Jules: Hey Kate! Nice to meet you. So I first heard about you through Ewa and then I started looking through your work and feeling really inspired. It seems like you really found something you love and carved out a niche for yourself. You create content across all these different platforms and I’m just like, “Wow, what a boss!” I can only imagine how busy you are so I really appreciate you taking the time.
Kate: Happy to be here, thanks for asking.
Jules: So to kick things off, I love to ask people what their sun, moon, and rising are.
Kate: I’m a Taurus sun, Capricorn moon, and Pisces rising. I’m mainly just very stubborn and a creature of habit, which are very much Taurus things. But I think the Pisces rising is more the creative side of what I do — the dreaming and romanticizing and being a bit flighty and head in the clouds, which I think I need a little bit of to do what I do.
Jules: Love it! I also love how transparent you are about how you got to where you are on your website. I feel like I got a pretty good sense of your origin story through reading through your stuff but for the person reading this blog who probably hasn’t done so, can you give a quick background story. How did it all start?
Kate: I was always a sex nerd. From a fairly young age, I would listen to sex podcasts and read about sex stuff online. My parents were both in media. They met when they were working at a radio station together, so media was always a potential career path in my mind .
After I finished high school, I took a year off before going to university because I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. During that time, I applied to work at a sex shop and didn’t even get called in for an interview. But in the process of applying, I thought I should brush up on my sex toy knowledge. I was Googling around and found all these sex toy review blogs. And I was like, “I could do that.”
I had a couple of sex toys at that time and I was interested in them. So I started my blog, Girly Juice, when I was 19. Originally, it was mostly sex toy reviews with some erotica type stories about my own sex life. But my sex life at that time was not all that interesting. I was in a fairly vanilla, monogamous relationship, and not really doing anything kinky or adventuress.
Over the almost eleven years that I’ve been doing the blog, I came to realize that I was kinky and wanted to be non-monogamous and all these other things. Also during that time, I eventually stopped using the pseudonym Girly Juice and started writing as myself – Kate Sloan – so that I could branch out into working for other publications as well.
I’ve written for Cosmo, GQ, Teen Vogue, Glamour, and a bunch of other places. These days, I still mostly write about sex toys, but I’ve also written a fair bit about kink, including my first book, which I’m really proud of – 101 Kinky Things Even You Can Do. It’s been a really fun journey and I’m really grateful to get to do what I love.
Jules: Amazing. I was listening to an episode of your podcast called Sanitize Me Daddy and I loved the candidness. You talk about how you’ve experienced a sort of splintering of your personality. There’s the voice you use to write listicle type articles for big name publications versus the more editorial stuff you write on your personal blog versus the non-professional side of yourself, which while sexual is obviously much more layered.
In my experience, it’s tricky. On the one hand, I kind of love how my friends tell me I’m like Samantha meets Carrie from Sex and the City, and that people come to me for advice on sex and dating. I do feel like I genuinely am a super sexual, uninhibited being. But then other times, I’m like, “Wait, I’m also so much more than this!” Sometimes it can be hard to separate the labels I take on from how I view myself. Can you relate and how do you balance it all?
Kate: Yes. So one of the things I talked about in that podcast episode is that I feel like when I was more toward the beginning of my career, I was using the identity of being the sex person as a way of getting attention. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with getting attention or wanting it at all.
But I do think that sometimes when you’re pursuing things from a deep-seated need for attention, you may not be asking yourself important questions like: “Do I actually want to be doing this? Is this actually who I want to be? Am I just sort of trying to be who I think is going to get the most attention?”
And so I think over the years, as I’ve done lots of therapy and gained more experience, I’ve started to feel much more value in showing more sides of myself online and not being the manic pixie dream girl all the time. Because that can be really exhausting and it can also attract people into your life who are going to treat you like that’s who you are and that’s the only thing that you are.
I also just realized that my persona for quite a while was not in line with what I actually wanted. I went through what I affectionately refer to as my slutty phase, where I was having a lot of casual sex. It felt like it was the thing people were doing and so it was the thing to do. I usually was not enjoying it that much and it took me quite a while to figure out that that’s what was going on.
I just don’t form attractions to people that quickly and I prefer to take my time and get to know people. I also just vastly prefer having sex with people who understand that there is more to me than that and who are attracted to me because I’m smart and creative, not just because I write about sex stuff online.
So I think these days I have a much more balanced presentation of myself online. It’s definitely still a persona. I think it’s disingenuous to ever say that we’re not putting on something of a persona when we’re online or even when we’re offline, talking to people in our own lives. I think we’re always putting on a little bit of something.
