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The other day I ran into a friend I don’t see a lot and am not particularly close to. I’m always happy to see her because she seems to make it a practice to be entertaining. On this particular day we talked about sex. We could easily have not talked about sex; in the past, I think I have talked to her about salad dressing for at least 20 minutes. But sex was on the table, and this woman, and I—conversationally—tend to eat what’s put in front of us.

This woman has a patient, eager smile; she invites confidence. So, there I was, laying it all out in front of the blueberries. I wasn’t describing actual sex acts. I was saying, in general terms, that despite the most important relationship of my adult life having ended in a manner well beyond unpleasant and shattering, I had unexpectedly started seeing someone that I was way more attracted to than I expected to be at this incredibly fucked up moment in my life. It was even possible, if such feelings are to be trusted, that I was more attracted to this new person than I had been to anyone before.

 She was into it. It is always a pleasure to mesmerize an already beautiful person.Their fascination adds luster to their already perfect features. Also, she is younger than me, so I think she may have found it encouraging that I was still interested in sex. Maybe she is the kind of person who is afraid she’ll be sick of it by the time she is at my advanced age (just kidding, I am only eight to ten years older than she is).

 When I got back to the car, I called my mother. Speaking of age, she is 86. She was the same age I am now—55—in 1993.

 “Quick question,” I asked, “If you ran into someone in the grocery store in 1993, would you talk to them about sex?” 

 She didn’t ask how well I knew this person or anything. She just said, “Absolutely not.” I thanked her for the information and complimented her on being a real class act. 

I was charging my all-electric car and it needed some more time. I opened Instagram (never a good idea). At the top of my feed was a post from Clementine Morrigan, the Canadian writer and co-host of the leftist anti-cancel culture podcast, Fucking Cancelled. I used to be very into Clementine, because I agree with her that there are elements of the left that are scoldy, and that many elements of identitarianism border on fascism. But my enthusiasm for her has waned a bit. She is a little high on her own supply. This is not a crime in and of itself, but it’s a bit grating. 

Today Morrigan was talking about her other favorite subject, her pussy. “I discovered g-spot sexuality and became a squirter in the 2^nd half of my 30s,” wrote Morrigan, who also writes a lot about polyamory, sexuality, abuse, and is generally interested in trauma and feelings. “Discovering that my body was capable of entirely new types of pleasure, and even doing something dramatic like squirting, was an exciting and pleasant surprise.” 

 Jesus Christ, I thought. This is quite a lot to take in on a Friday afternoon. 

All day, I kept thinking: “Wow. People today are just out in public like: hey everyone, I like to squirt out of my pussy.” Not only that, I was living in a world where I was able to have a spontaneous conversation about sexual desire in a supermarket with a mere acquaintance. The fact that such a conversation was not utterly taboo seemed somehow connected to Morrigan’s explicit post on Instagram.

I had this fair, balanced, charitable, and dare I say “feminist” thought that I should be grateful to Morrigan. She and her dramatic squirting were pushing the boundaries of how much you could say and where you could say it, running so I could walk. I wasn’t like my mom in 1993, forced to have supermarket discussions about whatever people talked about then: “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” or maybe Václav Havel?  

Then I had less charitable thoughts. Wow, that girl really needs to rein it in.  

When I saw my boyfriend, I barely said hello. “There’s this woman on Instagram and she was like ‘My g-spot squirts.’” He was emptying a dishwasher, half-listening. “Do you… want to try that?” he asked, because he is a man, and thought I must be bringing it up because I wanted help.

No no no, I explained. I wasn’t saying it because I wanted to try it. I was just kind of blown away that someone would say something like that on Instagram. I don’t mean I had never ever seen anything sexually explicit on Instagram. It was just this particular subject in this particular way. I saw Clementine Morrigan talking about squirting while in a grocery store parking lot and I had to recalibrate: I had to acknowledge that we were living in a world that I had been seeing out of the corner of my eye but had never really looked at head-on.

 “You wouldn’t put something like that on social media?” my boyfriend said. He’s not on social media, and he never looks at mine, so I think he was genuinely wondering. I said, “No, I would never.” 

I went outside to smoke a cigarette, perfectly relaxed. Then I stiffened from a sudden knowing. There are chapters of my life that I regularly look back to, ones that I consider part of my personal mythology. Then there are others I must find inconvenient to this narrative and accordingly manage to never think about, like my first job in non-regional media as a sex columnist for Details magazine.

Once I was someone who talked about their sex life explicitly: I talked about anal sex, I talked about cheating, I talked about getting head and giving head. Listing all the things I wrote about then made me feel sick now. Who did that? Who was that person? I really didn’t want to be writing or publishing any of it. Every single time a column came out I felt like I was waking up after a blackout, wanting to clean up a mess I couldn’t even find. Worse, I never talked about how much I didn’t want to be doing what I was doing. Worse still, I thought that if I acted like I was proud of what I was doing—as if it was aligned with my actual desires—then maybe that could pass for being proud. Worst of all, I hadn’t even admitted these feelings about it until at least ten years after that job was over.

It was clear my indignant and superior reaction to Morrigan was more fraught than I would have perhaps liked to have imagined. Only hours ago I had truly believed that Morrigan and I resided in separate universes when it came to public sexual sharing capacities. Now I knew the reason I was so vehemently like can you believe this bitch is that I was that bitch.

