Author’s note: As a feminist, I embrace the terms “slut” and “slutty,” as an act of empowerment. If you aren’t comfortable with those words, simply exchange them for one that works for you.

We’d be so much sluttier if men were honest about their intentions. We’d love to jump into bed if we could count on truthful communication about wants, needs, and what’s actually on his mind. If we didn’t have to navigate the landmines of lovebombing and lies. If we knew he probably did not have a girlfriend or wife that he didn’t bother telling us about, or absolutely has zero interest in having a relationship.

That’s right, we’d be slutty to the point of occasional (or not-so-occasional) one night stands if conditions were safer and more honest. If we didn’t have to deal with both his and society’s judgment about our morality once the sun comes up the next morning. If we didn’t have to worry that our new one-time lover might kill or rape us. If we lived in a culture where it would be reasonable to assume that taking a chance on a new partner just for one ride would be worth it.

Too often it isn’t.

Read more

If there is one thing I can count on in this world, it’s that heterosexual men will almost always mislabel my sexuality. At one time, I even named it in my bio just to help people better understand what they’d find in my writing so they could skip it if my worldview and identity were offensive to them.

And yet still, heterosexual men could not get it right.

There’s only two possibilities when they bring an argument to the table. Many assume I’m a lesbian, simply because I’m a feminist.

This, of course, is one of the laziest forms of misogyny. To many men, particularly patriarchal men, lesbian is not so much a sexuality but more a political statement. In other words, they see lesbian as a synonym of feminist, which in turn, is a synonym of misandrist. There’s no actual consideration of my sexual orientation - it’s just an attempt to discredit me.

But believe it or not, it’s the second option that annoys me the most. It drives me absolutely crazy when men assume I’m heterosexual.

Sure, I find men’s propensity to call every feminist they encounter a lesbian incredibly boring and unoriginal (get some new materials, guys), but nothing could be more boring to me than the sweeping assumptions men make that they are the only thing that could turn me on.

“Female breasts send men into a tizzy,” a man recently said in my comment section. “This is the way we’re biologically programmed. You are wrong that they aren’t sexy. As a woman, you couldn’t possibly understand.”

I get comments of this sort a lot - particularly when I write about the hyper-sexualization of breasts.

Honestly, it’s almost funny to me how mad some men get in response to this subject. It’s as if they’re afraid I’m threatening to take their favorite fetish away. One male reader accused me of trying to erase male sexuality by insisting breasts aren’t inherently sexual.

Which is what I said, by the way - that breasts aren’t inherently sexual. I never said they weren’t sexy, despite the sheer amount of men who argue that I did. (It’s easy to fact check, guys.)

As a woman, it’s important to me to call out the fetishization of the female body and the fact that hyper-sexualizing breasts to the point where we conflate them with penises and vulvae is just a clever tactic of the patriarchy to exert control over the female body.

Read more

It occurred to me recently that no doctor at any point in my life ever asked me if I was satisfied with my sex life. I’ve never been asked if I’ve experienced any trouble in the bedroom, vaginal dryness or discomfort, or a difficulty reaching orgasm.

They’ll ask if I’m sexually active, which will bring on a sl…

Read more

“You’re such a hedonist.”

I could tell he meant this as a criticism based on the tone of his voice and the expression on his face.

We were sitting across from one another at a restaurant and I’d made a comment about how much I valued pleasure in life - and all pleasures, not just those of a sexual nature.

“I don’t like hedonists,” he went on. “They’re goddamn lazy. Always looking to feel good and never willing to work for anything important.”

I was shocked by his comments. This was a college lover I’d spent several nights with, a man who had repeatedly pulled my hand into his pants or pushed my head into his lap and wouldn’t let me move until he was satisfied.

And a man who had never, ever returned the favor because he believed that a woman’s production of oxytocin during an orgasm would cause her to develop loving feelings toward the person who gave her the orgasm, which he felt was an irresponsible thing to do to a woman he didn’t want to be with long term.

In other words, if anyone was a goddamn lazy hedonist, it was him. I honestly couldn’t believe he’d had the balls to say such a thing to my face after all the pleasure he had taken from me with no intention of putting in the work to reciprocate it.

Nevertheless, I stood my ground. Because somehow, even back then at such a tender age, I knew I was right.

Pleasure, sexual and otherwise, is a critical ingredient of a good life.

As a middle aged woman in the height of perimenopause, I find that I think of pleasure a lot. For instance…where did it go?

These years have been a time of low-key physical suffering, as many women would agree. Little sleep, constant joint and back pain, breast tenderness, moodiness, brain fog… It’s an incredibly hard daily slog.

