That straight face is a dare.

So here I was, sitting on a tram while I was visiting my hometown in France, slithering through the ancient streets of the city that I love so much, and I was reading about a woman getting the best orgasm of her life from a man written by a woman who Macgyvered her so well, she took a whole page just to come back down to earth. I’m not sure to what degree feminism took a backseat during that scene, but I wasn’t in the mood to have a debate with my inner Simone de Beauvoir, so, I’m sorry, but that scene had my undivided attention.

Men, please take notes.

Was I blushing? Maybe. Was my resting bitch face in full presentation? Absolutely. Thankfully, I was reading in English, so the little old lady sitting next to me, despite her curious eyes on my Kindle, had no idea what I was reading.

But again, even if she could read what was on my Kindle, why would I feel shame?

I think of this as a dare to society, and a dare to the patriarchy, a dare on behalf of women who have been sexually repressed and put down for years. In the words of Taylor Swift, look at what you made me do.

I felt so free, so very very naughty, and it was so hot.

Sadly, I’m still single, and had no MacGyver to jump onto when I got home. But have no fear, a girl is nothing if not resourceful: I usually travel with a few arrays of toys catering to my vast and raging libido, as one does when one is a woman in her 30s.

That straight face is a dare.

You’re sitting in a room, on a bus, in a tram, turned on, feeling all of those little butterflies, fantasizing, imagining, feeling it in your body… and your face reads nothing.

On purpose, with full awareness of what you’re doing.

And there’s something about that I love.

Because in this society, in the world we grew up in, especially if you were born in the 20th century, women are still supposed to make their desire legible somehow. Visible, open, available to be read or responded to by somebody else.

That straight face, that resting bitch face, feels like the metaphorical middle finger.

You kept that to yourself because you wanted to, because you don’t owe any part of yourself or your body to anyone unless you actually want to share it. Nobody else in the room needs to know what’s happening inside your body. They don’t need access to it just because they’re there.

And I don’t know, there’s something about that that feels very rebellious to me. Very chic of you, darling.

Now I’m back on that tram, after that ovary vibrating revival passage, and I’m looking around… and despite my free will, there’s still this little dip of shame.

Or maybe it’s paranoia?

I can feel the need to get back to my apartment as soon as possible after what I just read, but I also need to look cool, calm, collected. What if someone could tell I was very turned on by a book in the middle of a packed tram?

And then immediately: why do I care?

I don’t want to care, but the shame is still there, peeking its little head out.

And I think that’s the part that annoys me, because some conditioning just doesn’t disappear because you decided you don’t want it anymore. You can know better and still feel it in your body anyway.

That being said, maybe that little peek of shame makes all of this hotter?

The guilt and glee there at the same time… the thrill of maybe being caught, while also being pissed that this is even something I should feel guilty about in the first place.

It always reminds me of partner toys, where a woman wears a vaginal toy out and about and her partner has the remote. Her fate is in their hands… the thrill is intoxicating, but it also means her pleasure is in their hands too, and how much will she be able to hold back? Will someone notice?

writer’s note: I don’t know what I was thinking writing this essay when very single and with no one to flirt with on my roster. I do this for you, because I love you.

Except here, with your smutty book, you’re the one wearing the toy and you’re also the one holding the remote.

You chose the book. You chose the scene. You let your imagination go there. Nobody else is doing it to you, nobody else is controlling it, and nobody else even has to know.

The dare kind of completes itself.

We’re all good girls who want to read filth without shame, guilt, or expectations.

Because our bodies and our pleasure aren’t up for debate any longer.

And it’s all in the quest to keep getting turned on by life!

This month, we're reading about a woman whose body was never allowed to simply belong to her.

Harlow Carrenwell is poison personified. Her ability: a poisonous kiss.

So naturally, she was labelled a weapon without her say.

Her family has spent years using her body to eliminate their political enemies. Widowed from her first forced political marriage. Her future has been decided and negotiated for her without much concern for her desires.

But like every scorned woman, she has a secret.

While everyone thinks they know exactly who she is what she’s capable of, she has a favorite passtime: hunting abusive men through the city.

Sadly that poisonous kiss of hers chose to fail with one man: Henry, her betrothed, heir to her family’s greatest enemy, becoming one of the only people alive who knows exactly what she is.

And this is where our first month of Well Read, Well Wrecked begins.

Because underneath the fantasy, the poison and the 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ romance is a question I think a lot of women know intimately:

What happens when the thing everyone else has tried to control about you finally becomes yours?

Ownership.

This is where we stop just reading Harlow’s story.

Inside the full book protocol, you’ll get the essential oils I chose around the book’s major themes, both for what Harlow’s story brings up for you and for what I know you may need most while reading it.

You’ll also get instructions for how to use these essential oils, why I chose them, the toy I paired with the book, the intimate play protocol, journaling prompts, and the live call details.

Because the point of this book and protocol is to notice what this story touches in you: your anger, your body, your choices, your pleasure, your sense of ownership, and give those parts of you somewhere to participate too.

Bookclub girlies already signed up, your first Well Read, Well Wrecked protocol starts below. 🌶️

Read more

The bear, the vampire, Frankenstein, the sentient wicker basket man. As of August 2026 this is all we’re seeing and it has somehow been welcomed with open arms by women and communities online. And channeling my inner Carrie Bradshaw inner monologue: I couldn’t help but wonder, are we actively choosing the monsters we were told to fear over the men we were told to trust?

Society has always sold women the idea that the monster is “bad”, “evil”, and the propaganda machine did the rest: women who want the monster are twisted, damaged or have daddy issues, and (my favorite) can’t handle a real relationship. I then came to realize that society had been selling me the idea that I need a particular archetype of man in my life, and it so happens that that man ideal being pushed on me, was my ex who emotionally damaged me so much it caused the start of my sexual trauma journey. For the purpose of this article, let’s call him Adrien.

Adrien was perfect on paper and “perfect” for me, and the latter is what made it so hard for me to let him go at the end. He is multi-cultural, mixed background, went to an expensive international school in Asia (just like me), we met at our country club (I know how it sounds, but that was the expat life), and he was extremely intelligent, courteous, smooth, flirty, and charmed my mother to no end. He got an expensive university education in law, to which he decided later to become a banker. It’s giving “I’m looking for a man in finance, trust fund, 6’5, blue eyes”. Looking at this on paper, you would think I hit the jackpot, and I should have married him, and thankfully I didn’t. But he is a man society would have handed me a certificate of completion for choosing. It took me a decade to understand that he was grooming me into submission, manipulating me, gaslighting me, and taking away my “no”, even from a distance. Silence was enough for him because society taught him it was enough. To my shame, I loved him for far longer than he deserved or that was good for me.

But this is what society wants for us, this is considered stable, perfect, “normal”, and healthy. By whose standards? Definitely not for women.

The monster asked anyway.

Despite society saying that he’s dangerous and that you’re damaged for wanting him over the Adrien’s of this world… the monster still asked for consent. Shocking concept. “Is this okay?”. To him in this fictional context created by a woman for other women, and the reason women respond to it so strongly, is because her wanting matters to him as much as the wanting itself. He yearns… completely, devastatingly, openly, without apology, and the yearning makes him need to know she's in it with him. The asking IS the yearning made practical. And here's the part that nobody talks about: her nervous system has never once been hurt by a fictional man, and it keeps that record with a precision her conscious mind can't always access. So it opens for him. It lets itself want things without immediately calculating what that wanting is going to cost.

At the start of 2026, it was Dracula from the new Luc Besson adaptation, and then Frankenstein… when we were little girls it was The Beast from Beauty and The Beast, because in an obvious turn of thought, he gifted her his library as a gesture for her love of books. Gaston demanded she become his wife, because he was “Gaston”. Which do you think society in this real world would tell us to choose?

