Misseducated

Hello Wonderful Readers,I feel excited and quite nervous about sharing this update with you. Since launching The Intimacy Journal, I’ve learned a lot about how I want to provide value to you and live my mission to help the world be shamelessly sexy.TL;DR* All Misseducated Substack content will be 100% free from now on. This weekend I ungated 43 articles in the Archive. If you find a Comments section that’s still behind the paywall, please let me know, and I will remove it.* I hope to keep publishing at a cadence of around 2 articles per month, but that could range from 1 to 4 posts. I enjoy publishing on Tuesdays, but will no longer be strict about it.* From now on, I am implementing the “buy-me-a-coffee” model for my paid subscribers. I will no longer be creating any special paid subscriber content. I will not be offended AT ALL if you stop paying for your subscription because of this, or if you stopped paying in the past. Please feel free to cancel guilt-free right now. I am nothing but grateful to you! Thank you for whatever you were able to give.* If you would like to keep contributing, you will be supporting a more shamelessly sexy world, helping me keep the lights on, and ensuring that my sexuality content stays free and accessible for everyone.* This is what the Misseducated Subscription page now looks like (in $USD):Come back for more! 💜The Truth Of It AllI’ve realized that paywalling my content on Misseducated is no longer serving you, me, or my mission. It’s taken me months to actually implement this change because doing this scares the s**t out of me. But I’ve known for a while now that this is the right thing to do.Firstly, I want to thank my existing paid subscribers. Over the last three and a half years, since I quit my corporate media job in New York, you have helped me build a new life for myself. You gave me my first few dollars of validation as a “professional writer”. You gave me the courage to keep going. Still, offering two tiers of content has always been extremely challenging for me as a one-woman show. Especially with the regular cadence that newsletters require, for too long now, I’ve felt guilty and stressed out for not delivering good enough content to you. Switching to a “buy-me-a-coffee” model allows you to still support a more shamelessly sexy world if you want to, and allows me the freedom to create the most impactful work that’s accessible to everyone.Secondly, I’ve realized that to help the world be shamelessly sexy, I need to be a truly open book as a writer. I originally paywalled my more sexually explicit content. Maybe I didn’t want my dad and his friends reading that I like butt stuff. Or maybe I felt, like some sex-writer-worker, that people should have to pay to access these deeply personal details of my life. But as I’ve grown, I’ve come to the realization that I just don’t give a f**k. I want anyone, anywhere, to benefit from this blog if it can help them. Gatekeeping just doesn’t float my boat anymore, and I’m not going to live my life in arbitrary fear of other people’s judgment.Thirdly, I’m enjoying productizing things my readers want a lot more than I thought I would. Creating The Intimacy Journal was SO much fun. It’s a standalone purchase that people can get if they want to deepen their practice, and I’m extremely proud of it. Energetically, I feel a lot more confident and excited to provide value to you through books and workshops than I do about consistently creating special paid subscriber newsletter content.Fourthly (if that’s even a word?), I noticed that when I speak on podcasts, I’m sharing all the personal details that were behind the paywall on Misseducated anyway. Check out the 111 podcast episodes I’ve spoken on, with over 42 hours of episodes here. Those podcast listeners have had the full story, but I haven’t been offering the same to you. So I want to make your access to my content limitless. Additionally, while rereading some articles over the weekend, I rediscovered many ridiculous things I’ve written, which I hope you’ll find funny. I can’t wait for you to enjoy those stories fully, too.The last thing that truly impacted my decision was a conversation I had recently with a male Misseducated reader. He said that while he likes reading my blog, he had really been curious about the article, “I Pegged My Boyfriend,” but had never read it because it was paywalled. That hit home for me. I thought: Why? In that article, I make some very important points about why we need to allow men to be able to show weakness and sensitivity. With the paywall, I was denying him the opportunity to explore his masculinity and preventing that article from reaching its full impact in the world. So, paywalls be gone!For those of you who have been waiting patiently, here is a short list of my top five now-ungated articles you might enjoy:* The 4 Categories of Porn I Watch, and Why* I Pegged My Boyfriend* My BDSM Test Results* Why I Never Swallow Cum* My Hard Biological TruthYou can check out the full list of 43 now-free articles below. Trust me, there’s plenty of spice and juicy details to go around!That’s enough for now! Thank you for trusting me and for sticking along for the ride. I’m so grateful and excited for the next chapter. Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions, concerns, or if you gain any new insights from reading one of the articles below. Hehe.Sending love,Tash💌✍️The Full List of 43 New-Ungated Articles 🪅* The 4 Categories of Porn I Watch, and Why* I Pegged My Boyfriend* My BDSM Test Results* Love & Dreams* The Strangest Date I Ever Went On* Starting The New Year Off With A Bang* On Top Of The World* Sex In The London Library* I Kissed A Girl And I Liked It* Misseducated Update: What’s In The Works* Welcome to the Misseducated Community! Please introduce yourself here so we can say hello :)* Back To Where We First Met* Why I Never Swallow Cum* How To Keep Your Creative Dreams Alive* I had casual sex.* On Withholding Sex From Men* Burnout and Book Cover Reveal!* I finished writing my first novel! ✨✍️* How To Make An Audiobook* Peach Tulips: Almost Off To The Printers ✨ 📚* When No One Comes To Mind* Zoom Crush* Girl Crush* 💖 Sexico City 🌃* 💖 Sexico City Update 🌃* My Hard Biological Truth* The Little Things* Somebody to Love* The 64 Traits of My Ideal Mate* What I Learned Hosting A Sex Writing Workshop* My Hard, Biological Truth, Part 2* The scene that took me 13 years to write* How to Overcome the Fear of Success* Does Penis Size Matter?* Liar, Liar* The Wrath of Seeing Your Ex* My Ego Stroke of a Lifetime* How To Not Care What Other People Think* The Dog Cage* That’s all from Misseducated in 2024!* My Sex Toy Collection Revealed* Announcing: The Misseducated Sex Journal!* My Week-Long, Creative Orgasm Get full access to Misseducated by Tash Doherty at misseducated.tashdoherty.com/subscribe

Dear Wonderful Readers,It’s the moment many of you have been patiently waiting for: The Intimacy Journal is officially live on Kickstarter! 🚀And we are already 25% funded! Thank you so much to everyone who has already supported us. If you’d like to join us, you can back the project to get your own Intimacy Journal, gift a journal to a friend, join our workshops, or book a one-on-one writing session with me. Check out our project video and all the options here:The seeds of this book were planted almost a year and a half ago, when I first heard Peppur Chambers read her poem, “Can I?”, at an open mic with The London Writers’ Salon (Writers' Hour Magazine). I invited Peppur to read her work in my first sex writing workshop. It was beautiful and daring for those of us who shared what we wrote. I felt like we had stumbled across something magical.I realized that writing openly about my sex life here for you all on Misseducated has taught me a lot. I learned more about my desires, my pleasures, my kinks, and my fantasies. I learned that writing is a powerful tool to connect us with the erotic. As I shared more in “How to be Shamelessly Sexy” and “How to Keep A Sex Journal,” I realized that I had a unique opportunity to create something that you all might just love. A journal that each of you could fill with your innermost, spiciest thoughts!I will admit something: I underestimated the joy that creating this project would give me, and that I could complete it so quickly. Writing my novel required a specific kind of marathon in terms of the creative process, spanning 14 years for me in total. Yet since I started working full-time on this project at the beginning of July, from start to finish, it has taken me almost four months (which included my one month of road-tripping and mountain escapades in the Western US, by the way). Putting this journal together for you has been a surprisingly sweet and pure joy. It brought me to new heights of creative euphoria, and I finished the first draft within 30 days. My soundtrack for this entire experience was the instrumental “aubades” album by Jean-Michel Blais. He’s an absolute legend, and I’ve listened to this on repeat hundreds of times:While I’ve been quiet on here over the last few weeks, I bulldozed through a lot of extremely stressful yet tedious logistics, such as negotiating with printers and navigating the bureaucratic Mexican tax stuff, so that I could deliver your copies to you with ample time for the holiday gift-giving season. With an awesome creative team from Sustancia MX, and amazing contemporary voices, including Peppur’s, somehow we did it! I’ll update you more on that later, as the book also features lovely poems by Abigail A Mlinar Burns, of Happy Endings and Ozy Aloziem. Come back for more! 😉 🫦Launching a book in four months is a pretty crazy thing to do. But when you get a strong sense of conviction about a project, like I did with this journal, there’s simply no time to waste. You only have a little window of the universe’s offering of timing, luck, and good fortune. So you just have to go for it. That’s how I felt with this project. I just knew I wanted to be the person to create this. And here we are.Words of Praise for The Intimacy Journal ✨ 🌿I’m honored to share that two of my idols, Cindy Gallop and Anna Lee, have given short book reviews of The Intimacy Journal:“We could all do with asking ourselves more questions - especially the questions that we would never think to ask ourselves. Tash Doherty’s Intimacy Journal is a wonderful way to explore and get intimate with yourself, to improve and increase intimacy with others, while enjoying some amazing poetry along the way. The perfect gift for someone you love to love them more - yourself.” - Cindy Gallop, Founder & CEO of MakeLoveNotPorn; Author of Dear Cindy. “As someone who’s always advocated for understanding pleasure through self-reflection, I love how The Intimacy Journal fuses introspective journaling with erotic curiosity. Tash’s prompts push you to think—and feel—more deeply.” – Anna Lee, Co-founder & CEO, lioness.io, (S)explore by Lioness. Check out their vibrator.More about The Intimacy Journal 📕💋The Intimacy Journal is an erotic poetry anthology and guided journal with 20 days of writing prompts to help you awaken your shamelessly sexy self. It’s a tool to explore your love life and your turn-ons, and define sexual intimacy, fantasy, desire, and pleasure on your own terms. This is not something you can find on Amazon with a best seller’s rank! This is an independent creative project, inspired by and brought to you from Mexico City.This is quite a full-circle moment for me. I never could have imagined, while living in New York and working my desk job, that one day I would be creating a tool that helps people use my favorite thing, writing, to explore physical intimacy with themselves and others.I cannot thank you enough for being here! It’s honestly so much fun to be able to share this with you. Writing this blog for you has taken a certain amount of grit and vulnerability over these last few years. I am so grateful you are here and along for the ride.Sending love,Tash💌 ✍️p.s. Here’s a photo of me with Rahsa Dezmen, the author of the poem “Open”, which you can find in the last chapter of The Intimacy Journal, for the theme of “Evolution”. She did a reading of her work at the book launch I hosted on my rooftop in Mexico City on Sunday night! Get full access to Misseducated by Tash Doherty at misseducated.tashdoherty.com/subscribe

