I Always Felt Sexy. I Just Needed Somewhere to Put It.

Hi. I'm Seska.

I'm an online adult entertainer, and I have been since 1998. I started at 27, which means I've now spent more of my life doing this work than not. I wanted to say that up front, because I'd rather you hear it from me than wonder.

Here's what you might not expect. I grew up in a suburban house with a happy family. I went to university. I was, by every measure, a regular girl from a regular place. But I always believed that pleasure, romance, love and sexual expression were mine. They were my birthright, not a privilege I had to earn or a secret I had to keep.

What I didn't see was anyone like me in adult entertainment. The women on screen weren't women I recognized. Then the internet arrived, and for the first time the tools to make and share this kind of work were in the hands of ordinary people. I jumped.

I wanted to see what happened when someone like me got to decide what desire looked like. Not what a studio thought was sexy, or what a magazine told me I should be, but what I actually felt. Because I did feel sexy. I always had. I just hadn't been given anywhere to put it. Nobody sat me down and told me that feeling that way was something I could say out loud, let alone show.

But I found it anyway, in pieces. Madonna's book SEX showed me a woman who treated her own desire as something to be curious about, not something to hide. Sarah McLachlan and Sophie B. Hawkins, in their music and their videos, showed me that longing and sensuality could be honest and still belong to a woman on her own terms. They didn't hand me permission. They showed me it was possible to take it.

So I started showing it. I learned that being sexy isn't a body type or an age. It's a way of paying attention to yourself, and then letting someone see you do it. That turned out to be the most freeing thing I've ever done.

What I found was that my interests were real, and that they changed as I did. What I make now isn't what I made at 27. I've stopped apologizing for that. Growing older didn't shut my appetite off. It made me clearer about it.

I'm not writing this series to tell you how to feel about sex. Plenty of women carry a lot of shame about it, and plenty of them were taught to, for good reasons and bad ones. I carried some of it too. What I'm going to share is how I set mine down, and what I found on the other side.

Over the coming weeks I'll write about what I was taught, what changed, what this work really looks like day to day, and what I've learned about desire and aging. I need to keep it SFW, but I'll keep it honest. That's the deal I'm making with you.

And here's the part I care about most. I don't want this to be only my story. If you have one about pleasure, intimacy, shame, or finding your way through it, I'd love to hear it. You can share it with your name or without. You don't have to be a writer. You just have to be honest.

Send yours from the Home page.

I'll see you next week.

Seska