Some men (I refuse to generalize to all men, because that wouldn’t be fair or accurate) do not yearn! They don’t: why else are sales of romance, romantasy, dark romance books exploding world wide? Look no further to the immediate impact of dating apps and dating in general in 2026… the book sales have spoken the words that no one will speak out loud. They don’t give any intensity or substance women’s nervous systems can build on; so her nervous system goes looking for it elsewhere. This alone explains why most of the women that reach out to me admit that they started reading smut by accident and have kept reading because it felt like a relief point to their nervous system.

The body knows what the mind won’t admit. So she went looking for that signal somewhere safe: in her smutty little books. Where the yearning is unlimited, consent is a default, and she has full control. Her nervous system is so expertly showing her exactly what it needs, as a result of its history and exposure to trauma: intensity plus safety, yearning plus consent.

When society decides to unsolicitedly poke its nose, and looks at women choosing the bear, the vampire, the wicker basket man, and calls it “unhealthy”, “toxic”, “damaged” the real question is: dangerous compared to what, exactly? Compared to the Adriens of this world? All I have to say is that society has the audacity to slot us in the DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for saying “no” to Gaston/ Adrien.

What and how women choose to respond to what they read in smut is not something up for criticism or judgment.

The next time her body lights up for a fictional man, notice what he’s doing in that scene. Yearning? Asking? Questioning? Listening? That’s her nervous system and body handing her a criteria of what she should be asking for and expecting: not for a fictional man written by a woman, but for a real one made by a woman. She now knows what to look for. And she now knows why Adrien, despite being “perfect on paper”, was never perfect for her.

Dark romance or smut with monsters, didn’t give her unrealistic standards: it gave her standards for her self-respect.

I’ve been asked to create a book club for months and months. Then I posted one comment about a smutty somatic therapy book club, half joking, and 589 of you liked it before I’d even finished thinking it through.

So here we are.

Before we get into it, you should know who’s actually running this.

I’m a sexologist and a certified clinical aromatherapist. And I’m a survivor who spent a decade not knowing it, until my body made sure I found out anyway (the very hard way). Everything in this club comes from that combination, not just the smut, or just the science, all of it.

This club exists for your self love, your pleasure, your empowerment, your autonomy over your own body, whatever it’s been through.

Join the bookclub tier

Pleasure is not a bonus or is not a reward you earn after you’ve healed enough (I know, because I used to believe it was). Pleasure is your human right, exactly as you are, and this club is where you get to claim it.

Here’s how it actually works.

Once a month, I pick a book. Your love for paperbacks, easy access Kindle with its highlight function, or a saucy audiobook that makes you pause to take a moment, either way, you always manage to keep a straight face in public. And it’s your choice how you want to absorb the content.

Then I share an essential oil pairing, chosen for what that specific book tends to stir up in you, and what themes of healing, self-love or sexuality come up. You inhale it while you read: hold the bottle close, breathe it in, let your body start making the connection between this scent and whatever the page is doing to you. This is part of the somatic experience.

Then, give that man written by a woman a reason to tell you “good girl.” The same essential oil, properly diluted, used on yourself intimately (internally or externally, however you like to play) while you give yourself exactly what the book just spent three hundred pages making you want. Completely safe to use intimately, with some surprising perks.

Then there’s a toy category (this is not a requirement to participate, just an extra bonus for you to experience more benefits). Use what you already own, go find something new, or let the book and the essential oil do the whole job without it.

And this is where I deliver on my promise.

We welcome the full smutty somatic therapeutic power of what we just read. We share, we analyze, we understand the why behind what our book is doing. We cry, we laugh, we debate.

Go grab whatever’s live right now, in your format of choice, and I’ll see you on the call.

Chloé

P.S. IMPORTANT: you can inhale the essential oil freely, always, experiment with it however you like, it’s completely safe that way.

Intimate use is different. Following exact dilution guidance is a mandatory safety measure, the same one all professionals in my field take with clients, especially in educational settings and capacities. I don’t want you to be afraid of this method at all, because it’s amazing when used properly, and if you follow my instructions.

"The Madonna and the Whore," Frank C. Pape.

Understand your desire pattern in five minutes with the Smutty Desire Quiz. Or if you're ready to go deeper: book a free call with me and we'll figure out what comes next together. For the women who are done apologizing for knowing too much.

This one is for every woman who was broken down by a man who was too far away to touch her but close enough to break her.

I know it has been three years, but my shame, anger, and resentment have only been growing since then. Three years ago I was still shy and unsure about my identity as a woman, my sexuality and the power I possessed: I still existed in a time where I needed a man to validate my reality. Hence, my shame today. But I didn’t understand back then the harsher truth of sustaining a long distance situationship with a man, just because he was more like me than any other man I have ever known or dated. But there were red flags, that today, I would shake sense into a woman who came to me with those very same red flags… I’m aware of the double standard, but I am a changed woman who is now in her thirties and has zero energy for nonsense.

We were texting one night and I confessed to him that I believed I was scaring off men, and didn’t understand why. This “man”… said “yes”, and then carried on to “mansplain” why I was the problem. In that moment, I felt the color drain from my face, cold sweat leeching to my skin and tears welling up in my eyes… “omg I’m the reason no man will ever want me?”. I wish I could hug her right now and tell her that this is just a measure of him, not me. His exact words were:

The dichotomy that women need to be the Madonna and the whore at the same time. If you’re a virgin or the Madonna, they’re afraid of the emotional responsibility. If you fall under the label of the woman who “knows too much about sex”, you’re the whore, and suddenly men don’t want you either, from what I’m guessing is a bout of “small dick syndrome”. I know because I was both the Madonna and the whore at different moments in my life, exposed to men’s double standard reactions to both. But suddenly here I was, labelled the whore with a scarlet letter branded on my head. This blow was delivered disguised as advice, by a man who was supposed to want me.

But he kept going, because of course he did!

Translation, since he needed one: “I need to feel smarter than my partner or my ego will wither and die”. Despite my pushback and disbelief at what I was reading, the tears that were rolling down my face and worthlessness filling my chest, he dug the grave a little deeper with:

So I should downplay who I am until a man decides I'm worth taking seriously? The ingrained gaslighting veiled as advice was impressive. But why did I still feel that my worth was to be determined by what this “man” decided to tell me? This coming from the man who would repeatedly tell me that I needed to get laid because it was unfathomable that I wasn’t sexually active with someone else. Veiled compliment? Maybe. Stupid comment? Yes. But underneath it all, it was “what’s wrong with you, really, don’t guys want you? Because I want you”. The whole contradiction was the main manipulation. He wanted me available and diminished at the same time.

I trusted him. I confided in him. And in return I was victim to what I can only describe as a power grab disguised as honesty: he tried to dismantle my confidence by turning my greatest strengths against me, or make me resent them. But in reality this was all about him, his insecurity, and his fear. He made me feel like damaged goods while being simultaneously intimidated by everything I was. Both things, at once, serving the same purpose: keeping me small enough to control and too insecure to leave. As the conversation went on, I did cry, and I did hate myself. He knew, and he didn’t care. And here comes the gaslighting:

Said like a hazard sign he was all too willing to point out.

Despite my emotionally withered state, I still knew where to hit where it hurt most, so I went for his pride and manhood, “It's not my job to make guys feel like men. I can't make them something they're not if this is their outlook and needs”.

But this isn't just about him, his fragile ego, his little engine syndrome, or his very apparent awareness of his bad technique in bed.

The mind-numbing, face-palming, under-developed frontal lobe detail was… he was crazy about me. I could see drool on my side of the screen. It took so much of my self-respect and knowledge of men to understand the sheer level of Machiavellian, unconscious lengths this man went to to make me believe that no other man, apart from HIM, would want me, because he was the only one who “understood” me. Maybe it's my fault for not listening to my body almost ten years prior when we first met, and he triggered a response in me that could only be compared to subconscious revulsion. I’m not proud to say that he wasn’t the first man to manipulate me into thinking I was attracted to him… but he was my last.