As a single, childless 30-year-old woman, I don't have all the answers. Still, I've found my role in the village: being a supportive auntie to young women navigating topics they’d rather not discuss with their parents.This all started when I worked with teenage girls one summer a couple of years ago. I realized that while I’d been stumbling through my twenties, trying to hold down my jobs and avoid financial ruin, I’d actually learned a few things about the female experience that could be valuable to them. These girls were 15 and were just starting to have their first relationships. That got me thinking. Getting pregnant in your teens when you don’t want to be is a big freaking deal. Soon, I was pulling them aside and saying,“If you ever need Plan B or anything else, just let me know.” Then I typed my number into their phones.Send this to your most responsible female friend, lol 🥸When I said “anything,” I meant help sorting out gynecological issues, periods, relationships, emergencies, or understanding how to use substances like alcohol, weed, or drugs safely. If I lived in their town, maybe I could accompany them to their first OBGYN appointment or something like that. Basically, it’s all the stuff that’s part of growing up, that you can’t talk to your parents about and fear people might judge you for (hello shame!)Here are my six tips to help you have these conversations as a supportive auntie:* Listen and validate in a nonjudgmental way 🎧I only offer advice if they actually agree to needing it. Sometimes, it’s just about being there to validate their experiences and their pain, and confirm that having female reproductive organs is awful sometimes. Because the medical system ignores a lot of women’s health symptoms, I always acknowledge their pain first because for them it is real. For example, I’d listen and try to empathize with the side effects she experienced from taking the pill and why she stopped, before rushing in to freak her out that she could get pregnant because she’s not on birth control.* Err on the side of over-sharing your experiences 🙆‍♀️Your experiences of having periods, being pregnant, or trying different birth control methods could be gold to a teenager’s ears. Plus, you may have the only honest, real-life experience from a vagina-owning person they can learn from. I take my role pretty seriously, and I provide the honest, juicy details. Pain is obviously subjective, but I try to be honest and not sugar-coat things like my period cramp pain, my IUD insertion, or the red flags of men in my previous relationships, especially around addiction, so I can help them notice the signs to look out for.* Be subtle and cautious to maintain a respectful balance ⚖️Yes, it’s a paradox, but you have to assume they may know very little, but then ultimately respect whatever decision they choose to make. I go with the idea that I’m giving them pretty unusual information on an important topic, so I just bring them aside once a year as a reminder if they need anything, and then I respect their choices.* Beware of age-appropriateness 🫣I’ve found the age difference of 10-15 years to be ideal, but there is also such a thing as too young. For example, I had to remove my 11-year-old cousin as my follower on TikTok because my blog’s content about orgasms didn’t seem appropriate. Once she’s 14 years old, I’ll be sure to pull her aside at the next family function.Dr. Lisa Damour said on the Re: Thinking Podcast,“The data give us a pretty strong sense that the single most powerful force for adolescent mental health is strong relationships with caring adults…Healthy teenagers are meaningfully connected to adults. Bosses, mentors, aunts, uncles. It doesn’t matter if it’s not your kid. You are responsible for all the teenagers in your community and for having meaningful relationships with them.”You’re not their primary support system or a replacement for their therapist. But given that you’re an adult, you can help guide them towards professionals who could help with tough subjects like mental health, abuse, or addiction, etc., when necessary.* Don’t waver in supporting them 🌊Young people need to be able to learn their own boundaries and make mistakes. Without anything too serious happening, trying out substances and exploring sex are normal parts of growing up.As Simon Sinek cheesily said on the Design Matters Podcast,“Leadership is a human enterprise. It’s not about being in charge, it’s about taking care of those in your charge...where you take responsibility that the people in your charge learn confidence, gain a skillset, have the opportunity to try and fall and try again, and discover that they were capable of more than they thought they were capable of. They cannot do that without someone who says, “I believe in you.””* Create the culture you want to see in the world 🌎This is your chance to own these conversations, demystifying and de-stigmatizing as you go. Before you dive into being a supportive auntie, it might help to reflect on your own experiences of these conversations and think critically about how you want to approach them differently for this generation. It’s a great way to work through any shame you might have, which we know is a fundamental part of being shamelessly sexy. The ACA Serenity Prayer captures this well:“God, grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change, the courage to change the one I can, and the wisdom to know that one is me.”Conclusion 👀I hope this piece resonated with you and that you feel encouraged to steward a young person in your life through these issues. And remember that simply by having lived longer, you may have something to offer. I’ve found this to be both a meaningful and healing part of adulthood. If you’re able to break the cycles of shame and secrecy in your important relationships, I hope you get to experience the same.Have a great rest of your week, and I’ll be back soon with some updates about the sex journal’s Kickstarter, which I hope will launch on October 1st!Stay up to date on the sex journal launch! 🚀Love,Tash💌 ✍️Song pairing to get you in the teen vibe: More From Misseducated 💌 ✍️ Get full access to Misseducated by Tash Doherty at misseducated.tashdoherty.com/subscribe

Dear Wonderful Readers,We did it! The first draft of The Sex Journal is done, and headed to the printers today! It’s 140 pages long, so my estimate of 70 sheets at the printers was bang on. As I write this, I realize I’m probably going to regret not having any reader feedback before printing the first draft. Still, I look forward to learning that lesson the hard way when I return in August to examine the samples.It’s not too late to sign up to be a beta reader of The Sex Journal! My offer still stands:* If you’re a free subscriber, you can get 3 months of Misseducated’s paid tier comped in exchange for your feedback* If you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll get a discount on the final journal once it’s releasedI’ll be back in late August with more updates about starting preorders. If you’re truly dying to get your copy and don’t want to miss a second of updates, you can respond “Preorder!” to this email, and I will put you on a special separate list.Share this with your favorite person…Let me just say, if there’s one thing I’ve learned through this process, it’s that creating a journal is WAY easier than writing a novel. WAY easier. It took me two years to complete the first draft of my novel, and 14 years to publish it. I completed the first draft of the sex journal in about a month. It’s insanely faster. I’m grateful for that.A month ago, I looked at this pretty massive mountain in front of me and I thought: how the f**k am I going to do this? Well, it’s been quite the creative rollercoaster, but somehow I pulled it together. For anyone who wants to try this at home, I’d recommend making your project your full-time job temporarily, picking an absolutely ridiculous deadline that you’re not sure you can meet, and of course choosing to focus on a project that you are actually dying to do. I think the fact that I want this sex journal to exist and I have a seriously limited amount of time to create it before I go on holiday / run out of money has been the perfect recipe for getting s**t done. It enabled me to blast through any and all gatekeepers and limitations that were standing in my way.Now, I am not going to lie. I’m absolutely fried right now. I really wanted to write a funny, actually useful article for you today, but my brain is literally shutting down. On this home stretch, I’ve started sending emails to potential clients with spelling errors! For me, this is a small travesty and a sign. I can’t go on.The good news is that I have SO many fun upcoming articles planned for you. Here are a few hints:* “My 5 Kinks and Why”: I want to revisit a classic topic and delve deeper into the quirky psychologies I developed in my childhood. Thank you, Freud!* “The Hot Gal’s Guide to Sex in Mexico City”: Echoing my piece about dating Mexican men, I’m creating a guide for the girls, the gays, and the theys (à la Blakely Thornton) based on my experiences of living in Mexico City for three years as a single person wedged in the dating scene. This guide will be full of local lore that you can’t find anywhere else, including which locations, bars, restaurants, and gyms you should frequent, depending on the type of person you’re looking to bang. This piece makes me smile every time I think about it.* “We are the village”: This will be a more tender piece about how we can shamelessly support the young women in our lives with issues like sex, birth control, and healthy romantic relationships. I’ll be coining an unscientific term of “life auntie”, a role which I’ve accidentally taken on. It’s an ode to remembering that we matter when it comes to being there for younger people. It’s also an antidote to the insanely uncertain shitstorm of the world right now, because it’s a direct impact we can have on the lives of others and something we can control.* Do you have a burning question or a topic you want me to write about? Leave me a comment, a DM, or a quick response to this email, and I’ll make it happen.The bad news is that I am indeed going on holiday for almost a month. You can expect the next Misseducated update from me on Tuesday, August 19th. I know that is an age away. I will miss you because I love writing this newsletter. But the truth is that aside from the week-long creative orgasm of my sex journal, I have been struggling creatively. This is because of at least two major factors:* I started using AI to help me edit my work. I started paying for Claude and ChatGPT, and while it’s been helpful to tighten my paragraphs for clarity and make it easier to find research articles for The Sex Report, for example, I feel like I’ve lost the way. I’m obviously a bit of a writing purist, so I only use AI to help me edit my work, but still. I don’t like the quality of the things I’ve been producing with its help. Looking back, I don’t like it’s ideas of what’s optimal. I need to take time away from the internet. Luckily, I’m going to the mountains of California with literally nothing but my own thoughts to nag me for almost two weeks. It’s the reset I need. Wish me luck.* I’ve started stressing about growth metrics too much. Just like the type-A Wharton graduate I am, or like anyone who’s hooked on social media, I’ve been checking engagement, clicks, views, subscriptions, and all that crap of this newsletter for a few months now. I’ve noticed some trends as to what people like, but it’s started to consume me. I’ve literally forgotten about the fun things that I want to write about. I’ve become too focused on the outcomes, as opposed to just enjoying the creative process. According to Rick Rubin, James Clear, and a variety of modern-day gurus, obsessing about the outcomes and the performance of your work is literally the worst thing you can do, for your work itself and your creativity. And I’ve got a pretty heavy case of the outcomes obsessions. Here are some relevant Rick Rubin quotes:“The best work is the work you are excited about.”“Your trust in your instincts and excitement are what resonate with others.”“If we second-guess our inner knowing to attempt to predict what others may like, our best work will never appear.”And of course, it’s all exacerbated by comparing myself to other Substackers! Social comparison is the worst. I still haven’t learned my lesson. So a break from social media will also hopefully help me with that. The point is, I’m hoping a couple of weeks driving around in the Western United States, and retreating to the mountainous forests of Northern California, will help me remember why the hell I am doing this and what kind of writing excites me the most. I am not giving up.Anyway, I want to say a big thank you for reading and being here with me for this ride! Your support helps to keep me going, reminds me to keep learning, and keeps me honest in the process.I hope you all have a relaxing, creative couple of weeks, and I can’t wait to connect with you again soon once I’m back!Lots of love,Tash💌 ✍️Come back for more! p.s. Here’s a smattering of things to keep you entertained in my absence. My Road Trip Playlist 🛣️ 🌲 🏞️Listen to the Misseducated Podcast 💌 ✍️More From Misseducated 💌 ✍️ Get full access to Misseducated by Tash Doherty at misseducated.tashdoherty.com/subscribe

