I’m the funny one, not the pretty one – Erin

Erin is a queer woman who deals with OCD, has tattoos that help her love her body, and has always seen herself as the "funny one" not the "pretty one."
Good Girls Talk About Sex
Good Girls Talk About Sex
I'm the funny one, not the pretty one – Erin
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Erin is a 34-year-old, cisgender female who describes herself as queer, in a new relationship, she isn’t certain of her preferred relationship style.

Erin deals with OCD, plus related mental conditions that cause her to pull her hair (Trichotillomania) and pick her skin (Dermatillomania). Those conditions cause her nervousness when exposing herself with a new partner.

Major themes in this episode include being queer, OCD, and exploring sex in adulthood.

AUDIO EXTRAS:

  • Bisexuality – the language that is used around it and the experiences each of us have had around being rejected for it as well as being fetishized for it
  • Choosing a monogamous relationship after exploring ethical non-monogamy
  • The extended Q&A

 

In this episode we talk about

  • Feeling the tingle watching animated cartoons
  • Growing up in a progressive culture
  • The lack of good sex education, even in a progressive city
  • Erin’s first time having sex
  • The dreaded moment of receiving oral from a boyfriend who didn’t like doing it
  • Basing her teen body image on being the “funny one”
  • How getting tattoos as an adult has helped Erin to embrace her body
  • The positive impact improving her body image has had on her sex life
  • Erin’s first relationship with a woman
  • Navigating dating and sexuality with a form of OCD that is very visible (skin picking and hair pulling)
  • Erin talks about her hard red lines around sex

Full episode text

LEAH: Hi, I’m Leah Carey and this is Good Girls Talk About Sex. This is place to share conversations with all sorts of women about their experience of sexuality. Before we get started, I want to tell you this. These are unfiltered conversations between adult women talking about sex. If anything about the previous offends you, turn back now! And if you’re looking for a trigger warning, you’re not going to get it from me. I believe that you are stronger than the trauma you have experienced. I have faith in your ability to deal with the things that upset you. Sound good? Let’s start the show!

[MUSIC]

LEAH: In today’s episode, we’ll meet Erin, a 34 year old cisgender woman who describes herself as white, queer, recently in a new relationship, and still unsure of her preferred relationship style. Erin deals with OCD plus related mental conditions that cause her to pull her hair and pick her skin. Those conditions cause her nervousness when exposing herself with a new partner. I’m so pleased to introduce Erin!

I am so excited to meet you. Oh, you’re so adorable! [LAUGHTER]

LEAH: Before we started, just to clear everybody in. Before we started recording, Erin got on the phone and she was like, “I’m kind of fangirling”, which I think is the cutest thing ever.

[LAUGHTER]

LEAH: And you’re already giggling.

ERIN: Yeah, that’s true.

LEAH: I’m so happy to have you here. [LAUGHTER]

ERIN: Thank you. I’m really excited to be here.

LEAH: So you contacted me and said you were a listener and you wanted to be involved so what is so exciting to you about this?

ERIN: I took a class that you taught at She Bob. LEAH: It’s a sex store here in Portland.

ERIN: Yeah, and I went with one of my really close friends and it was just this hugely transformative experience for me and for her actually. And then I started listening to your podcast then I felt so good. The podcast feels good to listen to. The class was incredible and so I was like, “Whatever I can do to push this really wonderful experience forward and out to more people, I’m going to do it. I’m excited to do it.”

LEAH: Oh my goodness. Wow. Well, thank you. That means a lot to me to know that what I’m doing is having resonance and is making a difference. That’s a really big deal, so thank you.

ERIN: Yeah, absolutely.

[LAUGHTER]

LEAH: Well, I’m excited to talk to you. So let’s dive in. What is your first memory of sexual pleasure? [LAUGHTER]

ERIN: I don’t remember how old I was. I was young-ish. I mean to say early middle school, maybe late grade school. And I think I was watching Oliver and Company or like Robin Hood, some older animated Disney movie and I was like, “Oh, that’s interesting. Robin Hood is very cute, even if he’s an animated fox.”

[LAUGHTER]

ERIN: It makes no sense. And so I just remember the tingly thing going and I was like, “That’s weird. I don’t know if I enjoyed that.” And I kind of just ignored that for a little while and then later on, once I started hanging out with or dating people or things like that, that’s when I was like, “Oh, I was able to make that connection back like oh, this thing that now I’m doing is connected to that thing from when I was a kid.” Yeah, so I really don’t remember how old I was but I was young enough that it was about a Disney cartoon.

