Sexy, Not Sorry
Reclaiming Desire Without Apology
Desire and lust are funny things.
From a young age, I was taught that Barbie had Ken and that was it.
She dressed up to get Ken’s attention. Ken dated Barbie. They had a dream house. Usually somewhere in Malibu, and all was right in the world.
Only… in my world, something was… different.
My Barbies didn’t date just Ken.
Barbie dated Teressa… and sometimes she dated Ken. Sometimes she had more than one Ken. Sometimes Barbie dated Ken and Teressa at the same time. Sometimes Barbie was just… Barbie.
According to my friends down the street, that was weird. I was weird. And suddenly, I wasn’t invited over to play at their houses anymore.
Essentially, I grew up already assuming that my natural inclinations of relationships and attractions were inherently shameful and wrong.
On top of it, I knew my body was not my own, but something to be judged and weighed in value against the ideals of society.
I remember VIVIDLY the neighbor boys teasing me for damn near everything. I wasn’t thin, I had glasses with an eye patch due to a weak left eye, and all my clothes either came from thrift stores or were home made. None of which are reasons to tease, and yet, kids will be kids, and tease they did.
Flash forward… as I came into my teen years, I had a similar experience as most girls do. I was instructed to not wear anything too short, too tight, too revealing or I might come across as too “easy”. And yet, the girls that were all over MTV, like the Spice Girls and Brittany Spears, seemed to be the absolute ideal of what boys wanted to see, wearing exactly what I was told would give them the wrong impression and earn me the wrong kind of reputation.
Hell, even I had a crush on Sporty Spice.
The fact was, where I grew up, girls that dressed in mini skirts and had a belly button ring were the ones that got asked out.
Girls like me, with a nose buried in a book and worked backstage in drama club floated under the radar.
And, if you floated under the radar, the less likely it was that guys messed with you. The cost of course, was… guys completly ignored you. Can’t have your cake and eat it too I guess?
I can remember watching MTV and thinking “yeah… I’ll never come close to looking like that” ( and man did the guys in high school make sure I knew it) so, I went full swing into the alternative grunge style, rebelling against the sexy skinny ideal of what society forced down our throat as popular, instead opting for bondage pants, flannel shirts, and wearing black like it was a life source.
Eventually, I experimented with the mini skirts and tight tops though. The attention I got left me with a weird combination of feeling gross and powerful at the same time. What a paradox to be in....
I hated the fact that in order to be noticed I had to dress in ways that left me feeling exposed rather than it be purely for my own enjoyment. On one hand, I loved the curves I had and how I felt in my body as I grew up. But, it never seemed like it was truly "my body", or that my sexuality was actually mine.
You see, I craved learning. I loved excelling in school, I loved dance, and art, and history, writing... but no one cared that I had skipped two grades, received awards of excellence, won poetry and writing contests, had dreams of becoming a writer or anything else. While the fact that no one cared shouldn't have mattered, I was frankly, lonely as hell.
Other girls didn't like me because they considered me either too smart or competition. Guys wouldn't give me the time of day unless I put on display the assets that kept their attention. And the entire world seemed to reinforce this same idea. If you tried to live outside this idea, you were teased, considered "fringed", or "stuck up" and if you leaned into it, you were a slut or a whore. There never seemed to be space to just be well... a human.
Books didn’t tease though. Books and fantasy were always there. I could be whoever I wanted and no one could tell me any different.
I started writing my own stories, sketching out the scenes and outfits of the characters I wrote about, and around my teen years, as the hormones started racing, I began writing my own fantasies. In the back of a poetry notebook, sandwiched between SAT vocab flashcards and a crumpled math quiz, I hid the short smut stories like contraband. Because desire—mine, anyway—was something I learned to treat like a bomb: dangerous, powerful, and not to be played with unless someone else handed me the match.
That early hunger—the way it took up space in my body, how it surged in my chest and coiled low in my belly—was never about anyone else. It was mine. But I didn’t know that yet. I thought I had to hide it, or worse, give it away for someone else’s approval.