It’s why we’re a little bit different with some friends versus with other friends. But I think that the self that I present to the world now is much more authentic to who I am, which sometimes means tweeting about sex stuff and sometimes means tweeting about the Pokemon game I’m playing or the weird shows I’m watching on TV. Ultimately, I find that it attracts people to me who are much more in line with who I am and who I want to be hanging around.
Jules: Cool cool, I relate so much to that! I feel like I’ve been on a spiritual journey over the last few years that has totally reframed my approach to sex. I still have this, “Fuck the moral judgements society places on sex and sex work” attitude and I totally encourage everyone to go through a slutty phase.
That’s how I was able to find out what I liked and who I was in a beautifully shameless way. But I leaned so hard into to it for so long, that now I’ve gone kind of the opposite way. I’m all like, “Wait! Energy is a thing and I’ve been letting all of these unworthy penises inside of me and maybe I should think about not doing that.”
It’s not that I think having casual sex is bad or anything. I’ve just changed and that’s okay – although it did take me a while to accept that about myself. I think a big part of that was living in this little bubble of Brooklyn kinksters, where there’s almost this expectation to be super down for any and everything.
I know so many people who want to be ethically non-monogamous just because it signals that you are cool and progressive but then in reality, they don’t feel good when they try it and then they internalize this sense of shame for not being open enough, thinking to themselves: “Am I just totally brainwashed by the patriarchy for wanting something a little more traditional?”
It’s so weird and interesting how complicated all these layers surrounding sexuality and shame are, and it’s such a magical experience shedding those layers and really coming into your own.
Kate: Yeah and I think that therapy helps a lot with that — sort of picking apart which aversions to things are actually because you don’t want that thing and which are based on insecurity or shame or judgment that have been instilled into you through culture.
I went back-and-forth a lot on the issue of non-monogamy for myself because it was really painful for me a lot of the time. I initially labeled it as jealousy but I think it was more than that. I was getting triggered into a trauma response that was tapping into this deep sense of shame and fear of abandonment.
When I started doing therapy on the original issues that triggered me, I eventually came to the conclusion that non-monogamy is more in line with my values and the kind of life that I want to lead, but it can be really hard to sense those signals accurately when you have a bunch of unprocessed stuff that’s blocking that.
Jules: Totally, I love therapy! So tell me about 101 Kinky Things Even You Can Do. I haven’t bought it yet but I did read a sample from it online. The writing is so fun and Ewa’s illustrations are amazing. You guys did a great job of making kink approachable and digestible for people who may otherwise shy away it.
I also really like how you distinguish kink from BDSM. People use them interchangeably, but BDSM is just one of many types of kink. I feel like your book is such an awesome resource for anyone who is interested in exploring a kinkier side of themselves.
Kate: Thank you! So I had been doing the sex writing thing for eightish years at that point when I received an email from a commissioning editor at Laurence King Publishing, which is a publishing house in the UK. She said, “We want to do a sexy book. We’re not really sure what we want to do, but we’re interested in working with you on it.”
Of course, as a writer, writing a book is one of those things you feel like you should want to do. So I had all these ideas that I had had for a long time in terms of books I wanted to write, but they were very wordy and historical, and that’s not really the type of stuff that Laurence King Publishing does. They focus more on books that are fairly quick to read, feature a lot of graphic design, and do well commercially. They are great, especially for gifting.
So when I pitched my original ideas to the editor on our call, she was like, “That’s great, but that’s not really the kind of stuff that we do.” And just in that moment of having to improvise something else, I responded, “Well, what about something that is sort of like an A to Z of interesting kinks and fetishes or 101 unusual kinks and fetishes?”
I had always been fascinated learning about unusual kinks, like clown fetish, sneeze fetish, and denim fetish – all these interesting things that make up the spectrum of human sexuality. So I put together a pitch because she was interested in the idea and then she talked it over with her team and basically they decided, “This is great but it would probably be more marketable and help more people if it was an introductory book.” That’s how it became 101 Kinky Things Even You Can Do.
This was not something I had ever set out to do. I had always been more interested in the weird, esoteric subtopics within the realm of kink – like how kink interacts with mental health, or the specific things I like to write about on my blog, but I had never considered doing an intro to kink book.
But once I was assigned that idea and started looking around and thinking about the books that had been influential to me, I realized that a lot of the intro books out there are very limited to the kinks that most people already know about, which for the most part is stuff that falls into the category of BDSM. So bondage, domination, discipline, submission, sadism, and masochism – the 50 Shades of Grey kinks, if you will.