TL;DR Better out than in. Be bold. Tell people you love them while you still can. No regrets. 💌 ✍️Dear Wonderful Readers,My grandmother is not getting out of bed. I can't help but think of what she's leaving behind: the things, the people, and the world outside her room. She spent all of COVID alone in her apartment on the second floor of a crumbling stucco building in Koreatown, Los Angeles. She was happy living there until she had to be taken to hospital when she fell over and broke her pelvis two years ago. She hasn't stood up unassisted since. When she moved, my aunt came and packed up everything that she owned and put it in a storage unit.When I tell people my grandmother lives in Los Angeles, it sounds incredibly glamorous. Their eyes open wide. But they don’t know that she misplaced her divorce settlement money in the 80s on a hotel in Palm Springs. Then she didn’t want to look after Aunt Mildred, which at least would have left her with the three-story house in the Castro, San Francisco—a house that her granddaughter, paying astronomical rent in the same city some fifteen years later, would quite like to have had.Share this with a fellow millennial who pays astronomical rent:Still, I love my grandmother. She balks at the MAGA, conspiracy-theory-inclined, insecure man in my family and our circles. She pesters them, expecting better. She calls me up to remind me that I should subscribe to Heather Cox Richardson, the esteemed historian from Harvard. She listens to my podcast. She says I have a talent for interviewing people. She tells me of the love she feels towards one of the carers at her nursing home, blurring tender affection with attraction. I read between the lines.My grandmother tells me getting old sucks. Half the time she calls me, it’s because she can't figure out how to do something on her iPad. The other half of the times she calls me, it’s to remind me of the things she has selected for me to have after she dies, the few treasures amongst the multiple boxes of rotten, rat, pee-and-poop-infested books that I’ve already hauled out of her storage unit on Pico.That freaking storage unit. It's like a hospital for people’s dying memories of their old selves. Yet, unlike bodies, which you can put in the ground, you can’t get rid of the things in there. There’s too much “value”. Nostalgiafied, imagined value. These embodied artifacts of your soul make it impossible for any future person to get rid of them.I've already siphoned off the treasures I wanted as payment for my time cleaning out the crap. The two ceramic Mexican masks and the two pieces of Huichol (Wixárika) felt art that I found in a trunk. A trunk that was buried deep in the bowels of my grandmother’s storage unit and which, I kid you not, also contained her mother’s, my great grandmother's, ashes. Thankfully, the soul of my great-grandmother has since been laid to rest. Her ashes scattered by my sister, my great-aunt, and my cousin at Stinson Beach.My grandmother tells me she wants to walk, but she always said that exercising hurt her. One time, I dragged her, rushing, from Southwark tube station in London to the Tate Modern to see a Lichtenstein exhibition, which I didn’t even like. That was the closest I ever saw her to running; for a timed entry to a museum, which we simply could not miss.My grandmother might never run again, or maybe even stand up unassisted again, but her saving grace is that she can still make art. My grandmother has painted all her life and recently started doing art again in her nursing home, even though she struggles to see and move her hands. I am glad for her, finally having fun and challenging her inner perfectionist. But she told me most of what she creates is a charcoaled blob. It’s to represent the darkness of the now-charred neighborhood, Pacific Palisades, which she used to call home, where she raised her children.My grandmother's memories live in a version of Pacific Palisades that no longer exists. One of my grandmother's proudest, most cherished memories was starting Art Alley at Marquez, the elementary school in the Palisades, where she painted a series of murals with the kids. I don't know what the murals looked like, people in the "Pacific Palisades - Remember When" Facebook group definitely do. I once asked some famous YouTubers who grew up in the Palisades. They remember it also. My grandmother was very pleased when I told her that. For better or worse, of course, she had sold the two houses she once owned in the Palisades and the condo on the beach in Malibu long ago. No surprises there. In the wake of the fires, it’s hard to know whether this was a blessing or a curse.We joke that my grandmother is a witch. Once, when my mother was a teenager and her boyfriend broke up with her, my grandmother made her a voodoo "Aidan doll" and pins to go with it. Aidan died a few years later. Smoking weed and a brain hemorrhage, they said. I warn my grandmother to be careful. She tells me she's working on our current president, but he's a tough one.I take screenshots when I talk with my grandmother on FaceTime. It’s strange to have a relationship with someone where there’s always that thought in the front of your mind that this could be the last time you talk to them. I learned years ago now to always say, “I love you,” just before we hang up. The Englishness in me resents this and feels embarrassed. But, perhaps shaped by the beauty of Mexico, I'm learning to express that. Perhaps not all feelings are meant to be swept under the rug. Maybe it's like the characters in the staple movie from my childhood, Shrek, belching as he says, “Better out than in, I always say.”The thought of expressing these feelings is bringing up a lot of emotion for me. Maybe that’s what I wanted to say here, and part of what this newsletter is about. While I was basically told to keep sweet my entire childhood, as an adult, I prefer to use my words. Say what I really feel. Leave no stone unturned. What’s the point of being alive if the closest people to us are left guessing whether or not we ever truly cared for them? If we ever truly loved them? If they ever meant anything to us?Maybe it wasn't a mistake to tell two grown men last summer that I loved them. One of them was my old boss, another was an old friend. Both of them had been huge supporters of my work, which I later discovered is my Achilles heel when it comes to men. There’s nothing that turns me on quite like a man calling me a prolific artist. Unfortunately, neither of them has talked to me since. It seems neither of them could handle it. I have been feeling some shame about that. Still, it's not up to me to make them believe they're lovable.That is why we must say what we feel. Be bold. Express what we feel we must say. No regrets. It’s mostly just to sense check with ourselves. To reconfirm with ourselves that we are truly alive.Is there someone you say “I love you” to every time you hang up the phone?Is there someone you wish you could say it to?Or something you've been meaning to say but haven't?I dare you to say it while you still can. If you feel like sharing, I’d love to hear it.Lots of love, and have a great rest of your week,Tash💌 ✍️Read me again sometime…More From Misseducated 💌 ✍️ Get full access to Misseducated by Tash Doherty at misseducated.tashdoherty.com/subscribe

Abstract (TL;DR) ⏰After 64 attempts and zero orgasms, I finally understood why 81.6% of women can’t reach orgasm from intercourse alone. Here, I uncover the reasons why. I was in a one-year relationship. We were in our teens, and although we had lots of fun penetrative sex in different places, neither of us understood the importance of the female’s pleasure in a heterosexual relationship. I cite a research paper where I self-identify as part of the 81.6% of females who cannot orgasm from intercourse alone. Then I share which of the researcher’s suggested techniques for helping women orgasm also work for me. These include not feeling rushed, having a partner who knows what I like, and anal stimulation.Subscribe for regular spice 🌶️: Introduction 💦I lay there, naked, as my partner pushed himself deeper inside of me. He grunted and closed his eyes from the intensity as he leaned down on top of me. Yet, as I hugged his shoulders, I was silent. My eyes were wide open. I stared at the cream-colored plaster flowers that lined the edge of the ceiling in my bedroom; their shadows elongated in the late spring evening. Despite all the girls in porn having so much fun during this part, I felt almost nothing. I was too embarrassed to admit to myself that I was almost…bored?That relationship lasted for one year. I never orgasmed with that partner. This is despite the fact that we had sex about an estimated 64 times (see details below) and that I’ve been perfectly happy masturbating on my own since I was 14. What happened? Or what wasn’t happening? Why was this the case? The article is a deep dive into a phenomenon I want to call “an orgasmless relationship.” Here, I’ll share everything that I’ve learned so you can avoid this experience for yourself in your current and future relationships.Before we get dirty, I want to apologize to my ex-partner, Will (not his real name), for the fact that I’m sharing the intimate details of our relationship on the internet. Unlike the situations of some women I’ve talked to who were also in orgasmless relationships (who had to fake them all in the end), Will was a very kind and loving boyfriend. I stand by the fact that he would have done everything he could to please me. The problem was that neither of us knew any better at the time. We were in our teens, and as you’ll come to see, we both lacked some key situational and psychological factors.Relationship Data Observations 🧫Here’s a detailed breakdown of our relationship: Category: High School Boyfriend. Monogamous.How we met: We took the same train to school and were also in the same choir. He took a liking to me, and at some point, we started talking on the way home.Birth control methods: The pill and condoms.Duration: 1 year, exactly. I broke up with him on our anniversary because I was on my period and got the ick.Why we broke up: We had very different interests, and I didn’t have the communication skills to tell him I wanted to have penetrative sex less frequently.Where We Had Sex: A Geographic Analysis 🗺️Here is a map of all the places where Will and I had penetrative sex. Keep in mind that we were both in high school, so we lived with our families.The school bathroom sex was not particularly warm or comfortable, but it was thrilling. Still, we almost got caught by some younger male students once. Around this time, I was in the running to become a school prefect, and Will was trying to get recruited to play rugby at university, so we decided it probably wasn’t worth the risk anymore. Yet the secrecy of it all was intoxicating. Looking at my Maths or English teacher in the face the next day at my lessons felt very cheeky and naughty indeed.Analysis 📊Given that I had so much sex with Will, why did I never orgasm? Here’s what was holding me back:* I was never taught that my pleasure was important, or I saw it as less important than Will’s, so I never prioritized it. Plus, as a people-pleaser, I wanted Will to have an amazing time so that he could boast to his rugby friends.* I was too embarrassed and ashamed to admit to Will that I knew how to orgasm or that I masturbated. Female masturbation was extremely taboo. Not even my closest female friends had ever mentioned it to me.* I struggled to relax and simply receive. Will would eat me out until a certain point, but when it got to be too much pleasure, I quickly stopped it. I felt uncomfortable taking so much time.* We didn’t explore anal or toys or anything like that. This was Will’s first relationship, and I already felt guilty for having penetrative sex with him, like I was corrupting him.* I never thought to bring my bullet vibrator into the bedroom with Will because I didn’t want him to feel incompetent. I didn’t know the most basic rule that we need to transfer our techniques for pleasuring ourselves to our partnered heterosexual sex.* From porn, I believed that the goal of foreplay was to prepare us for intercourse. I didn’t realize that foreplay is the main course for many women. Women in porn videos also seemed to find having penetrative sex very pleasurable, but apart from stimulating my g-spot with strange positions like "split the reed," penetration wasn’t pleasurable for me. I blamed myself and thought something was wrong with me.