What I learned about sex on the Internet

A decade ago, I had the peculiar distinction of being dubbed “The Sex Priestess of the Ivy League” by the sassy New York Observer. I was teaching in Princeton’s creative writing program and promoting a new book, The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers, a serious approach to writing sex scenes in literary fiction. Not long after that, there would be more to my moniker than The Observer–or my students–knew. For the next two years, while instructing my young charges in the elements of serious fiction, I wrote a monthly column called “Girl Talk,” under a pseudonym, for the Japanese edition of Playboy. Each piece was a mini-play starring four saucy New York women in their twenties–though I hadn’t seen my own for some time– who met at trendy bars and ski lodges to discuss their latest sexual exploits. It was lively banter and a smidgen of soft-core porn.

I hadn’t sought out either publication. Until a publisher asked me to write The Joy of Writing Sex, I kept busy teaching and writing literary novels (each with a few sex scenes), book reviews, and the occasional travel piece or personal essay. But the publisher’s idea appealed to me. Before I knew it, I was conceptualizing theories and strategies involved in writing about sex, collecting examples from contemporary work, and interviewing writers including Russell Banks, John Updike, Dorothy Allison, and Alan Hollinghurst. In New York, I happened to meet a Japanese editor and book scout and sent her the finished manuscript, hoping she might interest a Japanese publisher. Instead, she phoned me some time later with a far more exotic invitation.

Japanese Playboy needed a monthly woman columnist after their New York-based writer suddenly quit. Was I interested? At first I was flummoxed. Writing about sex in fiction came easily to me, but what could I possibly dream up, month after month, that would hold in thrall tens of thousands of randy Japanese men? I balked until she mentioned the mini-play format, which suits my taste for writing dialogue, and the hyper generous fee–every month for a year. Surely, I could think of something. Once I did some novelist’s research into the sex lives of Gen Xers and New York’s latest hot spots, I was turning out my spicy columns the morning they were due. Readers were happy. I was prosperous. The contract continued for a second year, until the editor in Tokyo moved to Venice.

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