I Told a Group of Strangers I Write About Sex
The room went quiet
I write erotica, so it won’t come as a surprise to many of you that Emma Austin is a pen name.
It’s partly for aesthetic reasons. I love my husband dearly, but he didn’t exactly gift me with the sexiest last name.
But a bigger part of it is just worry.
I worry about the kind of reactions I’ll get when I tell people what I really do.
I worry that people who know me look at me a little differently — even the ones who know I’m a horndog at heart.
And yes, I worry about what my mother will think. (Serve me right for writing autobiographical erotica.)
Still, I feel incredibly conflicted about writing under a pseudonym. I want to use my writing to help everyone embrace their deepest sexual selves. I want everyone to have frank, open conversations about sex. And I want us to live in a world where women can admit to wanting to be fisted, double-penetrated, or spanked by a daddy as readily as men admit to wanting to stick their dick in just about everything.