* I had no idea that, for the most part, women cannot orgasm by penetration alone.Be brave! Share this post with someone who you want to give you an orgasm: Key Findings 🤓My experience wasn’t unique, or so I learned from digging into the science. In June 2015, an amazing group of researchers surveyed 1,055 women aged 18-94 about their experiences with genital touching, sexual pleasure, and orgasm. They surveyed a large enough group with the hope of getting a representative sample of all the women in the United States. Most importantly, they found “that nearly three-quarters of women reported that adding clitoral stimulation during penetration was either necessary for orgasm or made their orgasms feel better.” I highly recommend reading the paper if you want to know the extra juicy details of how different women like their clitorises stimulated.Their table shows a strong relationship between the stimulation of the clitoris during intercourse and a woman’s ability to orgasm on average:They added a fun section where they asked women for experiences or techniques that helped them orgasm. I then compared which ones I’ve experienced as being helpful to helping me orgasm:Discussion 🧘‍♀️Reflecting on my relationship with Will, I wish I had learned how to be shamelessly sexy earlier in life. I wish I had believed what I teach now: our pleasure matters, and we should not be afraid to tell our partners that we masturbate. We must ask for what we want. It probably wasn’t until my next boyfriend (who I pegged), some five years later, that I felt comfortable enough to orgasm in front of my partner. I matured a lot in my next relationship, and I’m grateful I did.However, I did not really begin to practice what I preached until I interviewed Dr. Laurie Mintz about her book, “Becoming Cliterate.” Since I wrote the piece “How To Achieve Orgasm Equality,” I made a rule with myself: we have to have at least one orgasm with any male partner before we have intercourse. I’ve pretty much stuck to that since. It may take each new partner a couple of sessions to learn how to play me like a new instrument, but given the fact that we will probably have sex and I have an affinity for creampies, it’s the least they can do.Did you ever find yourself in an orgasmless relationship? Did you find a way to fix it? Share your story in the comments so we can normalize talking about what actually works for our bodies. Thank you all for bearing with me as I try this new Tuesday schedule.Love,Tash💌 ✍️Send this article to a naughty, nerdy friend 😈🤓: Get full access to Misseducated by Tash Doherty at misseducated.tashdoherty.com/subscribe

Dear wonderful readers,Today, we have the ultimate treat for you all! This week, two shameless sex writers on Substack sat down to share our personal experiences of what it's really like to publish the details of our intimate lives on the internet.Share the steam with a spicy-minded friend 🔥Abigail A Mlinar Burns, the married sex writer behind Happy Endings, and Tash Doherty, the single sex writer behind Misseducated by Tash Doherty, chose to spill all the juicy deets. We covered everything from anal equality to the serendipity of dating apps and post-partum intimacy secrets to throwing societal expectations of weddings out the window. Plus, we dive into the importance and the power of women being woo-woo.We hope you'll love listening to this conversation as much as we loved having it! Be sure to check out our publications: Happy Endings and Misseducated by Tash DohertyEnjoy, and thank you for being here as we explore what it means to write shamelessly about sex,Abigail & Tash 💌 ✍️Read our work 🫦Happy Endings Misseducated by Tash Doherty Follow us on Instagram 🚀@abigailamlinarb@tashdoherty_Podcast Interview Transcript 📖[00:00:11] Tash Doherty: So, welcome back to Misseducated. You have no idea how excited I am for our chat today. We're meeting with Abigail Mlinar, who is the writer of Happy Endings, which has been my favorite Substack since I discovered it maybe like two or three weeks ago now. But we both focus on such incredible sexuality topics. Abigail specifically writes a lot about her marriage and sexuality within marriage, which I think is a topic that is so neglected in our society. And yeah, there's many myths that we can bust along the way. So, Abigail, welcome to Misseducated. So excited to have you.[00:00:45] Abigail Mlinar Burns: Thanks for having me. I'm super stoked to be here.[00:00:48] Tash Doherty: Yay! I feel like this is a dream come true. I don't think I've crushed this hard on another writer in like a long time. But we both went behind the scenes and like read a couple of pieces from each other's Substack, so we can start just with our backgrounds and whatever else anyone wants to know. And then hopefully dive into some pretty juicy, sexy topics as both of us have been writing for like a while now. So yes, let's get into it.[00:01:13] Abigail Mlinar Burns: Yay. I know you have such a like, clear, beautiful like shameless is your brand, but just your voice is so like just real that I really f*****g enjoy reading what you write.Is it okay if I swear?[00:01:29] Tash Doherty: Yes, it's completely fine. And I also really f*****g enjoy reading what you write as well. And the first question that I actually wanted to start with for you is: could you tell us about the serendipity of the song "Tenderness"?[00:01:42] Abigail Mlinar Burns: Oh my God. Of course, I can. This is my favorite story. I can tell this over and over again. It's just that I believe in magic, right? I don't believe in like magician's magic. I mean, I do in that it's a craft that they can hone. But I believe that there's magic in the universe, right? Yeah. And I try to follow it as bonkers as it can be at times because I feel like that's where you're meant to be, right?So one day, I was on Tinder, which, nod to your Vogue piece about dating apps while traveling. Like that's literally me and my ethos and my whole life. So I saw that, and I'm like, f**k, of course, we're supposed to meet. Like we have so many similar thoughts in this life.I was traveling constantly before I settled down, as happens in culture these days, right? Uh, I was traveling a lot, and my first modus operandi when I got to a new town was to pull up dating apps. And Tinder is my app of choice, or it was. I just feel like it's the dive bar of dating apps. It's so like random where you could happen into anybody, whereas you feel like on the other ones, they're a bit more curated, and you kind of know which type of person you're gonna get. I just love the randomness of Tinder. Yeah. Anyways, I opened it up. I was like wrapped in a towel naked, drying off after a shower from my leg travels, unpacking my suitcase in my new apartment. Well, I had a bedroom in somebody else's place, which is another whole story that's amazing. I'm humming a song that my dad introduced me to, and my dad is super important in my life. My mom died, and so it was just me and, my dad and my sister for a while. So he introduced me to the song. I'm humming it. It's so catchy. It's an earworm. It can't come outta my head. And I open up Tinder; the second third swipe is Joe, my future husband, who's in the other room. And his profile, it was just one photo and his favorite song, you know, the Spotify integration. "Tenderness" by the Parquet Courts, the same song I was humming.I got total full-body chills. I was so freaked out and I swiped right without even thinking a second longer. And we matched. I sent a message immediately and was just like, "You won't believe this, so serendipitous. I was humming your favorite song while I stumbled upon your profile." And his response was just so perfect. It was like, "I love serendipity.Let's get a beer today." And we met that afternoon just a couple hours later.[00:04:06] Tash Doherty: Oh my God. That is such a cool story. And also, like, I love that you take advantage of the randomness of Tinder because a lot of times when people are mentioning the music that they like on the internet, it's so random, right? Like, it's like we all listen to a lot of different music on Spotify, whatever. But, like, the fact that that song match was so perfect is actually crazy lucky. Because yeah, again, there's so many people who are like Arcade Fire or like whatever. And I'm just like, I could not give a s**t about their music choices. But yeah, that was like the beginning of your entire relationship, and then things blossomed quickly. I know this was only in 2019, so this was only like six years ago, basically. Yeah.[00:04:41] Abigail Mlinar Burns: Yeah. I met him, and then we were pregnant and married within like a year, year and a half.[00:04:48] Tash Doherty: Wow.[00:04:48] Abigail Mlinar Burns: So quite, quite a fast turn of events and a complete pivot from my lifestyle beforehand. But I just like I say about magic, I think when you know, you know, and you just follow that.[00:04:57] Tash Doherty: Yeah. That is so awesome, and it really gives me hope as well, I will say. So it's been really awesome to read a lot of your work in that sense. And so at this time, you were also, because you're the Head of Growth and Sales and everything also at Make Love Not Porn, which we love, working alongside Cindy Gallop, which is an amazing company. And now you guys live in New York, so that's the vibe with two kids.[00:05:18] Abigail Mlinar Burns: Yeah, two kids. My relationship with Cindy is slightly longer than the relationship with my husband because I started working out with Cindy a few months before Joe and I met. That was why I went to Europe was actually because I wanted to work in alternative adult content spaces to help change the big porn landscape a little bit by helping smaller creators be more dominant in that space and have more market share to then, like, hopefully, sway the supply of big porn. Anyways, came back to New York and the United States.I'm from Minneapolis, Minnesota, by way of Europe.[00:05:52] Tash Doherty: By way of Europe and picking up a husband along the way. So, that's been really amazing. And I've got some quotes from some of my favorite pieces of yours that I was reading. One of the ones that really stuck out to me was the one where you talk about, let's see what this is called. Is it "The Mother W***e Complex is Hot, Actually." And this is like an interview back and forth with you and Joe. And my favorite part, because one of the other questions I wanted to ask you because I've had this problem with my readers as well, is that I mostly slept with a bunch of different people, random on and off, and they often see themselves, you know, in my writing. But here, at the end, you have this amazing back-and-forth conversation, including like tips for postpartum intimacy, like all this juicy stuff. And then at the end, you are just like, Hey honey, can I like share this on my Substack? And he was like, sure, as long as you include this image of "L'Estasi di Santa Teresa."Which is, like, a kind of such a random thing. So, how has that conversation come up with you guys? And is he like a private person at all? Or are you just kind of like winging it as you are expanding Happy Endings like quite a lot?[00:06:56] Abigail Mlinar Burns: It is kind of hilarious because we're both sex writers, right? And so I suppose you can connect with this.When I first started writing, and a lot of my writing was sexy, and it was from my history because that's what I think a lot of artists pull from, right? Even if it's fiction, it's still pulling from your life. It got Joe, my husband, a little bit fidgety, thinking: oh, am I going to be attached to somebody who's sharing her sexual history on the internet in a public space? Like, what does that mean about me? And he had to work through that in some kind of way.But the bizarre, ironic thing, which isn't ironic at all to me if you know him more intimately, and I wrote something about the weirdness of his sexual perspectives because he's open to being open in the future if I ever wanna sleep with women again. But he wouldn't be open to being open in the future if it's about other dicks, because he's very much like one dick. So anyways, it's just--[00:07:26] Tash Doherty: He's a one-dick guy.[00:07:27] Abigail Mlinar Burns: He's messing. He's not one note by any means. So when it comes to my sex writing about him and our relationships, he is like, oh yeah, sure, go ahead. He doesn't give a s**t. He's my editor too, you know. He is the guy who reads everything before it goes out. So yeah, he signs off on everything.That interview that you mentioned was the first time that I pulled him in directly because I just loved his point of view on this exact topic, and I thought the world we needed to hear it. Like, there aren't a lot of guy's guides for postpartum sex, and you know that guys are interested in it because they're asking Joe about it all the time. Like, what? What's your guys' sex life? Before I started this publication, of course, because now they can just find it there. But people, they're curious, and nobody's servicing those needs.