[LAUGHTER]

LEAH: So at what point did you have that experience with a live non-animated person?

[LAUGHTER]

ERIN: Probably 8th grade. However old you are in 8th grade like 12, 13-ish somewhere in there. Yeah, I think somewhere like that. And it was with this boy that I loved or thought I loved forever and ever and we kissed for the first time and it was very exciting and all that. And so yeah, that was early days.

[LAUGHTER]

LEAH: How far did you go with him? ERIN: Oh, that was it.

[LAUGHTER]

ERIN: Yeah, partially because he grew up super religious and I was not. And so there was an element of I was the wrong kind of girl kind of thing. I’m doing finger quotes, but the “wrong” kind of girl to his family so there was like some of that going on. To me it was great but to him it was not great.

[LAUGHTER]

LEAH: Did you grow up in the Portland area?

ERIN: Yeah, I did. I moved here when I was a kid. I was 5 I think and I grew up in the suburbs here.

LEAH: It’s interesting to me because I grew up in an extremely conservative area where boys and girls didn’t really date. I mean it was just barely starting around 8th grade but Portland is a very progressive area. So what was your experience growing up in this area? Were there conversations about sex? Was that stuff happening earlier?

ERIN: Yeah, it’s interesting. So my family is from the mid-West like my extended family. And that’s where I was born and my parents were born there and all of that. I think that my parents did bring some of that, at least relatively more conservative viewpoints with us to Portland. They certainly aren’t as liberal with things as I am but I wouldn’t classify them as conservatives either.

But I remember in 7th grade or something, my mom telling me, “You’re not supposed to call boys. You’re supposed to wait for boys to call you.” And so my reaction to that was to be like, “That’s stupid. I’m calling whoever I want to call.” So I think because I grew up here instead of in the mid-West, I think that had a big impact on how I reacted to those kinds of viewpoints or that conservative viewpoint because it never made sense to me. But I do think that had I grown up in the mid-West that would have been really different. But no, that was the extent of the talk. To this day, technically I’ve never received the birds and the bees talk from my parents.

LEAH: Oh really?

ERIN: Yeah.

[LAUGHTER]

ERIN: They did that thing. They left a book out that I discovered. [LAUGHTER]

ERIN: And that’s how I learned about it but there was never a conversation about it at all. It’s still not something that we talk about at all.

LEAH: So what kind of Sex Ed did you get in schools or did you?

ERIN: So at the time I was in high school, the school that I went to had abstinence only education, which

at the time I also thought was very stupid. [LAUGHTER]

ERIN: But it was because of the types of parents that were on the PTA and who the administration of the school was and that kind of thing, they were super conservative. And so, that was not sufficient education at all and I kind of knew that.

Because of that, I think that with some of my girlfriends, we had more open conversations about what we were experiencing because we kind of had to make up for it if that makes sense. There were still certainly gaps like one 16 year old girl trying to teach another 16 year old girl what we know doesn’t compensate for a thorough education on that.

LEAH: No, that is very much the blind leading the blind.

ERIN: Yeah, absolutely. It was a lot of like “If you have sex, you will get pregnant and die kind of

perspective.”

LEAH: So what about the abstinence only education? What specific messages were you hearing?

ERIN: It was very much like, “There are two kinds of birth control. There are either condoms or nothing.” LEAH: Oh, wow.

ERIN: It was that kind of message. And they might have talked about a cervical cap which I don’t know anyone in my generation has ever used one let alone knows what it is.

[LAUGHTER]

ERIN: And they might have mentioned something like that. But they talked a lot about STIs and STDs. They talked a lot about teen pregnancy and that kind of thing and there were some girls that got pregnant in my high school with various results from that. But it didn’t seem like there was an above average number of teen pregnancies at my high school. There maybe were, I’m not sure.

The other thing I remember happening was our senior year, we had to do a senior project. And somebody in the class ahead of us did a project on Planned Parenthood. And as part of their project, they gave out condoms around school. And they got suspended for a week for it, just for handing out. There were a lot of messages like that more than really direct messages of this being wrong or bad. It was just clearly indicated through the actions of the administration.

LEAH: So you weren’t getting any conversation at home and you weren’t getting any reasonable education at school. You sound like you were getting most of your education from other 16 year old girls.