Of course, I am who I am: a woman, survivor, and sexologist… and all I have to say, a man written by a woman would NEVER. When someone dares criticize me, or any of the women who follow me that reading smut is gross, or stupid, or worthless, I say this: my trauma, self-worth, self-love, and dignity would beg to differ. A man written by a woman who understands desire, who respects women, would never ask you to be less so he could feel like more. Even non-fictional men… it restores my faith in humanity when I pulled in some men in my life (exes, friends and family), who were shocked by the statements and horrified at the generalization that this applied to “most men”. To them, being with an experienced woman is anything but a liability… as it should be.

But, you should still read smut with a man written by a woman, who will call you a “good girl”, and never make you feel like you’re too much, like you know too much, or that you’re undesirable.

His famous last words:

Needless to say, all of this is a representation of my emotional sexual trauma (sadly, a very common form of sexual trauma), one that I was able to mediate with smut, essential oils, time and therapy. But we owe a lot to this caveman specimen, he’s the one who inspired my Smut-Scent Method, that’s been helping more and more women regain their desire, understand their trauma, and learn to love their bodies again. This man was the first domino to unleash what would lead to exactly what he was trying to destroy… women’s self-love and empowerment.

We no longer speak. But if this essay woke something up in you that you want to take further: book a free call with me. The first conversation is free.

I chose Titian's Danaë (1553) for this essay because she is a woman receiving something her body was never given permission to want, and she is completely, unapologetically open to it. That felt right.

^{Before we get into it, if you've been living in your body like it's a foreign country you never asked to move to, the Smutty Desire Quiz will start to make sense of it.}

I was lost, I was tired, and so angry at my body.

To my horror, I was angry at my body and I didn’t greatly know why. For many years, I was just angry at my body for wanting sex and then feeling the cold sweats, accelerated heart beat and sympathetic nervous system activation, the second it got close to real circumstances. I was angry at my body for making me feel like a total stranger in my own skin when all I wanted, was to feel like a woman again. I thought I was broken, gone, ruined. And the worst part is nobody told me otherwise, or sat me down to say, “let me actually explain what’s happening here”. I had to spend 10 years figuring that out for myself.

So I spent years apologizing for a body that was doing the most loyal thing it had ever done for me. Years!

The women who come to me say it the same way every single time. “I’m so tired of feeling this way. I want to feel like a woman.” Even writing this now, just remembering those moments send chills down my spine. They want sex, okay? They are women with a human right to orgasms, pleasure and lot of sex. But their bodies have completely other plans, and the world has been absolutely merciless about it. “Cold fish. Frigid. In your head. Have you tried just relaxing? Have you tried a lubricant? Have you tried, I don’t know, not being so in your head about it?”

Not one person stopped to ask what her body might actually be trying to protect her from.

And I’m sorry but this is 2026, and this should not even be a topic of debate! Because this was never, ever a libido problem. It was a safety problem, and those two things could not require more different approaches, and we keep collapsing them into the same lazy useless diagnosis and then fanning confusion when women spend years feeling broken for absolutely “no reason”.

Your body was like that kid in college at the front of the class, taking notes like a fan girl. Of every single moment it decided sex wasn’t safe, filed away without your permission, held onto long after your mind decided it was time to move on already.

Your nervous system was paying attention when literally nobody else was.

This concept about safety took me embarrassingly long to figure out: you cannot think your way into it. Trust me, I tried, and it can’t be done. It is not a mindset you can change or manipulate the way you want. When your nervous system is actually regulated, parasympathetic forward, your body just… becomes available: in a way that has nothing to do with effort or willpower or how much you want it. There is suddenly room for desire, for pleasure, for real choice.

And when it’s in a threat state, even one you’ve cried about and processed and written three journal entries about this week, desire is physiologically off the table. But the thinking brain will often convince us that danger is still alive because it's trying to protect us. An example of a physical manifestation is women who presents with vaginismus as a result of rape: her body is coming forward and saying “you shall not enter” to all foreign bodies. The problem is that sometimes it keeps trying to protect us long after the danger has passed. Your body is not withholding pleasure out of spite. It is putting every single resource it has into keeping you safe, the way it learned to, because of things it never asked for and never forgot about even when you had absolutely no idea it was still carrying them.

This is why talking about it alone is often not enough. The nervous system does not update on words! It updates on felt experience. It needs to actually feel safe, not just know it is. And the gap between knowing and actually feeling it in your body, is where so many women spend years, decades even, whole chapters of their lives questioning their femininity, body, sexuality, sexual needs, desire, needs, and wants.

The body can do the most extraordinary things when we stop making the thinking brain run the entire show. That thinking brain was fed conditioning and shame and a lifetime of being told what women are and aren’t allowed to want, and it believed every single word. It’s the conditioned adult living by rules she was forced into.

This is my secret that kept me going at the beginning: scent (the clinical application of essential oils) is the only sense with a direct pathway to the limbic system and amygdala before it even touches the thinking brain. Every other sense gets filtered, processed, interpreted first. Scent doesn’t! It lands in the emotional brain immediately and starts shifting the nervous system’s state before the thinking brain has even registered that anything is happening. Which means no story required. No narrative. No having to go back there and explain yourself or justify what you feel or make it make sense for anyone. The scent just acts directly on the brain, on the nervous system, and slowly your body starts to remember that it is allowed to be somewhere other than in fight or flight mode.

Every woman is different. There is not one woman with the same needs, triggers, resilience, or relationship to her sexuality. That being said, trauma-informed work is extremely important in order to be able to feel pleasure at all. It’s the murky part of what I do, but I also see the activation of pleasure as a way of gently softening a lot of the physical and mental resistance that trauma creates.

The two feed off each other.

I’ll always want to make pleasure the focal point because it gives the body new experiences and, most importantly, kicks cortisol to the curb a little while welcoming dopamine and oxytocin back in.

This is why I use smut alongside essential oils in my trauma-informed work. It not only feels safe, but it is safe. Reading smut happens privately, at your own pace, without pressure or expectation, while aromatherapy allows the body to associate those moments with comfort, safety, and pleasure. We want that parasympathetic nervous system to wake up a little.

It allows you to create a new set of beliefs that your body will believe because it can actually feel them: sex can be safe, sex can feel good, and pleasure is still YOURS.

I see this especially in women who are survivors of rape or sexual assault. Women have to remember that they are more than their trauma. They are still women with sexual needs, with desire, and with every right to pleasure.

I’m still in it some days too, I won’t try to pretend I’m all healed and perfect because I’m a sexologist that helps other women control this. I’m still finding wiring I didn’t know was there, still catching catching myself right before I fall for a trigger, and having to remind myself where it’s actually coming from. You don’t get to be finished with this just because you understand it now… that’s now how this works. And the first step to loving your body again, accepting your trauma, learning how your body breathes now, is accepting that this will never go away fully.

But, understanding it is still everything!!

What would it mean to finally stop being at war with the body that was only ever fighting for you?

If you want to understand what your body has actually been doing and why, let’s talk. The first conversation is free.

“Women read smut to experience that fantasy”

“Women deserve to experience pleasure.”

“Pleasure is a human right for everyone.”

Reading them back now, with a graduate degree in sexology and a decade of sitting across from women who don't yet have language for what their bodies are carrying, I can see exactly what they are. They are someone telling you she has sexual trauma without telling you she has sexual trauma, because she doesn't know it herself yet. There's no clinical word anywhere on the page… really doesn't need to be. The pattern is right there, plain as anything, to a trained eye, and invisible to the person who wrote it.

