Violet Blue is an American sex educator, writer, and editor who has also kept a record of erotic culture online. Violet Blue is the legal name on her passport, Social Security card, and the rest of her ID. It was not invented for a column, and the trademark suit did not create it. In October 2007 she sued adult performer Ada Mae Johnson, who had worked as “Violet Blue” since 2000. Blue said Johnson had taken the name Blue had used in print since 1999, and the “Violet Blue” trademark Blue registered in 2007. The claims were trademark infringement, dilution, and unfair business practices. A 2007 preliminary injunction ordered Johnson to stop using names, trademarks, and domains confusingly similar or identical to the trademark VIOLET BLUE. Johnson changed her stage name to Noname Jane. The suit settled in October 2008. For readers in porn and kink media, the case is a reminder that an erotic name is both a person and property, and that the same three syllables can end in court.
Blue also tried to build sex-positive infrastructure. In August 2009 she and Ben Metcalfe launched vb.ly, promoted as the internet’s first and only sex-positive URL shortener, on Libya’s .ly domain. The homepage showed Blue holding a beer bottle. In October 2010 Libya Telecom & Technology shut it down after a letter saying the image was contrary to Sharia and not decent or family friendly. Her partner answered that a registry should not police site content by policing the domain. vb.ly died there. A sex-positive infrastructure experiment was erased by morality politics at the DNS layer. That was not a win. In July 2008 she sought restraining orders against online critics David Burch, also known as Ben Burch, and Nina Alter, to stop them emailing her, editing her Wikipedia page, or writing unkindly about her online. Both motions were dismissed. She kept the right to file again. Around June 2008 Boing Boing removed every post that mentioned her. A Los Angeles Times blogger put the count at at least seventy. Boing Boing said Violet had behaved in a way that made them reconsider whether they wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her, and framed the purge as an editorial choice. Editor Xeni Jardin said she hoped she would not have to make the reasons public.
The Cleis how-to shelf
The Cleis Press books are the center of that teaching career. She treats BDSM and fetish as a skill a person can learn, not as a pathology. The Ultimate Guide to Cunnilingus and The Ultimate Guide to Fellatio first appeared in 2002, with second editions in 2010 (ISBNs 1-57344-387-5 and 1-57344-398-0). They are direct practical guides for adult readers. The same stretch includes The Smart Girl’s Guide to Porn (2006, IPPY Bronze), The Adventurous Couple’s Guide to Sex Toys (2006), and The Adventurous Couple’s Guide to Strap-On Sex (2007).
With Thomas Roche she wrote Fetish Sex: An Erotic Guide for Couples (Daedalus, 2006, ISBN 1-881943-23-2), a couples’ fetish guide. The books treat kink as technique and give partners language for negotiating fetish without shame. The Smart Girl’s Guide to the G-Spot (2007) maps the G-spot, and the strap-on book puts that skill in the same mass-market nonfiction. That is the pleasure-literacy layer of the shelf.
What she edited
She also edited a long run of couple- and women-centered erotica, on the idea that fantasy is a script you can use. At Cleis that includes the Sweet Life series (2001 and 2003), Taboo: Forbidden Fantasies for Couples (2004), and Best Women’s Erotica across 2006–2011. The 2006 volume won an IPPY. The 2007 volume won IPPY Gold. Other collections include Lust: Erotic Fantasies for Women and Girls on Top: Explicit Erotica for Women (2009).
Through Digita Publications she released Erotic Role Play: A Guide For Couples (2007) and How To Kiss (2007, including Kindle), among other ebooks and audiobooks. The line treats safer sex as non-negotiable and erotic role play as a couple’s skill. In that editing, women’s erotic writing is a market force, not a niche leftover. For readers curious about BDSM, the anthologies and guides are a path from ordinary sex into an explicit power exchange without a full dungeon education first.
Privacy books and the memoir
Later the writing moved toward digital autonomy and her own history. The Smart Girls Guide to Privacy (2014, ISBN 0-9799019-9-5) and the self-published How to Be a Digital Revolutionary (2017, ISBN 978-1-52133-828-5) are about a sexual public figure protecting reputation and privacy on the open web. In 2023 she published the memoir A Fish Has No Word For Water: A Punk Homeless San Francisco Memoir (ISBN 978-0-9862266-7-0), about a punk, homeless stretch of her life in San Francisco.
A column in the San Francisco Chronicle until 2010, the podcast Open Source Sex with erotic readings and straight talk, and a 2013 Best Sex Educator nod from the San Francisco Weekly sit on one line: fetish, oral technique, and porn criticism in public, plus trademark fights and platform deletions. For adult readers she is someone who treats SM-adjacent curiosity and fetish curiosity as adult competence, internet mess included, and puts it on a shelf.