[LAUGHTER]

LEAH: So what did you believe about sex?

ERIN: I do think that I was never taught that it was wrong by people whose opinions I cared about. Does that make sense? At the time, if my parents had told me it was wrong, that probably would have bothered me but our health teacher, I couldn’t give two shits about what he thought.

[LAUGHER]

ERIN: So his opinion of it didn’t sink in and so I never had the kind of shame that I know a lot of people experienced and still experience. And it’s something that I’m really grateful for because that would be really challenging I imagine.

[LAUGHTER]

ERIN: So I never really experienced that kind of shame or embarrassment. There was a lot of gendered embarrassment or shame like “Girls shouldn’t like this as much as boys kind of stuff.” That was more the messaging that I got from a little bit from my mom, definitely from friends’ parents and things like that but very little about just the act of it being wrong.

LEAH: So you had that first kiss when you’re around 8th grade, what happened next?

ERIN: I had a lot of boyfriends when I was younger because I got bored easily is probably why.

[LAUGHTER]

ERIN: And I also was always lusting after my friends’ boyfriends, which was not good but even as a 13th year old, I was like, “Oh, I want that one and I want that one.”

[LAUGHTER]

ERIN: Like picking them off the shelf and so that was probably the thing that came next. I was like, “Oh, okay, kissing, I like this kissing thing. I like this. Give me more of this.” And so I sought that out. And I started going out to this summer camp that was a really important experience in my life that I attended and worked at for a long time so there was a lot of that because there was like sleep away camp and so of course there were a lot of shenanigans that went on there.

[LAUGHTER]

ERIN: So a lot of stuff, a lot of experiences especially first experiences at summer camp with my camp friends and friends with benefits kind of stuff.

LEAH: And how far did you go as a teenager?

ERIN: I didn’t have sex for the first time until I was 18 and it was with my high school sweetheart and it

was fine. [LAUGHTER]

ERIN: That sounds mean. It wasn’t horrible. I know so many people of all genders who had this horrible first experience and I didn’t have that. It’s funny I remember him asking me if it hurt. There’s that kind of sort of myth I guess. And I was like I said yes but I totally didn’t and I’m like, “That’s weird. That’s weird that that didn’t hurt for me. That’s supposed to.”

LEAH: So you said yes because you thought it was supposed to?

ERIN: Yeah, absolutely and I didn’t want him to think that there was something wrong with me,

physically wrong with me.

LEAH: Or maybe you weren’t already a virgin?

ERIN: Right, also that. Yeah and that the time, I remember junior and senior year like virginity was such a big deal like who had lost it, who hadn’t and now looking back on it, meh, it’s a social construct who cares? That kind of thing.

[LAUGHTER]

LEAH: In high school, talking about virginity being a social construct, yeah, the further I get into this world of sex and sexuality, I recognize that this thing we call virginity is only linked to intercourse but there’s all sorts of stuff that is sex that isn’t necessarily intercourse. So were there things that you were doing prior to having intercourse that you would say was sex?

ERIN: Absolutely. And it’s funny you say that too because at the time, I wouldn’t have defined those things as sex either. But now looking back, just what P and V sex is like, that’s not all there is and just counting that as the thing is I don’t know, I think it’s an outdated perspective I guess. And it’s certainly something that I’ve changed my perspective on as well over time. But oh yeah, absolutely I was.

[LAUGHTER]

ERIN: The guy I dated in high school, we were together for 2 years so a lot of it was with him and the people at summer camp too because it was summer camp.

[LAUGHTER]

ERIN: So yeah, I don’t know. It was a lot of trying out oral and things like that. And it’s actually not a funny story but the guy I was with in high school, I remember we tried going down on each other for the first time. And later I was talking to him about it and I made some joke about him doing it again and he’s like, “I didn’t like it.” And so that’s one thing that I had shame about for a long time actually is like I was like, “Oh God, there is something gross about me that makes him not want to do this. I don’t want to ever experience that again.” And so, I would refuse to have somebody go down on me for a long time.

LEAH: Did you ever ask him what it was he didn’t like about it? ERIN: Yes.

[LAUGHTER]

LEAH: And what did he say?

ERIN: It was all the worst answers. “I don’t like how it looks. I don’t like how it tastes.” It’s all of the things like I still kind of fear to this day. But yeah, that was such a huge blow to my ego and my self esteem, all of that stuff. It sucked a lot.

