I don’t have any memories before age three. But around then, I remember talking with pre-teen babysitters. I crossed my legs. I sighed. “Oh such silky-smooth legs” I mimed like a razor-blade commercial. I knew I was a girl. Girls were sexy, there was Jessica Rabbit, Miss Yvonne, my mom hosting a party with cleavage.

When I was a kid, a running narration ran through my head. I’d be standing in the back-yard, the sun starting to set  and a voice from inside my head would boom “nothing would be quite the same after that day.” Maybe it was the writer in me, or maybe it was watching too much of “The Wonder Years”.

But, the voice in my head sounded male. And somehow, this seemed to make sense.  Male, I thought, was more gender neutral. Female was a character, an act, a dress to put on. As I kid, I didn’t yet feel like I was inherently a girl.

As an adult, I identify as a woman but if I have to answer, philosophically, how I know I am a woman, I am not sure. But I know when I am “performing” my gender, and I know so often, it is about being “sexy”. The problem is not that gender is sexual but that since we are so bred into these sex roles (Such Silky Smooth Legs!) it can become unconscious. Un-chosen.

When we are dressing “femme” the sexuality of it is inherent, it’s biological. Heels force the pelvis to tilt, pushing breasts and bottoms on display. They create the “ideal” leg length, which according to a study is 5 per cent longer than the norm.

Clothes that nip at the waist create the illusion of perfect waist-to-hip ratio, the golden .07 shared by women like Marilyn and Kate Moss and corseted Victorians. We are advertising fertility. And while I don’t have research on it, I could casually argue that even the “girly” color pink brings out the orgasm flushed, healthy tones of our faces.

I don’t remember anything before age 3, but I know that when I was born there was a pink ribbon on my fuzzy head, it was decided for me. And sadly, there seems to be a lack of choice among adult women about putting on the femme role…Maybe this is why, in my experience, there is some jeering at highly-femme women in sensitive, intellectual circles.

I used to have an internal fight around this–Embracing the chicken cutlet boobs and pink heels. Then Guilty, guilty about being overly femme–pushing away from that role.

But, finally I realized it was okay. Femme was an act I could put on but it wasn’t one that I needed. It was sexual. And that’s okay because I am a sexual person, and gender presentation—and it’s clothes– are part of  play.

I am 15 and in music class. The  teacher is deaf.  His eyes are lidded with sleep, enlarged in owly-y glasses, ears grown over with cotton-fuzz.

Crystal is assigned to sit beside me. “Eat it” she said, pushing a spitball toward my face. “No” I breathed, a thing flying in my chest. The class rippled.  The teacher sat at the desk, his cotton-head fallen against his palm.

She said it louder this time; “Eat It.” Melodie Holloway was beside me, her eyes darted, focusing on the wall. Dirk Hendrick looked at me, a cheek bloated against his hand. He looked away.

“What do you feel towards her” my therapist might ask, of my 15-year-old self. My 25-year-old-self might fumble. For a long time, I think I felt indifference or anger. Shame. It wasn’t something I looked at. It was something I buried. Over and over.

I polled twitter and facebook about bullying. No one said “it made me stronger” or “it made me who I am today.” Instead I heard “It gave me a complex about my weight that I carry to this day. “It gave my social anxiety”. “It made it so hard to trust people.”

When a friend of mine was in a fight, she would come to me for help– I knew about these things. Over MSN Messenger, we’d send threats in hot pink over-sized  text. We might call the girl a “skank” or a “bitch.”  I didn’t know these girls. I didn’t intuitively know what scabs to pick. I was hurling things I thought would hurt, things that would hurt me.

Psychology has focused on bullying recently. According to a study, most  kids (60-70%)  are never involved in bullying, neither as targets or bullies. The  markers for being a target, they say, are passivity, non-violence. It’s also thought that bullying is formed early into the bully’s personality, marked by anxiety and early aggression. And bullying parents.

“What do you feel towards your 15 year old self now” my therapist might ask. And– I feel empathy. I feel for her, for the hurt that weighs in her body, a shadow balled up inside of her.

“Eat it” Crystal says.  I am shaking my head, my face hot, the room still.

This 15 year old is a part still inside of me. In this room, still stuck. Inside of me is the house I went home to and the Mother who I couldn’t tell, out of fear, out of shame, out of not knowing whose side she was even on.

“And what do you feel toward the house?  Toward your Mother. Toward Crystal?” I would breathe in–out. “I empathize with them” I could now say.  Knowing, that they were wrong. That the initiation of violence is always wrong. But also knowing  they are not unlike an animal, snapping their jaws at threats which aren’t real. Trying, they way they’ve been taught, to survive.

The next day I am at my locker, for a moment staring, in thought. Suddenly a great force is against my cheek. Hot and stinging, knocked into the side of my face. I am dizzied with ache, the sound of my heart-beat.  The air around me is cool and floaty.

