Submissive men have it rough. They are aroused by dominant women in a world that prizes female submission. Men with alpha characteristics are sought after. Women want men who seem powerful.

Women don’t necessarily want a “submissive” guy. They especially don’t want a man who is submissive in the bedroom. Any perceived weakness in men is looked down on. The shame surrounding submission is only exacerbated because this sexual preference is so misunderstood.

Fetish disgusts many people. Most can’t understand why a man might get off acting like a dog, being urinated on, or having his testicles tortured. Many fetishes…

When I met my current partner, it was love at first sight. He walked into our appointed meeting place — a dive bar — and we locked eyes. That was it, we were in love.

You’d think our story ended there. We lived happily ever after without any problems. The sex was great, period.

It was — at least mostly it was.

There was one issue. My boyfriend was having trouble becoming erect. When he did get an erection, he had trouble staying that way.

What was the problem?

He’d recently come out of a twenty-five-year-long marriage that bordered on…

Have you ever met someone who’s had sex with a lot of people? Like a lot of people. Do you ever wonder if this makes them incapable of committing to just one person?

If you would have asked me this question when I was younger and much less sexually experienced, I’d had told you yes. I believed all the stereotypes surrounding “promiscuous” people. They didn’t value themselves. They didn’t know how to make good choices. They certainly weren’t interested in a commitment. They probably weren’t even able to have one.

I wouldn’t have been able to give you data to…

“Usually women don’t let me have sex with them this soon,” Alex said to me, shaking his head as if he regretted the orgasm I’d just given him. I certainly didn’t regret the climax I’d just had with him. What was his problem?

Sure, we’d just met. We were on our first date. Well, if you could call meeting up for coffee and then jumping into bed “a date.” There was no dinner, no movie — but Alex was cute and I was horny. We ended up back at his place.

We’d had sex consensually. Now we were lying naked…

Back in the days before Craigslist got rid of its Casual Encounters section, I met a man there. His name was Lee and he was both very handsome as well as extremely direct about the fact he wasn’t looking for a relationship. All he wanted from a meeting was to give a woman pleasure. I jumped at the opportunity.

I wanted pleasure and I wasn’t interested in anything serious. Well, at least not with Lee.

I was physically attracted to him but I already sensed we weren’t a match for the long term. …

I was in a Clubhouse room the other day when a man spoke up to say he’d broken up with a woman he really liked because she’d had sex with too many other men. His name was Michael and his now ex-girlfriend had slept with sixty other guys. The sex was great but her high number of previous sexual partners made him too uncomfortable to continue on in the relationship.

Michael’s comment astounded me. I chimed in to say that maybe he’d enjoyed the sex so much with this woman exactly because she’d had practice with so many other men…

It’s a matter of time before my eldest son finds out I’ve done sex work. He was talking about looking up his father’s LinkedIn profile the other day while we were at the grocery store. As I bagged apples, he said, “I want to look up your LinkedIn, too.”

I sighed, put the bag of apples in our cart, and pushed on through produce.

What else could I do? I’d always known this day was coming. I’d been dreading it for years. …

I liked Sonny. No, he didn’t work in the sex industry as I did. He also wasn’t typically attending parties frequented by people with alternative sexualities. I was going to so many of these parties that what most people considered “alternative” no longer felt alternative to me. It just felt normal.

I felt normal as a sexually alternative individual. I was comfortable walking around nude at these parties, amidst people who were freely engaging in BDSM play, swinging, cuckolding, whatever.

But Sonny had never been to one of these events. We met at a regular old bar, over a glass…