I know I’m not alone.
The Lie We Swallowed Young
We are taught, explicitly and insidiously, that women’s pleasure is conditional.
Conditional on how we look. On whether we’re “ladylike.” On someone else’s desire for us. That we aren't to take up space and that we shouldn't make anyone else uncomfortable, even at the cost of our own comfort.
“Pleasure is the measure,” Emily Nagoski writes in Come As You Are. “Not the number of orgasms. Not how long it takes. Not whether it happens with a partner or alone. Pleasure. That’s it.”
But pleasure for pleasure’s sake? That’s not what we were raised on.
I remember when I first began writing erotic content publicly—how even after all my training, certifications, and embodied experience as a sex educator, I felt a flutter of fear to hit publish.
How could I feel like that? I started coming out publicly as a sexologist, owning my sexuality, taking back my body through my own brand of erotic art and pleasure activism in order to help breakdown the wall of shame... and yet, shame, like a fucking toxin, still finds its way to drip into the recesses of my brain and remind me that, still, to so much of the world, I am better off remaining silent, and that someone who looks like I do, who talks about the erotic, pleasure, sexuality, and art, is also "asking for it." That I deserve to be treated as "less than" human.
I've pivoted my content, keeping my sexology and educational content in places that people can find it, but out of the public space so not to disturb the masses, but still feel like I'm contribuing to my field and using my post-doctorate in a way that helps others.
Since 2022, my public social media content shifted entirely to art of creating.
And you know what? I LOVE IT. Creating my art, writing with passion, encouraging others to embrace their desires and sexual self… its what I LIVE FOR.
But…
After years and over a million followers later, I still get hit with that same shit on social today even though 99% of my content in the public sphere is centered around sewing, crafting, fantasy, and writing.
It took years of peeling back those layers—years of reclaiming desire and my own passion not as something to be earned, but as something I inherently owned—to understand just how much power had been kept from me.
And it's still something I have to remind myself of every damn day.
How Shame Gets Baked In
Shame is sticky. It gets embedded in everything:
The way we're taught to cross our legs.
The way sexual education focuses on prevention instead of pleasure.
The way women are taught to cover up because its our fault for enticing "the male gaze"
The way media simultaneously chastises sexual freedom in women while praising it in men calling them playboys and women sluts.
Even down to the sexual empowerment fields in the way people call you “brave” when you speak openly about masturbation or sex.
Brave? For talking about something that’s a biological function?
Would we call someone brave for saying they enjoyed a good stretch? A long bath? An orgasm?
And yet, even when I wrote my Masturbation May article for Substack, I found myself walking the tightrope of tone—balancing academic research with playful seduction so as not to sound “too much.” Too clinical, and I’d be dismissed. Too sultry, and I’d be discredited. This is the tightrope women walk when speaking about their sexuality with authority.
As Nagoski puts it, “Sexuality is not a performance; it is not a commodity. It’s a part of being alive.”
So why do we so often live like it’s a secret?
It’s All Connected: Arousal, Autonomy, and Artistry
I talk about Nagoski a lot, I know, but her books and research were not only foundational to me and my post-doctoral work, but as a woman learning to reclaim her body and sexuality after years of locking it away. She talks about the dual-control model of arousal: the accelerator and the brake. Your turn-ons (accelerator) only work when your turn-offs (the brake) aren’t slamming things to a halt. And guess what one of the biggest brakes is for women?
Shame.
Shame about their bodies. Their fantasies. Their sexual appetite. Their orgasms. Their “too muchness.”
I’ve seen this not just in sex ed sessions, but in every sphere of my work as an artist and designer. Women who come to me for custom gowns whisper things like:
“I want to feel sexy again.”
“I never dress up for myself.”
“I didn’t think I deserved to wear something like this.”
And yet when they put the gown on—goddess corset, shimmered slit up the thigh, a touch of danger and decadence—they glow. Not for anyone else. For themselves.
