Here are 3 tips on being shamelessly sexy to bring you wonder this week:

Desire It 💋

“I would like to be the air / that inhabits you for a moment / only.”

— Margaret Atwood, Variation on the Word Sleep, poets.org.

Think about a person whose presence energizes you. What draws you to them? Why are they so magnetic and captivating? Hold them in your mind’s eye this week and take note of anything that reminds you of them.

Honor It 🌞

“Mistakes are chances to learn and grow. You’re enough, no matter what.”

— The Loving Parent Guidebook: The Solution is to Become Your Own Loving Parent.

Just because you made a mistake, does not mean you are a mistake. Just because you made a bad decision or choice does not mean you are a bad person.

Act On It ✍️

Do you have a dream writing project you’ve never started? Are you in the messy middle of writing your first novel? Join me this Friday in a 24-Hour Writing Sprint with the London Writers’ Salon and finally put pen to paper!

Starting at 12pm in Mexico City (adjust for your timezone), this is your opportunity to dedicate a day to your writing. Cancel your plans and set aside this time. As a subscriber of this newsletter, following your dreams is mandatory, sorry!

See you next week!

Love,

Tash Doherty

Author of These Perfectly Careless Things

Creator of The Intimacy Journal

Facilitator of Intimacy Writing Workshops

💌 ✍️

Extra treats 🍬

Deeper Reading 🔥

If you enjoyed last week’s “Honor It” offering, I wrote the full story of my temazcal experience in a piece titled, “The Gift of Self-Love.”

Song of the week 🎶

Keep in touch! 🥰

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Thank you for your patience; I’ve been navigating a rough patch. I’m trying a new rhythm for Misseducated: three shamelessly sexy tips every week to give you something you can take into your daily life.

Here are this week’s 3 tips to become shamelessly sexy:

Desire It 🕯️

What is your favorite scent? Create an opportunity for yourself to experience it this week. If you don’t know what yours is, go to a fancy perfume or soap shop and try a couple. Bring free samples home. For example, I love Jasmin, particularly the Jasmin 17 scent from La Labo, and OroNardo perfume (no. 5) from Xinū; Xinū’s stores in Mexico feel like museums of worship to scent. Do I own an expensive little bottle of either perfume? Hell no.

Honor It 🌞

Working through grief and anger, I went to a temazcal on Sunday. It was a beautiful, intense, women-only ceremony, and I left at the 3rd door, before I almost fainted from the heat. As I sat on the ground in the sunshine, chugging water, I noticed the sun reflected off one of the sequins on my sweat-soaked dress. That’s when I remembered a lesson of self-love, which I now address to you:

Act On It ☮️

“You can do it on your own terms. It’s your sexuality in the end. So, do yourself on your own terms.” — Pauline on the Misseducated Podcast, Open Relationships 101.

I’m in my cozy luteal phase, still recovering from visiting my grandma. The very idea of going on a Hinge date overwhelms me, so the terms of my sexuality this week are: rest, gentleness, and peace.

What are your terms? Define three terms of your sexuality this week, and organize your evenings to reflect them. Tell me how it goes.

See you next week!

Love,

Tash Doherty

Author of These Perfectly Careless Things

Creator of The Intimacy Journal

Facilitator of Intimacy Writing Workshops

💌 ✍️

What else am I up to?

Extra treats 🍬

Misseducated Archive update 💌 ✍️

I’m migrating my top Misseducated articles to my blog at tashdoherty.com/writing. They get about 1,000 clicks from Google Search per month, and I want to own all my channels rather than give that traffic to Substack. Here are the new, updated articles:

1. The 4 Best Porn Categories for Women 💅

2. What is it like to orgasm on psilocybin? 🍄 🎢

3. The Ultimate Guide to Having an Incredible One-Night Stand

Podcast of the week 🎧

Burnout in Business episode (for all my solopreneurs out there). It’s because of this episode I haven’t burnt out, yet! Thank you for the recommendation, Anna-Louise (my marketing guru).

Song of the week 🎶

Keep in touch! 🥰

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Dear Wonderful Reader,

Tuesday, March 17th, 2026, marked 4 years since I freed myself from the shackles of my corporate job. Four years is a decent chunk of time. For the same duration as my undergraduate degree, I’ve been frolicking around Mexico City, perfecting my Spanish and waking up every day to the joy of being alive. How have I survived without a regular paycheck? And, more importantly, have I learned anything that’s useful to you?

It has been mostly a dream, but this quit-my-job-aversary comes at a particularly difficult time. I’ve barely made $2,000 this quarter, not even close to my personal OKR of $15k. Selling some of my index fund investments to pay my rent makes me feel like I’m failing at being an adult. Then again, I did take six months off client work to launch my second book, get it funded on Kickstarter in just 12 days, and get featured in The New York Times. Still, it’s hard to see the beauty in all that I’ve accomplished when reality is currently kicking my ass.

As you know, last week I was hit by a family emergency, causing me to fork out a couple thousand dollars more to fly to LA and say goodbye to my grandmother, who it seemed was on her deathbed. I sat with her in the hospital for five days as she went through a heart operation, reflecting on life in a mortal-imperative kind of way, while somehow helping to nurse her back to health. It was a close call. Not every day is sunshine and roses.

Sometimes those deeper, existential questions irk me. Am I really that much better off than before I burned my New York 9-5 life to the ground back in 2022? However, all it takes is a five-minute conversation with another software engineer who hates his life to knock my own sense back into me. I’ve definitely made the right choice.

I’m definitely not in the same place in this “creative career” as when I started. My direction is clearer and narrower in a way that’s motivating. I have a product to sell. I have workshops to teach. My path has a lot more shape, but it’s not easier. In fact, I’m still suffering. Yet I am following the advice of Graham Weaver, from my favorite episode of Lenny’s Podcast:

“Life is suffering, so make sure you pick something worth suffering for.” That’s how this feels right now. It’s a lot of work, but I’m much happier doing this than sending Sean a stupid, boring spreadsheet. (If you remember, in my corporate tech career, I worked with more men named Sean than with women on my teams, lol).

Here are four lessons I’ve learned in my fourth year of freedom.

1. Money still doesn’t really matter.

Yes, I’m a hypocrite. Aside from keeping the lights on and paying my rent, I still believe that money doesn’t really matter to me in my life. Through much self-reflection, I’ve learned that making money for money’s sake means nothing to me. I only make money to fund my creative projects and have control over my time. I couldn’t give a shit about owning a home. Sometimes I wish I had a bit more disposable income to travel, but that’s about it.

At the same time, the highest highs of my life cost next to nothing. Creating The Intimacy Journal in the second half of last year was pure creative bliss. Designing the pages, curating the erotic poetry, I had never felt so alive as I brought that book to life. Same with meeting up with a special group of incredibly talented poets and writers in Mexico City. Reading my work to them, experiencing their work, and feeling held creatively is absolutely fucking amazing. Enough said.

2. There are doers, and there are dreamers.

The other day, I was talking to a guy who planned to sell shoes from Mexico in the US.

“What shipping service are you using?” I asked him.

“Well, we haven’t actually done it yet,” he said, “We’re just developing the idea and exploring our options right now.”

Huh, I thought. So he hasn’t even really faced the issue, which is shipping stuff from Mexico to the US. He doesn’t know that Correos de Mexico, the Mexican postal service, isn’t permitting anyone to send more than a postcard. He doesn’t know they just digitalized their system and charge a shit ton more to send anything? Got it.

Something that continues to carry me through these years is that when I say I’m going to do something, I do it. Many people stand around commenting that what you’re doing is cool and that they’re doing it too, but then they don’t actually do it themselves.

You also don’t realize how much you will grow through this whole process. I look back, and I’m like: oh shit! I fulfilled 99% of the orders on my Kickstarter campaign. I hosted those workshops. I’ve done a lot of things, actually. And I’ve learned a lot, too. If you’ve been doing the things, you probably know a lot more than you think you know. By doing anything, you’re already way ahead of someone who hasn’t done anything at all. The same thing goes for reading books. A lot of people don’t read any books these days. Even if you just read one page of one book, that’s infinitely more than someone who just goes around saying how much they’d like to read more. Everyone talks a big game. When someone tells me about their dreams, but they aren’t actively doing them, I tune out. But when someone is doing something, even if they suck at it and they’re failing, I respect them.

3. Always be selling. Show, don’t tell.

If you bump into me on the street today, I am carrying 2 copies of my latest book, The Intimacy Journal. I have one sample copy and one copy in a gift-wrapped plastic sleeve. Why?

Well, when people ask me what I do, I don’t tell them; I pull the sample copy out of my bag and show them. I read them a line or a short poem, I show them the pages that I designed myself, and I tell them the story of how the book came about. I’m really proud of my book, and I think it’s beautiful. So I enjoy watching people interact with it for the first time.

What happens after that? Unexpectedly, they often want to buy one! And that’s when I sell them the gift-wrapped copy. This doesn’t always work, but I’ve sold about 42 copies of my book this way, which is about $1,250 USD in revenue for me (over a month’s rent!). Plus, people often add a little tip. It’s nice to have some extra cash on me. At times, it can get a little exhausting, and I feel torn or guilty if I’m not carrying copies of my book wherever I go. But I did sell 4 copies at my friend’s Christmas party. In fact, the last thing I did in 2025 was sell a copy of my book to a lovely gay man at a New Year’s Eve Party. Neat, huh? I keep track of how they pay me (Cash, Venmo, PayPal) and the currency they pay in (GBP, USD, MXN, EUR).

This is a true story: when I was a teenager, my family lived on the same street as the esteemed English fashion designer, Sir Paul Smith (he was knighted by The Queen years before). I only saw Paul Smith on my street a couple of times because he wakes up at 5am every day to go swimming. But one time, I ran into him and asked how he was. He immediately said to me,

“I’m excellent, thank you. I’m just picking out the furnishings for a new shop we’re opening on Albemarle, in Mayfair. You might like to go check it out.”

His words left an impression on me. He’s perhaps the most famous designer of men’s clothing in the world. His clothes are on billboards. He has shops in Tokyo and on Melrose in LA, and he’d been designing collections at Paris and Milan fashion week for longer than I’d been alive. As a 16-year-old girl, I wasn’t exactly his target demographic. And yet, here he was, imploring me to check out his new shop on Albemarle. I never forgot that he said that to me. And believe it or not, I did visit that new shop a few months later. And I liked the furnishings.

You’re not an obnoxious guy standing there with a big sign that you’re flinging around at a car depot. Don’t do anything tasteless. But if someone asks you what you do, or what kind of things you write, it’s about 1000x cooler to show them a beautiful book that you’ve created yourself than just about anything else.

4. Focus on one thing at a time.

One thing that has changed my life in the last year was deciding to focus on only one project: The Intimacy Journal. The world is a wide, complex, and distracting place, and each of us only has a limited amount of energy each day. When you work on 5 different projects, that energy is spliced out in 5 different directions. It leaves you too discombobulated and distracted to rise above the noise. And you need to do everything you can to rise above the noise because you’re competing with everyone else for people’s attention. If you put all your energy into one project, you have a chance of breaking out of your little bubble of people and reaching escape velocity.

Yes, I still wrote the odd article and kept up with my newsletter every week. But I concentrated all my energy into the journal. The launch. The Kickstarter campaign. The printing. Yes, I became a significantly simpler and boring person, but everything was more defined, and I found I made a lot more progress faster. My friends came back from the summer holidays, and I already had the first printed sample of the book to show them! A project like The Intimacy Journal is like a pillar. Once I got this book done, it opened up so many other revenue streams, including workshops, collaborations, podcast interviews, books, and audiobooks. I got a photo of me holding the book in the New York Times. Things just happened because I sat down and got that book done.

Whenever you feel that tug, that desire to ship this thing out into the world, and you’re excited about it in a deep way that makes you come alive, you just have to fucking do it. Because, like Elizabeth Gilbert talks about in Big Magic,

“Trust in the miraculous truth that new and marvelous ideas are looking for human collaborators every single day…Let them know you’re available. And for heaven’s sake, try not to miss the next one.”

The idea is yours for now. And if you don’t do it, the book, the song, the poem, whatever it is, will find another human subject to occupy soon. You’ll lose it, and you’ll wish you did it yourself.

I hope you found these lessons insightful, thought-provoking, and maybe even helpful. I seem to have driven home the point of being a doer rather than a dreamer here again a bit more. If that echoes what I shared in my list of lessons from last year, that’s because it’s proven to still be true.

I also hope that when I write to you again this time next year, I’ll have survived and thrived through this emotional rollercoaster and this dip in my bank balance.

Don’t forget to do something fun today!

Love

Tash

p.s. Visit tashdoherty.com for more writing, where I will be moving my guides and more SEO-focused articles shortly 👀

💌 ✍️

Get your copy of The Intimacy Journal 📕 💋

Buy your copy

More From Misseducated 💌 ✍️

Dear Wonderful Reader,

The money dwindles in my bank account. My grandma is dying. I have to sell my investment stocks and ETFs to pay for these flights. Hit by a “family emergency” when I have the least wiggle room. I gave up my Soho House membership, which in hindsight seems like an irresponsible and pretentious expense. Today is also my four-year anniversary since I quit my job in New York to pursue this creative life. I’ve spent 95% of my days since then extremely happy. No regrets. Yet two books published, workshops being taught, a feature in the New York Times, and a mention in Vogue isn’t much comfort when my client pipeline is dry.

