"This blog is what my children will use as evidence when they sue me for emancipation," says the introductory bullet at the top of Leigh Anne Wilson's sexy blog, One Good Thing, which the mother of two toddling sons writes when not running her Internet adult toy business.
One of an estimated 10 million American bloggers of all kinds and subjects, Wilson's days include trips to the Porn Superstore in Old Irving Park for wares to sell on her online toy store. And when not writing about the frustrations of doing business with creepy sales clerks or observing that not everyone working in the sex industry is "all excited about being there," Wilson is having a laugh at the expense of such obsolete law as Alabama's sex toy ban.
"Since the sale of female masturbation aids have always been illegal in Alabama, I am unaware of any brave young thing who may have gotten busted selling a bullet vibe on the courthouse steps of Birmingham," she wrote June 10, "but I have to admit when the rest of the nation was making fun of Alabama over this issue I was sorely tempted to be the one getting arrested for the cause. Or at least giving them away downtown until I was forced to stop."
The whole thing began when Wilson wanted to keep an old-fashioned scrapbook about her children but realized she was not a strong photographer. "I take a picture and it's blurry," she tells AVNOnline.com. "So I thought, maybe if I just wrote about it, I could get the memories that way. So I started writing about the stuff they did, and then it started kind of morphing into what good thing happened at work."
Wilson went into the adult toy business in the first place because she needed an adult-level outlet while raising her children and living in "this very sort of conservative neighborhood, where everyone's talking about babies and what's the best diaper. And that was boring me to tears. And maybe I needed to go back to work and do something just for grown-ups.
"I was doing research into what kind of business I could go into," she continued, "and my husband goes, 'You know, the adult industry, there's a lot of money in that, you should do research into that.' In Chicago at the time there were no adult stores specifically for women."
Wilson admits she gets a small kick out of needling those hunting her blog for porn delights and missing the catch-as-catch-can style.
"Today marks the one month anniversary of Alex's last accident," she wrote June 12. One month, people! I've been holding back on announcing this, but at last, I think it's safe. He's potty trained. Was there ever a more beautiful sentence in the English language than that? No. There isn't. (Hey, look, RedEye readers, if you'd shown up last week, you'd have gotten stories about foot fetishism, service industry stories from hell, free porn giveaways, and a review of the world's shittiest ice cream parlor. But no, you had to show up on potty training day. Life is unfair, what can I tell you?)"
Wilson opened on the Internet in January 2002 and opened a brick-and-mortar store the following May. She described it as a store decorated in an unusual style from a typical adult store, complete with potted plants and fixtures, with the bulk of the adult implements in the back of the store. At least once, however, it caused one small uproar from a customer.
"I did get one woman who came in one time, I think she kind of got angry because she thought she'd been tricked," Wilson said. "'Don't you believe in God, don't you know you're going to hell, how can you sell these things?'"
Since the Tribune article, however, most of the response to her blog and store has been positive.
"The American Family Association attacked me when the Tribune article came out," she said. "I've made the big time. [They were] railing about the Chicago Tribune writing a positive article about somebody like me and about how Chicago is going down the tubes."
Forrester Research has said that blogging now is every inch the Everyman activity from the top of the corporate ladder to the most obscure stay-at-home parent to the sexiest fantasists among the average suburbanites.
"The real potential for blogs," Forrester analyst Charlotte Li told the Chicago Tribune, "is that there are so many different voices and opinions to choose from that would never be out there otherwise."