I love those kinks but there’s a lot more out there, and I think that a lot of people who have fetishes that are a little bit off the beaten path might not even necessarily know that that’s something they can explore because the depiction of kink in popular media is fairly limited. The other thing I noticed in a lot of intro to kink books is that they tend to take a very hardline approach, where they say, “These certain things are unsafe to do so just flat out don’t do them.”
My approach to sex education has always been based in harm reduction, which to me means that I assume that people are going to do these things anyway. I think telling someone who has a choking fetish, “Don’t get choked,” is kind of irresponsible in the same way that teaching teens abstinence-only sex education is irresponsible. They are very likely going to do it anyway.
The best we can do is teach them how to do it safely and also inform them of the risks that are involved, so that they can make their own decisions. Every section in 101 Kinky Things Even You Can Do has some information on safety and risks for that particular kink. Some of them are more emotional; some of them are more physical. Some of them are very dangerous, like breath play.
This is a classic example of something that a lot of people do without knowing how dangerous it is. You can induce cardiac arrest and people have died from it. I wanted to be honest about that in the book, while also providing information that would help people do it more safely if they really felt that they had to do it.
It’s exactly the book I wish I had had when I was first figuring out that I was kinky because it goes through these 101 things and explains what’s hot about each one or what could be hot about each one, and then gives you three ideas for how to try it out.
I tried to incorporate not only ones you could do with a partner but also ones you could do by yourself — if you aren’t sure you want to bring it up with a partner yet because you’re not sure if you’re even into it but you want to you check it out on your own. So far, people have liked it and I’m really proud of it.
Jules: What a journey! Are there any kinks you discovered through your research that you had never heard of or that you were like, “Oh my god I have to try this!”
Kate: I actually tried to limit it to kinks that were pretty accessible to most people since that was the theme of the book. So I don’t think there was anything that I hadn’t heard of beforehand, but I did definitely learn about them in more detail. I found researching the clothing related fetishes to be really interesting because I really care about clothing, but it’s not something I especially fetishize.
So it was interesting to learn about the kinds of reasons that people are into things like corsets, leather, and latex, and it kind of gave me a new perspective on the clothes that I wear and how those can be sexualized and sexualized in a way that makes wearing them feel more fun and more sexy, even if you don’t necessarily have that fetish.
Jules: Any wild or cringe stories you feel comfortable sharing – either in the bedroom or just the misogynistic bullshit you had to deal with being a sex writer?
Kate: When I was 24, I wrote an article that was about dating men who identify as feminists but are not actually feminists and who kind of use it as a disguise in order to get women to trust them. I called them, “faux feminist men.” I told a couple stories in that article about a guy I had dated who claimed to be all about women’s empowerment but who actually didn’t believe in male privilege or white privilege, and how I had to break up with him because of that.
I also had a friend with benefits who very loudly identified as a feminist, but I found out that he had been abusing several of his past female partners. So I wrote about those experiences in this essay and the essay went viral. Not like super, super viral, but definitely more viral than anything I had done before.
There was this anti-feminist YouTuber with a lot of followers who I had never heard of. He made a video where he basically did a dramatic reading of my article and made fun of it. One of the greatest acts of self-control in my life was not watching that video. But it got like a million views and I started having all these people flooding my social media. They sent death threats and told me that I should kill myself – all kinds of stuff.
I remember being at work. I had an office job at the time and it all kind of popped off while I was at work and I started to get really scared. I had no reason to believe that anybody who was sending me these messages knew where I was physically or could find me or hurt me, but I was really, really scared.
So I called my dad and he came and picked me up from work, which was very nice. When I got home, my mom had bought me some bath bombs and my favorite flavor of Häagen-Dazs ice cream because she knew I needed some self-care and relaxation time.
It was horrible but it did give me a thicker skin and also just reinforced to me the belief that when it comes to a lot of the people who have issues with the work that I do, it’s way more about them than it is about me. My work just shakes up something about their foundational view of the world or themselves.
A similar thing happened a few years later, when I wrote a piece for Teen Vogue that was about men in music, like Drake and Nick Jonas, using the good girl archetype in their songs to sort of shame women out of particular behaviors. This article also went somewhat viral, and again, people were sending me horrible messages about it. But I really wasn’t saying anything that controversial.
It really just says that they are terrified of a world in which women have agency and I think that those experiences really shaped the way that I approach my work and made me much less scared to push those buttons because I saw that yeah, it can be scary when I push those buttons, but I know that I’m doing it right because this type of person hates it.
Jules: If anything, all the backlash just proves your points further because it is fueled by the very misogynistic bullshit you are calling out in your work.