This is a hard moment in my journey. Yet, I still have you, my lovely reader! Thank god you’re still here. We’re all still here, somehow. Today, I have something special for you. It is one of my favorite images. It is an image that sustains me in these difficult moments of life, and being a human on this planet. I wrote it when I returned to San Francisco from my friends’ betrothal. A former tech minion, I have seen the bridge many times. But something about that day was different.

Thank you for the opportunity to edit this and give this a little more love and polish. I will keep this in mind when I get on a plane tomorrow, and sit at my grandmother’s bedside. Things are hard, but this is keeping me going. This is a gift. This is my gift for you,

Love,

Tash

The Golden Gate - Friday, October 3rd, 2025 🌁

On Sunday, I was sitting in a quiet, dimly lit cocktail bar with an old friend. She’s very rich now. She told me she’s going to have five children, but not give birth to any of them herself (surrogacy). Now, that’s money. She’s getting engaged to her equally wealthy partner. Together, for her engagement ring, they’ve found an extremely rare jewel that naturally changes color with the light. If it’s a yellow light, the jewel is dark green and brown. If it’s a normal light, it’s purple and pink.

I chuckled to myself as she told me this story. Living in Mexico City as a writer, I don’t have even close to that level of wealth. Yet I smiled to myself because I think I feel just as rich. Earlier that same day, I had gone to Crissy Field in San Francisco with the rest of the wedding troop. It was the final send-off before my friends’ honeymoon in Santa Fe, New Mexico. As I sat on some picnic blankets on the grassy sand, and munched on the last of the feta salad, and cookies, and ham, and chips, I looked out over the Golden Gate Bridge.

I had never taken a good look at her from that angle before. Of course, she’s a she. I found myself turning away from the bustling group of millennials and gazing at her. I looked at her long and hard.

If you’ve been to that part of the world before, you know how insanely windy it is through the Marin Headlands. But she stood there. Unwavering. So tall. So strong. So majestic. Her goldenness was a burnt umber, crimson, brick-colored. It is funny to realize that I always thought of her as golden herself, not thinking that it’s the place she inhabits. But the light there is golden too. It’s just enormous. The swell of the bay in green-blue-grey waters. The clouds dipping through her, spreading out into pools of sunshine over the grassy banks of land behind her. The smooth hills glowing. Her curved nature hanging perfectly still. Straight upright. Unflinching. There.

Looking at her, I felt myself expanding. I felt I saw myself in the somewhat distant future. I’ve made it. I am taller than I am now. I have grown beyond in ways that my current little human self cannot even imagine. In the future, I am taking up space. I am moving. I am powerful. I make an impact. This is all culminating in something. I’m going somewhere, even if I don’t know where yet. Even after a week of stress and dealing with the printers and fear and self-doubt and worry, despite the treachery of the waters surrounding her, and the giant freight-bearing boats that passed beneath her, and the roaring, unrelenting wind, she stood there. Graceful. Whole. She had stood there all these years. Made a small scratch in the greatest force of erosion of all: time.

That’s all to say, I laughed when I recounted this all to my friend. Here she was, chasing a rare stone around the world for her engagement ring, and I just sat on a beach and looked at a bridge for an hour. My riches were free. I was just as transformed, just as inspired, just as contented, just as driven, and moved. It was moving, that experience. Maybe I saw something of myself in her, that bridge. Maybe at times she might underestimate herself, whereas anyone looking at her could easily see her excellence, how exceptional she was. Or maybe she knows her worth. Through her very existence, she is strong. Her strength, in that sense, is never to be questioned. Her talents a given. Her energy, immense, radiating out from all aspects of her everywhere, as she let the giant waves and ships pass beneath her like it was nobody’s business. Choosing not to lower herself to small problems that were literally beneath her. And the space she took up. The space that was meant for her to inhabit. So anchored and grounded by nature. I felt grateful to just see her, to receive her energy.

I couldn’t look away.

💌 ✍️

Listen to my grandmother’s story on the Misseducated Podcast:

Listen 🎧

More Stories about my Grandmother from Misseducated

💌 ✍️

Hello Wonderful Reader,

The mother-daughter bond is just about the last thing I wanted to share about this week. I only wanted to give you a taste of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven because next week we’ll be working with another poem by her in a “Fantasy”-themed Intimacy Writing Workshop (which I’m very excited to teach!)

Join my "Fantasy" workshop!

I found her poem “Marie Ida Sequence,” and I liked Part I. But once I sat down to illustrate, I got the message: she’s talking about her mother, their resemblance, and her love for her. Her mother, Ida-Marie, who died of uterine cancer when Elsa was only 19 years old. Her mother, who had suffered from mental illness and spent time in a sanatorium in Stettin, Germany (theartstory.org). Her mother, who had been stuck in an abusive, violent relationship with her father, and contracted syphilis because of him (Elsa blamed her father for her mother’s death).

I’m not going to lie, the complexity of it makes me feel a bit better about myself. I’m going through a difficult time with my own mother. I am trying to accept her for who she is, while she cannot do the same for me. My boundaries are met by her silence. I’m still an afterthought in her web of family gatherings, always wanting everyone to be close while still not really knowing what closeness means. It’s fucking complicated, and not fun to think about.

Still, the clear images in the poem captivated me. The slate-green eyes, the copper hair. Maybe that’s what writing is about sometimes. Facing the dark shit. Processing the stuff we’d rather not look at. In fact, in the research from UT Austin that I base my workshops on, they say that there are more mental and physical health benefits from writing about your most traumatic and difficult experiences than from writing about neutral topics.

So, here’s to facing our shit.

💌 ✍️

Join my next Intimacy Writing Workshop!

Theme: Fantasy 🧚✨

Next week on Thursday, March 12th, I’ll be collaborating with the wonderful sex-positive podcast, Honeydew Me, for an evening of writing about our intimate fantasies. We will be using a poem by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Join us!

Write with us!

Marie Ida Sequence

By Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927)

(Gesture of soul—action-:architecture —evolutionary)

I.
Mine flaunting dress—mine copper hair—
Thou—purple—dark— — 
Slate iris— forehead wide. 
Mine lips—as shaped and chiselled after thine— 
The nose is not—mine nose is aquiline— 
like tower—thine is short,

Thine hands—so imminently lovely— 
Frail—faintly dimpled—tapery fingertips— 
To worship—they are not the hands of me— 
Nor chaste as thine ponder mine lips.

Mine scarlet heart—mine slate-green eye— 
copper-sprayed star— 
Are thine—profound—! 
—Learned mine eyes what never thine eyes lit— ! 
Desire incarnate—erected fit 
Cradle for thine soul.

Nay—fundamentally I am thine root— 
Gyrating dizzying and high 
Upon that bloodcrest—mating a galoot 
Of steel and flame—making thee die.

Source: The Little Review, 1920. This poem is in the public domain. 🩵

Four Prompts To Go Deeper ✍️

For 20 minutes, write a memory, a reflection, a letter, or whatever comes:

1. Explore the physical similarities you have with your mother, and what they say about you.

Inspired by: “Mine lips—as shaped and chiselled after thine—”

2. Write about your most vivid memory of your mother.

Inspired by: “Cradle for thine soul.”

3. Write about the ways in which you and your mother will always be interconnected.

Inspired by: “fundamentally I am thine root—“

4. Write about what you wish you could say to your mother but can’t for whatever reason.

Inspired by: “(Gesture of soul—action-:architecture —evolutionary)”

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven herself was an exceptionally interesting woman. I don’t have time to go into it too much here, but give her Wikipedia page a read. Her “elaborate costumes both critiqued and challenged the bourgeois notions of feminine beauty and economic worth. She adorned herself with utilitarian objects like spoons, tin cans, and curtain rings, as well as street debris that she came across.” (Wikipedia) Yes, spoons are jewelry, friends.

I hope this invitation stirred something deep within you and inspired you to process it, as hard as that may be. Which writing prompt resonated with you the most? Let me know. I read and respond to every DM I get!

Sending love,

Tash

p.s. I’m sharing more updates on Instagram, TikTok, or LinkedIn. Follow me!

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More From Misseducated 💌 ✍️

Introduction

“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” — Irina Dunn, 1970

I heard about the movement of decentering men on TikTok. With zero expectations, I decided to try it out for a month. It was October 2025. I was sick of dating apps and about to publish my second book. I’d been single for three years, but this was something different. I’m here to tell you everything about it and share all the reasons why I’m never going back.

I wrote this article to give us, women, a blueprint for how to be the main character in our own lives. Our mothers and grandmothers couldn’t teach us this; they depended on men (financially) to survive, and had to center them accordingly. This article is not about hating men; it’s about unlearning the ways that the patriarchy has trained us to prioritize making men happy. This pressure comes just as much from the women in our lives (aunties, influencers, our mother), as from men. After all, it was my mother who let my brother get away with never doing the dishes after dinner.

Starting this process for the first time scared me. I was worried that if I stopped trying to date men, I was giving up on my dream of becoming a mother. Yet as I began to decenter men, I realized that my idea of motherhood was purely a fantasy. Facing the reality of motherhood, those statistics scared me much more. In this article, I will cover everything I’ve learned from the internet, economists, and my own experience, so that you can decide whether decentering men and trying it for a month to start is right for you. Let’s begin!

What does it mean to decenter men?

Decentering men means focusing on our own needs, desires, and dreams rather than prioritizing men’s feelings or validation. We believe our needs matter just as much as a man’s needs. We take our dream jobs, move to our dream city, and live fully without waiting to be “chosen.” If we do want a relationship, we believe the right man will support us in being our fullest selves. We are complete without a man, marriage, or motherhood, and our life choices, careers, and bank accounts reflect that. We respect other women’s decisions without judging them harshly either way.

In our lives, we can decenter men in big ways, such as by staying single forever, or small ways, such as following feminist creators on Instagram over trad wives. We seek content that promotes our right to choose, not content about women being controlled or subservient to husbands. It’s okay to want marriage and babies, but decentering men helps us see our people-pleasing tendencies and assess whether we’re getting a good deal. We only give what we are able and willing to give.

Why did I start decentering men?

I started decentering men just before I turned 31; the same age my mum was when she gave birth to me and became financially dependent on my dad forever. I had been living independently, yet, like many women, I felt that constant, sneaky, underlying pressure to “find a man” so I could have babies one day. The “manxiety” haunted me from coffee shops to house parties to bars (all the meet-cute spots). I’d built an amazing life for myself, and was about to birth my second book into the world. Yet, deep down, I believed I wasn’t enough without the stamp of some dude’s approval. I listened to Raye, wondering what the hell was taking my husband so long to find me. I had swiped through a million men (probably) in my dating app “career.” But as my thumbs ached, I considered a new possibility:

“What if I just…gave up? Well, not forever. Maybe I can just give up trying to find a partner for a month and see what happens.”

So that’s what I did.

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How to Decenter Men while in a Relationship

Negotiate a Better Deal

“I can’t mop the floor with my uterus.” — Professor Corinne Low, Having It All

For women in a heterosexual relationship, centering your man can have devastating consequences. Of course, it’s okay to care about your man, but you still need to take your own feelings and needs just as seriously as his.

In her book Having It All, Dr. Corinne Low, professor of Economics at The Wharton School, points out that while women have gained economic and job equality since the 1970s, men have not faced similar pressure to take on household and childcare chores equitably. This leaves many heterosexual women with two full-time jobs: their day job and housework (plus childcare). The reality is shocking: “Women in heterosexual marriages who are the primary breadwinners do almost twice as much cooking and cleaning as their male spouses” (Low, 2025). Gay and lesbian couples do not face the same inequities in the home, by the way. It’s gender-based bullshit.

Low challenges us to ask ourselves, “Am I getting a good deal?” Essentially, in your relationship, are your needs prioritized as much as your male partner’s? This could mean advancing your career, getting enough leisure and sleep, balancing household chores, protecting your happiness and wellbeing, managing commute time, and maintaining social support. The list goes on, and Professor Low wants to make sure you are not just happy, but ideally optimizing your personal utility on what matters most to you. She suggests you plan time in your schedule for leisure, whatever brings you the most long-term joy and fulfillment. Is it a massage? Brunch with the gals?

To test this, Low suggests asking yourself: if you got a job opportunity in a different city that would give you a 50% pay increase, but it required your partner to take a 20% pay cut, how would you decide whether to move? A woman decentering men would advocate for moving. Or if one of your kids is sick, how do you decide who stays home? Decentering means demanding a balanced household.

Please, whatever you do, don’t give up your apartment that’s a 15-minute commute to your work because your male partner is quitting his job and going on a “find-himself” sabbatical. Don’t get spun up in his chaos. And if you find yourself wondering whether to prioritize your career or your husband’s, Low encourages us to imagine that the gender roles were flipped. Would he ever give up his apartment for your sabbatical?

If your male partner remains useless around the home, and you’re sick of your job, commute, and living situation,

How to Decenter Men while Single

1. Pick your starting time frame.

I recommend giving it a month to see how it goes. You can always extend if you’re enjoying it.

2. Prioritize yourself and your close friends.

Delete the apps and stop dating. Decentering men means not trying to find a partner at all. For example, I stopped flirting with the random guys at parties, hoping they’d sleep with me. Instead, I’d catch up with the person I came with and deepen my female friendship. If a man talks to you at a bar, that’s fine, as is getting introduced by friends. But you’re not putting yourself out there. You can still prioritize platonic friendships with men, the gays, and the theys.

You can also dress in a way that doesn’t revolve around the male gaze, because you no longer give a fuck. Wear what makes you feel happy, exuberant, comfortable, and loving your life. Try to disentangle what you think you should wear to please men versus what you actually want to wear. It’s a thornier topic that I’ve written about before, but it’s worth paying attention to.