Eyes — We take you for granted: you are merely tools, a "necessity." We underestimate you. You give us amongst many gifts, vision and light. We see the wonders standing before us, in their heavy presence: but can sight give us insight? When two pairs of you connect, a new sight is born; one that can destroy or resurrect us. Don't you see? I am doomed, for I can see all too well into that soul, and it will crush me, surely. Eyes: are you sad? Are you happy? I'm confused, you appearance looks the same as it did yesterday, when you were happy. Today you are sad: a veil of doom and regret clouds your senses to see, not only the world around you, but also the world inside of you. You have shown me his soul and I wish for my sight to have never been born with me, so may my sorrow leave me in peace.

I wasn’t writing about insight as some pretty curse. I was writing “I wish I had never seen him”, and I meant it literally, not as metaphor, because if my eyes had never landed on his face I wouldn’t know what I know now and I wouldn’t be carrying what I’m still carrying. That’s the entire poem underneath the language a 22-year-old reaches for when she doesn’t have anything plainer yet. Seeing him is the wound. My own eyes did this to me, and I genuinely wanted them to take it back, to un-know him, to be spared whatever was coming because I had looked too closely at someone I should have looked away from. I’m Icarus who flew too close to the sun and who is just now recovering from the fall and burns.

Rereading it now, ten years later, I don’t think she was being dramatic. I think she was telling the truth in the only language she had for it. The man I loved hardest is also the man who hurt me worst, and this poem is where that grief started, years before I had a framework for what attachment wounds even were, let alone the language to name my own.

A man tries to hold my hand, sweetly and tenderly, who only wishes to make me happy. His face borrows the eyes and smiles of cherubs; I push away this angel, but why? Out of fear, guilt, or thinking I'm meant for someone else? As much as I wish otherwise, I am afraid of attachment and commitment.

A good man with kind hands who wasn’t asking for anything, and I’m standing there pushing him away while narrating the exact reason I’m doing it: fear, guilt. Getting the diagnosis right in real time and still not able to stop myself. That’s the part that wrecks me rereading it now, more than any of it. I knew. I wrote it down accurately while it was happening, and knowing didn’t change a single thing about what I did next.

I understand it now in a way I couldn’t then. Women with histories like mine carry a nervous system that learned threat and arousal on the same wire, so protection doesn’t get to pick and choose who it applies to. It shows up for the people who earned it and the ones who never did anything but show kindness with their hands. Wishing I had never seen him didn’t stay contained to him. It turned into a policy I didn’t choose and couldn’t see I was running. Every gentle pair of eyes after that walked into the same closed door, deserved or not.

I’d love to tell you I’m fully past it. Mostly, yes. But it still flickers, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. There are still nights I catch myself running the math on whether someone’s tenderness is safe before I’ve even let myself want it.

The difference is I know what I’m looking at now. She didn’t know she was writing trauma. She thought she was writing about a man and his eyes, and her own bad luck at falling for him. I know now it was never just him, and it was never just bad luck. It was him, and then it was every man who came after, quietly inheriting a debt he never knew he owed, written by a girl who had no idea she was already a case study standing in her own life.

I still miss him… I probably shouldn't… I KNOW I shouldn’t. But I think about how many women are out there missing the men who hurt them, despite everything, and feel immense guilt. I don't think that makes us weak or foolish or broken. I think that's just what it looks like to have loved someone who cost you more than he gave, and to still be human about it ten years later. That's the part nobody talks about: you can understand exactly what happened to you, name it, build a whole life around helping other women name it too, and still feel the ache of it once in a blue moon or during your luteal phase. Healing doesn't cancel the missing. It just means you finally know what you're missing, and why it was never really him at all.

My ode to all the women who have a him who ruined her in more ways than one, but to also know that this doesn’t have to be it. I broke his debt that my body was carrying.

Chloe

I have this perfume bottle amongst my respectable, slightly pretentious collection of artisanal perfumes.

I remember exactly who I was the first time I wore it. Every single time I wear it again, no exceptions, it’s almost annoying. The guy I was dating. Whether I was ovulating. Whether I was sad, or horny, or both, because apparently that’s allowed, who knew. My whole body remembers even when my brain is somewhere else, thinking about emails, thinking about literally anything else. The body’s been keeping its own diary this whole time and nobody asked it to.

I should say upfront what I actually do, since it explains why I notice this kind of thing for a living.

I’m a sexologist, which means women come to me to talk through what’s going on with their desire, their arousal, the parts of their sex lives that feel stuck or far away. I’m also a certified clinical aromatherapist, which means I spent years learning what specific essential oils actually do to the nervous system and to the physical body, the real pharmacology of it, not the candle-aisle version everyone assumes. Most people think those two trainings live in completely different parts of my brain. They don’t. They’ve never once been separate for me, and the longer I do this work the more I think they were never supposed to be.

Here’s where the two trainings actually meet. Smell is the only sense with a direct line to your amygdala. Everything else, sound, sight, touch, gets processed and filed first. Scent just walks straight in. Which means by the time I notice my own hand is on a particular bottle, my body’s already made an executive decision without consulting me. And since arousal lives in that exact same neighborhood of the brain, your nose might be the most honest thing in the room, more honest than whatever you’d actually say out loud if someone asked you directly what you needed.

And girls will be girls, so eventually, in every single session, we end up talking about perfume. Beauty always comes up somehow, usually right when we’re getting to the good part. I’ve started paying attention to which bottle a client mentions in passing, because nine times out of ten she’s already told me what she actually wants and needs before either of us said a word about sex. The body talks first… it always has. We’re just usually too busy translating it into something more socially acceptable to actually hear it.

Basil, Ocimum basilicum if we’re being precise about it. Sharp, and a little unhinged. Try Jo Malone’s Basil & Neroli if you want to actually smell what I mean. In clinical aromatherapy, basil is classed as a nervine and adrenal restorative, the kind of oil you reach for when someone has been running on adrenaline so long their nervous system forgot there’s another setting. It fights mental fatigue and hands back a sense of courage that’s gotten buried under exhaustion, the courage that’s still there, just buried under holding too much for too long without anyone noticing the weight of it. This is the woman who’s exhausted from running everything, including her own desire, especially her own desire, since apparently that needed managing too. She rebuilt herself. Became the proof everyone points to. Somewhere in the rebuild she started directing the bedroom too. Telling him where to put his hands, when, how fast, because someone has to and it’s always her.

Basil is courage that’s sick of being in charge. What she wants, underneath all that competence, is to stop being asked so carefully, so quietly, like she might bolt. Instead she might hear someone ask once, low and certain, and actually wait for her yes. And when it comes, finally let go of needing to manage anything else. Let them take it from there. Let herself gasp without immediately apologizing for the noise, feel their weight settle over her like a decision that’s already been made, let someone else carry the wanting for once instead of steering it herself the whole way through, hands finally somewhere other than bracing against the mattress, open to all of it instead of giving instructions.

Roman chamomile, Chamaemelum nobile, is sneakier. Soft enough to fool everyone, including the woman wearing it. Camomille Satin, made by Dries Van Noten with Guerlain’s perfumers. In the materia medica, chamomile sits near the top of the list for nervous system sedation, the oil you’d reach for to settle anger, fear, grief, the feelings that are easier to put to sleep than to actually feel. That’s exactly what makes it dangerous in the wrong hands, including her own. This is the woman who got so good at sedating herself she forgot that’s what was happening. She thinks she’s calm. She’s anesthetized, sitting on something underneath, anger probably, grief possibly. Who’s counting. Certainly not her.

She is drowning in soft and has been for years. Someone refusing the performance outright is the only thing that actually reaches her. Mouth against her ear mid-act, voice low and certain, not stopping anything, just saying it right into her skin. “I know you’re not actually this calm, so stop being calm for me, right here, right now.” Hands pinning hers down, not to control her, but to give her something solid to push against while whatever’s underneath finally surfaces. Her breath catches and breaks and finally, finally lets go. Her whole body arches up off the bed like something underneath has been waiting years for permission and just got it. Tears mixed in there too maybe. Nobody’s keeping score. That’s actually the entire point.