Kate: They don’t even realize that but yeah, totally.
Jules: So it sounds like you have amazing parents! I’m also blessed with super cool parents, but I’ve hidden behind a certain level of anonymity when it comes to my sugaring past and sex blogging present. My dad is my accountant so in theory, it would be very easy for him to look up where I’m making my money from but he hasn’t – or so I think. What is it like having a public persona centered around your sexuality and is that hard to navigate when it comes to family?
Kate: It was at first. I started the blog at 19. I was still living with my parents at the time and I started receiving all these boxes in the mail that were sex toys for me to review. I would always take them up to my room pretty quickly.
At one point, my mom sat me down and she was like, “I’m worried about how many packages you’re receiving. Do you have a lot of credit card debt from all the shopping you’ve been doing?” She thought I was buying clothes and I had to explain to her, “No, I’m receiving these for free. Please don’t worry about it.”
Jules: Oh my god, that’s hilarious!
Kate: Yeah, it was awkward, but they were totally fine with it once they knew what I was doing. They knew that it was something that I had been interested in for a long time. I do remember that when I got the first proofs for 101 Kinky Things Even You Can Do and brought them over to show my parents, my mom was flipping through it and loved reading everything.
My dad opened it and was scrolling down the table of contents. When he saw the word “enema,” he was just like, “Nope! That’s enough for me.” He’s so proud of me but he is a bit more squeamish about sex. So his thing has always been, “I’m really proud of the work you do but I don’t feel the need to read it.”
That’s honestly fine with me, especially since I write about some pretty wild stuff. I don’t mind if my family members want to respect their own comfort level around that.
Jules: Sounds like a good balance! I saw that you write about chronic pain and what it’s like to navigate through the world – sexually and otherwise – as someone with fibromyalgia. I suffer from autoimmune-related chronic pain myself and I find that it can be such a chicken-or-egg kind of thing for me, in a way I wasn’t aware of until recently – especially compared to when I was in the thick of my sex work career.
I wrote a piece called The Sex Worker’s Body Keeps the Score, which touches on the idea that disempowering sexual experiences often serve as a trigger for pain. Since taking a more holistic approach to my health in recent years, I’ve gotten a lot more in touch with my body through meditation and yoga. How would you describe your self-care routine and how do you manage the complicated realities of existing in a body that experiences chronic pain?
Kate: I think for me with fibro, the main thing has been stress reduction in any and all ways possible. That is one of the highest priorities in my life at this point. A lot of that has been adjusting the way that I use the internet so that I’m not getting into so many arguments or reading stuff from people I hate.
There’s even people in my own community who I’ve butted heads with a few too many times where I’ve been like, “You know, I respect their right to their opinion. But I also respect my right to have a life that is not constantly stressful and scary for me.” So I have no issue with soft blocking or muting people who are pressing my buttons a little too much and making me flare up.
Another thing is, I’m really, really grateful to have a job where I mostly get to set my own schedule. There are definitely exceptions, in terms of having to schedule interviews based on when sources are available or having certain deadlines that are set for me, but I do my best these days to take one day off every week.
I was doing Wednesdays for a while and called it my “Weekend Wednesday,” which is great because then you work Monday and Tuesday, and then have Wednesday off to recharge before working Thursday and Friday. But it kind of just moves around depending on what I’ve got going on that week.
I try to literally do nothing – like play video games or read or just go sit in the sun. That’s crucial. Also, therapy has been huge for me. There’s a lot of evidence that various autoimmune and chronic health conditions do sometimes have their root in trauma and in chronic stress. So going back and addressing some of those childhood things that had really stuck with me and that I didn’t even realize the extent to which they were affecting me has been really helpful.
I also just try to do as much relaxation stuff as I can. I’ve been especially interested in how that can combine with erotic hypnosis, which is my spouse’s main fetish. So it’s something that I’ve gotten into in the last five or so years. Hypnosis can be very relaxing. My spouse is very careful to stay away from any stuff in hypnosis that a hypnotherapist would approach because as we say, “It can be therapeutic but it’s not therapy.”
My spouse isn’t an accredited hypnotherapist or anything like that but I do think that it’s still a useful tool for relaxation – particularly since I’m such an anxious person. I get very in my head – sometimes to the point where I’m not really even able to relax into and enjoy sex. So it’s really helpful to sometimes start a session with hypnosis or massage or some other activity that helps me not feel so tense. I think that a lot of the time, being in pain makes your body very tense without you even noticing it.
Jules: Relatable! So what are your big dreams and where do you see your life going? I saw that you’re also into music?!
