For several years, while my kids were at school all day learning how to read and running around the playground at recess, I was at home doing dishes, folding laundry, and writing filthy erotic short stories under several pen names for $75 a pop. When I told someone I was busy working on a freelance job, it was equally likely that I meant I was writing a profile for a local business magazine or crafting an X-rated fiction about naked people doing fun and terrible things to each other.
I was a peddler of smut, a purveyor of sex, a teller of tawdry tales. And I was damn good at it. I’ve never added this to my LinkedIn profile, which is a shame, but it’s tough to find the right words to describe this role, wedging it somewhere in between “staff reporter” and “school volunteer.” Also, most people don’t think too highly of erotica. But I was proud of the work I did, and I still am today.
What I heard from my editor, and subsequently from the readers, was always the same: this feels real. This feels like something that could happen to a normal person on any random day of the week. This feels like something that could happen to me—and it’s very, very hot.
My stories were full of regular people: quirky characters with backstories (sometimes only hinted at but there all the same) who felt uncertainty, shyness, desire, excitement. I wrote about imperfect bodies living in average homes doing normal jobs. I wrote about long-time couples and new friends and sometimes strangers, about threesomes and foursomes and more-somes, and light kink and serious kink and no kink at all. I wrote about gentle sex and rough sex and long sessions that included hours of foreplay and quickies in the laundry room. My stories had skilled lovers and inexperienced ones and people who fumbled with their clothes and dropped vibrating toys on wood floors. There was laughter and shy smiles and sweaty bodies and groaning and spanking and ratty old pyjamas and beautiful lacy garments.
Whatever else these vignettes included, I stayed in my lane: they were always told from a cisgendered heterosexual woman’s perspective. But from that starting point, they filled the full spectrum of possibility.
And I always, always, always wrote about consent: a brief pause for a conversation, a verbal confirmation, an agreement, sometimes even a formal contract that ultimately asked: Do we both (or all) want this? The answer was always an enthusiastic yes—hell, yes—we really, really do. These passages, whether explicit or implied, were the real reason people liked my stories, I think. They were a glimpse of something that many women rarely, if ever, have: a sense that their needs are of equal importance and that they can be both sexual and safe at the same time.
Because you can buy all the lingerie in the world, stock up on handcuffs, learn how to striptease, but enthusiastic consent? Turns out, that’s one of the most erotic things of all.
The question everyone is most curious about, when they first hear about this foray into erotica, is how much of the content from those stories was drawn from experience and how much from imagination. I’ve rarely written in my real-world essays, under my real-world name, about my own real-world love life (save for a few pieces here and there about first heartbreaks and old romances), and I don’t intend to start now. It is one of the few parts of my life that I haven’t mined deeply, the way I have my body or motherhood or any of the other themes with which I so frequently find myself preoccupied. Perhaps one day, when I am so close to the end of things that it no longer matters what I reveal about my own secrets (and other people’s, by extension), I’ll write some steamy tell-all memoir, but until then, that part of my private life shall remain, mostly, private.
I will say that I’ve probably had a more exciting sex life than anyone looking at me in the grocery store lineup—with my hair in a bun, a hole in the knee of my leggings, oversized tote dangling off my shoulder—might guess at first glance. More exciting than even my friends would guess.
But I’ve come to discover that’s often the case: the most average people you know—the folks you’ll never see on the cover of a magazine, or the people with nerdy hobbies or weird hair or imperfect bodies—are probably having a lot of fun in their private time. (Seriously, if you’re looking for enthusiastic, friendly, kinky people? Try the comic shop or a Star Trek convention or the adults hanging out at the Lego store on new-release day, before you hit the club or a dating app.)
I was also a slow bloomer, in deed if not in thought, and a private one at that. I was nearly out of high school before I dated at all, and through my twenties, I had a few torrid but hidden affairs. If I knew you at university or in the years thereafter and I told you I couldn’t hang out on the weekend because I was going to study or do laundry? Sorry. I probably lied to you.
Why? Who knows. There was no reason to be secretive; there was nothing illicit or illegal going on. But I never talked about these relationships, or even acknowledged they existed. They were all mine, something for me alone, and I hoarded the secret of them like a dragon on a gold pile. I became an expert at playing innocent when friends described certain horizontal activities. “What, people do that?” I’d ask, all aflutter, tittering as though I’d never heard the like, while knowing all along that I’d done exactly that thing myself.
In retrospect, it’s clear to me that my secrecy was wound up in body shame and sexual guilt and kink and identity, along with a sense that my job was to help other people with their relationship woes, not talk about mine. But at the time, I told myself it was my own beeswax and no one else’s, and that was that.
