The Blogging Pimp

A journalist named Nils Jacobsen—economics background, actual media credentials—wrote about me in some German media publication. Not a profile I’d asked for, just an analysis of what Amy&Pink was and how it’d managed to capture a moment that respectable media had completely missed.

His argument was straightforward: the blog lived in the space between what teenagers actually wanted and what grown-up publications thought they should want. Everything was explicitly sexual, written by eighteen-year-olds for eighteen-year-olds, operating in a cultural moment where YouPorn and BuzzFeed were the actual authorities. Magazines and newspapers were irrelevant. The blog just provided what people craved, without dressing it up.

Nils didn’t soften it. He called it trash. Limited writing. Calculated. (He’d quoted something I’d said about basically forgetting how to write properly, which was fair.) But he made this observation that stuck with me: despite all that—maybe because of it—the blog captured the actual moment more truthfully than anything respectable media was doing. Magazine editors scrambling to seem young were missing it. Critics were always catching up. This was just direct.

Then he wrote that I was the blogging pimp of the Miley Cyrus generation, constantly feeding fresh material to eighteen-year-olds—written by eighteen-year-olds themselves.

I’ve never met Nils. But reading that felt like recognition. Not flattery, exactly. The rarer thing: someone from outside seeing clearly what you’d made and naming it accurately, without trying to make it respectable or noble. He just called it what it was.

I actually love when strangers write about you. It’s even better when they hand you a usable phrase. That one was so perfectly gross and specific I considered getting it printed on business cards. Which is exactly the kind of thing that should tell you something about my actual values versus whatever I might claim about them.