3. Prioritize your schedule and your needs.

In a life where your needs matter, prioritize your gym classes, sleep schedule, mental health, self-love, and prep time for work meetings. This is easier said than done, because if your life has been anything like mine, you may struggle to identify your needs. Growing up as the eldest of four children, I rarely owned anything that was just mine, and I internalized that my needs didn’t matter. Three years of therapy and two years of regular ACA meetings, a 12-step program for Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families, have helped me learn to identify my needs and believe they matter (and that’s improved my self-esteem).

Decentering men is about respecting your own time, energy, and space, not bending over backwards and screwing up your night of sleep for someone who probably sucks and won’t commit. Noticing our feelings is crucial; they alert us when our needs are being compromised or boundaries are crossed.

Try to do regular feelings check-ins: “What am I feeling right now?” You can and should be feeling multiple things at any given time. Use a feelings wheel to identify your emotions in the moment, or even do a needs check-in: “What do I need right now?” I could write a whole other article about this, but if you’re interested in learning more, I recommend reading The Loving Parent Guidebook. The book will teach you how to be your own loving parent, including things like:

4. Talk about anything else.

The world is a wild and wonderful place. You could talk about getting that bag, your dream holiday to Alaska, world domination plans, or perfecting your lemon cake recipe. Personal growth comes in many forms. Instead, you’re ruminating again about your inconsistent, alcoholic, man-child situationship. Your friends are probably bored of hearing about this walking piece of trash, but they’re just too nice to tell you!

When I was younger, I used to like getting all excited with my female friends about whoever in high school we were trying to kiss. Now I’m just sick of it. I have left women’s groups and avoided people hung up on literal losers. Do yourself a favor: notice what percentage of your time you spend talking about men. Then…stop talking about them and talk about anything else instead. It’s more interesting, and your friends will thank you for it later. Trust me!

5. Meet the humans in front of us.

Many of us were raised to put men on a pedestal. For example, if I met a hot guy, I’d give him tons of attention and make him feel as comfortable as possible, while building a fantasy that he’d solve my not-enoughness. Decentering men means seeing them as the flawed humans they are. Fantasies be gone. This means chatting briefly with a hot guy, thinking nothing of it, and moving on without letting him disrupt your foundation.

The ACA problem spoke to me: “[We] became addicted to excitement in all our affairs, preferring constant upset to workable relationships.” I’d get hooked on men who responded to texts inconsistently, mistaking anxiety for butterflies. Instead, as we decenter men, we can focus on one ACA promise: “We will choose to love people who can love and be responsible for themselves.” This means matching a guy’s energy. Don’t change your schedule for the guy who never confirmed date plans. Match the inconsistent texter’s energy by responding inconsistently because you’re busy with better things to do. Don’t reorganize your schedule for a guy who would never do the same for you. Notice when they don’t respond to your message. That signals their level of interest and respect for your time. Set boundaries with them and stick to them. I’m a fan of blocking people to get them out of my psyche. Decentering is our chance to reclaim energy that should never have been given to these men in the first place.

6. Build financial independence

“Women are brought up to think that a man is a financial strategy. You get married, and that’s it. And that is fatal, utterly fatal.” — Cindy Gallop, Design Matters Podcast.

According to Amanda Holden in How to Be a Rich Old Lady, there are levels of financial independence: “not solely relying on a man or partner for money,” and “not needing to rely on a job for money” I.e., you have enough money invested to live off the interest those investments generate. The second level is much harder to achieve, but once your 401(k) and savings generate enough income to live on, you can retire.

Financial independence is more important for us than ever. Why? Because “[marriage] is offering less value to people than it once did,” where marriage is defined as “a contract to protect women who specialize in home production” (Low, 2025). Back in the day, when we were housewives and weren’t allowed to hold high-paying jobs, we had to rely on men financially to keep us alive. Now, with our own financial resources, we have the freedom to leave whatever living situation or relationship we no longer want to be in. And remember, even if you love your career, “Do not let anyone convince you that fulfillment, passion, or caring is a substitute for money” (Low, 2025). We still need to be paid for what we are doing.

I briefly lost all my freedom and became financially dependent on my then-boyfriend at the beginning of the pandemic. I wanted to leave the situation, but without my own money, I got stuck and had to endure hell until I signed another job contract. It was not fun, and I don’t wish that experience on my worst enemy. I now live by Amanda Holden’s motto: “[Each] of us has two jobs: the job we do, and the job of marketing ourselves to make as much money as possible while doing it” (Holden, 2026). Or as Cindy Gallop puts it,

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7. Face the true costs.

“Men want children like how children want puppies” — The women of Reddit

I’ve always said I wanted children, but these four months gave me time to face the reality of motherhood. Ignoring the cost of raising a child, it’s estimated that “[women] lose half a million dollars in lifetime earnings, on average, just by becoming mothers” (Holden, 2026). So I’ll be poorer and not able to sleep in on Sundays? I realized that my life as a single woman is pretty amazing, and I need to think long and hard about whether I am willing to give this up.

Patriarchal inequalities extend far beyond cleaning your male partner’s stubble out of the sink. For example, “daughters take on far more caregiving than sons, with deeply uneven emotional, physical, and financial costs,” and “women over fifty who are forced out of work to care for aging relatives lose an estimated $324,000 in wages and retirement savings” (Holden, 2026). Facing these realities, it appears we may have to decenter our brothers just as much as our romantic partners.

Our culture has taught us that we must find a man to “save” us, but the facts show us we’re the ones saving them. Living with a man creates massive emotional and physical labor for us. One woman on Reddit swore she would never live with a male partner again; her last three partners only increased her housework while eating all her food. That makes me mad just thinking about it! Low gives an example of a married woman who can’t get two seconds of peace, while her husband swims a couple of times a week. One finding that fascinates me is “Divorced mothers sleep more than married ones” (Low, 2025).

Men benefit from women taking care of them and others disproportionately, which is why decentering men may even be good for our health. The deal that I’d most likely get as a mother freaking sucks, and looking at the facts, being childless at 50 looks pretty great. I haven’t given up on wanting children; I just think either outcome could be great for me. In fact, I looked up the definition of “spinster” and learned that it means a woman who is too old to get married, who historically spun yarn. She looks pretty peaceful, doesn’t she? I’ll have what she’s having.

The “Not All Men” disclaimer: I can hear you saying, “But, Tash, not all men!” There is a spectrum of weaponized male incompetence. However, I’m not very optimistic. Even my friend with a lovely, competent boyfriend, who sleeps in her own room in their apartment, has to remind him to scoop their cats’ litter box. We have not yet mastered getting men to take household chores as seriously as they take their jobs, for obvious reasons. So even if you’re not doing the chore yourself, you’re still managing the household by remembering and asking him to do it.

8. Try on alternative lifestyles for size.

“Is it absolutely possible to pause and question whether marriage really is for you, whether children are for you, whether even relationships really are for you. I’m absolutely ecstatic about the fact that I’ll die alone. Fantastic!” — Cindy Gallop, Design Matters Podcast

Decentering men has empowered me to identify which parts of my lifestyle I am not willing to compromise. For example, as I turned 30, I realized that I really enjoy my life in Mexico City. However, it’s common here for people to move to the faraway suburbs once they have kids. I wondered whether this was a lifestyle switch I was willing to make. Then, I met a woman living in the suburbs with her husband and three kids at a Christmas party. She spends an hour getting her kids ready, then a 45-minute drive to get into the city. I thought to myself: Oh, hell no!

There are many hybrid and alternative lifestyles you can explore. For example, you could sleep in a separate room from your male partner, or maintain your own separate apartments. You can have a child on your own. Leading research on fatherhood from Dr. Anna Machin shows that children need father figures, but these do not need to be the biological father or from a romantic relationship. Father-figure relationships are built on interacting with the child to nurture them while also challenging them to try new things and develop independence. An uncle, family friend, or your chosen family can fill this role.

Also, have you ever been attracted to a woman? Given the inequities around housework (and not to mention, orgasms), it’s a good reminder that “The lesbian is an evidence-based decision” (Low, 2025). There’s nothing that decentered men more in my life than exploring dating women.

So, think to yourself: where do you want to live? Which city or suburb? Could you survive an hour-long daily commute, driving future kids to school? Your time and happiness matter, and a lot of that depends on who you are and your lifestyle. In the words of Annie Dillard,

9. Avoid excessive people pleasing. Take up space.

Growing up in London, I was raised to believe that my worth depended on how helpful and useful I could be to other people. I never realized I was automatically doing the emotional and physical labor to keep the peace and make sure men felt comfortable. This came from a real fear: the men in my family could get angry, be aggressive, and shout at me.

But times have changed. I’m an adult now. I no longer accept aggression from men, and I’ve been learning that I have inherent worth as a human being. I don’t have to be extra helpful in order to be loved. If men at a family function are sitting around drinking beer, I don’t automatically get up to help with dishes.

Believing you have a right to your own space and time is a fundamental aspect of decentering men. These moments seem tiny, but they add up to being treated as a full person. For example, one friend mentioned that she feels selfish for buying a cookie from a bakery and sitting alone at a table to eat it and read a book. This is a small but classic example of how we, as women, are trained to center men and others over ourselves constantly. As patrons of a business, we deserve to sit and read in peace.

I’m not encouraging you to be an asshole. I’m encouraging you to tone down being overly people pleasing and taking care of others from 150% of the time, abandoning your own needs, to about 90% of the time. It’s not our job to be helpful all the time and fix everything for everyone else. Take the rest of this day to try to notice examples in your life where you are over-performing as a people-pleaser. See if you would be willing to let other people sort it out and let it go. You might be tempted to step in, but the trick here is to do nothing.

10. Exercise your reproductive rights

“Reproductive capital carries economic power.” — Professor Corinne Low, Having It All

We decenter men by taking control of our reproductive health. We get to decide whether or not, and if and when we want to be pregnant, if we want to have periods, and what medications we want to put in our bodies.

I’ve had the hormonal IUD for 9 years and I love not having periods. I don’t even have tampons or pads in my house. Many women prefer their natural menstrual cycle and resent doctors for prescribing hormonal birth control pills as a band-aid for health issues. This opinion is valid. On the other hand, I am part of “the silent majority”: I’m one of the women who has been on hormonal birth control for ages, I’ve been extremely happy with the results, and I’d rather not have a period ever again.

The birth control methods that are the most effective for preventing pregnancy are the IUDs (the Copper is non-hormonal, but can make your periods heavier) and the implant. They’re more effective than condoms and pills because they’re already in your body, so you reduce all the human error (e.g., the faff of the condom slipping off). Still, it’s always best to double up on methods because human error is a real risk. You can use a fertility tracker like Kegg to identify your fertility window.

11. Prepare to be called “selfish” (my favorite tip!)

Once you stop being overly helpful to everyone, it’s only a matter of time before someone calls you “selfish” for prioritizing your own needs. My mother called me selfish for asking for a guaranteed bed after traveling for 15 hours from Mexico to London. This is a small price we must pay for being reformed doormats. People won’t like that we’re asking for what’s fair and necessary, refusing to let others benefit from disrespecting our boundaries. But soon enough, they will learn to live with it.

What are the benefits of decentering men?

I didn’t realize just how much decentering men benefited me until I briefly redownloaded the dating apps in mid-January and started looking for a partner again. Suddenly, all my previous anxieties about needing to find a man quickly flared up again. So, I went back to decentering for my own health and sanity. Sometimes you don’t know how peaceful your life is until it’s disrupted.

Here are the main personal benefits I’ve gained over the last four months, aided by the work I’ve done in therapy and 12-step programs:

• More positive self-talk. I used to feel bad about myself when I saw a happy couple on the street because of abandonment issues from my childhood. Since I stopped looking for a partner, my most self-critical anxieties have melted away.

• Conversations with men that are more grounded in reality. I don’t dip into fantasy-land like I used to. I realized my fantasies were a way to deflect from the reality of my life. Decentering men has taken pressure off every interaction. I can still feel vaguely disappointed when I learn that a cute guy has a girlfriend, but I’m not bending over backwards to impress him. I find my interactions with men to be more neutral or positive overall, and not a reflection of my worth. We meet, we interact briefly, and then we move on.

• More goddamn peace and quiet. After growing up in a crazy house with three siblings and four animals at one point, my life is more peaceful now. If I need something, I pay for a man to do it, e.g., my taxes or an Uber. Thank you, capitalism, I guess.

• I am the main character in my life. As much as I love Raye’s music, I’m not waiting for my future husband to show up. I’m investing in myself now and the future I want.

What are the drawbacks?

• I haven’t had sex in four months, but this is typical for me. I published my second book during this time and had other priorities than my love life.

• Sometimes I feel more lonely, yet I usually fill this void by seeing more friends.

• I do miss intimacy. There’s only so many cuddles I can get from petting all dogs everywhere. But even then, my decreased level of general anxiety still feels like a breath of fresh air. It’s helped me decide that if I do want to bring someone into the fold of my life, they better be kind.

Conclusion

“Women are sold the concept of love is self-sacrifice. Yeah, well, it’s going to be hard, but if you love them enough, you’ll make it through…This is where we are all sold a bill of goods when it comes to love. It is not true that sex sells. It is absolutely true that love sells.” — Cindy Gallop, Style Like U

This moment is the only moment we truly have. Let’s invest in it, and not in some fake future that requires a man to complete it. Our grandmothers didn’t have bank accounts. Today we have options for financial independence and freedom they could only dream of. We can feel grateful.

I like to listen to music while cooking, but eat in silence. A couple of months ago, I was anxious. What if my hypothetical future husband likes listening to music while he eats? I should learn how to compromise now, I thought, because eventually I’d have to give up this quiet comfort.