Around the same time that I was writing erotica in my suburban basement, I spent a year or two selling sex toys. This was one of those home-party companies, except instead of selling food storage or makeup, I was offering vibrators and dildos. I’d show up to a house full of women, a suitcase of sex toys in hand, and then I’d deliver a fantastic spiel, pointing out the unique features of each item one by one. The gist of the speech, if you condensed it down, was: Listen, ladies, sex is good and healthy and important, whether it’s by yourself or with other people, and life is too short to feel weird about your desires and your fantasies. Now check out the ten modes of vibration on this rabbit. Also, did you know that you can use an open-ended cock sleeve to make blow jobs easier if you’re prone to gagging? And don’t mix silicone lube with silicone toys—water-based only, unless it’s glass.
I said things to strangers at those parties that I couldn’t have said in front of most people in any other environment. I became the boldest, most comfortable, most kinky version of myself. And the parties were a hoot. People got loud, the jokes got dirty, and everyone had fun.
But the best part for me was the one-on-one chats that happened after the big show, where I’d take the orders from the women privately, in a separate room down the hall, behind a closed door.
There were always a few who were happy to share with the whole group what they planned to buy and didn’t mind regaling a crowd of friends (and sometimes strangers) with their sex-toy stories, but most preferred privacy to make their orders. And to ask questions.
And oh, they had questions. About the toys, of course, but about so much more. About their own bodies, about their partners’ bodies. About their experiences and identities and insecurities and hang-ups. About whether or not they were normal. I had women of every age, every size, every sexual orientation, every skin colour ask: Is that okay? Is that weird? Am I allowed to like that, do that, want that?
And what one person deemed vanilla another might see as kinky—particular positions, even, had been imbued with meaning, from loving to degrading, though the conclusion of which was which, and why, varied from one person to another. And most people weren’t even sure why they felt the way they did.
I discovered that almost all of us have shame about sex that is so deeply rooted in our psyches we no longer know where it came from. Sometimes from parents or religion. Sometimes from early experiences. Sometimes from television or books or movies. Often, it seems as though it emerges from nowhere at all.
I discovered that the moment you eased someone’s shame, even a tiny bit, in its place grew joy. And giving someone joy gave me joy—and lessened my own shame too. Those private conversations were full of learning, and unlearning, for the customer and for myself.
Who knew that selling sex toys would lead to epiphanies?
It’s a different world now than it was when I was growing up. Sex-positive resources are only a few clicks away. Though the internet brings its own problems, and plenty of them, I confess I rather envy teenagers and young adults this magical portal that helps them find themselves and like-minded community. It’s hard not to wonder how much earlier I might have shed my own kink shame if I’d had access to Tumblr in my twenties rather than my forties, even though I began with a positive foundation when it came to sex.
My first significant exposure to human sexuality was a copy of The Joy of Sex on my godparents’ bookshelf when I was about ten. They had a small guest room whose walls were covered with bookshelves. One night, as my godmother was helping me settle in, the word “sex” jumped out at me from the spine of one of the books. It was like there was one of those neon lights with a big arrow pointing to it and bulbs flashing on and off around it. Impossible to ignore. I waited till everyone was asleep, turned on the lamp, and plucked the book from the shelf, memorizing exactly where it had been and how far it was pulled out before I touched it. I knew I would have to return it to its exact position so my exploration would go unnoticed.
I flipped the pages, mesmerized. This was the original The Joy of Sex, also known as “the one with the hairy hippies.” The simple illustrations were happy, sensual, carefree, and erotic, somehow all at once. It was a total revelation. I wasn’t old enough to be aroused, but I was something: curious, titillated, totally fascinated. I am not the only person of my generation to have had this experience; I’ve heard others talk about finding a copy of this book—tucked into a parent’s bedside table or while babysitting. I am convinced it had a special magic that, once encountered, lingered in the psyche. It embedded in me a deep sense that sex was supposed to be fun, that it was natural, and normal, and bodies were meant to be celebrated. Though the ensuing years would warp that memory with all sorts of limits and rules, uncertainty and myths, the core of it must have persisted in some small way.
Why else would I have been willing to go into people’s houses with a cache of dildos and stand in front of them talking about the best ways to clean your sex toys? Somewhere deep down, I always knew that sex was meant to be, as the title of that book had long ago suggested, joyful.
But it wasn’t until those long, question-filled conversations I had with customers that I really began to shed my own useless layers of shame and guilt. When someone asked me if they were weird, it turns out I wasn’t just answering them—I was also speaking to some younger version of myself who had wondered, so many times, if I was weird and if I was allowed to do that, like that, want that?
Like most things in life, this process is a work in progress. But it’s one that might never have begun at all if it weren’t for my brief but fruitful career as a peddler of smut. Maybe one of these days, I’ll write a whole book of erotica—under my very own name.
Excerpted from Halfway Home: Thoughts from Midlife by Christina Myers, 2024, published by House of Anansi. Reprinted with permission from the publisher.