Myrtle, Myrtus communis, is my favorite and the strangest, and I’ll be honest, this one’s more myth than science, but the myth is too good not to use. Myrtle’s been tied to Aphrodite since ancient Greece, sacred to love and to weddings. L’Occitane’s Myrte, from their Notre Flore collection, was built on the old story of sailors approaching Corsica who used to smell wild myrtle riding the wind before the island was even visible, scent reaching them before the eyes had caught up. That’s her exactly. She’s already wanting something and hasn’t gotten the memo yet, her body three steps ahead and sending signals her brain hasn’t cleared for release.

I think about this one the most, honestly, because it describes something I see constantly and almost nobody names correctly. She’ll tell me she doesn’t know what she wants. She’ll tell me she’s not sure she’s even attracted to them anymore. And the whole time her leg is bouncing and her voice has changed and she’s talking faster than she was five minutes ago, and none of that is nothing.

Whoever’s in bed with her needs to notice her breathing change before she’s said a word, and move on it right then, the way you only move on something when you already know each other’s “yes”, when trust has already been built and tested and earned long before this moment. Hand sliding up her thigh because the asking already happened somewhere upstream of this, in every other time they checked, every other time she told them what she wanted and they believed her. Her hips already tilting up, because nobody has ever climaxed from being asked to explain what’s happening to her body while it’s still happening, and nobody gets read like this who hasn’t already said yes to being read. Scent arrives before the eyes catch up. Wanting arrives the same way, in the body, well before the woman attached to it has been able to register it out loud.

And lemon, Citrus limon, in the energetic tradition I trained in alongside the clinical side, is a heart oil, said to open the heart and clear whatever’s gone stagnant there so love and pleasure can actually move through again. She already knows how to ask, easily, that’s never been her issue. The issue is staying still. 100BON’s L’Eau du Parc, all natural, lemon right up front, is the one I’d hand her.

What she actually needs in bed is someone who holds her hands above her head and keeps them there, who keeps giving and giving until she stops bracing for the moment she’s expected to give something back, their mouth moving lower with no agenda attached to it, no expectation that she perform gratitude or reciprocate on a timeline. Until her hips start moving on their own and she’s stopped managing any of it, until just lying there and feeling it stops being uncomfortable and starts, finally, being the entire point, until the only thing left in her head is “yes,” “more,” “don’t stop,” with nothing owed at the end of it.

My own bottle, since I’ve spent this whole piece reading other women through theirs, is jasmine, Jasminum grandiflorum, and its perfume counterpart Berdoues 1902’s Jasmin, sitting next to a cédrat and a cèdre blanc from the same line that I wear plenty, but Jasmin is the one I keep coming back to.

Rose is beautiful and I love it, but it can tip soapy fast, can get to be too much. Jasmine has never once done that to me. It’s sensual and deep but it also somehow manages to feel like a best friend hyping you up before you walk back out there. It feels expensive. It feels protective. Mostly, if I’m honest, it feels like home, because if you grew up in Hong Kong the way I did, jasmine isn’t a perfume note first, it’s tea, it’s everywhere, it’s the smell of Sunday dim sum with my family. I can’t smell it without going straight back there, to easier and calmer times.

Which makes it almost funny, in a way that isn’t really funny, that this is the exact oil I reach for clinically with women who are carrying the entire weight of the world on their shoulders and don’t know how to put any of it down. It’s the oil I use with clients on the other side of a sexual trauma event, the one that goes in when the work has stopped being about managing symptoms and started being about letting joy back into a body that forgot it was allowed to want anything. Not an easy oil to earn the right to use that way, and not always gentle work either, but jasmine, to me, can never do wrong.

It’s beauty, ancient, wise, stable, healing.

So when my hand finds that bottle without checking with me first, it’s not just pointing at exhaustion the way I said it does for my clients. It’s reaching backward, for dim sum, for a version of Sunday that just felt easier. What I actually want underneath it isn’t only joy in some abstract sense, it’s the kind that doesn’t ask anything of you first.

Which means what I need in bed is someone who can find what’s still alive in me underneath whatever I’m carrying that week and bring it up slowly, without making me prove I’m ready first. Mouth finding my neck before I’ve finished the sentence about how tired I am, weight settling over me until I actually stop talking. I don’t always want to be met at full volume. Sometimes I want to be the one who gets to stop running things and let someone else figure out how to make me laugh again before they make me come.

Five bottles. Five very different nervous systems making decisions faster than the women attached to them are willing to admit. If you read all five of these and didn’t see yourself in at least one, I’d actually love to know what you’re wearing, because that’s another essay I haven’t written yet.

So the next time your hand goes straight for one bottle without asking your brain’s permission first, don’t shrug it off as habit. Smell it properly. Ask what it’s actually telling you you’re in the mood for. Then go find someone worth telling, or worth doing it with, whichever version of honest you’ve got access to that particular evening.

where your desire pattern lives

You can find Stephanie’s on Instagram: smutt.therapy

KEY TOPICS

The journey into smut as a healing tool

Trauma, body responses, and implicit memories

Neuroplasticity and rewiring the brain through reading

The role of consent and trigger warnings in dark romance

Healing from religious and societal trauma through literature

There is allure… intensity, controlled danger melted onto the archetype of the morally gray man we see in smut written by women. Enter our favorite daddy: Xaden Riorson from Fourth Wing. A man written by a woman for women, the default setting being that he would never hurt his Violence. The danger is curated, the setup lush, erotic, magnetic… impossible to turn away from. The unpredictable black panther ready to pounce at any moment, and yet you cannot look away. What we’re really responding to is the intensity: a man so singularly focused on one woman that he’d burn everything down for her. The bad boy effect, stripped to its skeleton.

Being chosen so completely, so openly, that his whole moral universe reorganizes around you… any woman, especially a sexual assault survivor, will absolutely emotionally melt at the fictional possibility. We were never chosen for the right reasons, and never in a manner where we felt cherished, undeniable, centered. That was a reality that never belonged to us, until we read these books. This presence is intoxicating, and there is nothing wrong with it. But it is worth asking what it says about what we believe love has to cost.

The shadow daddy fantasy asks you to feel chosen despite the danger. For women who learned early that male attention comes with conditions, that love is something you survive and decode rather than simply receive, intensity reads as realness. The activated nervous system gets mistaken for passion. The push and pull becomes proof that it matters. We were shaped by exactly what we were handed, and then we went looking for it in fiction too.

If Xaden is a black panther on the prowl, Garrett Graham is a golden retriever that got out of the shelter. The fratty, golden boy athlete who actually cares about consent, ethics, being emotionally present and vulnerable; the juxtaposition is almost absurd until you watch him with Hannah, and then it becomes the most natural thing you’ve ever seen. He gives her agency, control, sovereignty over her body, and still makes her feel like a sexual being, all while she is living in the skin of a rape survivor. Women watching that are seeing another woman being treated in a way they would have crawled over hot coals for after their own abuse.

Hannah wants to be with Garrett. She is completely there in her desire, her mind is all the way in, and her body locks anyway. That is a survivor’s nervous system doing exactly what it was built to do: protecting her from something that no longer exists but left its handprint regardless. She tells him what happened to her, makes clear she isn’t fragile, doesn’t want his pity, doesn’t need him to become her therapist. He listens without making his listening the story. And then instead of pushing through or retreating, he hands her body back to her entirely, asking her to show him how she makes herself feel good, and offering to do the same. Equal vulnerability. Equal exposure. Nobody performing patience for the other person’s benefit. When he sees her go somewhere inside her head he says stay here, stay with me: not a demand, just a direction home. When she says he doesn’t have to turn away because he’s about to see her naked anyway, he says not until you want me to, because every small choice she makes is a real choice and he needs her to feel that. Later, when telling her story without her permission would have saved his entire career, he stays quiet. It was never his story to tell, and he knew that from the beginning.