This is ridiculous hypothetical thinking. With my therapist’s help, I realized that I deserve to enjoy my current reality without expecting it to change. These small needs might seem superficial, but they matter. We shouldn’t count down to the day when our needs get deprioritized. We shouldn’t curb our happiness today, believing that we’ll need to give up our freedom tomorrow.

Instead, trust that your future self will advocate for what matters to you; she will negotiate a good deal. No more shrinking to serve other people. Our self-worth and happiness are far too valuable to compromise.

We don’t have to decenter men forever. Start today. Try it out for a month and learn what you truly want. Good luck!

💌 ✍️

Decentered Misseducated Stories 💌 ✍️

1. How To Host A Naked Party 🎉 🌿

2. Say It While You Still Can 🩵

3. How I Almost Became a Scientologist 👾

4. The Secret Superpower of My Menstrual Cycle 🩸

Initiation ☄️

You’re headed to CDMX this weekend, and you’re horny as hell. Sure, you want to know where you can fill up on some completely unspicy tacos al pastor. But you made a fatal mistake: you bragged to your sad roommate, Sarah, and your boring coworker, Brian, about your trip. Now your Google Maps is flooded with their billion useless touristy recommendations. Yellow stars. Pink hearts. What does it all mean?

Don’t worry, friend! It’s time to shit, shower, shave, and scroll through the city’s raunchiest destinations. Pick your place based on who you’re trying to bang. And, dude, maybe don’t wear those dorky flip flops? You’re in the largest city in North America, not your mom’s backyard. It’s go time!

Activation: CDMX Date Spots 📍🗺️

Oropel, Roma Norte. Gagging for an artsy trust-fund kid? Teleport straight here from Brooklyn. Oropel means “tinsel” in Spanish, but there’s nothing Christmasy or cringe about it: only elevated, understated hipster cool. Don your Salomons, cross-body fanny pack, 90s-resurrected jeans, and tats to fit right in. Queer-friendly 🎨 🤑 🌈.

NIV Bar, Condesa. Sugar daddies for the win. Friday and Saturday, 11pm onwards. Pro tip: Quit your job and brush up on your pádel and golf skills before you go. One cocktail will upgrade you to homewrecker on a flight to “mantenida” (kept woman), via a beach trip to Acapulco. Wake up in your new mansion in Bosques de Santa Fe, a gated suburb with armed guards that traps the rich people in, as much as it keeps the commoners out. It’s the nightlife-to-wife pipeline. You’ve been warned 😬.

Caimán / TRAMPA / Hule, Condesa. The best dating spots when you’re clueless about the cooler speakeasies. Sample the same flavor of young Mexican “fresas” (upperclass snowflakes) from Las Lomas. Make sure to poke a hole in the condom while he’s talking about his family’s estate in Valle de Bravo, so your kids can be featured on Sucesión, Season 20. Don’t be fooled: he lives with his parents, and soon you will too, after you give up on your “progressive” ideals of feminism. Stop paying for stuff! You’re making life unnecessarily hard 💎💅.

Tlecān, Roma Norte. TimeOut’s third-best bar in North America is now overrun by equally horny gringos just like you! Discuss the “authentic” pre-Hispanic vibes over a mezcal with Brett from BCG and Connor from McKinsey. Then cross that threesome off your bucket list ✅.

Balagán, Juárez. Avoid this place. You’ll meet 25-year-old divorcée José Marco Treviño de la Treviño, a “norteño” (northerner) from Monterrey, armed with his daddy’s Amex. But don’t expect to bang! You’re not his cousin/type. Instead, head to El Ayer, Roma Norte. Pick the next “chilango” (Mexico City local) finance bro you can find. Ten cocktails deep, you’ll be putting whoever’s whatever into your orifices in the back of an Escalade all the way to Interlomas. No need to Uber when you’ve got a chauffeur 👨🏼‍✈️ 🚔.

Sports World, Condesa. Cruise on through, gays. This is the official sister gym to Equinox in WeHo. Forget the towel altogether and go get ‘em, queen. Trashier alternative: Smart Fit, Reforma 222. Straight version: Síclo El Parian, Roma Norte for a sweaty spin class in the dark 🏋 🧖🏽‍♂️.

Departamento, Roma Norte. Snag a vanilla banker with bottle service. Run by the cartels, this nightclub is known for Rohypnol with your rum and Coke. A dab of fentanyl with your blow. Careful! Gay equivalent: SIC, Juárez 🕺🏻❄️.

Parque Pentathlón, Roma Sur. Stop by the afternoon pickleball courts to find a frisky foreigner who is too nomadic to commit to anything 🥒🎾.

Pronovias CDMX, Polanco. If you’re Lauren Sanchez reincarnated, and your lip filler stretches as long as Rodeo Drive, go here to pick out your husband and wedding dress after you’ve gone full “buchona” (cartel wife aesthetic). They might seem laid back in Latin America, but trust me, you can’t escape the Mexican culture of matrimonio 💍 💒.

Koti Wellness, Condesa. Syphon off the sperm of a startup bro and spiritual narcissist as you sweat in the sauna. This is your chance to show off all the torture and financial turmoil you put yourself through at Barry’s. Take your new bae to the cafe Espíritu Sano, Condesa, for an antioxidant smoothie after, so they can bore you to death with their Burning Man stories before you bang 💦🔥.

Haab Project, Condesa. Pick up an expat who can’t speak Spanish and is avoiding taxes, while soaking up all the “rich history.” It’s casual dating only before he jet-sets off to his crypto mine in Siberia. Make sure he’s a member so you can enjoy the rooftop bar. Finding-yourself-in-Mexico first date approved ✈️ 💸 💀.

Hermanos Koumori, Condesa / Metta Running House, Polanco. Rich, athletic hotties who spend more on running gear than the average local salary. The ultimate Type 2 fun for those who are fit and want to fuck. At 7,350ft, the altitude will kick your ass. Let the Prince of Pemex sweep you off your feet after you faint. Follow the Koumori cult on Strava 🏃👑.

Huerto Roma Verde, Roma Sur. Are you healing from the sickness of capitalism? Head here to find yourself a washed-up Tuluminati wearing rags on the edge of “clothing optional,” sprinkled with undiagnosed mental health issues 🌿 🔮.

Parque México, Condesa. If you’re even remotely Catholic, you have to be extremely careful walking through this place. You might just trip over some cute dude’s French bulldog and land with an engagement ring on your finger before you can pronounce his name properly. It’s “Gerardo.” Good luck with that 🦮🌳.

Miscellaneous last resorts. Swipe on Bumble if you want to meet a local with a foreigner fetish, or Hinge to meet the rich Whitexican of your bank account’s dreams. Revuelta Queer House, Roma Norte, the epicenter of the dating scene for a “romantic” queer meet-cute-fuck. Sungay Brunch, if you want to relive your boozy dartying days. Or take your chances “metreando” (the last car on the metro) for sketchy night cruising 🏳️‍🌈 🫣.

Terrible date ideas (Do not attempt in any way, shape, or form): Visiting Frida Kahlo’s House, Coyoacán, unless you want to date a semi-retired woman from Arizona named Karen. Going to Chapultepec Park. Tinder. Churros or ice cream. Mariachi in Plaza Garibaldi, Centro. Dating a waiter from Quintonil or Pujol, Polanco (trust me, I’ve tried that and it backfired). Trajineras in Xochimilco, unless you want to be trapped on a boat getting serenaded post-rejection. Hidden gems that aren’t so hidden that you think are “unique experiences” 🙅‍♀️.

Fuckery Achieved 🏆

Got your spot in mind? Perfect. Now, get the hell out of your Airbnb! You’ll be bragging to your basic friends back home in no time, so even more of them can come here and #gentrify. You’re welcome! 💪

More Rejected Work from Misseducated 💌 ✍️

Hello Wonderful Reader,

Today, I’ve chosen a special erotic poem and writing prompts for you to explore secret anticipation. So grab a pen and paper, set aside 20 minutes to journal, and let’s get started.

Moonrise

By H.D. (1886-1961)

Will you glimmer on the sea? 
Will you fling your spear-head 
on the shore? 
What note shall we pitch?

We have a song, 
on the bank we share our arrows— 
the loosed string tells our note:

O flight, 
bring her swiftly to our song. 
She is great, 
we measure her by the pine-trees.

Source: Poetry Foundation. This poem is in the public domain. 🩵

Four Prompts To Go Deeper ✍️

1. Write about the anticipation of waiting for a lover to arrive.

“Will you glimmer on the sea?”

2. Write about a time when you stayed up all night with someone.

“on the bank we share our arrows—”

3. Write about the music, meals, or delicious things you made with a partner.

“We have a song,”

4. Write about a place in nature that expanded the depth of your love.

“She is great, / we measure her by the pine-trees.”

About H.D. (1886—1961)

Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Her father, an astronomy professor, hoped she would become the next Marie Curie, but she chose poetry instead.

In 1911, she set off for a short trip to Europe with Ezra Pound, and only returned to the United States four or five times before her death. Openly bisexual with many lovers (including the novelist Bryher), H.D. became a leading voice in the Imagist movement, whose poetry focused on sensuality, precise images, and emotion.

In 1933, she traveled to Vienna for analysis by Freud, hoping to process her trauma from WW1, her paranoia about the rise of Adolf Hitler, and her sexuality. Freud encouraged her to write about her traumatic experiences, advice which shaped her work. Decades later, we now know that expressive writing about our more personal experiences is good for us and genuinely aids healing ❤️‍🩹.

Here are other quotes by her that I love (source here):

Hire me for an Intimacy Writing Workshop! ❤️ ✍️

After my sold-out workshop at Soho House, I am now looking to teach intimacy writing workshops to women’s groups, writer’s groups, corporate ERGs (Employee Resource Groups), and wellness communities. If you organize a group like this, or know somebody who does, please reach out! You can respond to this email, comment, or send an email of your own to misseducatedtash@gmail.com. I can’t wait to hear from you!

I hope you enjoyed this invitation! Reply and tell me which writing prompt resonated with you the most? I read and respond to every DM I get!

Sending love,

Tash

p.s. I’m sharing more updates on Instagram, TikTok, or LinkedIn. Follow me!

💌 ✍️

More From Misseducated 💌 ✍️

Hello Wonderful Reader,

Today I’ve chosen a special erotic poem and writing prompts for you to explore your too-muchness and wild expansiveness. So grab a pen and paper, and let’s get started.

Desert Pools

By Sara Teasdale (1884 - 1933)

I love too much; I am a river
   Surging with spring that seeks the sea,
I am too generous a giver,
   Love will not stoop to drink of me.

His feet will turn to desert places
   Shadowless, reft of rain and dew,
Where stars stare down with sharpened faces
   From heavens pitilessly blue.

And there at midnight sick with faring
   He will stoop down in his desire
To slake the thirst grown past all bearing
   In stagnant water keen as fire.

Source: Poets.org. This poem is in the public domain. 🩵

Four Prompts To Go Deeper ✍️

I’m going to be honest: not everything about this poem resonated with me. I couldn’t figure out who she was talking about when she said “His feet.” Was it Love’s feet? Or was it her ex-boyfriend’s feet? I guess we’ll never know.

The rest of the poem might be about loving someone who didn’t realize how awesome you were. Still, the line that really sang to me was the first one:

So delicious. So juicy. So, I’ll keep it simple.

1. Describe yourself as a river. Where do you flow? What animals and plants grace your waters? What are you like?

“I am a river.”

2. Write about someone who was too small to handle you and your capability of loving them.

“I love too much;”

3. Tell me about your sheer expansiveness and limitless power, realized or imagined.

“Surging with spring that seeks the sea”

4. Write about someone you were devoted to, yet who never gave you the pleasure or care that you deserved.

“I am too generous a giver,”

About Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)

She was an American lyric poet who was awarded the first Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her 1917 collection, Love Songs. I featured one of her poems for the “Awakening” chapter of The Intimacy Journal. I like that she uses rhyme to brew momentum in her poetry, but it’s not predictable all the way through. Here are my favorite quotes from the mystery poem I featured in the journal:

I hope you enjoyed this invitation! Reply and tell me: which writing prompt resonated with you the most? I read and respond to every DM I get!

Sending love,

Tash

p.s. I’m sharing more updates on Instagram, TikTok, or LinkedIn. Follow me!

💌 ✍️

More From Misseducated 💌 ✍️

Hello Wonderful Reader,

Tell me about someone you loved but who held you captive. That’s the question that haunted me when I discovered this 1916 poem…

Sweet Torture

By Alfonsina Storni (1892-1938)

Gold dust in your hands was my melancholy;

I spilled my life over your long hands

My sweetness remained clinging to your hands

Now I am an empty amphora of perfumes.

How much sweet torture quietly endured

When, stung by the shadowy soul of sadness,

Knowing about deceptions, I spent my days

Kissing the two hands that shaped my life!

Source: Scribd

Four Prompts To Go Deeper ✍️

“How much sweet torture quietly endured”

1. Write about a connection with a partner where you couldn’t separate pleasure from pain.

“Gold dust in your hands was my melancholy;”

2. How has someone you loved kept you small?

“I spilled my life over your long hands”

3. Write about all the time you devoted to a person.

“Now I am an empty amphora of perfumes.”

4. Write about what a former lover took from you.

The Backstory 📜

Alfonsina Storni (1892-1938) was a Swiss-Argentine Modernist poet, teacher, and playwright. She took her own life at 46 when her breast cancer reappeared, inspiring this quirky tale:

I am obsessed with all things Alfonsina. I can’t wait to share more of her work with you. Here’s an extract from her daring poem “Hombre pequeñito,” with my English translation:

What else have I been up to? 🚀

• I finally launched my online shop!