LEAH: Have you heard other people as you went on through life say, “I love how it looks and I love how it tastes” and do you agree with them?

ERIN: Yes. My answer today would probably be different two days ago like it kind of depends I guess. Maybe it depends on how good a liar that person is.

[LAUGHTER]

ERIN: I’m just kidding.

[LAUGHTER]

LEAH: I think that those early voices carry so much weight especially when they’re negative and it’s really challenging to override those voices even when we hear good things later.

ERIN: Totally and for so long, it’s the kind of thing that you don’t tell somebody else about. I didn’t tell my girlfriends that he had said that. I would never have told them about that. In part because it’s the dynamic between teenage girls but it would have been ammo against me, I didn’t want that. But I think now yes, I believe it when somebody says something nice about me in that way but that’s honestly probably only in the last 4 years that that’s the case. So from 18 to 30, I wouldn’t believe it for a second.

LEAH: So what about your relationship with your body in general? As a teenager, how did you feel about your body?

ERIN: I was always the funny one not the pretty one. Sometimes I was the smart one. When one of my friends wasn’t around, I was the smart one because she was always the smart one.

[LAUGHTER]

ERIN: And I had a lot of really beautiful friends. I mean I think they were. And I look back in these pictures of me from that age and I’m like, “I was thin and tan and lovely and I didn’t know it.” And probably my girlfriends didn’t know it about themselves either, even the ones that were beautiful.

But I was frequently one of the guys or whatever instead of being the desirable one, which it sucked. It meant I had a lot of deeper friendships with some of those people like some of the guys that I am friends with still or was friends with for a really long time. But it also I think led to me being thought of and me thinking of myself as not the person you’d date, just the person you mess around with because I was convenient or I was there when the pretty ones weren’t there that kind of thing.

And I think it bothered me more than what I would have acknowledged outwardly and that sucked a lot. But now, my relationship with my body is a lot different. I have a lot of tattoos and those have been really integral to me feeling good about how I look and feeling beautiful.

LEAH: Really?

ERIN: Yeah. The best examples that I have is that I have a big tattoo on one of my thighs and thighs are not a thing that I would show off normally. There’s a period of time where I wouldn’t wear shorts and that kind of thing. But now, I feel like that part of me is really beautiful and so I’m like, “Yeah.” I’m like, “I’m going to wear the dress with the really high slit and I’m going to wear the short shorts.”

So I think that getting tattoos helped me really love how I look and it’s been other things too. I dye my hair fun crazy colors and things like that and that makes me also feel beautiful in a way that frankly is confusing to a lot of people.

[LAUGHTER]

ERIN: But it’s a kind of ownership. I’m taking ownership over how I look and choosing to look a certain way and that’s been a really powerful aspect of who I’ve become

[MUSIC]

LEAH: Y’all it makes my heart melt every time there’s a new review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much for letting me know that you enjoy the podcast. For instance, DurhamHP wrote, “Love this new podcast from Leah Carey. It’s time we start welcoming honest conversations about sex. Bravo!”

Thanks DurhamHP. I love hosting these honest conversations because they’re exactly what I have craved all of my life. You can find more of each of these conversations at patreon.com/goodgirlstalkaboutsex. The Patreon extras for this episode are at the 1 dollar a month level, Erin and I talk about bisexuality, the language that is used about it, and the experiences she and I have had around being rejected for it as well as being fetishized for it. At the 5 dollar a month level, Erin talks about choosing a monogamous relationship after exploring ethical non-monogamy. At the 7 dollar a month level, you get those conversations plus the extended Q and A. At the 10 dollar a month level, you get all of that plus the monthly ask me anything. To learn more about becoming a community supporter and to get all of these goodies, visit patreon.com/goodgirlstalkaboutsex.

[MUSIC]

LEAH: Has your experience of sex changed as your relationship with your body has changed?

ERIN: Oh my Gosh, so much, yes. Absolutely, yeah, I’m not as timid. And I’m not really a timid person, there’s kind of one version of me in any situation. I am who I am at work, at home, or with my family but I do think the confidence that I’ve gotten that I’ve created for myself rather than getting from other people has made it so that part of my life, my sex life, has been so much better than it’s ever been. Because I don’t worry, I don’t spend my whole time worrying. It’s so exhausting to worry that much.

LEAH: It really is. You don’t have time or energy to pay attention to what’s enjoyable.

