Sex positivity

No, they don’t. (Easy for me to say. I’m a woman.) Due to my writing and interest in sex positive representation in the genre, I’ve been lucky to connect with many sex experts and therapists. Recently, I was talking with one and she said a lot of couples come into her office and the male partner claims he needs sex. “Sex is not a need. It’s a want,” she said. A need is something you must have to survive. Water, food, shelter. These are things that a human would die without. No one has ever died from lack of sex. That’s not to say that some, regardless of gender, feel… read more

I was a busy mom. I had a stressful job in tech. My husband did too. We had two kids we were trying to raise in a culture of pressure and affluence. Spoiler: It’s not as fun as it sounds. My days were filled with hustle at work, transporting people from here to there, cheering at youth sporting events, squeezing in time for a workout as I fruitlessly tried to match the thinner moms, and making another (sadly) non-organic dinner that at least one kid would refuse to eat. Side note: I worked from home. My husband commuted to the… read more

I spend a lot of time thinking about people’s sexual fantasies. As a steamy romance writer, understanding common sexual fantasies is a key part of writing intimate relationships that resonate with readers. Some of us have perfectly vanilla mainstream fantasies. Others of us do not. Just because we have a fantasy about something doesn’t mean we want to live it out in real life. If you fantasize about toxic men, it doesn’t mean you want a toxic man. Take the Fifty Shades of Grey series of books by E.L. James. It did not sell 165 million copies to date because… read more

Let’s give today’s men some credit. They can handle the truth if their female partner just isn’t getting there this time. They experience combat. They run big businesses. They lift heavy things and so much more. Men are capable adult human beings exactly like women. So why do we women feel the need to protect them in the bedroom, even to our own detriment? Faking it is about caretaking Researcher Debby Herbenick and colleagues published in Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2019 about why women fake orgasm. The study of over 1000 women, most of whom reported being heterosexual, living… read more

In part one of this article, I mentioned how romance novels have evolved to be more diverse than the standard hero-on-a-horse/damsel-in-distress trope. Though we still love a good alpha male/ingenue story. “Fifty Shades of Grey” anyone? But modern romance novels are not all about alphas and ingenues. From including diverse characters to safe sex practices to confronting genuine issues with intimacy, these novels have become much more. There are best-sellers featuring same-sex couples, racial diversity, and neurodivergence just to name of few areas of growth. Everyone deserves to see themselves in the pages of a romance novel, and now more… read more

Yes, I believe reading romance novels can improve your sex life. But smart people don’t read romance. Orthose books are unrealistic or porn or fill-in-the-blank with whatever negative idea you’ve heard about the genre. Then keep reading because I have a point. Note: according to the Oxford Classic Dictionary, many scholars would argue that representing sexual activity, or obscenity in images or writing, does not necessarily make it pornography. Rather, it is defined as “material which presents people—particularly women—as mute, available, and subordinate sexual objects, often shown in a context of violence.” Romance is not porn. For years, some have… read more