• Today, I am giving The Morning Workshop at Soho House in Mexico City on the theme of “Discovery,” using one of Storni’s poems in a featured chapter from The Intimacy Journal.

• I published a new article on my other blog about The Tuluminati.

• I’m sharing more updates on Instagram, TikTok, or LinkedIn. Follow me!

Reply and tell me: which writing prompt resonated with you the most? I read and respond to every DM I get!

Sending love,

Tash

💌 ✍️

More From Misseducated 💌 ✍️

Hello Wonderful Reader,

Today, I’ve chosen a very special unpublished poem and writing prompts for you to explore the power of forbidden love. You’ll discover why the poet never published this work in a second. So grab a pen and paper, and let’s uncover some of your juicy secrets…

Evanescence

(unpublished, 1920s)

By Angelina Weld Grimké (1880 – 1958)

You are like a pale purple flower

In the blue spring dusk . . . . . .

You are like a yellow star

Budding and glowing

In an apricot sky . . . . . .

You are like the beauty

Of a voice . . . . . .

Remembered after death . . . . . .

You are like thin, white petals

Falling

And

Floating

Down

Upon the white, stilled hushing

Of my soul.

Source: Aphrodite’s Daughters: Three Modernist Poets of the Harlem Renaissance.

Your 4 Writing Prompts on Forbidden Love 🩵

1. Write about any secret lovers you haven’t told anyone about.

You are like the beauty

Of a voice . . . . . .

Remembered after death . . . . . .

2. Write about a fragile love that the world tried to take away from you.

You are like a pale purple flower

In the blue spring dusk . . . . . .

3. Write about falling for someone you weren’t supposed to.

Falling

And

Floating

Down

4. Write about the small miracles that brought you and a forbidden lover together.

“You are like a yellow star”

The Backstory 📜

Uncovering the unpublished poems of Angelina Weld Grimké (1880-1958)

I first heard of Angelina Weld Grimké while researching for The Intimacy Journal on poets.org. I discovered that she was a journalist, teacher, playwright, and poet, and an influential figure in the Harlem Renaissance, but much of Grimké’s intimate poetry remained unpublished during her lifetime. Why? Well, works like this week’s featured poem from the 1920s, “Evanescence,” were about same-sex relationships. This was culturally forbidden at the time. I ended up featuring two of her poems in The Intimacy Journal, because it was impossible to pick just one!

Diving deeper into erotic poetry, I found a book that centered on Grimké’s work, called Aphrodite’s Daughters: Three Modernist Poets of the Harlem Renaissance. This was written by Professor Maureen Honey, who recently retired from The University of Nebraska-Lincoln after a 40-year career! She is 80 years old, and naturally, I sent her an email.

She responded that, indeed, Grimké’s unpublished poems are the most erotic, and unfortunately, there is no published collection. It seems like somebody needs to publish these poems! 😂

A Quick Update From Me 🚀

When I’m not sinking my teeth into some juicy, erotic poetry from the 1920s, I’ve been working on setting up my online storefront, which should be done this week. In the meantime, if you want your copy of The Intimacy Journal, DM me on Instagram. Plus, next week, I’m giving my first external paid workshop at Soho House in Mexico City! I’m terrified, but in a good way. I think we will have the workshop inside, not by the fabulous pool, unfortunately:

I hope you enjoyed this erotic invitation! Reply with your reflections. I’d love to hear them.

Sending love,

Tash

💌 ✍️

More From Misseducated 💌 ✍️

Hello Wonderful Reader,

Welcome back to Misseducated! I’m Tash, and today I’ve chosen a very special erotic poem and writing prompts for you to explore nature and your body, and how they interconnect. So grab a pen and paper, and let’s get started.

North Wind

By Lola Ridge (1873 – 1941)

I love you, malcontent

Male wind—

Shaking the pollen from a flower

Or hurling the sea backward from the grinning sand.

Blow on and over my dreams. . .

Scatter my sick dreams. . .

Throw your lusty arms about me. . .

Envelop all my hot body. . .

Carry me to pine forests—

Great, rough-bearded forests. . .

Bring me to stark plains and steppes. . .

I would have the North to-night—

The cold, enduring North.

And if we should meet the Snow,

Whirling in spirals,

And he should blind my eyes. . .

Ally, you will defend me—

You will hold me close,

Blowing on my eyelids.

Source: Poets.org. This poem is in the public domain. 🩵

Here are your four writing prompts:

1. Write about your sick dreams that you might be too ashamed to tell anyone about.

“Blow on and over my dreams…
Scatter my sick dreams…”

2. Start with any of the phrases that use ellipses and write your own story about what you wish the wind would do to you.

“Throw your lusty arms around me…
Envelop all my hot body…”

3. What would you have tonight if you got your way?

“I would have the North to-night—”

4. Take features that you find attractive in your partners and pair them with your favorite places in nature.

“Great, rough-bearded forests…”

About Lola Ridge (1873-1941)

She was an Irish-born New Zealand-American anarchist and modernist poet, and an influential editor of avant-garde, feminist, and Marxist publications. I featured one of her poems for the “Nostalgia” chapter of The Intimacy Journal.

Keeping the love flowing...(A quick update from me)

Ever since I created The Intimacy Journal, I have become OBSESSED with erotic poetry written by women. Many works are in the public domain by poets who lived around a hundred years ago. When I read their work, everything clicks for me. I’m really enjoying the process of sharing and illustrating their work. It’s poignant. It’s dreamy. It’s delicious. And, it’s hot! I’m excited to see where this takes me.

I know that some of you still want your own Intimacy Journal. Sorry that I have been slow to set up my online storefront since we finished the Kickstarter campaign. I’ll hopefully have that up and running in the next week or two. In the meantime, please respond to this email or comment if you want your copy, or DM me on Instagram.

I hope you enjoyed this invitation! Reply with your reflections. I’d love to hear them.

Sending love,

Tash

💌 ✍️

More From Misseducated 💌 ✍️

“I’m not enough,” I think to myself, as I pass a couple in love on the street. “I could never have a relationship like that. I’m not worthy. Even if someone liked me, they’d just get bored eventually and move on.”

“I’m not enough,” I think to myself as I hit publish after writing an article all day. “I should have 5,000 subscribers by now. Then maybe my voice would matter.”

“I’m not enough,” I think to myself when I am mentioned in The New York Times. “That’s not a real feature. It’ll only count when I get a full-spread in The New Yorker.”

“I’m not enough,” I say to my therapist, trembling and crying in front of my computer screen. It is right on the surface of my psyche, and in many ways, it is fundamental to who I am.

Each time I achieve something, the goal post is suddenly flung out further in front of me, unreachable again. I do my best to achieve, achieve, achieve. Yet I metabolize my accolades and awards before I even get a second to enjoy them.

My therapist tells me to work on my anger towards the adults who failed me in my childhood (who will remain anonymous). I know I feel angry, but I don’t know how that relates to this core belief about my self and my worth.

That evening, I sit down on the crumpled corduroy green chair in my living room. I scroll back through the last three years of my text messages and rummage through decades of my memories. Those voices say to me:

“Everyone thinks you’re a bad person.”

“You’re so selfish.”

“If you think I’m favoring them instead of you, it’s probably because you think your work isn’t enough.”

I remember that last phone conversation. I saw red and told that person I needed a break from them. Then I didn’t speak to them for almost three months.

I realize that since I started therapy, even if I didn’t believe I am enough, I’ve been acting as if I am. I’ve been telling people not to treat me disrespectfully anymore. I’ve been telling others that my needs matter and my feelings are real. When people say things to try to tear me down, I don’t accept their insults or tolerate their behavior. I stop believing outwardly that I deserve to be shouted at. But these most subtle and insidious beliefs are different. People bury them way down in there: a parent, a teacher, someone you trusted in your childhood to take care of you.

I pull out my journal and delve deeper into this filth and arguing over the years. Then a new idea suddenly pops into my head. Maybe it was never about believing that I wasn’t enough. Maybe this other person is projecting their own pain and feelings of worthlessness onto me. Reinforced hundreds of times through our arguments over the years. Perhaps this is more about them, their opinions, and judgments of themselves. Perhaps this has nothing to do with me.

Something in me is changing. Deep down inside myself, I find this large, jagged shard of glass, black and glinting. I wrench it out of me. I cut open the parts of me that had tried to heal over and around it. This monster, this cancer that had never been mine. I will not carry it around anymore.

I look up from my text messages, and in my journal, I write: These are projections of low self-esteem. It has nothing to do with me or my worth. I’ve been carrying their belief about themselves as if it were a belief about me for decades.

I look up at the clock. It is 11:47pm. In 13 minutes, it will be December 5th, 2025, my two-year birthday in ACA, my group therapy program for Adult Children of Alcoholics & Dysfunctional Families. It has taken me two years of deep self-reflection and analysis to yank out that shard of glass. The new, empty wound leaves a void inside of me, slowly healing.

In our next session, my therapist asks me what I am going to do with this information. I tell her I am not sure. Yet over the next few days, things begin to reveal themselves and unravel. The load I am carrying feels lighter.

“I am happy for them,” I think to myself now, when I’m at a party, and I see a couple. “Look at them, so deeply in love.”

“What a beautiful book I have made,” I think to myself when people ask me what I do, and I pull out a copy. “I can’t wait to mention the designs, inspired by the architectural details of Mexico City.”

Get your Intimacy Journal!

“It’s amazing!” I think to myself now, when I receive my first payment for books I have sold. “I can pay at least a couple of months of my rent!”

“They must be hurting,” I think to myself now, when someone says something vicious to me. “This is unacceptable and has nothing to do with me.”

Perhaps the difference is only in my mind, but it does alter how I see the world. I realize I do not want to be living any other way. That this life, of writing and creating, my chosen life in Mexico, is the best life for me. Art. Architecture. Writing. Poetry. Film. Flowers. This is a real and beautiful way to live. I have conviction. I have pride. I feel like I am getting closer to the woman I have always dreamed of becoming, sitting in that beautiful office with the white walls, the ornate plaster fastenings, and the tall windows. And an Eames chair or two.

The people in my childhood who tried to keep me small and break my spirit are dead to me now. I do not wish they were dead, but I am not waiting for them to die before I let myself live. I am living now. Not entertaining their viciousness. Not playing it low and small so that I don’t threaten them with my brightness.

Some core beliefs about ourselves take 31 years to change. Four years of therapy. Two years of reparenting myself in ACA. Two years to wrench out that shard of glass. But here I am, in Mexico City, writing, creating, living the life I’ve always dreamed of. I am enough.

💌 ✍️

The Top 5 Misseducated Articles of 2025! 💌 ✍️

Hello Wonderful Readers,

I feel excited and quite nervous about sharing this update with you. Since launching The Intimacy Journal, I’ve learned a lot about how I want to provide value to you and live my mission to help the world be shamelessly sexy.

TL;DR

• All Misseducated Substack content will be 100% free from now on. This weekend I ungated 43 articles in the Archive. If you find a Comments section that’s still behind the paywall, please let me know, and I will remove it.

  Share

• I hope to keep publishing at a cadence of around 2 articles per month, but that could range from 1 to 4 posts. I enjoy publishing on Tuesdays, but will no longer be strict about it.

• From now on, I am implementing the “buy-me-a-coffee” model for my paid subscribers. I will no longer be creating any special paid subscriber content. I will not be offended AT ALL if you stop paying for your subscription because of this, or if you stopped paying in the past. Please feel free to cancel guilt-free right now. I am nothing but grateful to you! Thank you for whatever you were able to give.

• If you would like to keep contributing, you will be supporting a more shamelessly sexy world, helping me keep the lights on, and ensuring that my sexuality content stays free and accessible for everyone.

• This is what the Misseducated Subscription page now looks like (in $USD):

The Truth Of It All

I’ve realized that paywalling my content on Misseducated is no longer serving you, me, or my mission. It’s taken me months to actually implement this change because doing this scares the shit out of me. But I’ve known for a while now that this is the right thing to do.

Firstly, I want to thank my existing paid subscribers. Over the last three and a half years, since I quit my corporate media job in New York, you have helped me build a new life for myself. You gave me my first few dollars of validation as a “professional writer”. You gave me the courage to keep going. Still, offering two tiers of content has always been extremely challenging for me as a one-woman show. Especially with the regular cadence that newsletters require, for too long now, I’ve felt guilty and stressed out for not delivering good enough content to you. Switching to a “buy-me-a-coffee” model allows you to still support a more shamelessly sexy world if you want to, and allows me the freedom to create the most impactful work that’s accessible to everyone.

Secondly, I’ve realized that to help the world be shamelessly sexy, I need to be a truly open book as a writer. I originally paywalled my more sexually explicit content. Maybe I didn’t want my dad and his friends reading that I like butt stuff. Or maybe I felt, like some sex-writer-worker, that people should have to pay to access these deeply personal details of my life. But as I’ve grown, I’ve come to the realization that I just don’t give a fuck. I want anyone, anywhere, to benefit from this blog if it can help them. Gatekeeping just doesn’t float my boat anymore, and I’m not going to live my life in arbitrary fear of other people’s judgment.

Thirdly, I’m enjoying productizing things my readers want a lot more than I thought I would. Creating The Intimacy Journal was SO much fun. It’s a standalone purchase that people can get if they want to deepen their practice, and I’m extremely proud of it. Energetically, I feel a lot more confident and excited to provide value to you through books and workshops than I do about consistently creating special paid subscriber newsletter content.