ERIN: Right, exactly, yeah. And it has let me do and try and feel things that I hadn’t before. I didn’t make the space in my brain for it.

LEAH: So I know that you also date women. ERIN: I do.

LEAH: I guess I didn’t ask you when we did the little pre-questionnaire at the beginning and you said queer, I didn’t ask you if that includes dating people who are gender non-conforming or trans.

ERIN: It hasn’t in the past but it’s definitely not something that I’m anti. Yeah, I like everybody. LEAH: Okay.

[LAUGHTER]

LEAH: So when did you discover that you enjoyed people other than just boys?

ERIN: It wasn’t until junior year of college for me, which was this really intense super depressing for me. I lived alone for the first time. There were a lot of things, a lot of mental health stuff came out for me at that time because that should have been the point that I should have been diagnosed with OCD but I didn’t until later.

But that’s when those kinds of things started to surface and that’s when I started to come out to people. And I don’t remember what triggered it, I think what triggered it was I was in love with one of my friends. She was just beautiful. And I had this assumption I think that everyone thought people the same gender of them the same way that I always had but that was not the case apparently.

[LAUGHTER]

ERIN: And so when I realized, “Oh, I think of those people differently and maybe one of my straight friends, one does. Okay, maybe I need to pay attention to that. I need to look at that.”

[LAUGHTER]

ERIN: Yeah, so that was when that was.

LEAH: And what did you do about it? Did you pursue it?

ERIN: I did. And it was so scary. It was really scary. It didn’t help that she lived far away like we were both in college and she was in a different school. But she would send me love notes like snail mail me love notes. It was very sweet.

[LAUGHTER]

ERIN: It was this lovely kind of innocent version of a romance I guess. And yeah, it was good. It surprised me how easy it was once we actually kind of talked to our feelings with one another.

LEAH: So she reciprocated?

ERIN: She did, yeah. And she’s still really beautiful.

[LAUGHTER]

LEAH: So what was it like? You had already had sex with a penis having person at that point. [LAUGHTER]

LEAH: What was it like for you to become physically involved with a female?

ERIN: She was soft and smooth and she was this really strong but still very feminine. Not that the two don’t go together but she was a very strong feminine woman and she had this long, long dark hair. So it was just like apparently checked all of my boxes.

[LAUGHTER]

ERIN: And so it was just this, everything about her was softer like kissing her was just softer and it also felt like almost easier in that there was less directing. That’s what it was. Less directing had to happen because we kind of knew how each other worked a little better I think. I’m sure that’s not always the case but that was the case for us. Ultimately, she decided that she didn’t know how she felt about having sex with women so that kind of led to the end of that.

LEAH: Aww, that’s hard.

ERIN: Yeah, she had a bit of a crisis herself, which I resented her for at the time, which is not fair or okay

but she had to go through her process like I did.

LEAH: It’s also real.

ERIN: Right. Absolutely.

LEAH: Because your emotions were involved at that point.

ERIN: Yeah, that was a hard one. And she actually not long ago found me on one of the dating apps and messaged me and I was like, “Oh, that’s very funny.”

LEAH: Wow, how did you respond?

ERIN: I tried to be nice about it. I was like, “Oh, it’s so good to hear from you.” I like pleasantries, whatever, and I didn’t hear from her after that. So I was like, “Okay, I guess I’m glad you’re alive and doing your thing but also weird.”

LEAH: And also looking for women on dating apps. [LAUGHTER]

ERIN: Also looking for women on dating apps, exactly. So I was like, “Okay, I guess you’ve figured that out. I’m glad that you did.”

[LAUGHTER]

LEAH: Once you identified that you were interested, you were bisexual. How did your dating life proceed from there? Have you gone through periods where you’re more interested in one than the other? Do you just generally look for a person versus a gender? How does that work for you?

ERIN: Yeah. That’s interesting. So where I went to college was like middle farm country and I think I knew two out people and only one of them was another woman. So it didn’t feel at the time there were a lot of options for me when I was in college. That’s probably not accurate but that’s what I felt like. But once I moved back to Portland, it was a lot different than that.

[LAUGHTER]

ERIN: But when I got back here, I went through a 10 year no dating streak. Not a dry spell, but a 10 year no dating streak.

LEAH: Wait, what does that mean? [LAUGHTER]

ERIN: I still had to get some. [LAUGHTER]

LEAH: So you were still having sex with people, you just weren’t dating. And where were you finding people to have sex with?

