In 2008, at age 24, I published my first viral essay: "In Defense of Casual Sex." Living in San Francisco and working at Salon, I was responding to a wave of books warning young women that hookup culture would ruin their chances at love and marriage. I had slept around and felt anything but ruined. I argued that young women were "putting feminist ideals of equality into sex by refusing shame and claiming the traditionally male side of the stud/slut double standard."
Trolls flooded the comments and my inbox with insults like "tramp" and "cum dumpster." I printed the worst ones and taped them to my fridge, smirking every morning as I grabbed milk or eggs.
That essay landed in a sex-writing anthology, leading to a reading at Good Vibrations, a famous sex-positive store in Berkeley, just minutes from my parents' house. "What a hoot," my mom said. "How fun. Am I allowed to invite friends?" We carpooled together, laughing about our wholesome family outing to a sex shop. But when I read, my mom couldn't meet my eyes. Midway through, she fell into a coughing fit—a physical manifestation of anxiety, a paroxysm of panic. Afterward, her friend praised me, and my mom said weakly, "Yes, she survived." At dinner, she admitted, "I worry for you sometimes. You're so much braver than I was."
She was referring to her teenage pregnancy, which she had revealed when I was a teenager. At 18, in the 1960s Midwest, she was sent to a home for unwed mothers, hidden until she gave birth and placed her baby girl for adoption. I had been raised an only child, but suddenly I had a half-sister out there. The experience devastated my mom so much that she was committed to a mental institution. We rarely spoke of it, but it lingered between us—like after that reading, when I realized I had gone viral defending the very act that had shattered her world.
Years later, I told my mom, "Now companies are sending me sex toys at the office." I had been reassigned to cover the sex beat at work—a topic I always found excuses to write about anyway. "I don't want to be some Carrie Bradshaw," I said. "I want to write about sex with the same seriousness as any other aspect of culture." She nodded, saying, "Sex is one of the most vital parts of our world."
I dove into taboo subcultures: a kinky "fox hunt" with men dressed as leather horses and latex hounds, a session with a sexual healer where a woman squirted on my foot (leaving a weathered patina on my shoe). "You don't seem like a sex writer," strangers often said. I cloaked myself in good-girl respectability—loafers, turtlenecks, ballerina buns—and changed the subject at family gatherings.
When my mom was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, I threw myself into reporting. The first porn shoot I covered was for the BDSM series Public Disgrace, where a bound woman was paraded around a bar as men spat on her. A staged fantasy of disgrace. Around then, my college alumnae magazine interviewed me, and I said: "My aim is to be shameless." Those words became a pull-quote beside my headshot in a Peter Pan collar.
In my late 20s, I fell in love with Christopher, a feminist-minded man. When I published an essay about our engagement, a misogynistic blogger declared I had "won the mating game" by embracing "absolute sluttery" before settling down. We walked down the aisle to the Mission: Impossible theme, a nod to the sexist pressures of marriage. A relative called Christopher "brave" for marrying a woman who had written about her past.
Years later, I began my memoir, Want Me. By then, my mom was gone, and I was a motherless mother myself. I wrote during maternity leave, baby napping on me as I contorted into unergonomic positions, unraveling the threads of shame and sexuality that had bound us both.