I told my boyfriend that I had been full of shit when I said that I would never share as explicitly as Morrigan had. I told him that I used to be a sex columnist, that I had done it for a long time, and that I hated thinking about it. I said that I felt bad that I had once thought I had so little to offer as a writer that I was willing to tell the entire world things I felt should be private. I did it because I figured I needed to sell a part of myself along with my writing, because the writing on its own wasn’t worth enough.

 This seemed sufficiently vulnerable to pass as truth, but it was not the whole truth. 

The whole truth revealed itself to me only a few months ago, while I was reading Charlotte Shane’s 2024 memoir An Honest Woman. I only know Shane a little. I’ve admired her work and looked at her Instagram photos for years and been on her podcast. Okay, I’ve kind of worshipped her, not just because of her writing; she seemed like some kind of cool goddess to me. I had told myself (based on nothing she’d ever said) that she was—in addition to being a great writer—so eternally beautiful and born so comfortable in her own skin that she’d become a sex worker out of confidence.

This was not the case. I was shocked—funny, in retrospect—to discover from reading her memoir that Shane had not fallen to earth or leapt from her father’s head somehow impervious to the horrors of being female. Like me, she had felt unattractive as a teenager and a young woman. Doing sex work was, in part, Shane’s way of proving to the world that she was worthy. “I felt highly desired,” she wrote. “I was, verifiably, highly desired. Coveted, even.”

 I had written a sex column not because I was interested in it but because I wanted to look as if I were confident sexually. I wanted to let the world know that men wanted me, and then to have their desire confirmed in writing. I knew there was nothing sustaining in what I was doing. It would not give me real confidence. Having told myself there was absolutely no way to feel consistently sexually okay, shutting this off as a non-possibility, I was willing to accept the rush of pretending. 

This was not a matter of not liking myself. Shane writes about having no doubt that she was “an individual, a subject, not inherently lesser than.” I felt the same way. But just as Shane was aware that “women’s value had a ceiling”—a ceiling that has to do with how attractive they are to men—I both liked myself and felt that there was some depressing reality where my self-worth would be snickered at, or deemed delusional, if it dared to exceed the grade put on my general appeal determined by men.

 The sex column had been a way of circumventing the reality that I would never find a stable place within that value structure, because men controlled it, and some men thought I was attractive and some men didn’t. I didn’t write about sex because I was interested in exploring the subjects of pleasure, desire, all those things. It was just armor. The explicit reason that Morrigan annoyed me so much was that she didn’t seem to have boundaries: she was making the private too public, by my metrics. But not only had I done the same, I had done it in such a sneaky and creepy way. Morrigan seemed to be genuinely—innocently?—telling her followers: hey, maybe you should see if your G-spots work, because it might be fun for you. I had been pretending to help readers, to inform and entertain them, but my agenda was not genuine or innocent. It was convoluted and twisted and so fucked up: I had become a sex columnist so that I could imagine myself as having sexual confidence. I decided that imagining readers— strangers—believed I had it was the closest I could get or the best I could do. I would never convince myself I was worthy, but if others believed I thought I was… well, that would just have to do.

Even if I move on from my assessment that Morrigan’s post is less a sign of the world going to hell in a handbasket and more about my own fears about being considered sexy, I must admit from a (somewhat more defendable and secure position) that I still consider it a little annoying. Like “g-spot sexuality?” “Became a squirter?” Is “g-spot” a sexuality? Is squirter an identity category now? Did I want to describe sexual moments as “exciting and pleasant” surprises? Not really, no. 

But also, I can’t assume that what Morrigan is doing is just oversharing. That’s what I would be doing if I was her. It’s just that I am not her, and oversharing isn’t only about saying too much. It’s about the desperation to make an impact on people—needing them to have a reaction that will give you a feeling you can’t produce for yourself. Is she cringe? Sure. As a Gen-Xer, do I want to look at her and say “This fucking millennial?” As an American, do I want to roll my eyes and say “Why do Canadians have to be so earnest and healthy?” Yes, and yes. But I know now that what bothered me about her post wasn't about those judgments. It was jealousy that she meant what she said. She was saying what she meant when she was the same age I had been, during a time in my life I considered myself lucky to have the opportunity to lie to myself.

Being middle-aged and having regrets is surreal. For me, it’s not simply just: I did this stupid thing, I did that stupid thing, I hitched my wagon to this wrong person. It’s realizing how much of my life is the result of doing what I thought would make me look good to other people because I didn’t think feeling good was an option. It’s how much this is still ingrained in me. People are always asking me “But what do you want?”, and I can’t even ask myself the question. I just think “Who gets what they want?”   

Later, I told all this to my friend from the supermarket. I was embarrassed to have her learn that I was a sex columnist because I was trying to communicate something to the outside world that was patently untrue. But far from being weird, or saying something that might suggest I’d been vulnerable to the point of pathetic, my friend echoed that terrible feeling of knowing that large parts of your presentation—which easily becomes your personality—are not in fact a reflection of your beliefs or desires. She too had done and said things merely because it seemed like a better idea to look at if she were flourishing than to find a way to actually flourish. She said how much she had wanted to appear “up for it,” and that cultivating this appearance had been more important to her than anything.

My friend added she was not terribly interested in sex anymore and was at least as embarrassed about admitting this as I was about admitting that I had been a sex columnist for the sole purpose of looking like I was okay with being one. We agreed that even if it was fine for Clementine Morrigan to write an article about her G-spot squirting, we would both be way too embarrassed to do that ourselves, and that might be perhaps why we always intensely enjoyed our conversations.

What do I really want? Do I want to write about how sunshine and rainbows come out of my vagina when someone fingers my G-spot? I do not, and if they ever do, I certainly won’t be telling any of you about it.