It takes 10 seconds to catch my breath, to regain sight. People are milling to class but no one is looking at me. No one is there. I realize, someone has punched me. They must’ve ran, hit and kept running.

I see my 15 year-old self at her locker. I can look at her, where no one else did, and she can see me. My empathy grows, huge from the compacted place of self-love inside– I am not passive in this. And in processing, it is safe.

Errol and I are in the car. He’s been to The Sins Center before and I, well, I have never been to a BDSM club. “So tell me again about the last time you were there,” I ask. He shakes his head. “So I walk in, checking out the place and I notice there are a lot of older people. I sit down and this little old lady comes up. Gray hair, you know someone’s Grandma, here to pick them up. Then this guy starts tying her onto the equipment, pulling out crops and paddles. And she starts taking a beating. She’s got age spots… this guy is whipping them.”

We laugh, but Errol says he felt like he needed to watch to make sure that she was OK, and didn’t have a heart attack.

The club is spacious and clean. Saint Andrew’s crosses hang against the walls, empty sex slings sag in the corner. An older man with a beard flogs a graying submissive — a naked and bulbous woman bent into doggy style. Her purple posterior takes each of his toys: leather flogger, plastic cane, studded paddle.

It has become something of a hangout for older people in the lifestyle. Master Z, the owner of the club, says that about half of the clientele are over 55. “We have a club manager who’s 75, a club manager who is 80. As a matter of fact I don’t think any of our club managers are under 50 here,” says Master Z.

According to sexologist, Dr. Carol Queen, there are precautions that come with age. “Some sorts of BDSM are the erotic version of high-impact sports, a person of any age must take their health and body resilience into account” she explains “Some things to pay attention to with an older partner, is whether the skin is thinning and how their joints are doing. They’ll want to make sure they can communicate about health issues to partners.”

When I ask Master Z if the aging bodies makes him nervous he replies, “Hell no.” In his opinion, it’s the kids that get into trouble with hurting themselves, the newbies. The older people tend to know what they are doing, they are the ones who will stop a dangerous scene, and show you how to do it.

But sometimes older people are the newbies. Peaches’ hair is gray, her face sloped with age. In a voice shaky and warmed by southern twang she tells me she got into BDSM seven years ago.

“Well,” she sighs, ” I lost my husband in 1998. After awhile, my sister was trying to match-make but I was from a small town in Louisiana where everybody knows everybody.” Peaches decided to play the field online. There, she opened up to a guy about her tattoos. “I always liked pain to a certain extent,” she says as she motions to the faded designs on her upper arm. “He suggested I look up BDSM.”

For Peaches, it just clicked. “I was born submissive. I mean my grandchildren tell me what to do!”

Online, she met her master. Propped up next to her, Master R looks like a teddy bear. His eyes are murky and blue in coke bottle glasses. In his 80s, he is a little hard of hearing but is still playing hard.

“[Master R] does the violet wand [electrical stimulation], he does knives, canes, he does staples on me. I mean, he does it all,” Peaches says, looking at him, the lines around her mouth lifting.

Master R has been in the lifestyle for about 15 years. He too got into BDSM when his wife died.

“I think I’ve always been interested in BDSM,” he says. “I remember the comics that grabbed my attention, the light bondage scenes, I kept going back, re-reading those parts.” He brought it up to his wife, but she wasn’t interested. “We did some light bondage but nothing really worked. And eventually she died,” he stutters. ” It took me some time to get over that.” When Master R was ready, the Internet was there.

According to Dr. Queen, the Internet is a catalyst for older people. “I think it’s easier for younger people, in general, to go out and look for partners,” she says. “The Internet levels the playing field and allows older people to seek partners, making it easier to find new romance — or, for that matter, a tryst with a sex worker. It also brings the sexual world to a generation of people who may not have had as much access to explicit materials earlier in their lives, so I think for some, it sparks or gives permission for new erotic interests.”

The only worry for Dr. Queen is that being introduced to sex without much education brings risk. “There is recent research suggesting that [sexually transmitted infection] rates among elders is increasing. Widow/ers and divorce(e)s are out of long-term relationships. With a new partner, a person can reinvent her- or himself sexually, pursue long-held or new interests. However, it’s obvious that being ‘back in the game’ brings risks that these folks may not have had to address earlier in their lives. Many seniors haven’t learned enough about safer sex and sexually transmitted conditions.”

One thing that may benefit older people getting into the BDSM community is that often experience is valued — age can be hot. “I have a number of the younger ones ask me if they could play with me,” Peaches says. “Sometimes you get respect because you’re older and sometimes you get respect because you deserve it.”

While many older BDSM’ers might know how to play, it can’t be denied that as the body ages, play must be altered. Sometimes instead of safe-words, couples losing their hearing will use hand-signals. Doms also become more understanding, careful not to break a scene when a sub can’t get into position.

