lol i have unLOCKED SEO with this post already, just gonna watch the pageviews roll in

No, let’s be serious, though! I have a lot of opinions on having sex after you have a baby, and now you get to hear them. Let us begin with a brief litany of disclaimers:

1. I don’t know your life.
2. There are a billion emotional and psychological aspects to having sex after giving birth which this post is not designed to address. If you don’t want to have sex, don’t! If you’re all touched out and the last thing you want is to have sex, own that shit! You just had a fuckin’ BABY.
3. Wait the six weeks that they tell you to wait. Did I wait for six weeks? No. Is it a good idea? Yes. Let your medical provider feel around up there and then give you the green light.
4. If your partner is pressuring you and you’re not feeling it, smother them with a pillow in their sleep. Call me, I’ll tell the cops we spent all evening together playing Jenga.
5. Mom, Dad, aunts, my one niece who reads The Toast…close the tab, please.
6. This is for people who had babies come out of holes in their junk and now want to put dicks or dick-like objects in said holes. There are many other ways to have babies, and many other ways to have sex.

Okay. Let’s do this.

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• Women only love men with CROOKED SMILES, a man who smiles with his mouth all in a straight line might as well be DEAD; a male smile should resemble nothing on earth so much as the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Lombard Street, a lightning bolt, a scarecrow with a broken neck, or two palm trees leaning against each other to form a big “X”

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Jilly Gagnon’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.

Back in 2008, E. Jean Carroll asked me to join her in writing a book about college sex, which eventually led to a road trip through the south, horrific abdominal cramping, and generalized anxiety about the future of our society. This is the first part of that story.

***

I was on the toilet when the phone rang. 

Fortunately for me, my roommates at the time both had regular, business-hours jobs, so my bursting out of the bathroom mid-day—jerking and lurching against the leg-irons of my own underwear like some sort of semi-pornographic Frankenstein’s monster in my attempts to reach the phone before it stopped ringing—went unwitnessed. 

Except of course by my cat, who’s used to this kind of shit from me.

“JILL-ee,” the blast through my earpiece was somewhere between a bark and a gunshot, “it’s E.”

As though anyone else in my phone book, or my life, for that matter, had a speech pattern punctuated by frequent explosions. 

“I have got a project for you. What would you say to ghostwriting a book about…wait for it…COLLEGE SEX?”

“What sort of book are you talking about exactly?”

“Only the most scandalous, the most revelatory, the most rip-roaring, gamahuching, fucking sexiest book EVER! It will be GENIUS!“

“So a quick job, then.”

“Exactly! And I’ll pay you X dollars to do it!”

At the time, X dollars was upwards of 1/3 of my annual income. 

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A couple months ago I agreed to be interviewed for a story on my experience as an asexual woman. The read-back I was promised never happened, and the story was published without my approval. It not only contained misleading statements, but had been written—sans consent—in first person. And one of the more egregious inaccuracies stuffed in my mouth was this:

“In many ways I’m just like your average young woman. I love putting on heels and a dress to go on a night out with friends.”

First off, this is a laughable misrepresentation of my lifestyle; my “nights with friends” generally involve art supplies or homemade pizza, with no special dress code required. But on top of that, the author apparently felt compelled to feminize the asexual chick with traditional trappings of Lady Flavor. She wanted to reassure the magazine’s audience that I’m Still A Girl. Because you know what they say about girls who don’t like guys. Our femininity immediately goes up for debate.

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