The Basics of Sex Writing - Part 1

How writing about your sex life can help you claim your power and change your life.

P.C. Carli Jeen

Part 1 - Why Write About Your Sex Life?

For the last couple of years, I’ve been writing about my sex life on my Substack, Misseducated. Until now, I had never stopped to consider how this form of self-expression might have changed my life for the better or how doing the same could change yours.

Writing about anything I’ve experienced has been an excellent way for me to process how I feel and reconnect with myself. While it can sometimes be hard to start, the writing flow has become enlivening and addictive for me. But writing about your sex life? That’s got a bit of a different flavor. I am NOT saying that you have to be strange like me and post your most intimate experiences on the internet (unless you want to, in which case, be my guest.) But here, I hope to share why writing about your sex life might be an interesting pursuit for you and worth at least a couple of hours of your time.

In Part 2, I’ll get to How to Write about Your Sex Life, and if all goes well, in Part 3, I might even share my idea for a fun, collaborative project on this topic. FYI, here I mostly speak about being a woman because I am one, but men, trans, and non-binary folk may also find it a helpful exercise.

1. You’ll gain ownership of your reality.

In my experience, the act of writing about our sex lives is the quickest way to short-circuit what society has told us about ourselves for so long.

I enjoy some things about being a woman, like deep emotional chats with my female friends, but honestly, most of the rest of it is constructed and crap. The beauty industry has morphed into this toxic wellness industry with the same ads of new celebrity poster girls. No female can avoid or escape this, especially not the young girls scrolling on TikTok. It seems that our society is obsessed with telling women how we should look, how we should be, and, indeed, who we are.

With the expectations of marriage and the fake portrayals of my female sexuality through porn, growing up, I’ve found it difficult to differentiate between what is my true self and what is false. Writing about my sex life has changed all of this for me. Instead of dealing with some imagined, hyperbolized story told to me externally, I am getting in touch with what I have felt and thought through my own lived experience of having sex with someone.

That is my truth, and I hope that by expressing yourself through writing about your sex life, you can discover the same in your own lived experience: your truth. Sure, your feelings around your experience of sex might include guilt and shame (normal human emotions, I might add). But when you’re writing about your sex life in a deeply honest way, you are concretizing what happened to you.

Was your partner able to find your clit? Were you doing it quick and dirty in the bathroom at the office, so you didn’t have time to get wet and spent the rest of the day feeling uncomfortable? Was it spontaneous or planned, the first or last time with that partner? When you write about your sex life, you are claiming your reality and not the constructed box that society has placed us all into. And that’s amazing.

(Men, I’m sure, experience the same. But perhaps their traditional, constructed selves come with more power and money and less freedom to express their emotions.)

2. You’ll discover more about your sexuality.

Writing for Misseducated every week, I’ve recounted some of my most intimate experiences. This includes my masturbation techniques, my sexual fantasies, and random, kinky shit that I tried with my boyfriends, like pegging. Just like through writing my novel, I have discovered my own character’s hopes, desires, and dreams. What do I like? When do I like it, and with whom? Was I good at communicating what I wanted at that moment, or was I expecting my partner to read my mind?

When you write about your sex life, you will discover these things also. This open and expressive writing will allow you to feel and process all kinds of things, good and bad. And with any luck, you’ll see patterns, learn from them, and implement them accordingly. Heck, your sex life might get even better!

3. You’ll remember that you are a full person.

When you write about sex life, you remember that you were also there, in the room. So that means you are entitled to your opinions of how you experienced it. This is what was true for you. It doesn’t matter what your partner experienced because, as the quote goes, “Any story told twice is fiction” (Grace Paley). You were there, and you are a whole human. You can say,

“Hey! I saw that tree fall in the forest, and I can tell you it made a sound!”

I think this is especially important for women because for a lot of human history, and even today, in the doctor’s office, people don’t believe what has happened to us. But when writing our sex stories in the privacy of our own homes, we stop needing the external validation of other people, especially our male partners, to tell us what happened.

Some of my exes got angry at me for posting stories on Misseducated where they recognized themselves, even though they were anonymized. I have since apologized to them and tried to anonymize them further. But did I take that story down? Nope. This is about what I witnessed, and that is valid.

4. You’ll learn to enjoy writing more (if I’ve done my job right!)

I’m kind of a weirdo in more ways than one. While many people hate it, writing is hands down my favorite thing to do. I’m hoping that by getting into the fun, nitty-gritty details of recounting your own sex life, I can help you love writing, too.

From writing a lot, I’ve learned what I care about. I don’t care about fantasy. Instead, I’m obsessed with reality, with things as they are. I love to blur the barrier between my world and the page. I sit down, and the words flow through me like an extension of myself. It’s addictive. Right now, I see a man wheeling bags of sand into a construction site. I’m at a café, and coffee beans are whirring into grounds in the machine. And a song playing over the radio once used in a car commercial during my childhood in London. It’s Peter Bjorn and John’s song “Young Folks.”

Writing about your experiences is a great way to ground yourself in the past and present. And writing about your experiences of sex may well make you feel a little devious, a little rebellious, and a whole bit sneaky. It’s taboo and forbidden; even better reasons to do it. And at the end of the day, it’s all about you. Do you have to share what you write on the internet? Absolutely not. But you must write nonetheless, and hopefully then get into that addictive flow state where you’re admitting your deepest, darkest secrets to yourself.

How should you start?

Next week, I’ll share Part 2 – How to Write about Your Sex Life and what to do if you have a history of trauma and abuse (Short answer: seek therapy; I am not a medical professional!)

I hope you enjoyed this piece!

Love you all!

💌