Hello and Welcome to ‘Fatherless Behavior’
A newsletter featuring personal essays on sex and love by me—a sex writer who actually does have both a father and a pretty normal relationship with him, all things considered.
For those new to my work, I am the Associate Sex & Relationships Editor at Cosmopolitan, where I wrote the (now defunct) column ‘Sex at 27’ (formerly ‘Sex at 26,’ because that’s how aging works).
Fans of the column will hopefully find this Substack similar in that it will largely contain first-person essays detailing my sex and love life as it intersects with (and sometimes subverts) broader cultural forces and phenomena in the world of sex, love, dating, relationships, and gender. But while the column chronicled my changing relationship to sex and power throughout my early and mid-20s, ‘Fatherless Behavior’ won’t be so beholden to a specific narrative arc. I’ll still provide an intimate and unflinching look into my current state of (love) affairs, but we might also go back in time and, say, revisit my college years where I had a lot of mostly bad sex for reasons I’ll elaborate on (mental illness, mostly!). If I’m feeling particularly brave and/or masochistic, I may even resurface an excerpt from my college honors thesis—which was, you guessed it, a collection of personal essays about my sex life (and also being mentally ill). Some things never change!
I might also answer specific questions you (yes, you) may have about me and/or anything related to my sex and love life. I’d even be open to offering advice on your sex and love life, if that’s something you want from me for some reason. Who knows—anything could happen! Let’s get crazy.
I’ll be sending out a new ‘Fatherless Behavior’ weekly, likely on Fridays (unless I become overwhelmed with a vague sense of dread and can’t bring myself to do it, which is…not entirely unlikely, I’ll admit).
Most importantly, thank you so much for supporting my writing. Having a platform (of any size!) to reach a readership (of any size!) is an incredible privilege. Getting to share my work with you—and hopefully reflect some of your own experiences, fears, secrets, and thoughts of all kinds back at you—is a real-life dream that keeps coming true. Thanks for being a part of it.