… been a prostitute?

… fucked someone sight unseen?

… had an unpleasant sexual experience?

… done something you felt ashamed of?

… been intimate with someone who had shit-stained underpants and open sores? Were you Mother Theresa (not just during, but ever after as well) about it?

After the strong reaction to the final installments of “The Whore Journals” series that’s run here for the past year, those are my burning questions.

To refresh your memory, “The Whore Journals” was a private diary I wrote that ran bi-weekly in 24 parts. The entire journal was published rough and dirty, and featured crass encounters with rich boys, shy footjobs with a little league baseball coach, nasty threesomes with “Santa” and concluded with me performing oral sex on a grotesquely obese man with disabilities.

There’s something you need to know about the series: It was a great big experiment I conducted years ago. I was entering uncharted territory, and I had to assume a take-no-prisoners, Fear Factor mentality. I was in transition: just lost my job, had been stone cold dumped, and was flying solo. I was reinventing myself.

It was a two-month shock to my senses, from placing the online ad for my services with shaking fingers and a racing heart, to meeting stranger after stranger, never knowing what was around the next corner. It felt surreal then, and still feels like a weird dream today.

Some crazy shit went down, and I documented all of it. My tone and attitude in the journal is drastically different than what you find on my sex-positive website, The Beautiful Kind. The Whore Journals most decidedly did not belong on my website: It is not beautiful. It’s snarky and often ugly. And true. SexIs was brave enough to give it a voice.

I spoke with the SexIs editors about “polishing” the journal, but we decided to keep it 100 percent raw and intact, to capture the moment, rather than run it through the “P.C. Mill” and make it more socially acceptable, or to cast me in a more favorable light.

Month after month it unfolded online, and I never heard much about it, save an occasional compliment. Then the dramatic conclusion went up, and while it was visceral and intense, I had the entire year to prepare for its reveal. I can’t imagine what it was like for some people to read it, especially if it was the first journal entry they read out of the entire series. Taken out of context, not knowing important details, I can see it being quite the mindbender.

Some suggested a warning label or commentary should have been attached to it, but that never occurred to me. The entire series ran without trigger caution alerts, and it had its share of raw moments. Do they put a warning on season finale episodes of Dexter?

I’m truly sorry some people took the article personally, or were caught off-guard, and flamed me for being “anti-fat” or “body-negative,” but I do not apologize for being open and honest.

Some felt I should have turned the man away and not spent time with him. I think that would have been the worst thing I could do. Despite being shocked and taken aback by his physical condition, I conducted myself professionally and positively.

By fulfilling my obligation and completing the job I signed up for, I made his day. He was on his way to a crisis weight management conference, and I gave him confidence, an orgasm, and a good experience.

Had I turned him away, my guess is that he would have trudged off to the conference unsatisfied because even a whore wouldn’t be with him. Instead, he emailed me as soon as he got back online thanking me for a wonderful experience and asking to set up another appointment.

I adhere to an unusual rule: If I do something that makes me think, I don’t want other people knowing about that, it’s a sign I SHOULD share it. Why? Because the first step to overcoming shame is to own it.

I am ashamed of many things in my past, truth is part of growth. Instead of erasing/censoring my past, I chose to acknowledge and learn from it. I hope others learn from it, too.

One thing I learned from this experience was I never fucked a person sight unseen again.
I called my (300-pound) partner to tell him about the reaction I was getting from dropping the “F” bomb and he ranted, “If someone is going to condemn you for a single incident that happened years ago, then fuck ’em! Better yet, DON’T fuck ’em! I’d like to read THEIR diaries. They can’t handle the truth? It’s YOUR experience, not theirs. How dare they take it so personally?! They need to look up ‘projection’ in a psychology dictionary.”

He paused for a moment, then said as an afterthought, “It’s a good thing I didn’t keep a diary when I was fucking around in college … I did things I’m not proud of, but you better believe I learned from them and am a different person now.”

(It was only after I’d hung up the phone, that I appreciated how awesome it is to have a partner I can tell anything to—and in my case, anything can be pretty damn extreme—and he doesn’t even blink.)

I told a male friend about the whole thing. I asked him if he had a weight limit with the women he is sexually intimate with. He said yes: his max weight limit was 180—just as he was only attracted to black women. This from a white guy who weighs 450 pounds.

I believe it’s OK to have preferences, as well as less-than-stellar reactions to experiences, as long as we keep an open mind and learn valuable lessons along the way.

Be careful who you judge. Behind every photograph, video clip, article or post you take in, there’s always more to the story. As for empathy, it’s on the rise, both in our society and within me, and every day I am living it, learning it, and loving it.