12 Days of Girly Juice 2020: 11 Favorite Blog Posts

Blogger babe in her natural habitat, i.e. reading a sex book and drinking a cocktail in bed

By the time this year is over, I will have published 108+ blog posts on this website in 2020… Wow. Not as many as some previous years, but pretty good, considering that this year we had to deal with pandemic depression/displacement, and I also finished my book and got married!

It was a tough choice, but I think these are my 11 favorite blog posts I wrote this year… Feel free to go back and check ’em out if you’re looking for something to read!

I started off the year by writing about “The Most Beautiful Shoes in the World.” It’s a love letter to Loubs, a tribute to towering shoes, a manifesto on wobbly glamour. It’s also an essay about the tension between feminism and wanting/wearing pretty things, which unfortunately is a debate we’re still having in 2020.

Sometimes I write posts just as much for my own benefit as for my readers’, and that was the case with “Party-Going Tips for Shy, Anxious Introverts”! Most of this advice is fairly straightforward, but anxiety can make it difficult to remember even the most basic of coping mechanisms at the moment that you need them – so it’s good to have a “cheat sheet” at the ready, for whenever we can attend parties in person again!

Doing shrooms for the first time was definitely one of the most exciting things I did all year, so it was a lot of fun to write “20 Questions About My First Shrooms Trip.” I had some shrooms left over that I planned to use while alone at some point, but I think they’ve long since expired because I felt it would be too depressing/disorienting to do trippy psychedelics during a pandemic – even small sad things made me cry when I talked about them while tripping, so I thought it best to avoid shrooms while the world is so full of big sad things that are front-and-centre in our perception every day!

Writing fashion posts is a lot of fun for me, and I was glad to be able to do a lot more of that this year. It kinda surprised me that I hadn’t already written “What to Wear on Valentine’s Day” because I have a lot of opinions on this subject! In a broader sense, I think this is a post about the psychologically restorative power of dressing in a celebratory way – something that felt crucially important for me and many others while we were stuck at home for much of the year.

Sometimes it’s nice to write something really simple, like “How to Do Solo Foreplay.” Working in sex media for so long has shown me that some of the most “basic” sexual questions are ones that aren’t answered sufficiently in sex education, so a lot of people turn to Google, hoping it’ll fill them in. I also think solo foreplay became a particularly relevant topic this year even for sexually knowledgeable people, because masturbating and having sex during a pandemic (and, later, an attempted coup) is a whole different vibe and requires you to tune out your surroundings and tune into your pleasure even more than usual.

I was delighted to finally get to review the Clone-a-Willy after wanting one for many years! Writing this review was especially fun because it was more about a scientific process than a finished product. I really like how ours came out, and will probably do another one sometime soonish, since my pals at TheVibed recently sent me a glow-in-the-dark Clone-a-Willy kit as a wedding present!

I’m still as annoyed as I was when I wrote “Le Wand Keeps Copying Other Companies’ Sex Toy Designs,” especially since I’ve observed and heard about even more instances of this since I wrote that post (including the striking and no doubt not-coincidental similarities between Le Wand’s B-Vibe plugs and an older Mr. S Leather butt plug [link very NSFW], a fact I edited into my post after publication). I don’t want to be mad at Le Wand, and I wish they were better – I just really dislike plagiarism and think it’s inexcusable, especially in a field like sex toys where so many people struggle so much to get their original and inventive designs seen and produced. I hope this becomes less of a problem in 2021, but I’m not holding my breath.

I wrote “Handbags in the Age of Coronavirus” during a spell of femme obsession with leather bags galore. Despite being partly a celebration of materialism, it was also a contemplative essay on the role of aesthetic-based consumerism during a demoralizing pandemic, and the uselessness/usefulness of handbags while many of us were forced to stay home. (I ended up buying 3 new bags this year, if you’re wondering!)

Solo dates are one of the things I’ve missed most during the pandemic. Maybe it’s odd to miss a solitary experience in a year so full of loneliness and isolation… but a solo date isn’t quite a solitary experience, because mine always take place at locations other people also frequent, like bars, bookstores, and movie theatres. I wrote “15 Ways to Take Yourself on a Date During COVID Times” both for myself and for my readers, because I had been sorely missing the introvert-recharging powers of solo dates for those months of quarantine. Sadly, this post is still relevant 5 months later… although most of my suggestions require more outerwear now than they did then!

“How to Write 1,000 Blog Posts” was me reflecting on the ridiculous archive of writing I’ve built up here and trying to offer some advice on long-term blogging – including on idea generation, motivation, compensation, and transformation. Wonder how many more posts I’ll end up writing!

Finally, of course, I would be remiss not to include “I’m Engaged!!! Here’s the Story…” in this list! I’m so glad I chronicled this really important evening so soon after it happened, so I can remember it forever. Matt’s proposal still makes me sigh happily whenever I think about it.

I’ll end with a little mini-list within this bigger list… Here are my 11 favorite essays I wrote this year in my weekly newsletter, Sub Missives, which you are welcome to subscribe to if you want a more personal and intimate view into my brain: