Ode to being a slut

Radical acceptance has never felt better

I am a total slut.

I was 8 years old when I found my mom and sister going through my backpack. They had discovered the backdrops that my best friend and I had made for our Barbies. Inspired by her dad’s playboy magazines, we made a play photoshoot of our own. With markers and construction paper taped together and block printed words like “sexy,” “hot,” and of course, “slut” scrawled in Lisa Frank colors, we lay the Barbies out in compromising positions and pretended to take their pictures. In 1991, we didn’t have cameras or smart phones.

“I didn’t even know she knew that word,” I heard my sister tell my mom. When they caught me listening, she scowled at me from underneath her 13-year-old bangs. “You’re embarrassing.”

I am embarrassing. As a child, I was hypersexual. A catholic schoolgirl who was boy-crazy, had an absentee father and started drinking at age 12. I was the first girl in the friend group who got fingered in the backseat of someone’s car, the first to put her mouth on a boy’s you-know-what. “Slut” could never hurt me. Slut is who I am.

My interest in sex was rampant, I read bdsm erotica using the dial-up internet on the family computer in the dining room. I stole my sister’s back massager to use on myself, I had erotic fantasies where nameless and faceless boys would bring me to orgasm over and over. By my junior year I was known as someone who loved hugs, especially from the tall, muscly football players. I would lift myself up and wrap my legs around their waists, clinging like a koala to a tree. They would carry me around at parties on their backs, pass me from one to the other, a game made from what I now see as a young girl who was starved for touch, desperate for attention, dying to be told she was good at something, perfect, at least in their eyes, at least for one night. Later, pawing at each other in dark fields and barns and the backseats of shitty cards, I’d become very familiar with the feeling of a man’s giant paw on the back of my neck, pushing my face into his lap.

“Slut” could never hurt my feelings, I accepted it to be true. You can write it on a bathroom mirror in lipstick and you can pass it in a note in Biology, but I learned very young if agree with the bullies, it takes all the heat out of the hurt. I was a slut. Even if I wasn’t letting them fuck me, I was still enthusiastically doing whatever it was they asked. I was the girl who would take her top off after three drinks, the one who was always ready to skinny dip in the lake, to get naked when everyone was watching. “Is that the worst thing you can say about me?” and “get a better insult” were my common retorts.

I don’t know the actual definition of the word, but if I had to guess at what Miriam Webster would say, I would go with: a promiscuous woman. Woman? A promiscuous person. One who has many partners.

I have had many partners. I unabashedly love sex. In therapy I unpack the childhood trauma and the abusive relationships, but no matter the origin, hypersexuality has always been the cloak that I hide myself in. The clumsy high school bjs graduated to clumsy high school sex with my (football playing) boyfriend once I turned 18. The summer after high school, I told him that I was finally ready to give it up and he was overly enthusiastic to be on the one.

We had our first clumsy attempt on the bathroom floor of his grandpa’s lake cabin. I was on my period, we figured it was a good time because I couldn’t get pregnant. Plus, I was already bleeding! We did it on a towel on the tile floor so as to not make a mess. It didn’t last longer than five minutes. The next week, back in his basement bedroom, surrounded by posters of the Doors and Pink Floyd, I told him I didn’t want to do it again. It wasn’t fun.

“You didn’t have fun?”

“No, I didn’t get off.”

“What? You will this time.” Insert devil grin emoji.

He made it his mission to make me orgasm as many times as possible. He was already pretty adept. I’m grateful I was lucky to be with someone during my first times who showed me that my partners should always enthusiastically want me to orgasm before they’re allowed to fuck me.

He was a lot of firsts. The first man to tie me up. The first man to take a naked picture of me. The first man to hit me (if we don’t count my father). I loved him, for all the things he was and wasn’t. I love that he made sex fun

We went our separate ways and I graduated to university level sluttery. The dark backseats of Fargo, ND had not prepared me for the very adult situations I would encounter once I was completely unsupervised and alone in the big city. I went immediately to the student health center and put myself on birth control, my mind finally set at ease that I would not be an unintentional mother.

My first year of college held so many more firsts: sex, yes. All the kinds. Changing partners like changing outfits, the dorms provided fertile hunting ground for hookups. I struggle to remember those days clearly, drinking played a more important role in my first year of college than men, though of course the two went hand in hand. I slept with the boys from the dorm. I slept with the men I met in classes, or from the local coffee shops. I would always give someone two chances at sex with me. If the first time didn’t go well, they got a second shot because everybody gets nervous sometimes. I slept with both my best friend’s boyfriend and my boyfriend’s best friend.

I slept with men on the first date. I slept with women. I had my first threesomes. I dated a woman who was my brother’s ex. Two friends from high school drove down to visit me in my dorm and we had a threesome on the floor while my roommate was away. The next day he got a tattoo on his forearm of the cat from the cover of that Blues Traveler album, and she held my hand while I got my tongue pierced.

In college, I met my new best friend and was delighted to discover she was a complete slut. She owned that word with confidence, I learned so much from her. By the time I’d met her, her body count was over 100. “What’s up, slut?” was our greeting, or in a group chat “my slutsssss” was how my college friends and I greeted each other. It meant my girls, my loves, my people. The ones with too-short skirts who are always laughing/crying over a cock sucking joke, they are the real ones, the ladies I always want to sit next to.

My journal from those years tells of men falling in love with me and asking for commitments while I would show them to the door, thanking them for their services. Not many actors made it past the second audition. A handful of men made it to the role of “guy I’m dating” but there was not a single boyfriend or steady anything for me. I would see them out as soon as they started to get attached.

At 20, I met my husband, and my slutty behavior took a seat for a few years, though of course it was exactly that which drew him to me. We had sex on the first date, and I was shocked when he went down on me, enthusiastically giving me multiple orgasms and then staying the night. We had incredible chemistry right from the start. He loved my body and told me how perfect I was, he loved touching me and making me squeal and scream. He loved how good I was at blowjobs, the reason for the tongue piercing, of course. For the first few months, sex was almost all we did. We moved in together immediately, we’d known each other just under three months when the lease was signed. The wedding was the following year.

For awhile, I did my best to be the good wife. I played the part. I was faithful to my marriage for its first seven years, and then – well –I cheated.

Ugh, what a slut.

After the initial incident, we tried to open our marriage, though I was never on board with the rules and continued, for years, to play by my own. Slipping secretly into the beds of men that I desired while he was off pursuing his own interests: the women he met on okcupid and craigslist, and the threesomes I reluctantly agreed to have with him. I was a slut then, but I was trying to keep it a secret.

At the suggestion of one of my boyfriends, I started selling content. He told me I’d make an incredible camgirl, as he deeply loved the racy Snapchats I was secretly sending. Dave loved the idea. He thought it was hot that men would jerk off about me, sexy that others could fantasize about me but he was the only one who got to fuck me (or so he thought). He wanted to help take my pictures and fuck me on livecam. He called it his “favorite tv show,” I would stay home while the kids were at school and he was at work and livestream myself masturbating in front of the record shelves. I would play vinyl while my fans’ tips would activate my vibrator.  My childhood fantasy of nameless, faceless men making me orgasm was surprisingly easy to make into reality.

Camming was fun and I loved doing it. I made money easily and found that my favorite part was chatting with the men I met online. I would do video calls and get off together watching each other. I felt so sexy in those one-on-one’s with strange men all over the world, I loved getting to know them and what they liked and what their lives were like. It was hot for me to have internet lovers that were far away and would only ever know me by a fake name. So much of it was just listening about their kinks and not shaming them, hearing stories about their partners that were loving but not giving, not kinky like me. They made me feel so loved. So much of sex work is just listening.

It all screeched to a halt when my 13-year-old nephew found my racy Instagram, which linked to my racy Twitter, which linked to the myfreecams page, which led my (conservative, still Catholic) sister to find out that: oh no! Once again, I was being an embarrassing slut.

She went through the roof, and I got to explain to my 68 year old mother what a camgirl was while taking down all of my pages and dying in shame. I did my best to try to repair the damage, but this time my sluttiness shot a massive hole in the relationship I have with my family and it lasted 18 months. Flashbacks of those Barbie backdrops came immediately. Some people get really mad when they find out you’re a slut on the internet, and it sucked to be told that you are no longer a part of someone’s family just because you happen to like masturbating online with strangers (and hey! Let’s be honest: friends :)). It sucked to not see my nephews for a year and a half and it sucked to feel ashamed of my existence. There’s a lot of self-loathing that comes with being caught doing something dirty and weird. Sometimes it feels bad to be a slut.