“There is indication that heart attack risk increases with new partners, so if someone has heart issues that might dictate no electricity play or play that might result in very strong emotions and adrenaline rushes. This last caution would be especially true of someone just getting into BDSM,” warns Dr. Queen.

“My knees burn sometimes, like when I go up two flights of stairs,” Peaches says. She also just found out she has diabetes, which she is learning to play around. Peaches and Master R agree that with age, a lowered sex drive can be a limitation, but that playing is what keeps their sex drive healthy.

When I ask why people are so grossed out by older people being sexual, Master R quips, “No one wants to think that their parents have sex!” Peaches points out that even her conservative older sister and her husband, who sleep in separate beds, are still having sex.

“I’ve heard from more than one woman that as menopause changes their sexual response and how it feels to have intercourse, non-vaginal forms of pleasure gain new prominence,” says Dr. Queen. “One of my post-menopausal friends discovered she really loved anal sex even after she was no longer particularly into vaginal ‘vanilla.’”

According to a study by the University of Chicago, more than three-quarters of American men and half of women aged 75 to 85 are still interested in sex. But culturally, we don’t see this.

Dr. Queen has two theories. “There had been an underlying bias in our culture that sex really is, at bottom, for reproduction. That’s one of the things that continues to power homophobia too. After one is out of one’s reproductive years, the notion of sex becomes unseemly and even unacceptable to many. The other thing, I think, is that there is societal pressure on us to fear aging, and seeing evidence of older people’s sexuality brings up our difficult feelings about getting older, our own body image fears, fears of mortality.”

Both Peaches and Master R have tried coming out to their adult kids. Peaches’ kids didn’t want to hear about it, shutting her up with a quick, “Mom, if you are happy, we are happy.” Master R opened up to one of his children, who did not approve. “I know if one of them knows, then they all know, but no one mentions it,” he says.

As our collective lifespans continue to increase, that stretch between 65 and 80 is no longer the last phase of life. “I love Sir and I love being out there in my sexuality. And that’s it. My children have got their own lives now,” explains Peaches. It’s a new section of life, one  that we’ve never had before.

I’d get in at 8:50 and carefully hang my coat while the phone rang. My voicemail would be full of messages, left in that window of infomercials and irrational thought patterns. “ Yeah, uhm. I was wonderin’ about this egg donation that I read in the paper. It says I can make $7,000.”

The overwhelming majority of callers were black girls in their twenties from a lower income and limited education. They sat, nervous in the waiting room, thumbing through photos of their kids with acrylic nails the color of tropical fish.

I’d put on my phone-voice and ask: How old are you? What is your racial background? How much do you weigh? How tall are you? What is your education level? Have you ever been depressed? Diagnosed with anxiety? An eating disorder? Are you in contact with both of your birth parents?

At least 80% of girls didn’t pass the first round of requirements.

It was a time when the economy was digging itself into a hole. So far, the parents were still paying—a donation cycle at $20,000, which doesn’t include clinic fees or guarantee a pregnancy. The parents were often infertile by age. They were desperate, going a little crazy. I began to wonder if there were any really good parents.

“You just want white bitches” one of my callers said when her application was denied, and hung up. Well. The intended parents were buying genes, they wanted: white, movie star beautiful and diplomas from the right University.

At parties, I would find myself cornered by a flock of young women. They’d seen the ads too. The media even picked it up as a trend: “College students turn to donating eggs in economic crisis!” I was on television twice, answering the phone while smiling: “I’m sorry but you don’t meet our requirements at this time.”

I’d give the girls my spiel: “If you pass the requirements you are put in the system and when an intended parent chooses you, we’ll call and ask if you can go through a cycle. You will get several shots of hormones. Then go through the egg donation process which is done vaginally. You will be put out for the procedure and need the entire day to rest.”

They stood listening eyes a-glitter, breasts pushed out in unconscious knowledge that their female bodies had the ability to give life, that this was sought after.

What was not included in my speech (and what one study would find most egg donors don’t know) was that these shots were drugs that encourage the ovary to ripen several eggs simultaneously, rather than the one egg normally ovulated each month.

Some argue we don’t know enough about this heavy dose of hormones  to call it safe. There have been no long term studies on egg donors. Others say a lot about can be learned from the studies on infertility patients, who go through the same stimulation and egg retrieval process. With these patients, cancer is a health concern, which may be from the infertility itself.

Sometimes, I felt awkward when a friend asked about becoming a donor, I bit my lip. Lesbians never made it through. Bisexuals sometimes did, but we had to tell the parent about the donor’s sexuality. I guess it was the whole gay gene thing. Which science has not concluded. But it was also thought that the parents just wouldn’t choose gay donors.

