People think I must be gagging for it. I write about sex, support erotic artists and create my own erotica so the assumption is that my legs must be open to whoever happens to be strolling on by. 

It feels as if women have only two states of being–the madonna or the whore–and if you’re one, you can’t possibly be the other, too.

We can thank Freud for this: “Where such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love." While Freud is long gone, research says this is still a complex people grapple with.

I have vats full of stories that could illustrate this but I’m going to share with you one from just late last year.

I hired a carpenter to build and install a long bench seat I designed for my dining room. Though I found him annoying and lacking in any good work ethic, he also seemed like a harmless, chatty chain-smoking, middle-aged Italian man who liked to pop by with a coffee to discuss anything other than the lack of progress he’d made.

Then, one morning on his way over to pick up the fabric for the seat cushion, I got a text message. He was waiting for his coffee at a cafe around the corner and flicked through a newspaper where he’d found the sex column I used to write, accompanied by a terrible photo of me (you know, the kind shit newspapers like with their heavy makeup and bouffant hair(you know, the kind shit newspapers like with their heavy makeup and hair that's holding a can's worth of hair spray). He took a photo of the column and sent it with the words “Hot”.

I carefully choose the people I discuss my work with, and for obvious reasons never mentioned it to him. I felt like a bird in flight before a storm–I knew something was coming and I was trying to figure how to get the hell out. 

He hadn’t been at my house long before telling me about a client who offered his co-worker a lap dance, and after sucking back some thick smoke from his second cigarette he said, “I bet you’re fun. Come on, give us a kiss?” 

And there it was. Apparently, I was ready to come out to play. He wasn’t even going to spend time figuring out if I was interested. I had a sense he was going to try something so I’d had 10 minutes to think about how I was going to handle the unwanted advances.

I was not surprised by his reaction to my column. I was used to this kind of behaviour –not because I’m in erotica now but because as an attractive person who spent a good chunk of her younger professional years working in the misogynistic media industry, I’ve been the target of many, many unwanted advances.

And I could feel myself slipping back into 19-year-old me– the girl whose boss called her into his office to watch a porno (yes it really happened but that story is for another time).

Much like the younger me, I could feel a part of me not wanting to upset the situation. All those years of being told that I was a woman and I should be polite and that “boys will boys” and to just laugh it off. 

I couldn't really offend him. A little voice kept saying "don’t rock the boat, quietly say no thanks and walk away" instead of doing what I wanted to do on a guttural level–slap him in the face and say “fuck off arsehole.” 

But I wanted my bench seat more than I wanted to teach him a lesson. In a stupidly inflated market, I got a great price for a custom piece and as I was hosting Christmas in less than four weeks, I was avoiding any more delays. I worried that if I made him feel like the piece of shit that he was, I might not get my seat. 

So I laughed it off and told him to behave because he was married with two young kids, and I was happy having fun exclusively with my partner. I kept it light but still firm and walked him to the door. He installed the bench seat a week later and that was that.

I sometimes wonder if the desire for the bench seat was just another version of me “being polite”, and maybe I should have rocked the boat, and potentially sacrificed my seat. Would it have changed anything? Who knows but I keep reminding myself that I did what I wanted and what I thought was right in the moment. And I should probably learn to stop criticizing myself.