And here is the part that is hardest to say out loud: the same women flooding the comments about Garrett, crying at that scene, saying they had never seen anything like it, those women may not even recognize him if he showed up in their real life. It is like looking through overcorrected reading glasses. You can see the outline, but you cannot make out what it is. You can see the man standing in front of you, but the nervous system puts a blanket over your eyes. He doesn't read as romantic. He doesn't read as passionate. The hypervigilant brain is too busy scanning for threat signatures it already knows, and when it doesn't find them, it doesn't know what to do with what's left. Calm doesn't compute as signal. That is just what trauma does to perception.

I’m a survivor too. I got bored with the good guy even though he would have given me the world and would have been patient and aware of my needs. Because my trauma, my nervous system made me need intensity, unpredictability that proved to me that I was alive, that I could still feel, that promised me a high ceiling, that made me feel like a woman with power, that I could tame the untamed. I needed to feel chosen by the impossible. And so I kept choosing my version of shadow daddies in the real world, when it was the last thing I needed. That is a trauma response. The nervous system doesn’t discriminate between what is good for you and what it recognizes: it only knows familiar and unfamiliar, and after abuse, those wires cross in ways that take years to untangle. Calm, safe, nurturing never registers on the brain when you’re operating at a frequency that only reads intensity, and that applies to everything you find attractive or noteworthy in your life at the time, not just men/women. Some things only belong in fantasy. But that’s easier said than done when you’re operating with the trauma brain of an SA survivor. The tricky part about being in a toxic mindset in the wake of trauma is that we rarely want in our real life what is good for us. We will want it in books and series because our context is there, in our space, not the real world. I realize how screwed up that sounds. But it’s only after years of trial and error healing on my part that I’ve reached a point in my body and my life where I want what I always refused.

The work of surviving is never just surviving what happened. It is also the long, slow work of learning to believe, in your body, not just in your head, that you are allowed to be the point. That your pleasure is the whole agenda. That a man can want you without that want arriving with a price attached.

The shadow daddy stays. We all love him for a reason, and it feels good to allow ourselves to swoon and fantasize about a man that is dangerous to anyone else but us. Fantasy is allowed to be exactly what it is, and there is something genuinely beautiful in that particular kind of fictional devotion. He becomes a ceiling the moment he is the only thing we can imagine deserving. The moment a man’s steadiness reads as absence. The moment someone being consistently, quietly, un-performatively present makes us wait for the version of him that will eventually make sense to our nervous system: the push, the pull, the heat we were taught to read as “love”.

What would you have to unlearn to let a Garrett love you?

And what does it mean that there is anything to unlearn at all?

About three weeks ago, I understood for the first time that I was sexually assaulted in college. Never thought I’d ever write those words at the start of a paragraph, but here we are. It took ten years for that word to become available to me: ten years of my mind protecting me from something it decided I wasn’t ready to hold, and when it finally surfaced, everything that had never made sense about my body suddenly made complete sense.

I want to sit with that for a moment because I still don’t entirely know what to do with it. Ten years. A whole decade where my body knew something I wasn’t ready to hold yet, and so it held it the only way it could: quietly, in the background, in the form of reactions I couldn’t explain and responses that made no sense and a version of myself I kept apologizing for without understanding what I was apologizing for.

When it finally surfaced, the first thing I felt was nausea. And then, underneath the nausea, something I wasn’t expecting - relief. Like a pressure I had been living under for so long I had stopped noticing it finally had a name. And having a name for something, even a name that changes everything, is still somehow better than carrying the weight of something you can’t see.

And then the shame came. It was right there waiting.

I still feel it. Writing this, right now, I feel it. The particular shame of being a woman who works in this space, who talks about desire and the nervous system and the body’s intelligence, who has built something around helping other women understand what their bodies are trying to say, and who spent ten years not understanding her own. And I think that shame is part of why I’m writing this, because it is so familiar, and because I know she is reading this right now too, in her own version of it, and I would rather she feel less alone in it than I feel more comfortable keeping this to myself.

It is also not a coincidence that I became a sex therapist. I think we become what we need most in our own lives, and I needed someone to explain my body to me so badly that I eventually became the person who does that for others. I found the research, I built the method, I created the framework, and the whole time some part of me was also building it for the version of me that sat outside with friends studying abroad, with a guy she actually liked, and felt his hand on her shoulder for thirty seconds and wanted to disappear off the face of the earth.

Cold sweats, immediate and total. Anxiety flooding my body before I could even form a conscious thought about what was happening. A need to be somewhere else, anywhere else, that I couldn’t explain and couldn’t stop and couldn’t let anyone around me see. And then immediately after - the guilt. The anger at myself for reacting that way to something that was supposed to feel nice, to someone who had done nothing wrong, to thirty seconds of an ordinary afternoon that my body had apparently decided was something else entirely.

I was so angry at myself that day. I thought something was wrong with me.

Nothing was wrong with me. My body knew things I didn’t. It had been keeping records I hadn’t given it permission to keep, in a language I didn’t know how to read yet.

The Journal of Sexual Medicine published research in 2014 that I wish someone had handed me years ago. In women with trauma histories, the threat response and the arousal response share the same physiological channel, which means the body that learned to protect itself doesn’t get to selectively apply that protection only to situations that actually warrant it. It applies it everywhere.

To touch that is completely safe. To people who have never given you a single reason to be afraid. To ordinary Tuesday afternoons where someone you genuinely like puts their hand on your shoulder and your entire nervous system decides the appropriate response is to want to vanish. Your body is not being irrational. It is being loyal, fiercely, exhaustingly loyal, to everything it learned, in every moment it had to learn it, before you were old enough or safe enough to understand what was being written into you.

This is why I think about smut the way I do, and why I built an entire method around it. A fictional man has never hurt you, and your nervous system keeps that record with a precision your conscious mind cannot always access. So it opens for him. It lets itself want things without immediately calculating what that wanting is going to cost. For a lot of women - for me, for years without understanding why - a smutty book is the only room in the house where desire has been allowed to exist safely. That is not a small thing or an embarrassing thing. That is your body finding the only place it felt it could breathe, and doing everything it could with the space it was given.

I do this work because I was that girl sitting with her friends with cold sweats and no language for any of it. I do it because I experienced a sexual assault in college that my mind buried so completely I only understood what it was a decade later, less than a month ago, sitting with the pieces of my own life finally arranged in the right order. I am a survivor who didn’t know she was one. And I spent years living in the gap between what my mind thought it had processed and what my body was still carrying from a violation it never forgot, not for a single day, even when I had no conscious access to it. Nobody told me this is how it works. Nobody explained that the body keeps going even when the mind has moved on. I don’t want that for you.

I grieve the years I didn’t understand this. That is probably the most honest thing I can say about where I am right now - I got my body back and I am grateful and I am also grieving, because understanding something a decade late does not return the decade. All the moments I spent ashamed of reactions I didn’t choose. All the times I thought the problem was me. The relief of finally knowing is real. The grief of finally knowing is also real, and I am not going to rush through either one of them.

If you are somewhere in this - if your body does things you cannot explain, if your desire operates on terms you don’t fully understand, if you have spent time being angry at yourself for reactions you didn’t choose - I want you to know that your nervous system is not betraying you. It is doing exactly what it learned to do, with exactly the information it was given, and it has been faithful to that learning in every single moment since. You were never insane. You were just never given the right map.

The Smutty Desire Quiz will start to show you yours. It takes five minutes and it will name your pattern more precisely than you’d expect.