At work, the question inevitably directed at me was “So when are you going to donate?”It was tempting: it wasn’t just a single 7 grand, you could do it up to 6 times. But something about it felt off.  Most parents, I’d decided, were not really good parents. I began avoiding my own parents phone-calls.

One afternoon I was alone in the office when a woman called. She was hysterical.”I just don’t understand how you could do this.  There are so many babies that need adopting. Why are people doing this?” I was bored. I calmed her down and let her talk. I didn’t tell her that adoption can often be cheaper than using an egg donor.

I do empathize with egg donor parents. I don’t think there is anything morally wrong with choosing egg donation over adoption.  But it does seem that children are often, in part, brought into the world for selfish reasons.

A study in Fertility and Sterility reported that about one in five donors experienced psychological effects. Some women reported positive ripples, feeling proud for helping an infertile couple. Others began to ruminate, worried about the strangers raising their eggs– their genetic kids.

As I worked to help people get babies, my mind spinning with my own childhood, I grew sensitive. I no longer grit my teeth when a kid cried on the bus. I saw the Mom yelling. I saw the stay-at-home Moms on parade,  ignoring their reaching babies, not hearing the kid say they needed something.

Donor-babies come into life with a delicate background. Potentially, they could live an entire life shadowed by family secret. The donor is not listed on the birth certificate. They may never know half siblings, existing in mirrored ignorance.

If I were to donate my eggs, I couldn’t choose which parents I wanted to help have a baby. It would’ve been about the 7 grand. It would have been just another grasping reason to bring a life into the world.

On my laptop there is an ever-increasing  folder of images.  Some of them, like this one (found here) end up as photos on Rabbit Write. But many, you’ll probably never see. They are, plainly, porn. I have this worry-fantasy, where a friend or someone will pull up my laptop to find these naked bodies projected on the screen, or worse, a video on pause.

This is all the more mortifying if the friend I am imagining is a woman. Women, in my experience, don’t really talk with each other about porn. There seems to be some silent rule which says: “No!” And “…seriously? Ew.”

There are a lot of reasons that women don’t watch porn, aside from the background noise that brainwashes en masse “porn is wrong porn degrades women.” It seems a lot of women just don’t connect with porn. But  I don’t think it’s because women aren’t as visual. There is not lot of porn out there made for women, especially straight women. Yet, new research shows that while men are the large purveyors of porn, women audiences are steadily increasing, growing louder in our silence, apparently.

In junior high, boys started talking about jerking off. It was something to roll your eyes at but it was okay–we knew all boys did it.  When we talked about masturbation amongst each other it was with the idea that it was just weird and gross. As I’ve gotten older, that has lessened, we do talk about masturbation. But it’s through glamorizing it, Hitachi and the rabbit and Sex & the City, some faint hot pink echo of “you go-girl-isms”. But talking about porn, remains taboo, and kind of embarrassing. Talking about porn gives our masturbation a desire.

It seems women are more open about porn with guys.  But in talking with dudes about porn and bonding with them over porn, we often just show we are sharing in their desires, also ogling the women. Not having our own.

I like some porn and I want to like more porn, but most of it is so bad: the telemundo lighting, the army of women that appear to have been poorly cloned from Pam Anderson circa 1986. Even when porn hits the rare hot spot, it often misses straight girls. Have you ever noticed how in porn the men are strangely objectified? We barely get names or faces. Just disembodied penises, bobbing in and out of mouths and various black-holes.

My friend Fruzsina and I were loudly discussing bisexuality, over a jukebox and pitcher of beer. “So I think that women are just trained to see other women as sexual,  because of advertising and art and televison, we are groomed to look at them as sexual objects.” I was into this. “The male gaze” I confirmed. Most porn is made by, and can only be viewed through, the male gaze. It avoids lingering on the woman’s point of view in a blowjob, passively capturing images of penises or ab muscles.

There are more women directors than ever. Feminist, lady-friendly porn is being made. Although, a lot of it is queer, not directed at straight women. Burning Angel is a straight porn site that boasts popularity with women. They also try to employ hot young alt guys. But the way the site is set up I can’t search for James Deen or Zak Sabbath. There’s a drop-down “choose a girl” section, but what if I want to choose a guy?

While the numbers are rising, I don’t think the majority of women are watching porn. But I advocate that we start talking to each other about why we don’t watch it or do, what we like or don’t like. And let’s take a cue from the boys I knew in junior high and share our finds. Here, I’ll go first. This and  this is good. This and this also this and this and sometimes this and this also this is helpful for finding new stuff and this as a guide for renting/downloading. Our collective muffled moans are getting louder, let’s use them for good.

Yesterday I was in the shower, the warm-cool space where I do my best thinking, and I realized that so much of what I’ve learned about my sexuality has been through asexuality–from somewhere invisible in sex-positivity, in feminism, from somewhere that isn’t sexual at all. Asexuality is the lack of sexual attraction. It’s not like celibacy, which is a choice.