Explore The Intimacy Journal 📕 💋

Fourthly (if that’s even a word?), I noticed that when I speak on podcasts, I’m sharing all the personal details that were behind the paywall on Misseducated anyway. Check out the 111 podcast episodes I’ve spoken on, with over 42 hours of episodes here. Those podcast listeners have had the full story, but I haven’t been offering the same to you. So I want to make your access to my content limitless. Additionally, while rereading some articles over the weekend, I rediscovered many ridiculous things I’ve written, which I hope you’ll find funny. I can’t wait for you to enjoy those stories fully, too.

The last thing that truly impacted my decision was a conversation I had recently with a male Misseducated reader. He said that while he likes reading my blog, he had really been curious about the article, “I Pegged My Boyfriend,” but had never read it because it was paywalled. That hit home for me. I thought: Why? In that article, I make some very important points about why we need to allow men to be able to show weakness and sensitivity. With the paywall, I was denying him the opportunity to explore his masculinity and preventing that article from reaching its full impact in the world. So, paywalls be gone!

For those of you who have been waiting patiently, here is a short list of my top five now-ungated articles you might enjoy:

1. The 4 Categories of Porn I Watch, and Why

2. I Pegged My Boyfriend

3. My BDSM Test Results

4. Why I Never Swallow Cum

5. My Hard Biological Truth

You can check out the full list of 43 now-free articles below. Trust me, there’s plenty of spice and juicy details to go around!

That’s enough for now! Thank you for trusting me and for sticking along for the ride. I’m so grateful and excited for the next chapter. Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions, concerns, or if you gain any new insights from reading one of the articles below. Hehe.

Sending love,

Tash

💌✍️

Subscribe now

The Full List of 43 New-Ungated Articles 🪅

1. The 4 Categories of Porn I Watch, and Why

2. I Pegged My Boyfriend

3. My BDSM Test Results

4. Love & Dreams

5. The Strangest Date I Ever Went On

6. Starting The New Year Off With A Bang

7. On Top Of The World

8. Sex In The London Library

9. I Kissed A Girl And I Liked It

10. Misseducated Update: What’s In The Works

11. Welcome to the Misseducated Community! Please introduce yourself here so we can say hello :)

12. Back To Where We First Met

13. Why I Never Swallow Cum

14. How To Keep Your Creative Dreams Alive

15. I had casual sex.

16. On Withholding Sex From Men

17. Burnout and Book Cover Reveal!

18. I finished writing my first novel! ✨✍️

19. How To Make An Audiobook

20. Peach Tulips: Almost Off To The Printers ✨ 📚

21. When No One Comes To Mind

22. Zoom Crush

23. Girl Crush

24. 💖 Sexico City 🌃

25. 💖 Sexico City Update 🌃

26. My Hard Biological Truth

27. The Little Things

28. Somebody to Love

29. The 64 Traits of My Ideal Mate

30. What I Learned Hosting A Sex Writing Workshop

31. My Hard, Biological Truth, Part 2

32. The scene that took me 13 years to write

33. How to Overcome the Fear of Success

34. Does Penis Size Matter?

35. Liar, Liar

36. The Wrath of Seeing Your Ex

37. My Ego Stroke of a Lifetime

38. How To Not Care What Other People Think

39. The Dog Cage

40. That’s all from Misseducated in 2024!

41. My Sex Toy Collection Revealed

42. Announcing: The Misseducated Sex Journal!

43. My Week-Long, Creative Orgasm

Hello Wonderful Readers,

I’m writing to you with some equally wonderful news. The Intimacy Journal has just been funded on Kickstarter! We’ve accomplished this in just 12 days. What a glorious day this is. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for supporting my work. Thank you for encouraging me and indulging me in bringing this beautiful project to life. It has truly been an honor to steward these poems and birth this book. I can’t wait for many more of you to get your hands on a copy!

Support the Kickstarter 🚀

To celebrate you all and help spread the word, I’m gifting you a free chapter of the journal today. When I’ve discussed the book in workshops, many people are intrigued by the chapter on “Deviance.” This makes me smile. It’s a cheeky testament to the human spirit, I guess, to want to go deeper and get curious about our true nature. Loving all parts of who we are. So, without further ado, please click here to download the “Deviance” chapter.

Download Free Deviance Chapter

What is the origin story of the “Deviance” chapter? 🌅

I originally had the poem “Rendezvous” by Edna St. Vincent Millay for this chapter. I liked that the poem mentioned perversion and coming, but when I tested out the poem in a sex writing workshop, ultimately, I found the language in it a little inaccessible. Meanwhile, I also got some reader feedback on the first draft of the journal, and I decided to write a little bio for each poet I featured. That’s when things got interesting.

I already had another poem by Amy Lowell in the book (“Summer Rain” for the chapter on Safety). And soon after searching for a new poem for Deviance, I found her poem, “The Weather-Cock Points South.” I loved the vivid imagery in it, especially the beautiful idea of someone parting you from your leaves. This poem resonated with me even more when I discovered that modern scholars view it as a celebration of lesbian sexuality. I then learned that Amy Lowell lived openly with her partner, Ada Dwyer Russell. This poem was published in 1921, and among others by Angelina Weld Grimké, this was a time when same-sex relationships and expressions of love were totally forbidden. I thought about just how much these women had risked to live a lifestyle that was true to them. Amy Lowell, in particular, reminded me to stand up for myself and not give a fuck about what other people think. So, I topped her poem off with an introductory quip from Dorothy Parker, and created the chapter you see today in its current form.

According to the Oxford Languages Dictionary, Deviance is “the fact or state of departing from usual or accepted standards, especially in social or sexual behavior.” It’s juicy and delicious, isn’t it? I think it’s something I’d like to explore and delve deeper into in the future. While this poem is kind and feminine, I wonder what it would be like to introduce a poem and prompts that might focus more on even more taboo BDSM activities, kinks, etc. Still, for now, I am grateful to share Amy Lowell’s work and guide the reader through a more gentle and nurturing introduction to these more playful aspects of ourselves.

What do you think of the poem and the prompts? Is there a different question you wished I had asked? What does Deviance mean to you?

Please also enjoy the audiobook segment of the chapter.

Support the Kickstarter 🚀

Sending love to you all! We did it!

Tash

💌 ✍️

Free Chapter: Deviance 😈

Download Free Deviance Chapter

More From Misseducated 💌 ✍️

Dear Wonderful Readers,

It’s the moment many of you have been patiently waiting for:

The Intimacy Journal is officially live on Kickstarter! 🚀

And we are already 25% funded! Thank you so much to everyone who has already supported us. If you’d like to join us, you can back the project to get your own Intimacy Journal, gift a journal to a friend, join our workshops, or book a one-on-one writing session with me. Check out our project video and all the options here:

Back The Intimacy Journal Kickstarter!

The seeds of this book were planted almost a year and a half ago, when I first heard Chambers read her poem, “Can I?”, at an open mic with The London Writers’ Salon (). I invited Peppur to read her work in my first sex writing workshop. It was beautiful and daring for those of us who shared what we wrote. I felt like we had stumbled across something magical.

I realized that writing openly about my sex life here for you all on Misseducated has taught me a lot. I learned more about my desires, my pleasures, my kinks, and my fantasies. I learned that writing is a powerful tool to connect us with the erotic. As I shared more in “How to be Shamelessly Sexy” and “How to Keep A Sex Journal,” I realized that I had a unique opportunity to create something that you all might just love. A journal that each of you could fill with your innermost, spiciest thoughts!

I will admit something: I underestimated the joy that creating this project would give me, and that I could complete it so quickly. Writing my novel required a specific kind of marathon in terms of the creative process, spanning 14 years for me in total. Yet since I started working full-time on this project at the beginning of July, from start to finish, it has taken me almost four months (which included my one month of road-tripping and mountain escapades in the Western US, by the way). Putting this journal together for you has been a surprisingly sweet and pure joy. It brought me to new heights of creative euphoria, and I finished the first draft within 30 days. My soundtrack for this entire experience was the instrumental “aubades” album by Jean-Michel Blais. He’s an absolute legend, and I’ve listened to this on repeat hundreds of times:

While I’ve been quiet on here over the last few weeks, I bulldozed through a lot of extremely stressful yet tedious logistics, such as negotiating with printers and navigating the bureaucratic Mexican tax stuff, so that I could deliver your copies to you with ample time for the holiday gift-giving season. With an awesome creative team from Sustancia MX, and amazing contemporary voices, including Peppur’s, somehow we did it! I’ll update you more on that later, as the book also features lovely poems by , of and .

Launching a book in four months is a pretty crazy thing to do. But when you get a strong sense of conviction about a project, like I did with this journal, there’s simply no time to waste. You only have a little window of the universe’s offering of timing, luck, and good fortune. So you just have to go for it. That’s how I felt with this project. I just knew I wanted to be the person to create this. And here we are.

Words of Praise for The Intimacy Journal ✨ 🌿

I’m honored to share that two of my idols, Cindy Gallop and Anna Lee, have given short book reviews of The Intimacy Journal:

“We could all do with asking ourselves more questions - especially the questions that we would never think to ask ourselves. Tash Doherty’s Intimacy Journal is a wonderful way to explore and get intimate with yourself, to improve and increase intimacy with others, while enjoying some amazing poetry along the way. The perfect gift for someone you love to love them more - yourself.” - , Founder & CEO of MakeLoveNotPorn; Author of Dear Cindy.

“As someone who’s always advocated for understanding pleasure through self-reflection, I love how The Intimacy Journal fuses introspective journaling with erotic curiosity. Tash’s prompts push you to think—and feel—more deeply.” – Anna Lee, Co-founder & CEO, lioness.io, . Check out their vibrator.

More about The Intimacy Journal 📕💋

The Intimacy Journal is an erotic poetry anthology and guided journal with 20 days of writing prompts to help you awaken your shamelessly sexy self. It’s a tool to explore your love life and your turn-ons, and define sexual intimacy, fantasy, desire, and pleasure on your own terms. This is not something you can find on Amazon with a best seller’s rank! This is an independent creative project, inspired by and brought to you from Mexico City.

This is quite a full-circle moment for me. I never could have imagined, while living in New York and working my desk job, that one day I would be creating a tool that helps people use my favorite thing, writing, to explore physical intimacy with themselves and others.

I cannot thank you enough for being here! It’s honestly so much fun to be able to share this with you. Writing this blog for you has taken a certain amount of grit and vulnerability over these last few years. I am so grateful you are here and along for the ride.

Back The Intimacy Journal Kickstarter!

Sending love,

Tash

💌 ✍️

p.s. Here’s a photo of me with Rahsa Dezmen, the author of the poem “Open”, which you can find in the last chapter of The Intimacy Journal, for the theme of “Evolution”. She did a reading of her work at the book launch I hosted on my rooftop in Mexico City on Sunday night!

Introduction 🎬

“I’ve been faking it for years!” — My grandmother.

The other day, I had four pretty sensational orgasms with a male partner. Yet for many years, I found sex boring. I’d often look up at the ceiling, waiting for it to be over. I’ve never faked a whole orgasm, but sometimes I shout a little louder or say dirty things to help get my partner over the edge. In fact, 55% of women (The Hite Report) have faked an orgasm at least once in their lives. In this article, we’ll explore the culture of fake orgasms, how to do it, and how to have tough conversations with your partner so you can get the real sexual pleasure you deserve.

Why do we fake orgasms? 🪅

According to these two studies, the most common reasons are the following, and in any combination:

• To avoid conflict and not hurt a partner’s feelings (chosen by 78% of respondents).

• To please our partner (chosen by 47% of respondents) and gain positive consequences, like being seen as good in bed.

• To avoid feeling bad that we’re not orgasming, or we accept that orgasming is unlikely for us.

• Feeling tired, bored with the sex (lol), wanting to end intercourse, or being intoxicated.

• Because we hope it will turn us on more.

• Because we may falsely believe that females need to orgasm in order for our (male) partners to feel satisfied and receive pleasure. Interestingly, women who have anti-feminist values are more likely to fake female orgasms than others.

Is it more common for women than men to fake it? 🕺

Yes, in heterosexual partnerships, women fake orgasms more than men, but a significant number of men do it too (who knows how they can pretend to ejaculate). In one study, about 25% of men and 50% of women admitted to faking orgasms overall, while 28% of men and 67% of women specifically said they faked orgasm during penile-vaginal intercourse.

Why should you never fake an orgasm? 🤐

“Liar, liar, pants on fire. Except your underpants won’t be on fire, because your pleasure-ometer will be stuck at zero.” — Tash Doherty

As far as I’m concerned, faking an orgasm is a form of lying, and it is a sexual sin. I liken it to “The Spelling Test Analogy.” Imagine you give your partner a spelling test. If they get 10/10 correct on this spelling test, you get 5 of the most earth-shattering orgasms you’ve ever had in your life. You read out each word, and this is how he spells them:

1. Anatomie

2. Dalightful

3. Fewshia

4. Acommodate

5. Naushous

6. Liason

7. Hapy

8. Delishous

9. Apertment

10. Bare with me

First of all, you shouldn’t be dating a guy who can’t spell “happy.” Still, by faking it, you score your partner 10/10 on this test, when they actually got 0! Now they have no opportunity to learn, and you also have no real orgasms that you deserve. And if you say something like, “Well, I feel bad for him. Every woman is different. That’s too much for him to learn how to spell my words,” please, for the love of God, scrape your self-esteem off the floor and remember that spelling and satisfying a woman are both useful skills that are going to serve this person in many areas of their life.

It’s time to stop doing a disservice to yourself, every other female out there, and all his partners that will come after you (or not come, because you have left them with a fundamental misunderstanding of how the female body works).