Chloé

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In the quest for love, many of us often wonder: What is the secret to attracting the right partner? In this podcast, I explore the transformative insights shared by Ashley B. Jones, a psychic mentor and artist, who specializes in helping neurodivergent and witchy creatives attract soulmate relationships. She emphasizes the importance of self-alchemy, nervous system regulation, and intuitive guidance to unlock your true potential for love.

About Ashley B. Jones

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You can find her here:

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A global organized network of men sharing techniques for drugging and assaulting their wives, trading the videos, livestreaming it to paying audiences - 62 million visits to one site in February alone, and what I felt when I read it was not the jolt of something new but the particular exhaustion of recognition, the specific fury of having something confirmed that women have been carrying in their bodies as knowledge for a very long time without ever quite being given permission to say it out loud.

We knew. We have always known.

Our bodies knew before we had the words for it, and we were told we were paranoid, we were told we were dramatic, we were told we needed to give men more credit, and here is the credit: 62 million visits.

And then, because the investigation itself apparently wasn’t enough, men showed up in the comments to correct the statistics. To clarify that it was 62 million visits, not 62 million individual men. To note that this doesn’t represent all men. Choosing data as your first response to the documented sexual assault of women tells me everything I need to know, and it is not the defense I would reach for if I were trying to make a case for myself.

If you ever wanted an explanation for the “male loneliness epidemic,” look no further. Women are choosing the bear, smut, iced coffee, and thriving.

Do you remember the bear debate? When the internet asked women whether they’d rather be alone in the woods with a bear or a man they didn’t know, and women answered, and men were offended by the answer, and women couldn’t quite believe they were being asked to explain it? That moment has stayed with me because it was one of those rare times the nervous system spoke before the social script had a chance to intervene: women said the thing they’d been quietly knowing their entire lives and watched it go viral because apparently it wasn’t as quietly known as everyone had assumed.

The CNN investigation is the footnote to that conversation. The clinical confirmation of what every woman’s body already knew when it chose the bear, and the reason none of us should have to explain that choice ever again.

This is also why women read smut, and I mean that clinically, not as a cultural aside. A 2006 study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior found that guided fantasy significantly increased physiological arousal in women in a way that was specific to women - a specifically female nervous system pathway to desire, where the imagination creates the conditions and the body follows when it feels safe enough to.

The reason the fictional man does what the actual world so often doesn’t is that he exists in a space the nervous system can actually trust: a world where her desire is safe, where she is wanted in the way she wants to be wanted, where the ending belongs to her and nobody is coming for her. Every time a woman loses herself completely in that world, some part of her nervous system is collecting evidence that this version of intimacy is possible, is real, is something she deserves. That is one of the most quietly defiant things I have ever watched a human body do given everything it has been asked to absorb.

The fictional man is the nervous system voting, without apology, for the world it actually deserves to live in.

And here is the thing that makes me furious, for which I am done making excuses for.

We have spent decades building an entire therapy industry to help women recover from what men have been building organized, legally protected academies to teach. The harm has infrastructure. The recovery is individual and slow and expensive and still, in too many rooms, treated as though the woman is the one who needs correcting.

As though the desire she lost access to was a personal failure, as though the body that closed was the problem, as though what she needs is better coping strategies for living in a world that has always had this in it and simply expected her to manage quietly.

The body that closed was paying attention. It was right to. And it is time we started saying that as clearly and as loudly as it deserves to be said.

This is why I do this work at the body level, because the pattern doesn’t live in her thoughts: it lives in the body. Chronic stress raises cortisol, cortisol constricts smooth muscle, smooth muscle constriction reduces blood flow, which means reduced arousal, reduced lubrication, more pain. The threat response and the arousal response share the same physiological channel, and when the nervous system has learned - correctly, based on real information about the real world - that intimacy carries risk, the threat response wins every time before a single conscious thought has had a chance to weigh in. You cannot think your way out of that. The body has to learn its way out, with tools that actually reach where the pattern lives, in conditions that are genuinely safe, over time.

The reason women choose the bear is the same reason they choose the fictional man, and the same reason their desire went quiet: it is all the same nervous system, reading the same world, making the same completely reasonable calculation about what is and has never reliably been safe.

Your desire didn’t disappear. It went somewhere the world couldn’t reach it, somewhere it could wait, somewhere it has been protecting itself on your behalf this whole time.

The work of coming back to it, on your terms, in your own time, is the work of giving the nervous system enough new evidence to make a different decision - and it is entirely capable of that, because the capacity to change doesn’t expire, and the desire that went quiet is still there, in the body that kept it safe, waiting for you.

On that note: read the smut with the man written by a woman, choose the bear, choose your nervous system.

This includes a personal look at how smut became an unexpected part of my own recovery, and why placing the brain in a contained, safe, fictional sexual context can start to change the response over time.

Because the brain changes through repetition, and what it experiences repeatedly becomes what it expects, exposure to these kinds of environments can shift how the nervous system reacts… including reducing constant threat responses and making it possible to stay present again.

In this episode, I cover:

• Why most sexual trauma doesn’t come from strangers

• How the brain processes threat after these experiences

• What freezing, shutdown, and automatic responses actually are

• Why arousal can occur during unwanted experiences

• How trauma shows up later (overthinking, control, disconnection)

• Why smut creates a different kind of sexual context

• The role of repetition and neuroplasticity in changing the response

• How exposure to fiction can reduce constant fight-or-flight activation

• What shifted for me personally after reading romantasy and dark romance

I’m writing this as an American woman in her thirties, who’s also a certified clinical aromatherapist, a sex therapist, and a sexual trauma survivor. The latter is why I became a sex therapist… I love irony, too.

According to the CDC, more than half of women in the U.S. have experienced sexual violence involving physical contact in their lifetime, and nearly one in three have survived physical or sexual violence from a partner.

And yes, that includes physical trauma like sexual assault/rape. But it also includes the quieter wounds: gaslighting, manipulation, emotional coercion, the kind of experiences that don’t leave visible scars but live in the nervous system.

As both a woman with trauma and a sex therapist, I’ve spent the last few years finding ways for women to rebuild self-trust and feel safe in pleasure again, because WHY is this not already normalized? But, i’m not doing this just to erase trauma, but to stop living as its prey.

What is emotional sexual trauma?

It’s theft of the self: the kind that doesn’t leave bruises but takes years to recover from. It’s when a partner convinces you to do something intimate you never wanted to do in the first place. Maybe they pressure you to send them nudes or threatens to “look elsewhere.” You don’t want to disappoint them, and you don’t want to lose them. And, it’s not that you can’t say no... it’s that they know exactly how to make you doubt your right to. That’s emotional manipulation at its best.

Gaslighting is another one: the confusion, the apologies for things you didn’t even do, the constant second-guessing.

This kind of trauma hides in plain sight. It shows up in the anxiety before a date, the panic when someone touches you, or the way your body goes numb when attention lands on you. It looks like low libido, disinterest, detachment… like you’re just not “in the mood.” But the truth is, your body and mind stopped being on the same team a long time ago. Pleasure doesn’t feel safe anymore… maybe sometimes, it even feels dangerous.

And that’s how emotional sexual trauma survives; quietly, inside the nervous system, long after the relationship ends.

“Smut, Scent, Trauma” is the framework I created to help women reconnect to safety, sensuality, and self-trust after trauma.

Each pillar supports the body and brain in different ways:

• Smut: When we read erotic or romantic fiction, our mirror neurons fire as if we’re experiencing those emotions ourselves. That releases dopamine and oxytocin, the same feel-good chemicals linked to trust, bonding, and safety. For women with trauma, this helps the body practice arousal and connection in a completely safe context, with no real risk, no pressure, just the nervous system learning that desire doesn’t equal danger.

• Scent: The sense of smell is hardwired to the limbic system, the part of the brain that controls emotion, memory, and hormonal regulation. Certain essential oils, like rose (Rosa damascena) or cedarwood (Cedrus atlantica), can lower cortisol (the stress hormone) and activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which signals the body that it’s safe to rest and feel. Aromatherapy essentially becomes chemical communication between your body and your emotions.

