A stranger wanted to pay me $3,500 to sleep with him - you won't believe what happened next

I learned a lot about myself, sex work, money, labor and value while writing my latest DAME column, "I Was Offered $3,500 to Have Sex with a Stranger. Thanks to Melissa Petro and Kimberlee Cline for sharing their thoughts for the column. Check it out now, and I welcome suggestions on future topics to cover at rachelcitypaper at gmail.com - you can also read my entire DAME Shameless Sex column archives.

Can you be addicted to your vibrator?

That's the issue I explore in my new DAME sex column, as well as what women who aren't necessarily "addicted" but feel too reliant on one way of coming can do to switch things up.



Also: I'm always open to pitches about what to cover next for my columns. DAME's Shameless Sex column deals with women and sex and Philadelphia City Paper with anything and everything (for a few examples, popular topics have included sex and depression/mental health, Valentine's Day polyamory and metamours, dick pics, what it's like to be a male dominant and working at a porn company). Email rachelcitypaper at gmail.com with your column idea (for either column) and as much as detail as possible. I'd love to do more columns on dating in particular, but am open to anything. Feel free to pass this on to anyone you know who might have a great story my readers would enjoy.

What does "orgasm equality" really mean?

That's the question I tackled in my latest DAME column, "Is Orgasm Equality As Simple As Tit for Tat?" where I looked at recent statements by Nicki Minaj and Amy Schumer about how women should demand and go after an orgasm, and explored a few reasons why it may not be so simple. Want to read more? Check out my DAME Shameless Sex archives.

Here's a snippet of this one: "n situations like this, it’s as if, rather than demanding orgasms, they are being demanded of us. Or, as author Jenny Block puts it in her forthcoming book O Wow: Discovering Your Ultimate Orgasm, we’ve made orgasm less of a joyful endeavor and more of a power play, a symbol of achievement first and foremost." Read the whole thing here

My Mother's Day sex column for DAME on sex positive parenting

My new DAME sex column is up and it's tied to Mother's Day so I focused on mothers who've been shamed about sex and mothers who approach parenting from a sex-positive perspective. Those may seem like two separate topics, but I think they all tie back to how women, and mothers especially, are expected to act a certain way and if they step out of line, watch out, which includes how they parent. I quoted Jillian Lauren (from her new memoir Everything You Ever Wanted as well as Kendra Holliday, Airial Clark, and Crista Anne. See the column archives here.

My interview with Maria Bello on sexual identity labels and her new book Whatever...Love Is Love

I interviewed actress, activist and author Maria Bello about her new book Whatever...Love Is Love: Questioning The Labels We Give Ourselves for my DAME sex column Shameless Sex. As always, if you like it, please spread the word! Here's the archives of my column.

"Yes, Fat Women Are Sexy" is my latest at DAME

It's one thing to write something in the plain old Times New Roman font I use in a Microsoft Word document, and another to see it in bold type on a website I contribute to. My first instinct when I saw "Yes, Fat Women Are Sexy" was to think, Duh. I mean, obvious town, right? But it's still something that needs to be said and reinforced with word and image, and the women I spoke to and quoted, namely April Flores (about her soon to launch site Fat Girl Fantasies), Substantia Jones, Kitty Stryker and Brittany Gibbons, are doing just that. Please check it out, and see the full archive of my DAME columns here. Suggestions for future topics related to women and sex? Email me at rachelkb at gmail dot com with "DAME" in the subject line.

Sex and making babies in my DAME column

I'm very proud of my latest DAME Shameless Sex column; I went over my usual word count (with permission) because my interviewees had so many fascinating things to say about sex for pleasure vs. sex for procreation. Thank you to everyone who spoke to me for this. I learned a lot! My working title was "When Sex Is For Making Babies" but I like the final one too: "Doing It Like It's Your Job." And yes, I know plenty of non-male/female couples work on having babies, but as I said, this column was already way too long, so I had to limit it somewhere. I've been thinking about this topic ever since I saw the play Giant Box of Porn last summer at Capital Fringe; the reason why is the opening of the column.