Hello !

If you replied to my email from two weekends ago with the subject, "😳 How did you learn about sex?" - thank you!

I can't express how much joy I get hearing your stories. There's so much diversity in them, but one thing that feels the same—we're all people who care about others. There was so much empathy in your words.

Another common theme was that we all want to be seen and acknowledged as being perfectly fine, exactly as we are.

But then, there were differences.

For some, romance novels are a pure fantasy escape. Give me the impossible-in-real-life fairy tale match between the hero who never has bad breath and the heroine who never has blood stains on her period panties.

For others, though, romance novels are where we go to see ourselves reflected in stories where heroine's who will never be featured in a magazine spread are still worthy of all the love the dreamy hero has to give.

Shortly after I wrote that email two weeks ago, I listened to a podcast conversation with the founder of a website called Make Love Not Porn. It's a site where real couples, not actors, film themselves having sex in very normal-to-them ways.

The founder's name is Cindy Gallop. The conversation was mostly about business, but it was also fascinating.

Cindy sees herself and her website as a social change advocate and I have to say ... I think she's onto something important since most porn presents totally fantasized situations. And in her lived experience, being an older woman who has younger male lovers, she said those young men's ideas about how to have good sex were entirely skewed by their porn consumption.

She did a 5-minute TED Talk, called Make Love Not Porn, where she talks about this. (But heads-up! The website she points to in her talk is no longer text-based and now redirects to a video-based site.)

One thing Cindy Gallup said in the podcast that struck me, was this:

“Our parents bring us up to have a work ethic, sense of responsibility, accountability. Nobody ever brings us up to behave well in bed. But they should because in bed, values like empathy, sensitivity, generosity, kindness, honesty, and respect, are as important as those values are in every other area of our lives where we are actively taught to operate them.”

I don't really know where I'm going with this this morning! Welcome to free flow thoughts from a romance author before coffee on a Saturday morning!

Hello, my name is Danika and I write ....

Last week, I participated in an online meet-and-greet event where I was placed in different break-out rooms to meet three other people at a time, nine total, who, like me, are interested in making connections with others working in different fields.

The rooms I chose to meet folks in were "Arts" and "Social Issues." We each had two minutes to introduce ourselves. I met women (they just happened to be) who do all kinds of work: a disability activist, a dietician who works with vegetarians to lose weight, a coach for musicians, a nurse doing health equity education, the woman who founded the International Day of Calm .. it was a diverse range.

Introducing myself as a romance author is something I've had to learn to be proud to say, since there's (almost) always someone who will think it's absolutely fine to say reply with, "Oh, so you write smut" while making a face like she's just had blue cheese wafted under nose.

And sometimes, the silence speaks as loud as the derision. After others had their two minutes, people would ask questions and compliment them on how important the work they're doing in the world is. A romance author's value to the well-being of our "clients" seems hard to understand to people who don't read the genre. And maybe even to some who do ...

That's one reason I so enjoy chatting with you. You are my people!

And this all adds up to ..

As we're wrapping up another year, and my birthday is just weeks away, I'm finding myself pulled back to my roots as a social justice advocate. So, as I've been planing my next series, my heroines are becoming more mouthy! Like I was in my twenties! I toned it down in my thirties and forties. But this latter half of my fifties is definitely finding that "mad as hell, not gonna take it" energy again.

The heroines in the books I'm working on are being influenced by smart and caring people like Dr J and Cindy Gallop and by you, every time you reply and tell me something about your lived experience that makes me want to burn the house down and rebuild it with kindness, empathy, and love.

There you go. A little drive around my brain this morning. I'd love to take a tour in yours and hear what you're thinking right now.

love & learningstuff,

Danika

xo

Ideas for a weekend escape

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