“I have a surprise for you…”

I always hate when guys say that. Mostly because not much surprises me, and I suck at feigning astonishment. I brace myself as he plops on my countertop a small bottle of hand sanitizer.

“Look at the bottle. It made me think of you.”

…

When you write about sex for a living, people have two misconceptions.

A. You have a lot of sex (I wish).

B. Your job is never dull.

If you read the longwinded research papers that I have to slog through, you too would get bleary-eyed every time you saw the…

As someone born in the wrong century, I get annoyed when a man walks next to me but doesn't walk on the traffic side of the sidewalk. In Victorian times, not protecting your date from muddy carriages would be the epitome of classlessness.

And although the Victorians get pigeonholed as…

When I was thirteen, my older sister saved my life. Or so she claims.

She administered an eighteenth-century-style chickenpox inoculation. She sat on my head and rubbed her open, weeping, itchy, chickenpox sores all over my arms, legs, and torso. It was a tad cruel.

“Mom says you have to…

Throughout history, women didn't know what to do with men's penises. During the Renaissance, the first time many young maidens saw a penis was on their wedding night. Before that day, mothers only taught their daughters to preserve their chastity and not get pregnant.

By the seventeenth century, naughty authors…

Whenever I cooked for my ex-boyfriend Carlos,* he would immediately grab the salt and shake, shake, shake over my meal.

"Don't you want to taste it first to see if it needs salt?" I would ask.

He would half roll his eyes and say, "You never add enough salt."

So…

On the anniversary of the Capitol attack, Americans today will inevitably doomscroll through shocking footage of the rioters who desecrated democracy. We remember the poop-smeared marble floors, the noose hanging ominously above the Capitol steps, and the costumed rioter dressed as the Viking warlord of his wet dreams.

But out…