Howl

What Happened When I Came Out as a Sex Blogger

Suddenly, everyone wants to talk about sex

About a month into my experience as a sex blogger, a reader messaged me to say he admired my honesty. I told him that it was sometimes hard to be so raw on the page, but the true challenge was to be honest in real life.

I started writing about sex after spending an afternoon with a new friend who suddenly and unexpectedly opened up about her inner conflict involving a lover. All of a sudden, it was like a floodgate opened. We both started pouring out our hearts about our romantic and sexual disappointments and we began talking about what we wanted in a future partner.

I realized I hadn’t talked to a friend about sex in nearly ten years.

She admitted she’d had a similar experience. “It seemed like when my friends got married, they stopped wanting to talk about sex,” she pondered.

As someone who has never been married, I experienced something similar: I can’t remember the last time I talked to a married friend about sex. And since most of my friends were married…I hadn’t talked about sex in a very long time.

But suddenly, after all those years of silence, my new divorced-and-semi-single friend had opened up a whole new world to me. We laughed, we swooned like teenagers, we made plans, we cried a little. I remembered what it was like to be in my twenties and talk and joke openly about sex with my friends. It had been so freeing, so life-affirming, and so comforting.

When I started writing about sex online, I kept it a secret. I didn’t tell a soul — not my sister, my best friends…no one. After years of bottling up my sexuality following a crushing breakup, it felt so good to let that part of myself out again.

I knew none of it would matter if I couldn’t write with honesty about my feelings and experiences. I knew I had to find a way to celebrate the conversation I had had with my new friend — to bring that feeling into my work, that feeling of opening the windows in a house that has been closed up for years. Fresh air. Dust motes dancing in streaks of sunshine. A breeze fluttering the curtains.

Ahhhh.

But after I got that reader’s message, I became worried that maybe I shouldn’t be writing in secrecy. Shouldn’t I be able to share this new adventure with my closest inner circle?

I was afraid, though. I know the intentions behind what I’m doing here. But would other people understand? I write heartfelt, impassioned pieces on shame, consent, intimacy, and love. But I also write super smutty pieces that are just for fun — because I believe sex can and should be fun, that we should keep it light even when we honor and acknowledge its gravity.

But would my friends and family understand that? Would they judge my attitude about sex? Would they think I was in it just for the clicks?

I was also worried about the concerns I thought some people would have. I thought my sister and mother might worry about my safety. They know I have been stalked before when I was writing about less provocative subjects than sex. I knew they would be worried about misogynistic comments, cyber bullies, trolls.

And my dad? I thought he would flip out.

Yet I couldn’t get that reader’s message out of my head. He had specifically called out my honesty. I didn’t want to be a fraud. I didn’t want to feel such a schism in my life between my sex blogging and everything else. If I was going to talk openly about sex…could I do so in real life, too?

I told a dear friend, first. I revealed my secret in an email and I apologized for not telling her. I also apologized if my articles seemed incongruous with the person she knew. I was very aware of how much I had packed away my sexuality. I was afraid she wouldn’t see me in my work.

She responded with excitement, though. She read the tamer articles and glanced at the semi-scandalous titles of some of the more…let’s say “sexy” articles. She said she saw me everywhere. She recognized my voice, she saw the person she knew in those articles. And she was excited for me.

I told Sunny next — the friend who had helped me start this journey, who had by then, become a trusted companion. She was overjoyed that I was letting my sexuality out again.

Then I told another friend, and another…

Emboldened by this, I finally told my sister. She said, “God, Yael, I’ve been waiting 15 years for you to embrace this side of yourself again. You used to be like this — you’ve just put yourself away for so long!”

We talked for hours while we held her little girls on our laps, sharing our dreams for their futures, wanting for them what we didn’t have: no more sexist bullshit around female sexuality. We want them to be free. They stared back and forth at us as we tried to determine what words to “bleep out” and what to share openly. We didn’t want to create more shame by choosing to whisper certain words as if they were dirty.