I don’t consider myself asexual, but from talking with asexuals, I’ve learned a lot about my own relationships, sexual and non. Here are excerpts from interviews I’ve done over the past year with David Jay, the founder of AVEN,  illustrating my education in sex and not sex.

Friendships and relationships aren’t that different.

“In the asexual community the word single doesn’t exist. Because single implies that if you don’t have a romantic relationship you don’t have a valid source of intimacy in your life.  A lot of “single” people have extremely valid sources of intimacy worth talking about. Instead, words like romantic and aromantic get thrown around to describe relationships. When asexual people gossip we don’t just talk about the relationships we are in, we talk about the relationship models we are in. Every asexual person ends up with this elaborate world view of how intimacy words and their relationships work.

We have to ask, what makes a relationship different that a really close friendship?  What is monogamy? At what point would I be cheating on my romantic partner with my best friend? What commitments do we need to make in order for us both to feel safe and trusting? You have to go deeper than some sexual couples might, where that  line is drawn by sex.”

Being open and honest about sex is great, but how you do it matters.

“The desire to create a dialogue of sexuality in our marketing driven culture can easily turn into over-celebrating sexuality and glamorizing or fetishizing it. I think that you should be mindful of the way that you are glamorizing sex or treating sex as intrinsically different or better than other ways of connecting with people.

We think that if your goal is to create an open honest dialogue about sexuality, you should be talking about asexuality too. By celebrating sexuality, you should also be celebrating the fact that sex is sometimes boring and that there are other ways to connect with people. Right now even in sex positive spaces if you start talking about how sex is sometimes boring it has the weight of I have to lower my voice and have a hand on my back in order to talk about it.”

Often, it’s really intimacy we are talking about, not sex.

“I would define intimacy pretty broadly, I would say an intimate relationship is one where you feel comfortable being vulnerable. In our society intimacy is really strongly correlated with sex. The ability for someone to fully emotionally connect with someone else is largely sexualized. There is a strong case to be made that not all important relationships are sexual and not all intimacy on an emotional level is sexual.

I’ve definitely had conversations with a lot of guys that start out expressing what they’ve label as sexuality. And if I kind of prod, there’s a lot of other emotional stuff that’s under that. And it may or may not have anything to do with sexuality, they just may not have another language set for expressing it.”

Gender is sexual

“Part of the boogeyman that gets you if you don’t gender perform right is that you won’t be sexually attractive. So, if you’re female you have to be feminine or you won’t be attractive and that means you won’t be in a sexual relationship with someone. But if you’re asexual that’s already not happening. And your only incentive to be feminine is if that is a genuine expression of who you are. And so I think, with that incentive stripped away, there’s less emphasis on gender but in some way, the emphasis left is kind of a little more genuine. Because it’s driven by self expression.

So much of how we express our sexuality is gender. The expression of our sexuality ultimately often is the expression of our gender. And we are still trying to figure out what the expression of asexuality looks like, learning how to have an empowered gender identity without sexuality is really tricky.”

Grant Stoddard is the much loved underdog of the sex-writing world. His “I Did it For Science” column at Nerve gave us a hands-on account of his personal exploits, which saw him tackle everything from dressing up like a baby to doing a sample Real Doll at the factory.

A few must reads:

Experiment: To attend and participate in an Orgy

Experiment: To have a threesome with a woman and another man

Experiment: To literally have sex with Myself

Experiment: To have sex with a Real Doll

He’s since published a memoir, Working Stiff: The Misadventures of an Accidental Sexpert. Paramount Vantage bought the motion picture rights and Stoddard signed a deal with 20th Century Fox Television. For The Man Project, he opens up about doing it for science and how he got his sex education.
Do you think it’s harder for men to write about their sexual experiences than it is for women?

We think there’s something gross about reading about a straight guy and his sexual experiences. The whole premise of “I Did it For Science” was that I was the least likely person for the job. I started interning at Nerve when they gave me the sex-writing job as a joke. I was vastly inexperienced. It was kind of like I was being forced to do it, but I think that made it palatable for readers to hear about a man’s sex life.

Who’d ever suspect that a guy who’d make a mold of his penis and fuck himself with it was inexperienced?

All of a sudden, I was dressing up like a baby, convincing a masseuse to give me a “happy ending,” getting fucked in the ass by a friend. I was like: “I wanna deal with normal sexual stuff, the stuff I am supposed to be doing with my youth!”

As a guy, what have you learned from exploring the vast rainbow of sexual experiences?

Women are given great sexual latitude to do a number of different things—bondage, kinks, even lots of different vanilla sex. Men are really sort of reduced to just wanting to fuck something, and that’s it. There’s a huge downside with what’s expected of you, and how you’re expected to behave in the bedroom. It’s very limiting.

It’s a double standard we hear about over and over.