ERIN: It was mostly friends or friends of friends, which is so not the way to go in my life anyway.

[LAUGHTER]

ERIN: Because then it becomes a thing. So yeah, eventually it became going on the apps and doing the Tinder thing and that sort of stuff. But yeah, so that big chunk of time, I wasn’t looking for anybody. It was whoever was around and whoever was willing to sleep with me basically.

[LAUGHTER]

LEAH: Regardless of gender?

ERIN: Yeah. I call it my slutty phase and I use that not in the use of the word in a negative, I’m happy I went through that. Had I not, I wouldn’t be in the place where I am now. And so I mostly called it that as a joke but it was a long period of time and sometimes, I forget how long it was but yeah.

[LAUGHTER]

LEAH: You mentioned in passing OCD and I wanted to just come back to that for a moment and find out if it’s a completely separate topic, that’s fine. But if it has any impact on your experience of sex and sexuality, I wanted to open that topic.

ERIN: It probably more directly relates to the relationship side, which certainly is connected. But for me, I don’t have a cleanliness thing. The closest thing actually, now I’m going to take it back. Part of my OCD is I pick my skin which is technically a separate disorder but I do think it’s connected, it’s dermatillomania, which is also trichotillomania, which is hair pulling. And so I have those as well because you got to have a whole bunch of disorders if you’re going to have one.

[LAUGHTER]

ERIN: And so that picking at my skin in particular happens when I’m very anxious or I mean frankly just any time. It’s how my body is coping with whatever rampant thoughts is happening in my brain or whatever stressors are outside. Often they have to do with things. For me, I have a lot of food stuff like food has to be eaten in certain numbers, that kind of thing.

And the skin picking is never a fun conversation to have with someone I’m going to sleep with because they can see it. I know they can see it. I wish they didn’t. Right now, I have full eyelashes and eyebrows but I don’t always and I haven’t always. So none of that is a fun conversation and I don’t like how it looks but I also know that I’ve been doing this since I was 10 years old and so stopping is more than just, “Oh, just stop it. Just stop doing it.” But when I know that somebody is going to see these parts of me, I get

really nervous and I feel like I have to give them a heads up almost even though especially when it’s somebody I’m not going to see again like who cares what they think?

[LAUGHTER]

ERIN: But it often gets seen as a self harm thing and it’s not. The food stuff for my OCD often gets seen as an eating disorder thing and it’s not. So it gets misinterpreted a lot and that makes it hard in relationships and in sex because I want to be seen as more than just my mental health issues. But I also do, if I want to be with a person, I also want them to know about and not be freaked out by those things as well. So it’s this weird balance. But the skin picking part of it probably, that definitely impacts my experience of sexuality, yeah.

LEAH: What kind of touch do you enjoy the most?

ERIN: I like a whole range of things. I like little kisses and very gentle stuff but then I can take it to the

other extreme and I love biting. But do I want somebody to bite me in the middle of a restaurant? No. [LAUGHTER]

LEAH: Context is important.

ERIN: It really matters, yeah.

[LAUGHTER]

LEAH: What are your hard red lines?

ERIN: I do not enjoy any kind of anal anything. It’s not for me. LEAH: Giving or receiving?

ERIN: Yeah. I don’t know. It’s not for me. And I don’t want to be choked. I don’t really even like it when somebody puts their hand near my neck. I know that’s a big, popular thing right now it seems but I don’t dig it. That feels too unsafe. It’s things that feel like they are unsafe actions that are surprising. Yeah, that’s what it is. It’s things that feel like I might be at risk even if that person doesn’t intend it. Those are typically my hard lines because I don’t want to feel unsafe. It’s taking me a while to get to the point that I am at with my body and my word and my sex life and I don’t want to introduce things that are too scary. I don’t do the breath play stuff. I don’t like any of that.

[MUSIC]

LEAH: Before we finish up, let’s do the Quick Five. Five quick questions we’d usually be too polite to ask any good girl.

[MUSIC]

LEAH: Do you have sex during your period?

ERIN: I don’t really have one anymore.

LEAH: Really?

ERIN: I have an IUD. When I did have one, I did not. Well, pretty much exclusively because I didn’t want to because I’m a stormy monster who doesn’t want to be touched.

[LAUGHTER]

ERIN: But yeah, it wasn’t something I wanted to do and now it’s not an issue.

LEAH: Does an IUD usually stop a period?

