checking my posts and interviewing people. I also guess having entered the BDSM lifestyle almost 30 years ago makes me jaded at least enough not to have the sort of wide-eyed over-enthusiasm that newcomers tend to have. I am still amazed by what I keep learning almost every day, but I tend to have rather balanced views.

Kinkly: What is the topic that you find yourself covering most often and why?

Ayzad: BDSM is my first love and the topic I’m most knowledgeable in, so I write about it quite often. I guess it’s because it sort of contains many other sub-kinks and non-normative sexuality, while being where most new experiments happen. At the same time, that’s where so much of the current alternative sex culture comes from, so you’re kinda bound to revisit it all the time.

Kinkly: What was your most popular post ever? Why do you think it drew so many readers?

Ayzad: For the English section, it would appear to be one of my Don’t buy it! guides to the weirdest sex toys in the world, closely followed by an article about impotence trials in Renaissance France. I don’t know about the former, but the latter’s spike depended on being picked up by Reddit on a lucky day. It’s pretty interesting how both posts got tens of thousands of views, and just a handful of social shares. On the other hand, my Italian readers went somehow bonkers for the story about Dollfie sex and the very recent post about the reasons why kinky relationships tend to be very short-lived. The most visited page, however, is the monster BDSM glossary I’ll have to translate into English someday. And I must be honest with you: besides the last two, which clearly are about answering concrete questions, I haven’t the faintest grasp on what in the world drove my readers’ preferences.

Kinkly: What's the best thing about writing a sex blog?

Ayzad: The hundreds of messages from people telling me that my writing helped them to get a serene sex life. This is literally invaluable and reason enough to keep at a job that has no financial meaning. I’m not joking when I say I am a reformed journalist: no matter how well paid it was, I just couldn’t cope with having to use my skills to toil at spin-doctored news that cared nothing about readers. Now, I feel I am making a real difference.

Kinkly: What's the worst thing about it?

Ayzad: The money. I don’t do pay-for-review posts or accept advertising for products that don't fit my approach to sex and kink. So, it’s basically just expenses. I earn something from my consultancy and kink coaching, and of course from my books, but a large part of my living is still coming from translations and ghostwriting.The English language editions of some of my books are beginning to reach a much larger market base. So, that will hopefully change things quite a bit.

Kinkly: OK, now for the good stuff: Give us your best tip for great sex.

Ayzad: This is easy since I wrote a post right about that. It’s simple: don’t settle for anything less than you desire. Coming to little compromises is, of course, a practical necessity, but dismissing your fantasies because you believe them to be hard to achieve is soul-crushing and has no reason to be, given the wonderful resources available today. Don’t be afraid of yourself nor of judgement. Talk openly with your partners and you’ll eventually get to experience the greatest sex life ever.