There is also the double standard of consent. If you go on a date, and the girl doesn’t want to have sex with you it’s accepted. But if a guy is offered sex and he declines, it raises eyebrows. This happened to me once, and then it was all these questions: What’s wrong with him? Is he gay? The idea that I just simply wasn’t in the mood [wasn’t allowed.]

What about the male-female double standard regarding bisexuality?

Oh, yes, “You know, I wanna suck a dick. I don’t want to conform to a lifestyle or necessarily move to Chelsea. I just want to suck a big one.” If women [want to eat pussy], it’s cool, but for guys it’s, “Oh, so you’re gay?”

Maybe homophobia hasn’t gone away, but now it’s a personal thing? Like, “That’s okay for you, but NO, I am not gay!”

It’s very strange. My friends who are supposedly liberal and comfortable sexually cringe when it’s implied that they would be implicated in any [form of] gay sex.

What is your relationship to masculinity like?

Tenuous. I’ve lived in Manhattan for most of my adult life (although, he was born in England). [Masculinity is] not highly regarded as it would be elsewhere. I’ve definitely benefited from the fact that it’s not in vogue. I was actually playing with the idea of writing a book about how “un-masculine” I am. I just bought an apartment and I don’t know how to do anything. I’m looking at these ugly light fixtures now, and I have no idea how to change that. I’m gonna need some sort of tools. I have no tools. I have no hair on my chest.

Is there something you feel needs to be addressed about male sexuality, or changed?

I’m not exactly sure how you would go about instituting it, but the way that men use language. They talk about banging girls, finger banging or fucking. It’s something mechanical that sort of gets done. I hope for them it’s actually a little more complex than that, a little more considered. But anything other than some sort of Anglo-Saxon terms for what you do to a woman as a man is viewed as somehow weird, or creepy, or it makes you a sensualist.

Do you think that stems from our cultural insistence that men not use “flowery” language? We tend to view men as just thinking with their dicks.

To some extent, we do. I would agree with the sentiment that men are sexually oriented. What I disagree with is that it only manifests itself in one way. Sexually, we are forced into a box and not allowed to express ourselves in many more ways than society allows.

Growing up, where did you learn about sex?

My friend showed me this hardcore French pornography. I was nine years old. I’d never seen anything like it before. I was shocked. [He] was just like, “Yeah, everyone does that. Your mom and dad did last night!” Later, a friend found an illegal porn dealer—[it was] like crack. We’d meet him in the parking lot of a Home Depot. I’d spend my allowance—or morally support my friend if he spent his allowance—buying porn.

That’s a common thread: learning about sex through porn and friends, rather than in any sort of formalized sex education.

In Sex Ed, we had a gym teacher putting rubbers on bananas and stretching out dental dams. I couldn’t keep a straight face. I was so excited, I got thrown out. I got a report card with an annotation I had to sign saying I was too immature to be in a Sex Ed class.

You’ve come a long way, from getting thrown out of Sex Ed to writing a book about your sex life.

I feel like in writing about sex, I got to become myself. I’m glad that I did all this stuff. My penis: bringing good to the world.

When Karen decided to go off the pill, her relationship wasn’t going well. She had a husband whose depression hung heavy. Karen began noticing a putrid smell, emanating from him. “I couldn’t stand to be close to him because he smelled so bad, it wasn’t what we call body odor, it smelled like a soured clothes…so naturally that is what I thought it was.”

But after digging through his laundry, she had a dizzying realization… the smell suffocating her space was her husband.

Karen could no longer muster a simple attraction. Warmth began to dissipate. A divorce ensued. Later, stumbling across research about pheromones and birth control, it clicked.

In Clause Wedekind’s study, women were given t-shirts that had been worn by men. They were asked to smell the shirts to report attraction. They found women were attracted to men with a different MHC level than their own, and repulsed by one too similar. The theory is this delicate difference of pheromones makes the healthiest offspring.

But, oddly women taking oral contraceptives lost this sense of attraction. Not only could she no longer sniff out her best match, she became actively attracted to men with a similar MHC level, closer to her own genes.

When Karen let a male friend vent about a recent break-up, it sounded familiar. “Had she recently gone off the pill?” She asked. When the answer was yes– she was convinced. “That is when I started calling it the divorce pill” Karen says.

Studies on MHC have gained popularity thanks to authors like Jena Pincott of, Do Gentleman Really Prefer Blondes “There is more interest in whether or not birth control is the right thing if you are in your twenties or thirties and haven’t found the right guy yet” Pincott says. She also states she is pro-birth control and doesn’t give specific advice on the pill, “I think what women need to bear in mind when hearing these studies is that effects are statistically significant, but they are generalities.”

But it wasn’t just Wedekind’s study that perked women’s senses. Pincott brings up the “famous lap-dance study” which found that strippers not on birth control made more than those who were on the pill–which suppresses ovulation.  Further, Pincott points out “men tipped women who were ovulating significantly more than they did the same women when they weren’t.  It might be behavioral, the way we look or smell.”

