All through the 80’s it seemed the seedier side of the sex industry plastered its naked fanny across the TV with such frequency it’s a wonder I didn’t contract juvenile eye herpes just from watching the five o’clock news.

Growing up in my suburban home the typical family dinner consisted of meat and potatoes, green beans, and a side of marginalized prostitute or suburban Megaplexxx NIMBY debate peppered with regular Roe v. Wade challenges and rape headlines for dessert. Yum!

Ever the impressionable sponge of a child, I internalized two major life lessons by the age of seven:
1. More often than not, it was terrible 80’s fashion and not the woman to blame for her lack of control over her own body. I mean, you did see what she was wearing, right?
2. Sex = bad. Female sexual expression = even worse.

Add to that Catholic guilt. Multiply by a fear-based sex education supplanted with Vatican mandated slide shows of STI riddled genitalia… and the sum of all these parts is the singularly curious yet ill-equipped human being before you now.

Stumbling the fine line between sex positive and whore, I and my torrid loving, my good intentions, and my tragic dating record have somehow qualified me to work as a sales associate in a sex shop, dispensing advice that I have yet to apply to my own life.

I know.

It shouldn’t make sense.

But looking back on those family dinners, with the incessant line of marginalized women always on trial just ten feet away, I knew something wasn’t quite right. Though I couldn’t articulate it then, the lesson I had really learned is that human sexuality has a right to exist safely in all its incarnations without judgment. I knew this from the moment I first saw police on TV handcuffing a woman for being pretty…and, apparently, for being an entrepreneur.

To me, my little sales job is a calling. A feeling, I imagine, much like the priests at my Catholic schools felt before taking their Holy Orders.

Oh wouldn’t they love to hear my confessions now.