It didn’t stop me from being dirty and weird, though. I disappeared from all social media and promised myself and my husband I would never have a Twitter account again. But you can’t kill that slut in me. She may hide but she will always return. I broke that promise and re-joined Twitter in 2020.

It was the beginning of the pandemic. I didn’t know it yet, but my marriage was crumbling. I didn’t tell him when I joined because I didn’t have any reason to. I wasn’t going to join onlyfans, and at first, I didn’t. I was looking for something to do. I made friends online because I’m funny, not with pictures of my butt (this time). I got added to DM rooms and achieved brief internet stardom when buzzfeed picked up an instructional series I did with a zucchini on how to take better dick pics.

A year later, when I had one foot out the door of my marriage and I had started to contemplate how much it would cost to separate myself from my husband, when I finally got back to being dirty and embarrassing on the internet.

I initially joined OF out of spite. One of the mean girls in a DM room was trash talking me and said I had a “dead-eyed hooker stare” in my selfies, so I joined Only Fans to spite that mean bitch and see how much money I could make with my incredible dead eyed hooker stare.

Turns out it was $3K in the first month. What a surprise! That was more than I ever made live camming. I didn’t tell Dave. Instead, I opened an online savings account in only my name and decided it would be, “just in case” money. We had maybe $500 in our joint savings. All of our accounts were shared. For the first time, this money felt like it was all mine.

My following grew quickly during the pandemic. I was traveling for work and would pack up a selection of lingerie and pretty panties to take to hotels, where I honed my skills of self-photography. Learning how lighting works and the basics of editing made my pictures better and better. Through the lens of my own camera, I started to fall in love with myself. The money growing in my account made it possible for me to move up the timeline of leaving my marriage.

In April of last year, the kids and I moved out. In May, I delivered the divorce papers, and the following week he took his life, setting off a series of event that rocketed me to the unenviable position of The Internet’s Most Loathesome Slut (a self-inflicted title). The shock of my husband’s suicide is something that is still difficult to relive. Thinking about that time feels blurry, like my memory is sticky, not fully formed. The week after he died, I posted on Twitter a picture of us and a post that said that if you’re struggling, please don’t do this, please seek help. The trolls found me fast, and juxtaposed against my onlyfans posts, I got shared and then reshared as, “Woman Fakes Husband’s Death to Sell Nudes” Reddit got ahold of it and I made it to the front page of r/trashy at lightning speed, and a horrid little incel named Adam wrote a knowyourmeme.com article about me.

The internet stardom meant peers and acquaintenaces started to recognize me, and after his obituary was posted around, the narrative changed to “Horrible Slut Uses Husband’s Suicide to Profit” and the ghastly “He Killed Himself Because of You” messages rolled right in. The tide of hate was shocking, and in the weeks after his death I would lay in bed and read the death and rape threats and claims from strangers that I was the reason he killed himself, because I was SLUT. I caused his death because I had an onlyfans, it was my fault he died because I was gross and embarrassing on the internet. “He killed the wrong person” was the general sentiment, along with “women can’t be trusted” and “have you no remorse?” At the same time, I rocketed to the top 1% of OnlyFans, because the haters love nothing more than seeing you with your pants down.

At first, I attempted to reason with them, thinking that if I could just convince everyone that he loved my camming and always wanted to fuck me on livestream they would realize that it wasn’t my fault he was dead. But then I remembered you can’t reason with people who are set on misunderstanding you, so I locked my account and disappeared from social media, praying my sister didn’t see.

I don’t think he killed himself because I’m a slut. I’m pretty sure he killed himself because he was severely mentally ill and struggling with lifelong depression and alcoholism, though I accept that I am not blameless.

Feeling like the entire internet hates me and thinks I’m gross and disgusting has not given me as much perspective on my sluttery as I would like. I’m surprised as much as anyone that I’m not ashamed. If I’ve learned anything in the year and half since his death, I have learned to forgive myself. To love me as I am, where I am. Radical acceptance and self love aren’t just for the kids these days. You don’t have to write it on a bathroom mirror in lipstick or post it on Reddit: I know I’m a slut. Is that the worst thing you can say about me?

Get a better insult.