I told my mom the next day. She had the same response and then some. “I’ve been wanting to talk to someone about sex for so long now. It’s like no one will talk about it after 50. Maybe we can talk more and you can write about this, too.”

My heart opened so much. I realized again how much silence we keep around female sexuality.

Then came my dad. This was hard. His girlfriend is very conservative and I didn’t think he would be thrilled to know his little girl was writing about her orgasms on the internet. When he asked how my writing was going, I told them I had a new project I was working on — that I was blogging and writing a column. He asked what it was about, as I knew he would. I said, with a slight squint to my eyes: “Sex. And feminism.”

He tipped his head and said, “Oh. You mean like #MeToo?”

“Yes!” I responded, relieved that he had latched on to a relatively safe subject. His girlfriend seemed curious but she remained quiet.

“I’m glad,” he said. “I feel badly that so many women have been dealing with these horrors for so long. I’m glad you are speaking up about that.”

I was grateful for his support, but I confess: I decided not to tell him about my sexual bucket list. I thought that maybe I didn’t need to be upfront about everything.

I can’t believe how much this honesty has changed my relationships…and maybe even my life.

I feel so much more openness in my body — both physically and emotionally. I literally feel like my chest and hips are open, like a book, ready to meet the world, ready to receive whatever it throws at me — even the scary, hard stuff.

I am more open to people’s pain than I think I ever have been. I want to hug people more, be as present as I can be with them. Look in their eyes, really listen to what they are saying.

I want to know people more. I want to ask them about everything I’ve been afraid to ask in the past.

Now, I tell people more freely what I do. This isn’t my only work, of course — I have other hustles, as most freelancers do. But I’ll slip “sex blogger” into the list of my work projects. Surprisingly, people either seem to take no notice of it or they get really excited and ask if I have any juicy stories to share.

Now that so many people know what I’m doing, they surprise me by bringing up sex in everyday conversations. They ask me if I know what certain terms mean (admittedly, I rely on Urban Dictionary more than I should), they want to know if people online are creepy (mostly no, they haven’t been), and surprisingly, they often want to talk about sexual philosophy. You know, like whether or not I think monogamy is dead, or whether or not we are doing enough to empower young women in their sexual expression. (No and no.)

I find myself piping up with random facts about sexual fetishes (not my own, just things I’ve read about) and practices, or making exclamations at odd but appropriate moments like “Cockblocked!” (you guys, I can say cock!), or “Give it to me” (“it” usually being chocolate, but regardless of the non-sexual object of my desire, I like to say it with a come-fuck-me twang).

Interestingly, people have started to take note of my appearance. The other day, Sunny saw me in a pair of leggings and looked me up and down before saying, in a very carefully measured tone, “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but this is the first time I’ve seen you wear something that fits you. Your other clothes are all two sizes too big for you.”

My brother recently teased, “You have to stop wearing those hideous pants. You’re never gonna find a man in those.”

My dad said, “You look happier lately. More open. Lighter.”

The best part of this, however, has been the way it has brought more laughter and intimacy into my life in non-sexual encounters. The other day, my mother turned to me, and out of the blue told me about a porn movie she had once watched. I stood there, slightly frozen, not sure how to respond to her telling me that the actor in the movie had had the biggest dick she had ever seen — like a horse, she said.

“You know,” my almost 70-year-old mother ruminated, “I always fantasized about what it would be like to have sex with someone who was that big…”

I decided to go for it. “Not me,” I said, in the spirit of honesty and intimacy. “I’m very tight and I prefer a nice, solid medium. You know, a slim model.”

We looked at each other and burst into laughter.

The conversation devolved into a series of jokes she made about hockey sticks (don’t ask), the word “girth” was thrown around a couple times, and a few minutes later, we were literally bent over, clutching our bellies.

We hadn’t laughed together like that in years.

So there you go. It turns out that coming out as a sex blogger was exactly the right thing to do.

© Yael Wolfe 2019