Kate: I think that I will probably be making media about sex for quite a long time. It really fascinates me and it’s hard to imagine not wanting to do something related to it, but I’m feeling more drawn to work that is creative, introspective, and personal, rather than strictly educational. I do have to do stuff that is more to the point – the listicle stuff for big publications – because it really does pay the bills quite well.
But I’m much more interested in writing about the psychology of sex and kink and how these things interact with mental health and self-development. So it’s been really important for me to have outlets for that and my blog has been one of those places. I still do sponsored sex toy reviews on the blog but I also try to write weird stuff that happens to be what I’m thinking about lately.
In the realm of sex, one of my big dreams is to make a piece of media about the history of the Hitachi Magic Wand vibrator. It’s been something I’ve wanted to do for a really long time. I’m really fascinated by the history of that vibrator, in terms of how it intersects with the development of sex-positive feminism and its role in Betty Dodson’s masturbation workshops.
In terms of music, I’ve been doing this challenge since December 2021 where I write and record a song every week, which is what I used to do back in high school. I used to want to be a professional singer-songwriter. Ultimately though, I realized that you really have to have a very thick skin for rejection for any sort of entertainment industry job, so I went in a different direction.
I also just think I’m a better writer but I still love music. I love writing songs, especially about weird sex stuff. So I’ve been trying to do some of that. It’s just fun when you’re a writer professionally to do writing that is not meant to bring in money. I also like to do fan-fiction sometimes, just to flex those muscles.
Jules: Such a renaissance woman! I would love to read that book about the Hitachi Magic Wand. I too am fascinated by the intersection of sex, history and, psychology. I feel like we live in such an individualistic society that I’ve been conditioned to believe that all my actions are totally made out of my own autonomy but then I’m like, “Wait, there’s so much at play here in terms of societal evolution that has gotten me to this place.” It’s been really empowering to develop a deeper understanding of that.
Kate: Yes, we stand on the shoulders of giants, as they say.
Jules: Indeed! So what advice would you give to your younger self?
Kate: Go to therapy as soon as you can. Journal regularly. I’m always glad that I have journals and always kind of wish that I had journaled more. Write about the stuff that authentically fascinates you. Charge more. Don’t let people lowball you on prices. Know your boundaries and assert them. You’re allowed to care about your own pleasure and not prioritize other people’s above your own. And wear sunscreen!
Jules: Beautiful! Any closing thoughts you would like to add?
Kate: One of the major goals of my work the entire time I’ve been doing it is to combat sexual shame. I didn’t grow up in a conservative or religious environment at all but even I have struggled with sexual shame and self-judgement around certain kinks or the types of people I was attracted to, and I know that there are tons of people out there who struggle with much worse shame about far more things than I do.
There have been times in my career when I felt like, “I don’t know if there’s even really a point to what I’m doing with all the turmoil going on in the world.” But the thing I keep coming back to is that when someone is stuck in feeling shame about their sexuality – which for many of us is so core to who we are – it’s really hard for them to focus meaningfully on anything else or to have healthy relationships or pursue their goals, because they’re just stuck with this constant feeling of “I’m not good enough” or “There’s something wrong with me and people are going to find that out.”
Sex can be such a de-stressing, beautiful thing and to have that be so limited or eliminated by shame, just really changes what people are able to offer. In my view, if I’m able to reduce people’s sexual shame, even a little bit, that could be helping them to do big things in the world that could address some of these bigger problems that I don’t feel like I have the skills or the ability to address.
So I think it’s one of those things where we all have our talents and gifts and interests that we’re given and we have to sort of play with the hand we’ve been dealt. I see writing about sexual shame and destigmatizing elements of sex and kink as a thing that I can do that is important and helpful, even if it’s not always immediately evident – especially to people who think that sex itself is frivolous and unimportant.
Jules: Well said! I often make sense of the world in Venn diagrams and what you said reminded me of what I believe is a useful tool to help people gauge what they should do career-wise. It’s the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, and what makes money.
Honestly, I just kind of fell into writing based on people giving me feedback that I was good at it and it’s kind of just taken on a life of its own. It seems like you and I are both living the dream in a lot of ways.
Kate: Yeah, it’s great.
Jules: Cool, well that about wraps it up. Thanks again for your time. It’s been an absolute pleasure!
Kate: Of course, thank you!
Jules
Based in Brooklyn, Jules has dedicated her twenties towards harnessing her pussy power, exploring the muse, whore, and wild woman archetypes along the way. When not blogging, you can find her sweating the toxins out in a hot yoga class or sipping a matcha latte at a pretentious coffee shop, whilst she scribbles away in her journal.
