My first viral personal essay was titled: “In Defense of Casual Sex”.

It was 2008. I was 24, living in San Francisco, and working at the online magazine Salon. I was responding to a series of books about hookup culture, including one warning young women that they were ruining themselves for love and marriage by sleeping around.

I had slept around and I didn’t feel ruined, and I wrote as much in my essay. I argued that young women were “putting feminist ideals of equality into sex by refusing shame and claiming the traditionally male side of the stud/slut double standard”.

Trolls filled the comments sections and my inbox with words like “tramp” and “cum dumpster”. I printed out the cruelest remarks and taped them to the fridge in my apartment: every morning, as I opened the door for milk or eggs, I smirked at these names men had called me.

My essay landed in a sex-writing anthology, which led to a reading in Berkeley at Good Vibrations, a famous sex-positive adult toy store, just a few minutes away from my parents’ house.