[00:08:34] Tash Doherty: Totally. And if anything, I think the stories that you guys do share are, like, so intimate and steamy that he comes off as, I mean, again, this is maybe more men having a lot of sex in the culture, but he does come off as kind of like a standup dude, haha, in the experience as well. And that's what I really liked about it because I've had people read my work. Then, like I, I wrote an article called like "I Pegged My Boyfriend," and that's actually been one of my best-read pieces over the years. And obviously, that guy reached out and was like really upset because it was like a very personal thing that he wanted to do. But again, he's my ex, and so I'm just like, well, I have full, full creative control, you know, and using that to my advantage over everything that I can say. But, like, the whole point about Happy Endings is that you guys are in a marriage, and it's a long-term relationship, and that has some consequences as well. Yeah.[00:09:17] Abigail Mlinar Burns: For sure. I think that it's a little bit. I mean, you and I write about our sex lives and, as you describe it, being shameless. I think that you have to have a bit of openness and shamelessness in order to do this kind of work. But I think it's so needed. Like we've talked about offline, I didn't have a relationship to view at home because my mom died, so I didn't really know what a heterosexual, happy relationship looks like intimately. And I think that that was to my detriment for quite a while. And so I thought if I feel comfortable enough, which I do, and safe enough and Joe's okay with it, like why don't we just open this privacy curtain that so many, like heterosexual relationships fall behind that I think isn't serving culture? It isn't serving relationships, that's for sure.[00:09:59] Tash Doherty: Totally. And you also talk about that when you say statistically married people have a lot more sex. And I can also attest to that as well, the fact that, like, the periods of my life when I've been single, I've had very little sex. It's despite the fact that I've been a sex writer for like three years. I've had like significantly less sex now than when I was in a long-term relationship. That's just like the nature of, you know, those things. Um mm-hmm. But actually, yeah, like the whole culture's narrative around like the pure wife and everything, and then like somehow living in a sexless relationship for 30 years. Like statistically, you are like, that's b******t.[00:10:31] Abigail Mlinar Burns: And those stories are juicy, right?Like people wanna hear about the like sexy single person because they can offload their fantasies and make it satisfying to them, like, oh, I'm not satisfied with my sex life because only sexy single people can do that. You know, it's just like a way that we can live through stories, but also distance ourselves from our happiness. And I just think it's a bit b******t and wanted to show a different way to be.[00:10:54] Tash Doherty: Yeah, totally. And that's why I think I resonate, well, so hardcore, or I kind of even aspire to the stories that you share on your blog because I'm like, hell yeah, like if I'm gonna get married or if I'm gonna be in a long-term relationship, I'm gonna have a s**t ton of sex, and it's gonna be amazing.And do you think there's also, like, an exhibitionist aspect to it as well? Because in your relationship, I don't know if you've talked about that with Joe, but what, if anything, do you think his friends and stuff, reading about his sex life has like also changed his perspective or your perspective as well?[00:11:21] Abigail Mlinar Burns: Yeah, I know. It's a good question because some of his friends are subscribers. And I don't know if they did it just out of, like, the goodness of their heart to say like, oh, I'm gonna support her and never read it, or whatever it is. Or maybe they didn't know what they were getting into. Who knows. I don't check and see the star rating or whatever I've heard about is in the Substack setting because I'm just like, I don't wanna know all of those kinds of details that I think creators and people growing brands can obsess over. And I really want this to be, like, core to my original goal of like feeling more love for myself and my relationships, but also like sharing love with the world and not about the nitty gritty growth mechanics and stats and whatnot.But anyways, I think the exhibitionism part is a real thing, yeah. I mean, I would've identified myself as an exhibitionist before being in a marriage. I think it's gotten so muddy now because being seen and having somebody catch me now has this connotation of, like, your kids walking in on you.And I don't wanna make my kids get traumatized by that kind of witnessed thing. So now, like, the idea of being caught is less sexy, but doing it online, I think, is something that feels safe because it's non-visual. And all of my most censored, explicit stories are behind the paywall. So I know that Google can't crawl it necessarily and out me publicly in some kind of way. But yeah, it is a way to have that energy in a more safe and controlled way, for sure.[00:12:46] Tash Doherty: Yeah. And I have also put my more spicy stories behind the paywall. But then I kind of unfortunately am getting into the nitty gritty of like growth tactics, and I'm like, you know, some aspects of my pieces are like the one about pegging my boyfriend, right?That's something that challenges the stereotypes about masculinity in a lot of ways and, you know, helps people to feel like men can, you know, take something off the bum. Like, enjoy it. Like, there are a lot of different interesting aspects that I think we need to explore to challenge masculinity in the culture.So, you know, I'm like, at the end of the day, it's a gray area, I would say, being a sex writer. Because I also write a lot about, like, female orgasms in a bunch of different settings. And I'm like, I enjoy butt stuff like, let's just put that out there. And I mention it. Like I sprinkle it in through, like, a bunch of different articles, and I'm like, okay. You know, like, maybe this is for the greater good. Like the world can just know that I like butt stuff, but it's more like I'm, hopefully, going be helping, like, my readers to be like, "Hey, this is something that I should be advocating for, or this is going to be pleasurable for me."And the huge concept that this also relates to is, like, anal equality. Because that's why I think the pegging my boyfriend article is so important. Because, especially in heterosexual relationships, the female receiving anal sex is like this kind of prized thing, I would say. Especially a lot of girls feel pressured into doing that, and I'm like: why don't we just have anal equality? Like guys have buttholes too. Like then, they can also receive (people who've been traumatized aside). I don't think people should be having anal sex unless they're willing to do it both ways. So it's like, those are all concepts that I think are very important, but that means that I have to share so much personal information in order to get that point across. But I'm just hoping that it's worth it in the end, basically.[00:14:21] Abigail Mlinar Burns: Oh, it is worth it in the end. A million percent. I mean, just thinking about, like, if you impacted one person to open their mind to anal play, you would make one person's life infinitely more pleasurable because it is so spectacular, isn't it?Yeah, and honestly, all of those important tidbits about my sexuality are above the paywall as well. Like, everything that I write is pretty much sexually explicit and available for free, but just the nitty gritty, raw details of the sex that we actually had yesterday play-by-play.That's my like once-a-month sexy post.[00:14:54] Tash Doherty: Yeah. So is that what you do? You have that behind the paywall, then? So, that once-a-month sexy post for your paid subscribers, or how are you exploring that field right now?[00:15:03] Abigail Mlinar Burns: Yeah. My thoughts right now, and I think it might evolve, but it's like once a week. Not super invasive to email inbox, but it's always an exhibition of love in whatever way. So sometimes it has been a very, maybe even twee, very much about, like, familial love and connection with children. Um, but then sometimes, about once a month, it'll be an actual sex story. My most recent one was about Joe giving me oral sex and in a moment of me feeling, like, a little bit in my head and tense about things. And he helped me, like, release through all of that in a very, like, playful and sexy way.I have that one story, but then the other things that I share are sometimes essays. Um, as you've seen about couples having more sex than single people on average. And just the ways in which our relationship exists. So sometimes that is like a sexual analysis that isn't an actual sex story, and thus, that's available for anyone to see.[00:15:56] Tash Doherty: It's crazy how many topics are so adjusted as well and so fascinating. And the other one that I liked, which we kind of already touched on, is, which one is it? "My Stranger Spouse." And I think this is interesting because what you really explore so well in your work is this difference between the myths and the kind of stereotypes that we have, but also, like exploring fantasies and going from the familiar to the not familiar, right? And that's what it's important to keep with the erotic. Honestly, there's a kind of danger breaking out of these molds of the day-to-day, which I think you need in order to have like a healthy sex life.And so that's what I really loved about "My Stranger Spouse." And even just like these little details, like, you wrote, "I smile at my stranger spouse, I give him a cup of tea so he knows I'm thinking of him. I brush his shoulder with my fingertips as I pass." Like, I just love those details. And playing with the idea that you maybe don't even know this person that you've been dating for six years at all is so interesting.[00:16:48] Abigail Mlinar Burns: Yeah, thanks. I think there's such a wave in culture in the last two years of people kind of upholding the divorce novel and these divorce stories as important movement. And I absolutely agree that if you think you should get a divorce, you should absolutely f*****g get a divorce. And so it's awesome that there's all these stories out there that are making that more normal and accessible for people who need it. But, um, for people who are happy in their relationship but go through momentary frustrations, because it's an inevitable feeling that we'll all experience, and you don't want your frustrations to devolve into resentment. And the other four horsemen of marriage, you should have some sort of tool in your tool belt.And I feel like there aren't that many of those out there. And "My Stranger Spouse" felt also like something that, yeah, like, it happened to me by accident once, where I was on a subway and wasn't feeling very healthy, and I was physically unwell. And so emotionally, naturally, you'll get a bit unwell, and you feel like a little crabby. And then the subway shook, and my knee shook, and I felt like I might die for a second. And in that moment, I realized that, like, if I ever lost Joe, I would feel just devastated, you know? Like he is such a treasure. And when you can get in that clouded state of self-centering and feeling like, oh, woe is me, and you forget that you have this like other beautiful individual of the world in your space with you, that sometimes you misjudge or generalize. And so, like, just having this meditation. I call it, like, "a divorce mitigation meditation" to help me, like, re-clear my sense of who this person is and see him like a stranger would see him as, like, sexy and interesting.[00:18:24] Tash Doherty: Yeah. That's I think so important. And I've also, like, come across this a lot with, like, my parents and my own family, which is like: all of your relationships are voluntary. You know what I mean?So I love the detail about you getting him the cup of tea. Because, it's like, that's how you don't build resentment over time by taking this person for granted, right? Like, that's a huge and important step to making sure that things are, like, spicy and interesting; you can just walk away at any point in time, which is terrifying but also keeps things interesting.