Or it could be the beauty-phenomenon of ovulation. “During ovulation we think we are prettier and independent observers find that we do look more attractive; our faces more symmetrical, lips plumper” Pincott says. This was explained by a study where men rated photos of women with and without make-up. The men consistently rated the women with make-up as more beautiful, except when the women were ovulating. Then the men rated them as the same.

But if you were to ask your OB-GYN about this you’d probably be met with a blank stare. Dr. Duana Welch, a social-psychology professor and blogger explains “Medical doctors are looking only at your physiology, not your psychology.” She advises that women be an advocate for themselves when considering birth control.

I spoke to several medical doctors and none were familiar with the research. Dr. Vanessa Cullins, VP for Planned Parenthoood said in a phone interview: “Ovulation is only important is if you want to become pregnant, in fact not ovulating protects you against ovarian cancer.” On the other end of the speculum, Beth Battaglino-Cahill the executive VP for the National Women’s Health Resource Center finds some value in ovulation: “It is important to know your own cycle.”

Welch and Pincott assert that ovulation has it’s benefits “I do not take an anti-pill stance, but I think birth control changes women psychologically.” She warns, women who have an MHC similar to their partner’s have a very high affair rate, as was found by a study from The University of New Mexico. “ We tend to focus on the more physical changes such as weight gain, but it makes us prefer men who match a genetic profile more like that of our father or brother.”

But nixing birth control is clearly not smart advice. Paranoid singles could sign up for GenePartner or ScientificMatch which pair couples by genetic compatibility. Or take Dr. Welch’s advice, make the date and when you say hello“lean in close and slowly inhale.” As of now, there are only two doctor recommended non-hormonal choices: A non-hormonal IUD or condoms.

The take-away for Dr. Mark Hathaway of the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals is more uneasy. “The fact that we divide birth control into hormonal and non hormonal is not helpful, we should help women find methods that are best for them.”

The advent of the pill and hormonal birth control was revolutionary, without a doubt one of the greatest things to happen in the last century. Our birth control options are still evolving and unfortunately, we don’t have a male birth control pill to rely on the guys. We also can’t rely on them to smell our MHC’s. They can’t. The ability to smell your soul-mate is purely a female phenomenon.

There’s got to be a moment when it switches on. But in that moment, I assume it’s great conversation, or I don’t assume anything, basking in the electricity of my own voice, the mirrored image of my lashes batting.

On this night, I felt it, a current prickled beneath my skin. It was after dinner at a friend’s house. Adam and I were sitting across from each other, knees bumping, talking too loud. He complimented me and I shared overly intimate of details of my life. The figure of my husband, Ned and other guests on the couch washed away.

Adam snapped a finger. “I know who you remind me of… Julie Greene!” He stood, smiling for a second, then wincing taken a-back. “Oh man. That girl.”

That girl. Leading him on. Sleeping in his bed, leaving the pillow-case smelling like cigarettes and hairspray and flowers. A reminder that she was untouchable. That he worshiped her.

I was a Julie Greene. This was the magnet. I realized in that moment Adam was someone I could easily dip into lukewarm, familiar waters with, there to admire my own reflection as I pulled him in deeper. And I didn’t want that to happen.

Male attention lulls me. I’m not sure when it started. As a child, I fell in love often but I was barely able to look boys in the eye, playing footsie under the desk. I didn’t get my first kiss or boyfriend until age 14. But I wonder if I am addicted to it, to being wanted. “You made me fall in love with you” was how the ex put it.

We were in high-school. I was a senior, he was a sophomore. My real boyfriend was older, a college drop out working as a convenience store clerk. He had an apartment where I’d go to eat bowls of cereal and lay around. When I went home at night,  it was the sophomore I called, pulling the covers over my face. “Tell me more about what you think of me.”

Eventually, we’d start having sex. Our relationship was a pull of intimacy and icy detachment, not allowing him the title of “girlfriend”. We’d get into violent fights then he’d go out and drink, taking mouthfuls of blue and white pills. He totaled four cars while we were together.

I had a lot of answers for how he was wrong. I was victim to his rage and abuse. I never said I wanted a relationship with him.

Recently, an old friend-or-flame floated into my life. Rolf. I once took him on a long train ride to visit my parents. We drank mini-bottles of red wine, patches of gold and turquoise blurring past. We slurred about poetry, the books we would write together. There had been many times he confessed his love, in letters or poems, or loudly, a little too drunk and unable to hold it back. Seeing him standing in my childhood kitchen, smelling like bonfire and pot-smoke, I felt safe.

That night, we slept side by side.  At 7 a.m. my mom stomped down the stairs and asked “did you two have sex?”  “No!” we flipped over.