How can I stop faking orgasms and ask for what I want?

“The clearer we are about what we want, the more likely it is that we’ll get it.” — Marshall Rosenberg, Non-Violent Communication.

Your partner is not a mind reader or a wizard after all, so they’ll need directions so they can get to the destination of their dreams: your pleasure.

Asking for what you want is one of the core principles on your journey to becoming shamelessly sexy. Firstly, it’s important to understand what you want and how you define success in your sex life. Do you want to orgasm every time you’re with your partner, or multiple times even? Are there role-plays, scenarios, or techniques you would like to try? Do you want to try anal or different sex positions? If your partner is not willing to use toys or they are not willing to experiment with you, you may need to be prepared to walk away from this relationship.

Secondly, identify the conditions you would need to achieve this. For example, to orgasm, do you need silence? Do you need to lie on your back with no time pressure, or would you prefer to have a countdown clock? Do you need to not be tired? If you’re not sure where to start, try Dr. Laurie Mintz’s solution: transfer the techniques that you use to pleasure yourself to your sexual activities with your partner. That includes your favorite setting on your vibrator, which you should bring to your partner’s house next time.

Thirdly, you have to believe that you deserve what you want. If your partner ever makes you feel bad about wanting to bring sex toys into your foreplay, stop right there and seriously consider whether this is a healthy relationship for you to be in. Don’t waste your time with a person who belittles you to avoid addressing their own insecurities and inadequacies. Normal men want to please women.

How else can I talk this through with my partner without hurting their ego?

1. Ask to experiment with other things that don’t involve penetrative sex. A male partner may get off simply by watching you get off for real.

2. Change his perspective on sex toys. As Dr. Laurie Mintz states, sex toys are like power tools. They don’t replace men; they just help you get the job done faster.

3. Ask for what would make your life awesome. As Non-Violent Communication suggests, “Making requests in clear, positive, concrete language reveals what we really want.” Rather than tell your partner, “I don’t really like that,” make a specific request that they can take action on, like, “Could you eat me out for ten minutes before we have sex? Here is my vibrator, and this is my favorite setting. This is how you can help me have an orgasm by using it.” Then demonstrate specific hand movements to him.

4. Be honest and patient. If your male partner wants you to orgasm, he’s going to need to work for that. If you are tired and want sex to end, it is perfectly acceptable to call it off and let the man come at another point in time. If they’re getting frustrated or discouraged, try to improve their mindset. Share that pleasuring you is a practice that your partner can learn and improve at over time (inspired by Heidi Grant Halvorson’s talk). Also, remember that it’s not your job to make him come every time you have sex, either.

5. Get the facts straight. As I wrote about in How to Achieve Orgasm Equality (one of my top posts), only 18.4% of women can orgasm from penetration alone, which is the sexual minority. This means that the vast majority of us can’t, which includes me, by the way. Instead, we need lots of the correct kind of clitoral stimulation. There is a large orgasm gap in heterosexual couples that doesn’t exist for gay or lesbian couples. In heterosexual relationships, male pleasure is prioritized for a variety of reasons. For example, we limit the definition of “sex” to describe a penis entering a vagina, leaving out oral sex and bundling the beginning stuff into “foreplay”, which is actually THE MAIN COURSE for most women.

The Truth Of The Matter 🍷

If I’ve been faking for a long time, how do I tell my partner the truth? What should I say? 🤥

This is about you reclaiming your right to pleasure more than anything else. Being honest and apologizing goes a long way. First, pick out some examples of when you faked it when you were genuinely tired, and admit to your partner that you don’t want to do that again. Your partner’s reaction will probably depend on their level of emotional intelligence. Here are two scenarios:

1. Your partner is emotionally intelligent, cares about your sexual needs, and is genuinely open to feedback. First, admit to them that they’re going to feel disappointed with what you’re about to tell them, and maybe a bit embarrassed. Then blame yourself, at least in part, by stating that you learned to fake orgasms to please your shitty ex-boyfriend (whoever he was) or that you learned it from porn. Tell your partner that you’re now unlearning this behavior, and you’re sorry for lying to them. Share that you know that having a happy sex life is important for your wellness and the long-term success of your relationship, which is why you’re sharing this now. Hopefully, they will be receptive yet disappointed, but ultimately motivated to relearn your pleasure together, after you emphasize that you need their help.

2. Your partner is not emotionally intelligent and doesn’t listen to you. I’ve been there. Some dudes genuinely believe their dick has magical powers. They’ll respond to your concerns like: “Well, you enjoyed it so many times before. Why are you lying to me now?” How nice of him to try to wear your self-esteem down, too. It may take you a while to realize it, but this kind of partner will never truly care about or meet your long-term needs. It may be time to call it off and find a partner who cares about pleasuring you.

What if I’ve never had a real orgasm? How do I even know what’s real? 🥴

This is why faking orgasms is wrong: it dissociates us from what our bodies actually like. If you’re in this situation, master how to pleasure yourself first, and keep a sex journal. Buy some toys you like if you don’t already have any, like a bullet vibrator, the Vesper, the Lioness, or the Rechargeable Magic Wand. Again, foreplay is the main course for many women, and most of us cannot orgasm through penetration alone. Once you master how to pleasure yourself, transfer your techniques to partnered sex.

How do I know when I’ve had an orgasm? 👀

That’s a great question. For me, my orgasms are so intense that I just know when I’ve had one and when I haven’t. If you’re experiencing a lot of pleasure, take your time with your partner and keep going until you reach a defined climax. For me, it’s a very distinctive 15-second window where I basically lose control of my body. After I’ve had an orgasm, my vagina also pulsates on its own for another 30 seconds or so. While I can’t guarantee that will happen for you, the goal is to get familiar enough with your own body so you know when you’ve had one.

That being said, anorgasmia is a medical condition related to sexual dysfunction whereby you can’t orgasm for a bunch of potential reasons. Be sure to see a doctor if you genuinely can’t orgasm, and check out research by Dr Charlene Muehlenhard and The Journal of Sex Research to learn more. Even forums like Reddit can be helpful, as well as tools like Oh My God Yes (OMGYes).

Why does society expect women to perform pleasure? 🎭

Mostly because of porn, but this is not porn’s fault. Pornography is just entertainment. It’s acting, i.e., people fucking in a studio. I am pro porn. The problem is that people mistake porn for sex education, attempting to bridge a gap that porn was never meant to close. Most Pornhub content was designed for the male gaze, creating the expectation that we females behave like porn actresses during sex, which we don’t. Cindy Gallop’s Make Love Not Porn is working to counteract this. It’s a website where you can watch couples having “real-world sex”, with all its messiness and imperfections, as opposed to paid porn stars who are performing.

Conclusion 💡

To me, faking orgasms represents the worst parts of being raised as a woman. We grew up being attuned to other people’s needs and the expectation that we should sacrifice our own needs to make everyone else happy. We put our partners’ pleasure first; we know exactly what their orgasms are like, how their body twitches, or how they scrunch up their face, yet we lose touch with ourselves. For our body, we’re not so sure. What is a real, earth-shattering orgasm for us? Or what could it be? Have we had one? We might not know or believe that it is possible. We receive all the praise for being a devoted and caring partner, but none of the pleasure. Instead, we are literal people pleasers. It’s giving trad wife.

I’m advocating here that there’s nothing righteous about any of this. Yes, our male partners are robbed of the knowledge of how to pleasure us. But ultimately, the only person who really loses out in this dynamic is us, the fakers. Our needs matter. We deserve to receive pleasure and enjoy ourselves. We’re here on Earth for a short while, so we must have a very fun time. And the fact that society is terrified of women enjoying themselves is society’s fault, not ours.

Other FAQs 🤨

Does faking an orgasm harm a relationship? 😵

There are obviously worse things you can do in a relationship than fake orgasms, but yes. Without real orgasms during foreplay, faking orgasms means you’re continuously not getting the pleasure you deserve. You’re creating a sexual relationship dynamic that is ultimately unfulfilling and unsatisfying for you. You’ll remain extremely far away from the best sex of your life or any meaningful sexual satisfaction.

Will my partner be able to tell if I’m faking? 🫣

Yes. Your partner may already know when you are faking or at least suspect it. It’s far better to admit to the orgasms you’ve faked now (read above about telling the truth), so you can reprogram your sex life together and learn together how to prioritize your pleasure.

Is faking an orgasm normal, or does it mean something is wrong? 😑

Faking orgasms is common among women, but that does not mean it should be normal. What should be normal is that women who date and have sex with men should receive lots of pleasure. If you are faking it, not climaxing regularly, and you would like to have more pleasure, then something is wrong, and your existing sex dynamic with your partner is not serving you.

Disregarding everything you’ve just shared, how can I fake an orgasm? 👻

Once you’re having sexual intercourse, start hyperventilating and whining like a constipated donkey with full “Ee-ow, Ee-ow” sounds. Scrunch up your face like you’re sitting on the toilet after a spicy food adventure gone wrong. Continue all this nonsense for five minutes until you scream the house down. All your partner’s neighbors must hear you. I remember that a guy in my fraternity in college was dating a girl, and we heard her. All the time. I remember her screaming, but I don’t even remember her name. That’s your goal.

Sending love,

Tash 💌 ✍️

p.s. Stay tuned for an update about The Intimacy Journal!

More From Misseducated 💌 ✍️

I’m not ashamed to write about my kinks. In fact, I find my psychology of kink, or psychoanalyzing where my kinks come from, rather fascinating and funny. Human sexuality, as we know, is varied and beautiful. No two people’s kinks and fetishes will ever be the same, because no humans are the same either (perhaps except those two sets of identical twins who married each other, no judgments).

I’m not some sex therapist from Psychology Today, and I don’t claim to know much about the psychology of BDSM. But I hope that from reading this fully honest kink-affirming account, you can relate to at least one of them, and feel encouraged to explore the psychology of your own kinks in your own time.

What is a kink? 🫦

A kink is an interest in doing something socially abnormal, hence the extensive variety. Wikipedia says, “In human sexuality, kinkiness is the use of sexual practices, concepts, or fantasies that are not conventional.” I like to think of it as something you might want to do with a partner, but that if you did it amongst the general population or discussed it at a dinner party, it would be weird or taboo. For example, it’s not okay to hit a woman, but my kink might be that I want my partner to hit me in bed. More on that later, lol.

As more of a practice tended to by kinky people, BDSM is characterized by a variety of kinky, role-playing, erotic practices, defined as “B/D (Bondage and Discipline), D/s (Dominance and submission), and S/M (Sadism and Masochism)” (Wikipedia). It extends into kink community sessions, safewords, and bdsm practitioners who have their own nonconformist yet healthy ways of exploring sexual identity.

“Many of our sexualities are at odds with who are in the rest of our lives…Someone who is really quite democratic, committed to egalitarianism, to the respect and dignity of all humans may want to enslave someone and treat them extremely badly in a sexual scenario.” — Alain de Botton, Design Matters Podcast.

How is a kink different from a fetish? 🤔

Thank you for asking! As explained in the DSM-5, “fetishism is sexual arousal from nonliving objects or specific nongenital body parts.” (Wikipedia) The person who has the fetish is called the “fetishist”, and examples of a fetish could include shoes, body hair, and underwear; I can’t help but think of Fran from First Dates saying, “A man in tweed is all you need.”

Fetishes are related to kinks, but they’re not the same. One distinction that the literature discusses is that a kink enhances your intimacy connection with a partner; it’s something you want to do to a partner or have a partner do to you. Whereas a fetish is a sexual interest in an object that might replace a partner. Still, this is an oversimplistic definition. For example, spitting on a partner could be a fetish and a kink; you find spit sexually attractive (fetish) and you find spitting on a partner sexually exciting (kink). Sometimes it can be both.

It’s clear from this definition how it is wrong to fetishize sexual minorities, such as LGBTQ people or sex workers. A fetishist might see them as an object as opposed to a human being.

Let’s dig into my kinks then…

1. The Praise Kink: Being called a “good girl”, especially when I excel at doing something “bad.” 😈

“One of the things we want from sex is a release from the pressure to be a good boy or girl. We want to be seen as “good” but not having to be good in any kind of overly punitive way. So being bad yet accepted is a really strong sexual fantasy. It’s not just a sexual fantasy, it’s a human fantasy” — Alain de Botton, Design Matters Podcast.

I want my partner to praise me for doing something bad in an exceptionally good way, especially for something sexual. If I give my partner a really excellent blow job, it would be great if he could caress my face and hair while he’s in a state of stupefaction and say,

“Good girl.”

The origins of this kink are obviously quite Freudian. As a child, I went to a private, all-girls school. I was expected to be a “good girl”, meaning a well-behaved, rule-following, nice little girl who was delicate and feminine. I was also a people-pleaser who constantly sought the approval and praise of my teachers and parents. Of course, sexual activities, such as masturbation or giving oral sex, were obviously seen as very bad things to do that nobody talked about. So getting my partner to praise me for doing these is the ultimate inversion.

2. The Performance Kink: orgasming because my partner wants me to, under time pressure. 📈

“Our desires, and we can thank Freud for this, emerge from childhood and are reflections of all sorts of commitments and ideas” — Alain de Botton, Design Matters Podcast.

I want my partner to demand that I reach orgasm, and then allow me only a very short time to do that. Ideally, they would say something along the lines of,

“I want you to cum in the next 10 seconds, or else.”

And then they begin to count down from ten to zero, slowly, so that no matter which of my sex toy collection I’m using, I have to make myself come. You can see where this is going. If I perform well, then they can top it off by calling me a “good girl,” and I’m extremely happy.