And there’s little respite - not even a fun evening with a lover, a circumstance that you can thank our nosediving libido for.

It’s one of the cruelest tricks nature plays on women. We hit our sexual peak right before we fall into our sexual wasteland.

I’ve never felt anything like what I felt in my early forties. Let’s just say I was ready to go almost all the time. It’s years - yes, years - of feeling like a cat in heat. (It’s no wonder that some of my best and most passionate writing flowed out of me during that time - and no wonder that most of it was about sex.)

And then I found myself in the mountaintops of perimenopause and suddenly things felt very different. Like a Swiss herdsman letting loose a yodel in the hopes of hearing her voice echo back to her, I’d yell out, “Hello?” to my suddenly absent libido hoping to locate it by its answering call. But that call never came. There was nothing but silence.

What the hell happened to that hedonistic woman I used to be?

Share

What makes a person who they are? What makes a woman who she is?

There’s no easy way to answer that, but I think each one of us holds on to certain truths that we know about ourselves. For me, I have always known myself by my creativity and my sexuality - which both come from the same place, in my opinion.

But what happens when that changes?

Read more

I bought it for practical reasons, as I suspect many women do. I remember I had a dress that I loved that was just a little too revealing for my taste and I wanted a slip that I could wear underneath for more coverage.

Of course, I ended up never wearing that dress, and therefore, the slip sat untouched in a drawer somewhere in the back of my closet. Until, that is, I moved in with the man I thought I would marry.

He loved to see me in a new set of sexy underwear or lingerie every night…but he had no idea how expensive it was to keep him visually entertained. So one night, after I’d worn the blue baby doll nightie with the matching thong one too many times, I went digging through my wardrobe instead of looking online for a new push-up bra and matching panties. Surely, I had something that would please him…

That’s when I came upon the slip. White, knee-length, and almost humorously simplistic.

I took off all my clothes, slipped the gauzy fabric over my head, took a moment to make adjustments, and then made my way to the spare room, where he was playing video games with his online friends.

With his headset on, he didn’t hear me enter, and he did a double take when I came into his line of vision. I hadn’t thought the slip would have much of an effect on him — he preferred much less coverage and a lot more lace. So I was surprised when he yelped, “Guys, I gotta go, emergency,” then whipped the headset off and hiked me into his arms, carrying me to the bedroom.

Something happened to me when he came home one day, years later, and told me about the young woman he had met at work — a woman he had fallen in love with and was about to propose to. I guess he hadn’t thought it important to mention their courtship until things got serious enough to leave me…

Something inside me clicked off, like a lightswitch. It’s almost as if I ceased being myself. Or a woman. Or even a human being.

I suppose that kind of thing is bound to happen when a man discards you for a newer version.

I spent years in a haze. Some part of me was fighting to feel something again, yet my body felt dead. Even something beyond the physical felt dead.

It took me a long time to realize that I had lost myself in his betrayal. I didn’t know who I was. And I’d let him walk away with my sense of sexuality, as if it was a tithing to the conquering hero.

I didn’t know how to feel sexual anymore. I didn’t want to feel sexual. And I couldn’t see myself as sexual. It was as if he had stormed into the temple of my womanhood and burned it down.

Seven years later, in the throes of early perimenopause, when I found myself so horny, I could barely keep my pants on, I had no choice but to face this. My body was demanding that I find my way back to myself. And for the first time…I wanted to.

I wasn’t sure where to start, until I remembered that old slip. It was the only thing that I had kept after the breakup — simply because it was the one sexy undergarment I had bought solely with a practical purpose in mind.

I pulled it out of the drawer yet again, took off all my clothes, and slipped it over my head…

Read more

Images of my short-lived relationship began to flash through my head. It had been immensely heterosexual, one in which my very traditionally masculine male partner had told me he wasn’t interested in my gender or non-hetero sexual explorations. That’s fine, of course - he identified as straighter-than-straight and there’s nothing wrong with knowing who we are and what we want.

The problem was…I’m not straight and not interested in continued explorations of carefully defined heterosexuality. And I had not been honest with myself about how much that relationship was going to put me in a - no pun intended, this is quite literal - straight jacket.

As we ladies continued our discussion and I felt more and more buoyed in their presence, realizing that the breakup might have been for the best, I heard one of the participants, Stella Duffy, say something that has stuck in my head ever since. Something like: “We all need to queer up our lives.”

Read more

In childhood, my growing awareness of the concept of sexuality felt like a mess. There was what I saw…and what I felt. And the two were often very different experiences.

I grew up in Los Angeles in the 1980s, a hyper-sexualized microcosm featuring suburban bathrooms filled with copies of Playboy magazine, men in micro-s…

Read more