The Argus: What do you do around campus?
Abby Spector: When people ask me what my extracurricular is, I say I just really enjoy people, and delving into people’s social intricacies. And I don’t know if that’s something that you can put on your résumé—professional awkward-enforcer. I do have a blog that I write, called Sexy Awkward Times, so I kind of work on that. I also did a student forum last year on pornography, and that was really interesting.

A: Did you do that with someone else?
AS: Mhm! Taylor Sander [’12], who’s one of my good friends here. We had taken it the previous year, and then we made our own version of it. It was really great—I wish I could have done it again this year, because this past summer I interned with this feminist pornographer and writer, Tristan Taormino [’93], who actually went to Wesleyan.

A: How was that internship? What did you do?
AS: It was so…normal! It’s funny. Like, my boss isn’t running around sticking her boobs onto things. I spent a lot of time organizing and doing basic office stuff, doing some editing, and some scanning and just putting things in binders, except for that the things that I was scanning were naked pictures of people. I spent four days just organizing her dildo collection.

But after you get over the hype of like, “Oh! This is what it is! It’s so giggly!” it just becomes a job, which was really fun and great to see.

A: Do you want to work in the sex industry?
AS: Yeah…I think so? I’m not really sure what my trajectory is… see, I need to actually sit down and process… or maybe not! Maybe I should just stumble into whatever. But if I tried to actively go into the creation of pornography—which I’m probably not going to end up doing—I’d really need to reevaluate my whole life, because that is such a life-choice and would affect a lot of things down the line.

I’m not going to perform in pornography—parents, I’m not going to perform in pornography. But I think that I’d love to write about sex. Yeah, I would love to have my own little line of goofy little books, but realistically, I’ll probably end up going to social work school in like, five years and be a sex therapist. I’m probably going to end up sitting down and talking to fifty-year old couples about what position gets them off. That’s probably where my life is going.

A: Let’s talk about your blog. How do you decide what to write about?
AS: People who I don’t really know will come up to me at parties and say, “I read your blog and I have the funniest story.” And they’ll tell me things about female ejaculate and period stains and parents walking in on them and them walking in on their parents—just crazy stuff, and I’m like, “I don’t even know how to turn this into a story. You need to write that story!”

Most of it, though, is just inspired by a lot of things that they left out, that I feel the media just left out. And not that I’m blaming them for it, but no one ever told me what happens if someone ejaculates inside you and where that ejaculate goes. I don’t know if that’s too inappropriate, but you never see a girl in a movie walking away and there’s like, a dribble down her leg. People never say that!

People never say that your period isn’t going to be blood-red. Why didn’t they tell us that? Periods are not red and ejaculate dribbles and people queef.

The first time I had sex, the penis didn’t just miraculously stay in the vagina. They make it look like you can just stand up and it will miraculously find it’s way! That’s not the way bodies work! It’s really important for people to know that they’re normal if their bodies work that way.

A: How do you deal with blogging on such a small campus?
AS: At times it’s been uncomfortable when I reference a certain experience. The time that I would reference in particular is that I wrote about someone going down on me and I had a piece of toilet paper stuck down there—it was a very specific incident and it was very clear who it was.

There are some repercussions to what I write—like when I wrote about the guy who I lost my virginity to in high school, about feeling like a dead fish being poked by a fisherman’s incredibly small rod. And I just got a Facebook message like a week ago with that line copy-pasted and him writing, “Really?” And I just had to be like, “No, not really! No! That’s just what it feels like when you have sex!” You expect it to be this magical thing and you just end up being this starfish and you’re just confused.

A: Any advice to Wesleyan students about sex in general?
AS: It’s just going to be weird! The most vivid image of not-real sex in my head is—have you ever seen Atonement? They’re standing up against a building and like, she’s having an orgasm and they’re just standing there and I mean, it was really hot. But sex is more complicated, and sex is weird.