I remember being under a lot of time pressure in my childhood. I was always forced to be on time for school, lessons, dinner, etc. Not only that, but at my school, I was constantly under pressure to perform well on exams, at piano recitals and ballet shows, in assembly, etc. I even remember my mother saying angrily, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” and then counting down from 5 to get us to do something like brush our teeth or sit down for dinner. In the adult inversion of these events, I enjoy being controlled and demanded to perform, but as a kid, I obviously hated it.

3. The Spanking Kink: Or receiving pleasure from pain (masochism) 🥲

“It’s exciting because it’s permission. It’s like the so-called dirty, shameful, private side is being accepted and witnessed by another person. And this is a vital corrective to the haunting feeling of loneliness which pursues all of us all the time.” — Alain de Botton, Design Matters Podcast.

I know that it is wrong to hit a woman and hurt other people, and that’s why I find it sexually exciting. I want my partner, whom I love and trust, to spank me as hard as they can on my ass, ideally leaving a mark for days, hurting me until I can’t take it anymore, and maybe even more than that. Perhaps we can then admire their handywork in the mirror.

There’s a strong submissive bend here, far away from how I present myself in my life as an independent woman, financially and otherwise. In this scenario, I want to be lying down on my bed, somewhat small, naked, and helpless. There’s power, ownership, and control at play here. Also, both my parents were raised disciplined with corporal punishment and made a point that they never wanted that for their children. So this could also have something to do with it.

4. The Choking Kink: On the verge of death, being held in place, unable to move 💀

“One has to go very carefully because issues of power are so troubling in the outside world...How do we stop this from simply being abuse?” — Alain de Botton, Design Matters Podcast.

If I happen to be with a male partner who is physically bigger than me (though this isn’t necessary), this kink is about the reversal of protection. I want this nice, loving, trustworthy partner role-play as a dom, to pin me down and choke me to the point where I know that he could kill me if he wanted to, but he’s choosing not to.

I’m not encouraging you to try this at home. This could be a dangerous situation if you don’t fully trust your partner (yet another reason we should not be dating assholes). I can only explore this kink with someone I really trust and feel safe with. Then and only then, paradoxically, can I consent to doing activities that are considered abusive.

5. The Creampie Kink: Getting filled by the sperm of many men 🍦

I like the idea of having multiple sexual partners in quick succession, in the style of the multiple cream pie or over consecutive days. I’m not sure what the sexual logic behind this is in my mind. Partly, I think it’s to do with increasing my chances of pregnancy. That’s hot. Plus, we might be confused about who the father is, which is also hot.

I like the idea of contradicting society’s traditional script that a long-term, dedicated monogamous relationship is the highest form of existence for a woman, and replacing it with a form of kink. Having sex with multiple men, giving me all their attention at once, takes them off their pedestal of being special and replaces it with my pleasure. Maybe it also gives me control? It speaks to my brat tendencies. I like to break the rules, and even though I’m submissive, I like being sexually deviant also. I can keep a secret, and these men may never find out about each other. Still, I’m not that reckless. I have my hormonal IUD. Plus, there’s always the risk of contracting an STD, so be careful, and again, don’t try this at home.

I hope you found this dip into my psyche both weird and wonderful. Overall, I believe that being a kinkster is a normal part of being human; there’s no need to be concerned about your mental health, necessarily, and we should avoid the pathologization of these basic human needs. After reading it, I’m curious to know what your kinks are. Where might those be coming from? (no pun intended). I hope you feel empowered to learn more about yourself and deconstruct some childhood shame in the process.

I’ll share some more updates soon about The Intimacy Journal! I can’t wait. It’s so close to being done.

Love you all!

Tash

💌 ✍️

More From Misseducated 💌 ✍️

As a single, childless 30-year-old woman, I don't have all the answers. Still, I've found my role in the village: being a supportive auntie to young women navigating topics they’d rather not discuss with their parents.

This all started when I worked with teenage girls one summer a couple of years ago. I realized that while I’d been stumbling through my twenties, trying to hold down my jobs and avoid financial ruin, I’d actually learned a few things about the female experience that could be valuable to them. These girls were 15 and were just starting to have their first relationships. That got me thinking. Getting pregnant in your teens when you don’t want to be is a big freaking deal. Soon, I was pulling them aside and saying,

“If you ever need Plan B or anything else, just let me know.” Then I typed my number into their phones.

When I said “anything,” I meant help sorting out gynecological issues, periods, relationships, emergencies, or understanding how to use substances like alcohol, weed, or drugs safely. If I lived in their town, maybe I could accompany them to their first OBGYN appointment or something like that. Basically, it’s all the stuff that’s part of growing up, that you can’t talk to your parents about and fear people might judge you for (hello shame!)

Here are my six tips to help you have these conversations as a supportive auntie:

1. Listen and validate in a nonjudgmental way 🎧

I only offer advice if they actually agree to needing it. Sometimes, it’s just about being there to validate their experiences and their pain, and confirm that having female reproductive organs is awful sometimes. Because the medical system ignores a lot of women’s health symptoms, I always acknowledge their pain first because for them it is real. For example, I’d listen and try to empathize with the side effects she experienced from taking the pill and why she stopped, before rushing in to freak her out that she could get pregnant because she’s not on birth control.

2. Err on the side of over-sharing your experiences 🙆‍♀️

Your experiences of having periods, being pregnant, or trying different birth control methods could be gold to a teenager’s ears. Plus, you may have the only honest, real-life experience from a vagina-owning person they can learn from. I take my role pretty seriously, and I provide the honest, juicy details. Pain is obviously subjective, but I try to be honest and not sugar-coat things like my period cramp pain, my IUD insertion, or the red flags of men in my previous relationships, especially around addiction, so I can help them notice the signs to look out for.

3. Be subtle and cautious to maintain a respectful balance ⚖️

Yes, it’s a paradox, but you have to assume they may know very little, but then ultimately respect whatever decision they choose to make. I go with the idea that I’m giving them pretty unusual information on an important topic, so I just bring them aside once a year as a reminder if they need anything, and then I respect their choices.

4. Beware of age-appropriateness 🫣

I’ve found the age difference of 10-15 years to be ideal, but there is also such a thing as too young. For example, I had to remove my 11-year-old cousin as my follower on TikTok because my blog’s content about orgasms didn’t seem appropriate. Once she’s 14 years old, I’ll be sure to pull her aside at the next family function.

Dr. Lisa Damour said on the Re: Thinking Podcast,

“The data give us a pretty strong sense that the single most powerful force for adolescent mental health is strong relationships with caring adults…Healthy teenagers are meaningfully connected to adults. Bosses, mentors, aunts, uncles. It doesn’t matter if it’s not your kid. You are responsible for all the teenagers in your community and for having meaningful relationships with them.”

You’re not their primary support system or a replacement for their therapist. But given that you’re an adult, you can help guide them towards professionals who could help with tough subjects like mental health, abuse, or addiction, etc., when necessary.

5. Don’t waver in supporting them 🌊

Young people need to be able to learn their own boundaries and make mistakes. Without anything too serious happening, trying out substances and exploring sex are normal parts of growing up.

As Simon Sinek cheesily said on the Design Matters Podcast,

“Leadership is a human enterprise. It’s not about being in charge, it’s about taking care of those in your charge...where you take responsibility that the people in your charge learn confidence, gain a skillset, have the opportunity to try and fall and try again, and discover that they were capable of more than they thought they were capable of. They cannot do that without someone who says, “I believe in you.””

6. Create the culture you want to see in the world 🌎

This is your chance to own these conversations, demystifying and de-stigmatizing as you go. Before you dive into being a supportive auntie, it might help to reflect on your own experiences of these conversations and think critically about how you want to approach them differently for this generation. It’s a great way to work through any shame you might have, which we know is a fundamental part of being shamelessly sexy. The ACA Serenity Prayer captures this well:

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change, the courage to change the one I can, and the wisdom to know that one is me.”

Conclusion 👀

I hope this piece resonated with you and that you feel encouraged to steward a young person in your life through these issues. And remember that simply by having lived longer, you may have something to offer. I’ve found this to be both a meaningful and healing part of adulthood. If you’re able to break the cycles of shame and secrecy in your important relationships, I hope you get to experience the same.

Have a great rest of your week, and I’ll be back soon with some updates about the sex journal’s Kickstarter, which I hope will launch on October 1st!

Love,

Tash

💌 ✍️

Song pairing to get you in the teen vibe:

More From Misseducated 💌 ✍️

Today I’m going to share my very pseudo-scientific logic on how women aren’t destined to be bonded forever to every guy we fucked.

The Logic

This process only works if you are 100% honest with yourself when it comes to the question: “Is he long-term relationship material?” To answer this question efficiently is a skill that you can build with time. It means not living in a fantasy land, and being realistic about the logistics of where you both live, who this person is, and what you are looking for.

The more men I’ve dated, the faster I come across deal-breakers. I no longer get hung up on workaholics, alcoholics, potheads, nomadic douchebags, men who tell me they have a thing for blondes, men who don’t text me back, men who are only in my city for a good time (not a long time), men fresh out of a relationship, or men who can’t make me laugh.

Instead, I pay very close attention to what these men say to me on our dates, what they are not saying, and how they act. If they don’t show genuine interest in me, or a desire to connect or care, I don’t think twice about it. I move on. Of course, sometimes I wish a hot, smart, rich guy were more available, but I can’t change that, and I don’t have enough time to sit around and wait for them to fix themselves or like me more. If I want to have sex with them, I do it to enjoy myself and nothing more.

If you’re not sure if a guy is long-term relationship material, and you might want a deeper connection with him, I recommend you withhold sex from them until you figure that out. Meet up again at a later point in time, and assess whether he meets your long-term relationship criteria in a different setting.

The Other Essentials

1. Make a good dating profile 📲

After tweaking mine for months, I’ve finally got it down. Below are the screenshots of my Bumble profile, which helps me match with lots of hot and interesting men. So, yes, you have to put yourself out there, and having a stellar dating profile is a great way to do that. If you only have old or uninteresting pictures of yourself, take some new ones and improve your profile over time.

2. Know what you want 🤓.

“I date younger men for sex. I want lots of stamina and very short recovery periods. I don’t get those with men my own age.” — Cindy Gallop, Style Like U.

I selected “Wants kids” and “Long-term relationship” on my Bumble profile. But the men I match with rarely read this, and I’m sure they just swipe anyway to see what they can get away with. That’s fine with me. I can have sex with someone simply because I want to. Read “How to be Shamelessly Sexy” to learn more.

3. Be smart about it 💡.

“Freedom without insulation is just exposure. To unwanted pregnancies. To STIs. To men who don’t believe in foreplay or boundaries. To misinterpreted power dynamics, coercion dressed up as flirtation, and full-blown abuse." - Casual Sex is a Rich Woman’s Sport, .

Obviously get birth control, use condoms, or just brace yourself for the fact that you might need to take Plan B. So make sure this is something you can invest in and do. And if it isn’t, then screw it. Go focus on your career.

4. Be realistic 🔍.

You know what is going to save your ass? Using logic and being honest with yourself about who this guy is. Not who you wish he was or who you imagine him to be when he gets a fancy job.

If a man has selected that he’s looking for “Fun casual dates” and “Intimacy without commitment” on his Bumble profile (see how casual sex is codified in our culture?), I use that extremely useful information, and I don’t try to change him.

5. Dip into the science 🧪.

Firstly, the popular claim that “women bond more after sex” is not supported by human data. While women can have much higher baseline oxytocin levels than men (up to 3x higher (Marazziti et al. 2019)), this can vary; human bonding is way more complex than just oxytocin levels. Both sexes use oxytocin for bonding through different mechanisms and timing, and the oxytocin response during orgasm shows no significant gender differences (Carmichael et al. 1987, the OG study). I said what I said.

6. Decide you don’t want to be in love, or if you must be, choose the right person 🧍.

“The moment you decide you don’t want to be in love, that just cuts a whole layer of crap out of your life.” — Cindy Gallop, Style Like U.

I believe falling in love with someone is a choice. You can choose who you fall in love with, who you give your energy to, and who you give the time of day. If you do really want to be in love with someone, then be sure to follow the Promises of the ACA 12-Step Program:

“We will choose to love people who can love and be responsible for themselves.”

7. Confront your shame 🫣.

Remember that shame is a normal human emotion, and it’s something you can work on as part of the journey to being shamelessly sexy. I felt ashamed last year when I had sex with a guy in my friend group, and he never really messaged me back. What I should have done was just forgiven myself and called it quits emotionally the moment the sex was over. We had sex. That was it. I didn’t want or need anything else from this person, and I don’t even need his validation.

8. Beware of your weaknesses 🏰.

If you start developing feelings for someone you hardly know after you’ve just had sex with them, I highly encourage you to speak to a professional. For example, when guys don’t message me back, I feel anxious and more attracted to them. Through therapy, 12-Step work, and analyzing my daddy issues, I’ve learned that I get addicted to excitement. It might feel like this guy is the one, but this is a pattern that I’ve witnessed with myself over and over. If I’m still hanging onto him, I give myself a couple extra doses of self-compassion, and then I move on.

9. Get your orgasms in 💦.

I don’t care who you are having sex with; your pleasure is a priority. Read “How to Achieve Orgasm Equality” and “The Ultimate Guide to Having an Incredible One Night Stand” and be sure to bring your toys.

So, there you have it! My guide to having good, quick, fun, unemotionally attached sex.

Let me know which tip was your favorite in the comments!

Love,

Tash

💌 ✍️

p.s. Behold, my Bumble Profile! 👀 🐝