[00:18:52] Abigail Mlinar Burns: I know, which I mean, brings me to some of the essays of yours that I found so thought provoking. Like about how you, um, didn't want marriage and how, like, amongst your family, you felt like the only person who is choosing, being single and judged for that. And then also the one about attending other people's marriages when that isn't your, like, life stage. Like, ugh! I so related and connected because I did identify as that person before I am now finding myself here. And the the feelings that you felt, I have felt before as well, and also can still see myself feeling because even though I'm married and in a marriage, I don't like think about myself as a person who is in a couple.I mean, it's so hard to say because you are in a couple, right? And you are connected with somebody else, and that is my most important value. So much so that I'm f*****g writing a substack about it. And yet, I'm still just an individual person, just like he is. And I think that's why we feel so healthy and happily in love because we acknowledge our individualnesses.[00:19:50] Tash Doherty: Yeah, totally. And you really wrote about that as well on your wedding day about it not being the biggest day of your life ever, right? I think, again, what's interesting is we're kind of, like, both toying with two sides of the same coin. This is why I focus on being shamelessly sexy because shame takes so many forms for women.Like, you can literally receive even also being a mother, I'm sure it's just like coming at you all the time. You can do anything in your life, and people will come at you with 10 different opinions about, like, what you should or shouldn't be doing. And the whole point is that I think, at least for both of us, I'll speak, well, I'll speak for myself, is just like saying what I actually think and feel. And now we're both so aware of how that actually challenges the societal norms.Like even the one in the wedding piece, which was so funny is like, one of my friends told me for six years about how much she hated her partner. And then, like, they got married, and she expected me to be happy for her. And I was just like, why do you have to be happy for people? If people seem like actually unhappy, I'm like, support their marriage or don't. And just feeling entitled to your own opinions, I think was the goal with that piece that I was trying to get across.[00:20:46] Abigail Mlinar Burns: Hell yeah. I know I've had friends that I've also counseled and suggested that they not be with them, and they've not taken my advice. And then you're still their friend, and you still love and support them, but you're witnessing something that's very tricky for you to, like, accept. Um, yeah, I totally understand that feeling.But the weird thing is, is in my life, I've such a, like, motley crew of friends that definitely fit my old lifestyle, and so I haven't been to many weddings. I haven't been invited to many weddings. Most of my people just aren't marriage sorts. And so, me choosing to elope wasn't weird at all to me, and in fact, my family was and is still probably surprised that I ended up getting married and having kids. So I, I don't have the same experience of like, oh, f**k another wedding season. But I can empathize. It would be a drag if that was my life.[00:21:34] Tash Doherty: Yeah. Well, honestly, I wrote that piece because people in my life were getting married, but I actually was grateful because a lot of them were slightly on the edge of my friendship group. I knew that people were getting married and that people were feeling this pressure, but I actually have not been invited to anyone this year, either. There we are.Um, I will maybe go to one engagement party again, like, later in September. But I think it was mostly just also around a lot of Instagram content. And this is why I'm like, okay, I don't like to consume as much social media as I do, but it does give you a really interesting perspective as to what people are valuing and how it's all happening. And consuming wedding content on Instagram is one of my favorite things to do because I get to see these people in Maine, or Lake Como in Italy, or wherever they are. All of the money that they've spent, and yet I have not had to, like, leave the comfort of my couch, and I like to get to enjoy their table place settings and blah, blah, blah.Even something like Say Yes to The Dress, I love that reality TV show. It's totally crap. But, like, the emotional feeling of finding a beautiful dress that like fits with these women's lifestyles is, like, I do enjoy kind of getting that window into their world. For a lot of ways, and I've also explored that a lot on my blog, is watching all of the older people in my life get divorced and have like really messy, terrible divorces, like destroying the marriage and the family and the kids and every, all the other fallout that happens with it. And ultimately, my parents, I mean, I dunno, they don't really read my blog, so maybe I can just share this, but they are still married, but I wouldn't say their marriage is necessarily like a happy one. You know, like, that's the kind of blueprint that I've been given. Maybe getting divorced in a later stage is important, and not having very much conflict in the family. Like, if conflict is your day-to-day existence, like, maybe you should just like separate for a while, you know? So that's a lot.[00:23:16] Abigail Mlinar Burns: No, thinking about that day-to-day existence is something that was a big driver for me on this. Like, what is people's day-to-day existence and whatever it is, is going to be your life, right? And so, do you want a life of conflict? Do you want your day-to-day existence of making the biggest decisions of your life center around, like, the dresses that you buy, which, yes, I agree. I love watching reality wedding content. Like, I am a "Love Is Blind" fan. I am. But you know, there's a reason why I really disdain the idea that a wedding day is thebiggest day of your life. It's because you're putting value into the wrong things. Your value should be put into your day-to-day, right, and the ways in which you're demonstrating love and feeling love yourself, and not into eyeballing these future milestones that you want to accomplish because that makes you a good person or a valued person. What is your actual day-to-day? And are you happy? That's what I wanna think about.[00:24:13] Tash Doherty: Yeah, exactly. I actually also encouraged you to write the piece about your mother because I was really curious. It is, like, a very important dynamic in your story as well. So, since you wrote that piece, or you were mulling over it for a while, like, how has your perspective changed? Or what have you learned?[00:24:27] Abigail Mlinar Burns: Thank you for that push, too, because it's something I've been jotting notes on this idea for probably a decade.You know, it's been that core part of myself that I've always acknowledged and said out loud, and when I felt safe and taken notes on, but never felt comfortable, confident enough to say out loud. Um, but that "I'm Glad to be Motherless" is ultimately the message because it shaped me into being who I am. It allowed me to feel confident navigating womanhood and relationships without a map. And thus, I didn't have any markers of what was right or wrong, and I could choose my own path. And it does feel messy and imperfect, and I think a lot of my stories and essays like, I like to not put too much "said" and a little bit more "unsaid." And that I think is the messy part about this essay is that it also is complicated because I come and have the same exact life as my mom, right? I'm around the same age as her when she died, and I look back and I see that I studied Marketing just like her. I have two kids just like her. I'm married with a similar age gap as she had with my dad. We have so much in common, and maybe I would've gotten to this point and made these decisions sooner than being so bizarrely navigated around. But the beauty of that weird navigation is my life.And I love my life, and I love who I am. So, I am glad that I was motherless. Yeah. So a little bit bizarre. And I'm a little woo-woo. And I, I have all of these different, like, ways in which I feel like my mom is a part of my life. So, um. It's messy. And I did say, "Mom, I hope you weren't offended by that." And she gave me a nice sign to say that she wasn't so.[00:26:08] Tash Doherty: Oh my God. Cool. I should start listening to more serendipity and stuff because, again, I also enjoyed this like spiritual woo-woo element. Because the world is so vast and so great and so far beyond what any single person can comprehend. And I find myself also as a single person, like, living in my masculine a lot. And actually, a lot of the time, the woo-woo-ness is kind of just that faith, taking a leap of faith, whether it's publishing something that's complex and difficult and challenging and hoping that it's gonna be okay. Or yeah, making life decisions that you don't know whether or not it's gonna turn out. And I think that's a much more fun way to live. And sometimes, if we're too busy paying the rent or getting the paycheck or whatever, it can be hard to connect with that emotional, spiritual element of life as well as the logical.[00:26:50] Abigail Mlinar Burns: 1000%. Dude, I think that I mean everything happens as it ought is my belief. And ever since I've been married, it's allowed me to heal things about myself and my life that I wasn't prioritizing before because I was so in my masculine. And so, uh, one of the like messages, like kept getting over and over, like I jotted in my phone and I'd write it down after I got married after we had our first kid, was: I need to resolve my fear of death. Like, I need to resolve my fear of death. And that's what brought me down this, like, rabbit hole of finally saying, "Oh. I'm comfortable to say it out loud. I'm glad that I was motherless. I'm also not afraid of dying myself even though I'm now in my bonus years as compared to her." And those are things that I just wasn't able to resolve, and I think that were actually pushing me on my crazy adventurous life because it is exciting, and it does make you feel like you are living life. But sometimes those true, like, aliveness moments are the more mundane. And that's something that I wasn't able to learn, I think until I was settling more into my feminine state. Yeah. Which I'm still not fully embraced by any means.[00:27:54] Tash Doherty: Yeah, exactly. And so when you talk about getting signs and stuff, what forms do those signs take? So, how can I be paying me better attention to what the universe is trying to tell me?[00:28:04] Abigail Mlinar Burns: Yeah. Well, the rabbit hole I went down about resolving my fear of death was quite bizarre and incredible and amazing. I like bought all these, like, 20 books that had various levels of kitch and practicality. Some of them very religious, some of them very scientific. The conclusion that I came to is quite a spiritual one ultimately, even though mostly it was science influence. There's quite a lot of research out there. No there, there actually is more research than people give it credit. Like talking about sex, talking about death are things that are very taboo, and those sorts of things don't come up to the surface very much. But the signs that I've often got are just those serendipitous things that give you chills, right? Like the song playing in my head and in the phone, and you feel it in your body, the chills that: wow, something here is, like, meant to happen. Yeah. I sometimes get that sensation even when I, like, walk into a restaurant or a bar. You feel like you're where you're supposed to be, right? And I, I now believe that you can also say, in your head or out loud, like, "Mom, are you offended by me? If you're not like, show me a penny on the sidewalk, but not just on the sidewalk. I want it in the crack of the sidewalk, and I want it to be heads up." And she'll show me the s**t that I wanna see, literally, a heads-up penny on the crack of the sidewalk. And, in fact, yesterday, it was a whole pile of 20 pennies. Most of them heads up. It totally blew my mind. I was like, "Okay, thank you."And sometimes I've been kissed by butterflies. In my head, like, "Mom, if you're around, like, show me a butterfly." And then a butterfly will come and like kiss me on the cheek. It's quite remarkable, really.