Q. Has there ever been a time/incident where your work “ruined” masturbation or other specific sex things for you (temporarily)?
A. This is, unfortunately, a frequent occurrence for sex toy reviewers. There’s increasing discourse about how monetizing hobbies can make them feel less fun, and I’ve found this to be true about both masturbation and writing at different times in my life.
There were, for example, two years in a row where I issued myself a daily masturbation challenge in May (#DidYouJerkOffToday) and found that by the end of the month, I could barely dredge up any enthusiasm for getting myself off. Yes, even orgasms had lost their lustre. How sad!
I’ve dealt with this by drastically cutting down the number of toys I accept for review, and by generally only accepting toys I think will be good or at least amusingly weird. My most frustrating experiences of sex toy reviewing usually centered around toys that were not good, not bad, but mediocre: decent enough to get me off, but not fun or flashy or earth-shattering or world-shifting. When using a toy is just as boring as trying to string together sentences about that toy, you know your vocation has truly drained the fun from your sex life. So I try to say no to that type of toy these days.
Sometimes people (mostly Tinder matches) express concern that because I write about sex and dating, my actual experiences of sex and dating aren’t authentic because I must be constantly filtering them through the question of “Can I write about this?” I’ve actually taken great care not to do this. I deemphasize actual dates and sex sessions in my writing, usually choosing to write about sexual and romantic concepts more generally, so that I only write about specific incidents when they’re interesting enough that I feel moved to do so. This keeps me from ruining my own romantic life by being too goal-oriented about my writing.
My partners have sometimes gotten frustrated when we needed to test a terrible toy multiple times – Lelo Ida, anyone? – and, as Epiphora has documented, this can put a surprising strain on relationships. It’s for this reason – as well as the whole “I’m in a long-distance relationship” thing – that I almost never accept couples’ toys for review. My job is ridiculous and nonsensical in many ways, and while my current partner is as GGG as I could ever hope for, I’m not prepared to risk my relationships’ stability just for a review!
Q. Have you ever published something you later regretted (e.g. because it was too personal)?
A. The week after an OkCupid boy cruelly ghosted me, I lamented to my therapist that I was already embarrassed by the post I’d written and published about it. The piece had spilled out of me in a tearstained whirlwind, and it had seemed so important that I get it out into the world. But in retrospect, it’s messy, and melodramatic, and god help me if that boy ever stumbled across it. I wish I had waited even a week before pulling the trigger.
This has become a less frequent problem since I’ve gotten serious about my blog as a full-time job over the past few years, because these days I always pre-schedule content, sometimes weeks in advance. I can’t count the number of times I’ve written something vulnerable, queued it up, and then thought, “Actually, no,” and filed it back into my drafts. There’s a piece in there right now called “10 Thoughts Upon Learning My First Daddy Dom Is Someone Else’s Daddy Now” that will probably never see the light of day, because I wrote it in 2017 after a grotesque breakup and that level of grief is akin to a state of intoxication: not a good space for decision-making.
When I showed that piece to Bex, he asked me, “Does it say useful, important things, or is it navel-gazing? Will it teach people something, or was writing it just a good way to process your feelings?” This is still my metric for the usefulness of personal essays. The great Glennon Doyle, a memoirist and blogger, says, “I never put my writing out there until I’ve figured out how this thing that happened to me is really about all of us,” and she’s so right: the specifics of your personal experience, while they might be cathartic for you to get out on the page, probably aren’t artful or interesting until you shape them into something more universal and broad. That’s not to say there’s no place in the world for telling our own unique stories – heaven knows I do it all the time – but I have noticed that the pieces I most regret publishing are the ones filled with unprocessed emotions, word-vomited up without care or consideration.
My friend Kate Sinclaire often says that if you want to do porn, you should first imagine the worst possible person to discover your porn doing exactly that, and if you can live with the reality that they probably will, then you can go ahead and do it. I think the same is true for sex writing. It might seem like a terribly good idea to publish an emotional screed about that Tinder hookup from last week, but what if the person you fucked finds it and reads it? What if your boss does? What if your grandmother does? Self-censorship can poison your creativity, but you need a certain amount of it, or you’ll drown in regret pretty quickly. Imagine the most embarrassing possible person reading your piece, and if that feels alright, then you can hit “Publish.” But please don’t do it before then, you impulsive little imp.
Got questions for this series? Drop ’em in the comments or in my contact form.