ERIN: It sometimes does. It doesn’t always. And there’s still some times where I’ll get a tiny bit of spotting but it’s almost completely gone which is great.

LEAH: Yeah, I’m a little jealous. [LAUGHTER]

LEAH: What is our favorite way to orgasm with a hand, with a tongue, a toy, a penis, or strap-on, or something else?

ERIN: They feel different. I don’t know if I could pick one or the other. It feels different when I’m by myself with a toy than when I’m with a partner and so I don’t know that I could choose. I think I more consistently do with a toy on my own, clit stimulation. But there are some people that I’ve been able to with just penetrative sex and that’s great. That’s fun. And it just feels different. It’s hard to explain how it feels different.

[LAUGHTER]

ERIN: But it does feel different. So I like them both I guess.

LEAH: You actually just answered my next question which is can you orgasm solely from intercourse or from penetration?

ERIN: I can, yeah, which I am very pleased about because I enjoy it. [LAUGHTER]

LEAH: Have you ever faked an orgasm?

ERIN: Oh, of course. Yes. Who hasn’t?

[LAUGHTER]

LEAH: Are there particular situations in which you do? ERIN: Oh yeah.

[LAUGHTER]

ERIN: I feel like I have to give the caveat. I haven’t recently and I definitely did when I was young, high school, college and I think in part I had this idea that you were supposed to cum at the same time as the person you’re with. And if you didn’t then there’s something wrong with you. And all of that so I think those were the most frequently the times when I would. Looking back, I’m like, “Why? It did me no favors.”

[LAUGHTER]

ERIN: And some people as a result of that, never learned the things that they actually like. I also didn’t have the words to tell them so that combination made it so that we didn’t have as much as fun as I think we could have. So it’s a policy for me now not to fake because it doesn’t do me any good and ultimately, I’m mostly in those situations to get mine and if the other person enjoys it, that’s great too.

LEAH: Do you have hair down there or are you bare?

ERIN: I do have hair, yeah.

LEAH: Do you trim it? Do you do anything with it?

ERIN: Yeah, I trim it and I do waxing on the edges. It’s funny being back on the apps relatively recently, that’s like the second thing that a lot of at least men ask.

LEAH: What? ERIN: Yeah.

LEAH: Oh my God. [LAUGHTER]

ERIN: Yeah. It’s like, “Hey, how’s your Friday? Are you fully shaved?: Those are like the first two questions.

[LAUHGTER]

LEAH: Oh my God.

ERIN: Yeah, at first it would make me embarrassed. I was like, “Oh, I’m not doing this the way that I should be.” And then eventually, I was able to answer, “No I’m not and if that’s a problem, see you” basically. But it was very funny to start to experience that question rapid fire especially because it was like a shock every time I asked it back.

[LAUGHTER]

ERIN: Because the answer was almost always no. Again, at least from dudes like, “No, of course I’m not.” And I’m like, “Really? Of course you’re not? That seems unfair. It’s not how this works.”

[LAUGHTER]

LEAH: Wow. I’m going to have to process that for a while.

[LAUGHTER]

LEAH: Do you enjoy dirty talk during sexual encounters?

ERIN: Definitely, yeah, mostly if I’m the one talking. Yeah, it’s fun. It’s like a fun very intimate but playful thing that I enjoy. It being playful is something that I really enjoy in that part of my life.

LEAH: So that is all of the questions. We have done it.

ERIN: We’ve done it! I’m very excited that we did this. This is very exciting for me. [LAUGHTER]

LEAH: Me too. Thank you so much.

ERIN: Yeah, yeah.

[MUSIC]

LEAH: Thanks for joining me today on Good Girls Talk About Sex. If you have questions or comments about anything you’ve heard or if you’d like to be a guest on the show, please email me at leah@goodgirlstalkaboutsex.com.

I was only able to step outside my good girl box when someone I respected told me it was possible to do it. If you’d like to step outside your good girl box, I’m here to tell you it’s possible. And I can provide you with tools to name your desires and communicate them effectively to your partner or potential partners. If you’re interested in working with me, visit leahcarey.com/coaching. You can find me on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube at IamLeahCarey. You can find these links and any resources we’ve mentioned during the interview in the Show Notes.

I’m Leah Carey and I look forward to talking with you again next week. Here’s to your better sex life! [MUSIC]

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Host / Producer / Editor – Leah Carey (email)
Transcripts – Jan Acielo
Music – Nazar Rybak

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