[00:29:38] Tash Doherty: Wow. That is freaking cool. Yeah. I will say, like when I lived in London a lot, it was easier to do this because there was always, like, a green man when you are like crossing the street. It was always, like, when I was walking, and I would just flow, right? Like the flow of the green man like, there would always light it up as I was like coming towards the crosswalk. Little things like that were super crazy.And I actually also just finished "The Artist's Way" again with some female friends. And, in that specific section, she had written, like, write some promises to yourself of like things that you wanted. So basically, I had made like four promises to myself, and one of them was to go to this specific restaurant in Polanco, which is delicious, like this steak-frites restaurant. The other one was to go to the hotel that I just went to in the forest. And so yesterday, when I was, like, in the forest about to open my journal, I read this promise that I had made to myself, like, "I will go back to this place in the forest." Yeah, it is powerful. It's fascinating.[00:30:28] Abigail Mlinar Burns: Dude. I just got chills hearing your chill-inducing moments. So, circling that. And that's so bizarre, too, because I'm glad that you're talking about "The Artist's Way." It's something that I've been thinking about so much. I want to make "The Erotic's Way". It's like this idea that I've had lately where I think that people need to take more responsibility for their sexual lives and treat it like a practice, like an artistic practice, instead of just a passing responsive thing that they can just consume whatever it is and masturbate quickly and have it be done with. But, like, make it more of an ingrained part of your life and expand it like your artist's way.[00:31:06] Tash Doherty: That's incredible. So you just need 12 weeks of different practices that people would do. And Julia Cameron herself is still alive, so maybe you can get her to write the forward as well.[00:31:16] Abigail Mlinar Burns: Yeah. Damn. That's aspiration. I'm actually working on, like, an op-ed that kind of pitches this idea out. Oh, cool. So, hoping to finish that up. I feel like it's very timely because there was an op-ed yesterday in the New York Times that I feel like this is a good response to. It's not necessarily, like, affirming it, but just about porn's impact on people in the world.Uh, speaking of, I went down the deep dive in one of your essays about the porn that you watch. Yeah. I found just f*****g delightful to read, so. Like a breath of fresh air. Like who, who is writing that? Like, that is just so remarkable. And so you. And what a gift to the world to like share exactly what you watch and what you like about it.[00:31:56] Tash Doherty: Right. I think it's really interesting. I guess I can share a couple of the categories if I remember them well. Number one, as I get closer to, like, childbearing age, the whole cream pie situation, it's just like getting hotter and hotter because it's also so forbidden, like, it makes sense.[00:32:13] Abigail Mlinar Burns: Yeah. Totally. I relate.[00:32:14] Tash Doherty: Haha. Yeah. It is kind of crazy because I just got another IUD put in in, like, December or whatever, or November. And so it's like very much like I cannot get pregnant right now. So I'm still, like, it could happen a lot. I let a lot of people come inside with me, which is fine. But yeah, it's not gonna lead to a baby anytime soon unless I actively take that out. But maybe that could also be part of the tease, or whatever in the future with my future partner is like. Maybe they could come to that experience with me of, like, getting my IUD taken out. And then going home and, like, consummating the situation. That could be really hot.[00:32:44] Abigail Mlinar Burns: Hell yeah. That sounds like a nice thing to put into your dreams. Yeah, exactly.[00:32:48] Tash Doherty: I'll fantasize about that. And then the other one is, yeah, like fat women. I think that's a very interesting one because, again, I always I grew up around so much fatphobia. And I just love watching fat women have sex and get railed. Like, it's amazing because I think it goes against the societal norms of what kind of women we consider attractive. And I don't think size actually really should matter. But it's great, I think that's important.[00:33:10] Abigail Mlinar Burns: No, for sure. Because if you grew up around a culture of shame around size, and then being able to consume videos of exactly what you're afraid of and feel pleasure from it, that's like healing literally.[00:33:25] Tash Doherty: It's healing something in me because then it can also be like, if I have a couple of months where I just feel like particularly chunky, all those things don't really matter in the eyes of your partner, I think. It's important to remember.[00:33:37] Abigail Mlinar Burns: Totally, yeah. There's been so many people have written into us at Make Love Not Porn, talking about how, like, watching people with bodies and that are similar to theirs be loved and valued and appreciated and have like hot sex and great orgasms has made them feel worthy of the same thing. Which they should have felt all along, but thank God, they actually realized it before they missed their chance, you know?[00:33:57] Tash Doherty: Yeah. That's super cool. Did you read the op-ed yesterday, by the way? I haven't actually read it. The one that says, like, there's nothing good that can come from porn, basically. So extreme.[00:34:07] Abigail Mlinar Burns: It was a little bit extreme. I feel like there's a big shift in culture right now I've been noticing. Like, I'd been walking down Smith Street, which is a street near where I live here in Carroll Gardens, and there's a really trendy bookstore called Books Are Magic. And literally, in the window of this super progressive, super trendy bookstore is the book Pornography by Andrea Dworkin. And I couldn't believe my jaw dropped.I'm like, five years ago, 10 years ago, they nobody would be putting that in the f*****g window. And I hadn't heard yet that it was being republished. And maybe that is just because it came out that week, and they thought it worthy to note, but it was still like so contradictory to the frame of mind for progressive world that pornography could be something to be disliked.And the fact that now there's all of this new chatter around it. I mean, I think that balance is good in the world, and I'm glad that people are able to share that message and counteract things that had been accepted before. But, um, it's a bit of a surprise because I don't think that having an anti-porn mindset is helpful for anybody, really. Um, I think that having balance is helpful. Having some sort of, like, more positive sex education that helps teach people that porn is entertainment, not education, would be helpful. There's a lot of things that we can do instead of just saying that porn is the problem.[00:35:24] Tash Doherty: Well, I think that's hopefully why I really like writing, and why I enjoy your writing, is because it adds nuance to the conversation, right? These topics, like sexuality, are so messy. And because people, I think, feel uncomfortable even talking about them, they're just more likely to write everything off completely. And I think the other aspect of that, which you go into in the article, "I'm a Cocksucking Feminist," and about giving, like, sloppy b*******s, it's important. Because by choosing to suck dick, as you say in your article, it's even hotter that you are like a liberal feminist who is choosing to do this out of your own volition, right? For your partner, which is amazing.But I kind of agree with that. I think we've gone a little bit too much, like men hating in the other direction. And it's not actually healthy for us either, especially if you are attracted to men, right? Like there's a lot that we need to be able to do here to help people to just enjoy their sex lives.And it's like: why is the liberal feminist agenda kind of getting in the way of that almost? It's a really interesting dynamic.[00:36:17] Abigail Mlinar Burns: Yeah. It just makes me think about the like societal trend toward the extremes, right? And I don't think that it is ultimately helping many people to say that you should hate men, which I don't necessarily think everybody is or anybody really is. But yeah, there's just been a lot of discourse around divorces, around celibacy, around all of these things that are ultimately distancing ourselves from each other. It is a good thing to do when you need it when it's done in the moderation that people need. But when that's like the dominant discussion point because it's clickbaity. Because it's something that drives attention. I think it is influencing people far more than we need, especially right now when the data is showing that teens are literally not spending time with each other. Young people are not spending time with each other. Like it's not helpful for society to be more separate. It is helpful for society to be appreciative of each other's differences, and to love each other, and to find ways to meet in the middle and give each other the things that we're able to. Of course, I'm never going to suggest that people should stay together if they shouldn't or suck a dick if you don't want to. But I choose to, and I think that it's been helpful for some people to see that; I like that.[00:37:33] Tash Doherty: Yeah, exactly. No, I think it's important. And again, it kind of goes back to the shame thing where, like, if you are reading about porn being terrible. Well, that means that the millions of people who do watch porn like on a semi-regular basis are gonna feel shame about that. And that's exactly the opposite of where we're really trying to go as a society, I would say. And I think that's ultimately what I want to get at with the work and stuff that I'm doing, is just helping people to see that whatever it is, whatever your kinks are, a lot of times they are like based in your own upbringing and a reflection of that or a perversion of that. And, like, that is totally okay.And it's, I have a lot of fun exploring these topics openly in public. I do like the shock factor, you know. Like, I do like a little clickbait when I publish my work because I'm like, I do wanna mess with people a little bit.And also because my grandma, like, you know, a super liberal woman, probably would have never had children if she'd been given the option to do that. But even in her generation, like, you could not say what you wanted openly on the internet. And I think I basically just see my life as also taking advantage of the fact that, like, my female ancestors, for like thousands of years, couldn't say these things. And now, you know, as my friend says, they should have never taught women to read. Because now we're reading, now we're thinking, and now we're sharing our opinions and changing the course of history at the same time. So, yeah.[00:38:44] Abigail Mlinar Burns: F**k yeah. Changing the course of history and psychoanalyzing ourselves in the process. I, I saw that the piece about porn, you were like, psychoanalyzing your interests. And I'd also written once about psychoanalyzing my favorite sex positions because I do feel like all of these things say so much about us if we would just stop and take a second to think about it.Like there was a two period in my life where I really liked having sex face down on my bed, and looking back in hindsight, I'm like, oh yeah, I didn't really like my partner very much. Then I should have paid attention to that, right? Now, my favorite sex position is like the most vanilla. I want to feel you all around me, you know, like, be in missionary, but just wrap myself around you kind of thing. Like it's, it just says so much about where you're at, how your heart's feeling.[00:39:31] Tash Doherty: Yeah, totally. And there's like so much to unpack with that. And that's also why I'm hopefully gonna be developing some materials around sex journaling. Like I use my Substack as my sex journal, as kind of yours is as well, exploring and being open about things. But not everyone wants to publish their sex life on the internet, and that's completely fine. But there are a bunch of different tools which I am hoping to develop around that, which is just the exploration of our sexuality, specifically using my like fun data analyst lens on it being like:Look at every single sexual experience that you've had. And think about it from, like, a fake scientific perspective. How many orgasms did you have? What positions did you use or whatever? And then using that as data to figure out, like, what you actually like in terms of your sexuality. And then keeping that little spicy journal for yourself, you know? That's the goal with that, I think.[00:40:15] Abigail Mlinar Burns: I'm obsessed with this. I think this is such a valuable thing. I mean, as you and I learned from doing it and doing it in public, like analyzing these things has so much value for our lives. And if more people did it, I think that we would all be happier.