Christine Fawley on the experience of being “The Sensual Lesbian Sex Educator” of The Sex Diaries Project
I remember being at that big oval table, week after week, pens scratching our most intimate stories into wide ruled notebooks. Arianne Cohen and I were classmates at an elite private school in the wooded suburbs of Philadelphia. We were both honors students, and we might have been fast friends back then, but Arianne was a swimmer training under our school’s Olympic coach, and I was sneaking off campus to smoke and make out with older boys. So even though I didn’t know her well, I remember Arianne’s presence in our high school days: big, brilliant, bound for greatness.
In the days before Facebook, Arianne and I may have slipped from each other’s lives as soon as our tasseled hats hit the ground. I went off to Vassar, she to Harvard. Thankfully, those little blue boxes of social media reconnected us just in time for me to discover her amazing work with The Sex Diaries Project. I saw her facebook post about collecting sex diaries and I reached out to her, offering to repost the call to my very diverse network. After five years as a sex educator in San Francisco, I knew I had friends with interesting stories to tell.
In my professional life teaching about sexual pleasure, I have long recommended journaling about one’s sex life. The act of writing down our truth is one of the most powerful practices I know for revealing desire, understanding scripts and patterns, and discerning who we are as sexual beings. So I was thrilled to participate as a diarist, logging in to Arianne’s online diary portal where I would log both play by play confessionals and color commentary for a week’s slice of my erotic life.
At the time of my writing the diary, my sex life was in a particular moment in time, which now with a few year’s perspective I understand as part of the ever changing landscape of my life and my relationships. I was, for the first time in my adult life, in a monogamous relationship with an amazing woman, my fellow Pleasure Mechanic Charlotte. We lived together in a small brick ranch in Durham, North Carolina, running our online business together while filling our days with copious amounts of massage, sex and naked cuddling. I wrote about our lovemaking rituals, answered Arianne’s prompts about my deepest vulnerabilities and fears, and shared about the triumph of love I was experiencing.
Writing the diary was itself such a stimulating practice that I gave little thought to how it would feel to read years later. When Arianne told me that excerpts of my diary would be in the published book, I was honored. If my words can give readers permission to experience more pleasure, more touch, more nakedness with their partners, I am grateful for that opportunity.
Reading The Sex Diaries Project offers the incredible opportunity to peek into the intimate lives of others. It is a rare treat to read the thoughts of folks very much like yourself and wildly different, and find resonance in the unlikeliest of places.
And for those of you interested in getting to know yourself a little bit better, consider heading over to SexDiariesProject.com and keep a diary of your own. You’ll gain invaluable insight into your desire, goals and inhibitions.
– Christine, “The Sensual Lesbian Sex Educator”
Also check out The Pleasure Mechanics Interview with Arianne, Editrix of The Sex Diaries Project