That glow? That’s the erotic... the pleasure... coming home.
I know this feeling well when I wear my own designs.
One comment I get often is about my "power stance." I didn't even realize I had a power stance until people started pointing it out.
I started analyzing it in myself. What I figured out is that when I put my designs on, I get the same feeling I do when I write my fiction works with bad-ass FMCs that own their sexuality in fantasy world filled with magic and inner power. The designs I make exemplify exactly what I try to bring to life in my writing and what I love so much about the books I read: It captivates the dangerous, powerful, sensual, mysterious, intoxicating, magical...
I only wish I could have gone back to my younger self when I was writing my stories and sketching these designs in the 10th grade and tell her don't let loneliness and assholes around you tell you you're not good enough, smart enough, pretty enough to make this happen. They can all fuck off and watch from the stands while you make a name for yourself however the fuck you want! Just don't hide it away... Listen to your gut and go for it!
You Get to Be the Flame
Let’s be honest—there’s something revolutionary about a woman who knows she is allowed to want. To pursue. To flirt without shame, fuck without apology, and dance with her own desires like they are holy fire.
Because they are.
“When we turn to the erotic as a source of power,” Lorde wrote, “we begin to recognize our deepest feelings. And once we begin to feel deeply in all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy.”
This isn't just about orgasms (although, they are pretty damn awesome.) This isn't just about sexuality. This is about looking the very things that drive our joy, passion, desires, and pleasure that we have denied ourselves, whether through societal pressures or through our own guilt and shame, and reclaiming them with a full chest.
I want you to have a life that turns you on.
One where you are not waiting to be chosen, but are actively choosing yourself. Every damn day.
Live for Your Heart, Not Their Approval
Let me ask you something bold:
What are you still not doing because of what they might think?
Are you holding back on writing the book, designing the gown, posting the art, exploring the kink, trying the new thing, daring to want something just because it lights you up?
How many times have we downplayed our dreams, called them “guilty pleasures,” or dismissed them entirely just to keep someone else comfortable?
Women are taught to starve their desires in the name of humility, likability, or “realism.”
We’re trained to treat ambition as arrogance. To treat joy as indulgence. That we shouldn’t celbrate ourselves in any way and remain “humble.”
But here’s the truth: your desire is not selfish. It is sacred.
Whether it’s the urge to touch, to create, to seduce, to dance, to rest, to build a fucking fantasy empire out of corsets and rhinestones—you do not need permission to want more.
You are allowed to want things simply because they set your soul on fire.
You are allowed to follow pleasure not just in bed, but in your life.
We have spent centuries being told our longings are silly. That pleasure is a distraction. That joy is secondary to productivity. That wanting too much makes us dangerous or unserious or “cringe.”
But cringe is often code for “a woman who refuses to shrink.”
And I’d rather be cringey than caged.
As Glennon Doyle wrote in Untamed, “The braver I am, the luckier I get.”
And brave, my love, is choosing your own voice over their expectations.
So let’s be brave. Let’s be too much. Let’s be lit up and turned on and ridiculously alive!
I say this not just to everyone who needed to hear it, but also as a reminder to myself. That younger version of me never got to hear it… so I’m saying it the woman that stands here today with unabashed furiosity, and to anyone reading this that needed to hear it too.
Say yes to the creative project you’ve been stifling.
Say yes to the trip, the story, the class, the kink, the wild idea that won’t leave you alone.
Say yes to your own damn delight.
Because your desire—sexual or otherwise—is not a problem to be solved.
It’s a compass.
It points to who you are and who you’re becoming.
The time for apology is over.
Now is the time to want boldly.
To live from the inside out.
To remember who the hell you are before the world told you to play small.
You are a flame. A pulse. A wild ache wrapped in skin.
You are desire incarnate.
And you were never meant to live for them.
You were meant to live for your heart.
I would love to hear from you in the comments if this resonated with you.
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