I kept him around and thought “maybe someday”. When asked, I acted repulsed by the idea. I thought of how we slept, sexless, our bodies hot and packed into his twin-bed. When I would feel his hand, heavy and warm on my back, I’d wriggle. “I hate those giant hands! I wish they would just fall right off his wrist. They will never have me.”

When Ned met him, he was confused: “I mean he is a lot like me. He is smart, a critical thinker. He’s creative and interesting. He is bi and attractive. Why weren’t you into him?”

I had a few pale answers. I was into him, but not. But why I wasn’t with him didn’t  matter. What mattered was whether I could trip down the same path. The difference was now, I knew it was a part of me that felt dizzy and ready to fall. I could separate this part from myself, see it.

It’s hard to face your own narcissism, your darkness and faults. When I see Rolf now, a part of me understands the safety of having someone to fall on, to bring validation, to soften the fear of being alone. In our exquisite-anti-relationship, we each held responsibility. But, I inflicted pain upon him, and I got something out of his emotional bruising. In mine and Ned’s dining room,  I touch his arm tenderly. I think, “I don’t want to hurt you”. I realize that old patterns, even when faced, are hard to see clearly. But in trying, I am more free, able to appreciate and care for myself, Rolf and all of the boys.

photography by Gordon Ball

The night before it happened there was a storm. The St. Louis sky bruised dark, knocking out trees and windows. A sex blogger,  known online as The Beautiful Kind was caught in the web of it, debris cracking her windshield.

The following Monday, she would go back to work and smile, trying to shake it off. She’d pin her long hair in a bun, put on her usual long skirt and glasses and level the dry scream in her throat to the warm “good morning!”

It was quiet with TBK got in. The boss tapped her. She needed to be seen in private immediately. “I was told to google you…It took me seconds to find your website. You know this means we are letting you go.  How could you put that stuff out there? What were you thinking? I feel like I am talking to a 14-year-old. We are done” TBK was told.

“She didn’t even want to be in the same room as me. She just wanted me gone”  The Beautiful Kind (TBK) says over video chat. I tell TBK  that losing a job is always a self-esteem jab, but to lose it because of your sexuality must cut deeper. “I mean the slut shaming is what’s really bothering me. I’m running around painting people’s houses, pet sitting and figure modeling and doing all of those jobs because I’m a slut, so I don’t deserve to have a job.”

The Internet has forever changed sex. Anyone can now engage anonymously (or non-anonymously) in every kink, chat, turn-on or hook-up imaginable. We each have the opportunity to talk openly in endless spaces about our sexual curiosities, fears and beliefs.

“Now we have all of this information on the kinks and fetishes that are out there. I feel like it’s a runaway train that society’s not keeping up with.” says TBK.

TBK and the site that got her fired–which doesn’t reveal her “real” name or face– is proof that culture is not keeping up. Proof that sex remains repressed, taboo.

Being a sex-blogger contains a bit of activism, privacy is something to be weighed for the “greater good” of helping shatter sexual repression. TBK knew this too. “I think anything you put online becomes public knowledge. I’ve made that choice and I’m giving people ammunition everyday and not just employers but also my ex partners, my partner’s ex partners.”

It’s not just sex-writers weighing risks. Take, the Craigslist experiment. A guy set up an extreme Craigslist ad, acting as a submissive woman looking for a dominant man. After he was flooded with replies that included photos, phone numbers and real names, he posted all of this information to a website, with the idea that these careless people deserve to be exposed.  It could be seen as a lesson in online safety, but it also couldn’t happen in a place where sex was not repressed.

“I think that I think everyone has fetishes and kinks, stuff things that turn them on that they’re not even aware of.  So putting it out there, I hope, is helping people move on to realizing their own kinks and fetishes.”

When I tell TBK about the Craigslist experiment, she asks “Have you heard of expose a hoe? It’s a site where they track down escorts and johns to out them.” Apparently Carnal Nation ran an article about this and got a lot of heat for giving it more publicity. “People have been trying to keep it under wraps  to protect sex workers” she explains.

But the problem of sexual safety for bloggers might be solved in one of two ways. Perhaps people who run social networking sites will actually lock down privacy, finding effective ways to separate our sexual, social and professional selves. If “Quit Facebook Day” showed anything, it is that we care about this.

Or, perhaps our generation will begin to effectively erase those old sexual stigmas. Just as employers are beginning to expect a social persona online, willing to dismiss keg-party photos, maybe we’ll become adjacently comfortable with sexuality in an online persona.

Really, it seems we will have to. There are so many facets of a human personality, and this is reflected in the avatar of ourselves. Projecting just one part of  our personality feels pale . The Internet brings a level of honesty about who we are.

TBK agrees. “If  we evolve and realize that people have value even if they like something stuck up their butt or whatever…  I would just be so happy.”

photography by Gordon Ball