• Trauma: Trauma disrupts how the brain processes safety. It can shrink the hippocampus (memory and learning), over activate the amygdala (fear center), and dull the prefrontal cortex (logic and decision-making). The main point is healing isn’t about pretending that didn’t happen... it’s about creating new neural pathways through repeated safe experiences. That’s where smut and scent come in: they reintroduce safety through sensory cues instead of talk alone.

I found that these three elements retrain the body to respond to connection with curiosity instead of fear. They help women rewire their relationship to pleasure; not as going from a place of fear or control, to trust.

I know it sounds a little crazy, that reading about sexual dynamics, slow burns, enemies-to- lovers, dragons, or fated mates could possibly have a healing effect. But it does.

This doesn’t replace therapy, obviously. It’s simply one of my favorite ways to rework trauma triggers and remind the body that safety can feel good again.
You’re welcome.

The thing about healing is that safety can’t be faked or forced. It has to be felt. Your body and your nervous system have to recognize it as real before your brain follows.

Here’s the analogy I like to use: think of your brain as a ball of Play-Doh. When trauma hits, it will dent it, dry it out, reshape it, even tear pieces away. Research shows trauma literally changes the structure of the brain.

But when you pair smut with scent, something starts to shift. The body relaxes, oxytocin rises, the limbic system softens, and suddenly you’re remolding that Play-Doh. I’ve come to discover that that’s what’s called neuroplasticity (I’m not a neuroscientist, but I do have a degree in a field of psychology): the brain’s ability to rewire itself and create new pathways of safety, pleasure, and connection.

According to the American Psychological Association, nearly 60% of women report feeling chronically anxious or disconnected from their bodies, even years after leaving a harmful relationship.

Because women are exhausted.
We’ve been told to meditate, manifest, journal, detach. We’ve done all of it, and still feel disconnected. We’ve also been told to… “calm down”… we feel SO calm after that suggestion.

Smut and scent work because they bypass logic. They don’t ask you to think your way into healing: they let your body feel it.

A dark-romance slow burn that makes your heart race, or a drop of jasmine and cedarwood that grounds you, that’s your body remembering what safety and anticipation can feel like without fear attached to it.

Who knew neuroplasticity could be this hot?

This is one of the moments in Episode 1 of my new Podcast where I acknowledge that what I’m saying might sound unusual at first… okay more than a little unusual, but that makes life a little more spicy.

Using smut as a therapeutic tool isn’t a concept most people have heard before, even though so many women already use it without knowing. But when you look at it through the lens of trauma and the nervous system, it starts to make a lot more sense.

Here’s a short clip from the episode.

From Episode 1 of Smut Happens: Why Women’s Desire Isn’t Just a Button — It’s About Feeling Safe First.

In this debut episode, we’ll uncover how engaging with smut storytelling can rewire your brain, reduce anxiety, and enhance emotional resilience. Discover the science behind how these narratives can trigger neuroplasticity, offering a unique pathway to healing.

Key insights include:
• The connection between your nervous system and desire
• The therapeutic role of fantasy
• Practical tips for using smut to support emotional well-being

Join me as we challenge conventional views on desire and embrace a new understanding of pleasure and mental health. Tune in to start your journey toward reclaiming your sensual self.

That message sits deeper than we realize, and it follows us into adulthood.
It shows up when you avoid self-touch, when a sex toy feels embarrassing, or when you still keep yours in the back of a drawer like it needs a passport to be seen.

Here’s the problem with that:
your pelvic area actually needs stimulation for basic health.
This isn’t about performance, kink, or being “more sexual.”
This is about circulation, hormones, tissue quality, and mood — the very things trauma tends to disrupt the most.

A lot of women with trauma deal with tension, numbness, dryness, low desire, mood swings, and chronic pelvic discomfort.
And most of them were never told that regular, gentle stimulation supports:

• blood flow

• hormonal balance (estrogen, testosterone, dopamine, oxytocin)

• tissue integrity

• comfort during arousal or daily movement

• emotional regulation

• pelvic floor relaxation and coordination

Sex toys help with these things because they are predictable and fully under your control.
They create consistent stimulation without pressure, without surprises, and without someone else’s nervous system in the mix.
That’s why they’re so effective for women navigating trauma recovery, burnout, and long-term disconnection from their bodies.

This isn’t about “fixing” anything.
It’s about giving your body the kind of input it responds well to: controlled, steady, private, and safe.

Women deserve tools that support their well-being.
We deserve education that addresses our bodies without shame.
And we deserve to understand that stimulation down there is not optional for long-term pelvic health.
It’s maintenance.
It’s regulation.
It’s mental health.
It’s aging well.
It’s comfort.

When you use a toy, you’re not doing anything wild.
You’re supporting your own physiology.
Your body benefits even on the days your mind hesitates.

And if it still feels taboo or awkward?
You’re not alone.
But silence was never designed to protect us: it was designed to control us.
We get to choose differently now.

When I showed up in person later, I didn’t expect what happened next.
Women started finding me: in hallways, between sessions, while I was trying to get tea

“I’ve had these symptoms for years.”
“I thought it was just hormonal.”
“No one ever explained this to me.”

They all looked the same way; relieved, but furious.

The sad part is that what they’d been dealing with wasn’t rare. It was ignored.

According to the CDC and WHO, more than 70% of women will experience at least one yeast infection in their lifetime.
Around 72% of bacterial-vaginosis cases go undiagnosed or misdiagnosed altogether.
And nearly half of women with recurrent yeast infections experience another episode within a year.
(CDC, WHO, Bradshaw et al., 2006)
Half will deal with recurrence within a year.

When the symptoms continue, most women are handed antidepressants or told to relax. Some are referred to therapy. Others are given the polite version of “it’s all in your head.”

Women are the most over-prescribed, over-medicated, and medically dismissed demographic, and nowhere is that clearer than when something’s wrong below the waist.

I see the aftermath every day.
Women who’ve been trained to distrust their own pain.
Women who’ve convinced themselves that burning, dryness, or low desire are just part of aging or stress.

I promise this is not about hygiene or hormones. It’s about regulation.
When your microbiome is disrupted, your nervous system pays for it.
The body holds the tension, and it stops feeling safe inside itself.

Essential oils aren’t a cure, but they can help the body recalibrate when used properly.
I use them because they work with the body’s terrain, they respect chemistry and sensitivity.

Geranium (Pelargonium graveolens) supports the vaginal flora and balances pH.
Palmarosa (Cymbopogon martinii) helps with fungal overgrowth and tissue repair.
Tea Tree (Melaleuca alternifolia) targets microbes and fungal growth.
Myrrh (Commiphora myrrha) reduces inflammation and strengthens mucosal tissue.

Here’s one of the protocols I shared during that presentation:

Soothing Gel for Early Irritation

• 1 tsp (≈ 5 mL) aloe vera gel

• 1 drop Tea Tree

• 1 drop Geranium

• 1 drop German Chamomile
  Mix and apply externally or intravaginally once or twice a day for up to five days.
  Always use fresh, well-stored oils.

It’s simple, but it works, because it meets the body where it is instead of trying to override it.

That week in Tampa reminded me why I started doing this work in the first place.
Women don’t need to be told to calm down. They need to be taken seriously.

It also pushed me to reopen my first book, Unbroken, and rewrite it from the ground up.
The updated edition explores what happens to women after years of dismissal and disconnection, how trauma, self-trust, and the nervous system overlap, and how aromatherapy can be used as a form of repair rather than escape.

Women aren’t fragile. We’re exhausted.
We’re tired of silence being the standard.
We’re tired of pain being normalized.

And maybe we’re done asking permission to talk about it.