[00:40:26] Tash Doherty: Yeah. We'd be happier. We'd have more orgasms. And also, you do learn a lot about yourself, and you can think deeply about where all those interests and things kind of come from, as we talked about with the porn categories. And then I would have a friend where I sent that article around, or I was thinking about it, I wanted to talk to some friends about it, and, that's when you realize, I have a friend who's never had an orgasm before. I had a friend who has never watched porn before. Crazy, like mind-blowing things to me in my like mid-twenties or whenever this conversation was happening. People come with it from all different stages of the journey as well for sexuality.[00:40:56] Abigail Mlinar Burns: Yep. It is really totally amazing to me how everybody has such a different experience because even being at Make Love Not Porn, we have people who are sharing sex videos every day, and we've seen sex videos for six and a half years; some of my colleagues have been there for 10 years, and we're still surprised by the types of thing that people share because like, you know, it's so corny now to say, but reality is stranger than fiction. It really is far more entertaining. The sex that people have in the real world is just far more sexy, entertaining, and hot, and that is why I like sharing our sex stories as well as watching real-world sex videos.[00:41:40] Tash Doherty: Yeah, totally. Okay, what are you excited about in the next couple of months? And where can people find you?[00:41:45] Abigail Mlinar Burns: Thanks. Um, in the next couple of months, gosh, I am, like, back to the thing I was ranting about earlier.I'm such living in my day-to-day right now. I have such a hard time thinking about the future. My life is a little bit revolving around my little dudes and my work, and so I don't know. Continuing to grow and develop and share my stories on Happy Endings. I'm really also excited about some work that we're doing at Make Love Porn and growing our creator base and people can follow and subscribe to Happy Endings on Substack.I'm also on Instagram at @abigailamilnarb because I do take my husband's last name, just in beautiful internet spaces and not in legal form.[00:42:31] Tash Doherty: Amazing. Good for you. Well, thank you so much. I've literally enjoyed this conversation so much, and also very telling that we have a very little special guest here, which is one of your sons, who could join us for the last 10 minutes of the conversation, waking up from a nap. So yeah, I can't wait to read more stories and keep seeing you out there in the Substack universe. So thank you so much for coming on with Misseducated. Yay![00:42:51] Abigail Mlinar Burns: Ditto. Thank you so much for having me. [00:42:53] Tash Doherty: Okay, bye.Misseducated by Tash Doherty is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Misseducated by Tash Doherty at misseducated.tashdoherty.com/subscribe

On a warm afternoon in May 2011, I was walking down Tottenham Court Road in London. I had passed through the wide, open grassy squares of Bloomsbury and Holborn, filled with corporate people enjoying the late spring sun. Now, I was surrounded by the streets of fried chicken joints and tourist souvenir shops packed with people as I headed to catch a double-decker bus home.At 16 years old, navigating London was nothing new to me. I had been taking the bus home from school since I was about 12. Still, this afternoon was slightly different. I was feeling curious, inspired, and contemplative. My school had just taken us out on a Maths conference field day. As I passed cars, lorries, and buses stuck in traffic, my mind zoomed, imagining all the possibilities of what I might study at university and beyond.I was mid-bustle when I saw a sign propped up on the pavement. It read, “Free Personality Tests.”A short woman approached me from the shop.“Hello!” she called out, “Would you like to take a personality test?”Much like the men selling Paddington Bears, Union Jacks, and keyrings, she seemed to be selling her wares. I almost didn’t turn around because I had already passed the shop. Yet I distinctly remember thinking, as I stood a couple of steps ahead of her, that maybe I should be more open-minded! A personality test sounded intriguing. My school activities were over for the day. I had nothing else to do and nowhere else to be. I thought to myself: why not?“Sure, I’ll take a personality test,” I said to her, turning around.“Amazing. Follow me,” she said, “There’s plenty for you to discover.”I went with her into the narrow shop front. The space was quite small and bright, with a kind of beige old office feel to it. The hardwood wall had some kind of giant inscription written on it, and the floor was a faux marble with light brown-green speckles. There was a staircase with a glass, silver-handled railing. She took me down a short corridor, passed rows of books and pamphlets on shelves, into a small back room with low-walled cubicles.She showed me to the cubicle where I was going to take my personality test, and I sat down on a scratchy, cushioned office chair with a round back. There were a couple of other people in there, flipping through pages of questions on small packets of white A4 paper that had been stapled together. I would have heard the scratching of their pencils on the pages, but there was a buzz of background noise and chatter throughout the place. She soon handed me a packet of questions. I wrote my name and my date of birth at the top of the page and got to work.I didn’t feel particularly scared there; I was just curious. I was still at the age where I believed that most people were well-intentioned in the world, and I would just be able to leave any place, including this stuffy office room if I felt like it. If anything, my friends and I were the ones actively breaking the law, getting ourselves into less-than-ideal situations, and running away from the police. We’d pay homeless men to buy alcohol for us from the local newsagents. We’d bribe the guy at the corner shop to sell us cheap Egyptian cigarettes. Even if one of us was caught smoking a splif (a rolled mixture of weed and tobacco) in the park, we usually found a way to speak posh with our private school accents and talk the constable out of calling our parents.I kept a steady pace through the questions, quite like the multiple-choice verbal reasoning tests I’d had to take for my entrance exams into secondary school. It had probably 30 pages of questions.Did I get angry sometimes? How often did I feel misunderstood? Did random coincidences happen sometimes that I couldn’t explain? Did I ever talk about someone, and then they’d appear later that same day? Did I ever feel very excited but also very bored? Yes. No. Very often. Often. Sometimes. Rarely. Never. Strongly Agree. Agree. Neutral. Disagree. Strongly Disagree.Gosh, that questionnaire was long. After at least about 20 minutes, I really hoped the personality test would be over soon. I was desperate to get the results. Was I a particularly angry person, with unacceptable levels of rage, getting angrier more than most? I thought about leaving the stuffy office, but now I had put so much into the first 25 pages of this thing that my time was such a sunk cost. Couldn’t someone just tell me what type of personality I had?When I finally finished the questionnaire, the woman instructed me,“Now, you’re going to watch this video where you can learn about the different personality types as we assess your results. You’ll know soon.”Thank god, I thought to myself. This better be good.She led me down the staircase with the glass railing into another smaller, slightly darker, stuffy office room. She sat me down in a similar low cubicle. There were a couple of other people in there, including a mother with her young boy, who was playing on the floor.The woman handed me a round, cheap headset with a small black muffler at each earlobe, quite like the ones we got on planes at the time. The monitor was an ugly grey color. She put the DVD into the desktop computer and started the video.I remember the video starting with bright yellow, gold, and orange sunsets and a man and a woman in hiking gear sitting there with their heads in their hands or running in slow motion up a hill.“Do you get angry sometimes? Do you often feel misunderstood by the people around you, even your closest friends and family? Do random coincidences happen sometimes that you can’t explain? All this depends on your personality, and we’re here to give you the tools so that you can navigate your life and thrive. Our guides are here to assist you.”I sat on my hands, praying that the whole questionnaire had been worth it. This was just starting to get good. About five minutes in, mid-video, the woman quickly came up to my cubicle and pressed stop on the video. She seemed huffed and bothered slightly.“I’m sorry,” she said, “We can't help you. We hope you have a great day—”I interjected,“But I just spent 20 minutes filling out that questionnaire. You can’t tell me anything?”“No. Sorry.”Without much of an explanation, she hurried me upstairs. I noticed that most of the people upstairs had gone, possibly to a meeting or to watch videos with their guides and get the answers to their personality tests. She hurried me outside and shut the door behind me. Their white shopfront now looked sleepy and vacant.I stood there for a moment, grumbling to myself, before I continued down Tottenham Court Road to the bus stop. What they had promised sounded kind of amazing, but it had all ended up being a waste of time when I could have been outside, enjoying the late spring afternoon. I regretted going in there only to have my expectations crushed. Why hadn’t she been able to give me any answers?Well, it’s now 14 years later, and the hilarious thing is that the place still exists. I had entered the “Dianetics & Scientology Life Improvement Centre,” an active “non-profit” organization with a whopping 4.4 stars on Google Maps and 291 reviews, offering “courses and counseling to help you improve your life and reach your full potential.” Just wow.I now know, thanks to this news article, that the questionnaire I took was probably their 200-question “Oxford Capacity Analysis.” The article says, “The Scientology “personality test” is described by various Internet sources as a Scientology recruitment tool used worldwide on Scientology websites, in Scientology churches, and in public settings such as fairs and festivals. It also has been criticized by psychologists as not a bonafide personality test...Young people under age 18 are asked to have a parent or guardian sign the questionnaire.”So, there you have it. Years later, I finally know why I was instructed to leave: I was underaged and alone. In that woman’s mind, once she saw my date of birth, I quickly morphed from a fresh, juicy recruit into a potential legal nightmare.I wish I could tell you that I saw it coming or that in the moment, alarm bells went off in my head, and I walked out disgusted, vowing never to return to any cult-like place. But that is far from what happened. Sure, I left that place feeling puzzled and disappointed. Yet, it was only with the benefit of hindsight that I see now how lucky I was to be a minor at the time, without one of my parents nearby to sign my waiver.The truth is that even if I considered myself smart or well-educated at the time, I only narrowly avoided joining one of the largest and most notorious cults in the world because of an even greater factor: the rule of law. Part of being shameless is accepting in a light-hearted way that even if we think we’ve got it all together, we can still make mistakes. We can still be wrong, very wrong. Especially as young people, sometimes we need an external force like the law to save us from ourselves. When we acknowledge our mistakes shamelessly and do not pretend that we are above other people, having this perspective on life is surprisingly freeing. We’ve fully come to terms with our foibles and failures, and there’s not much in the way of other people that can tarnish us if we hold ourselves in high esteem. We might make a mistake, but that does not mean we are a mistake. Indeed, sometimes, making a mistake may riddle us with deep shame and embarrassment, and that’s something we can work through. Then, we have other mistakes that may simply become a funny story that we can share 14 years later.Have you ever been duped? Did you ever almost join a cult? Tell us about your experience in the comments!Join us on our mission to help the world be shamelessly sexy!Love,Tash💌 ✍️More From Misseducated 💌 ✍️ Get full access to Misseducated by Tash Doherty at misseducated.tashdoherty.com/subscribe