Can Men Write About Sex

… very carefully

image — unsplash.com

I read an interesting article yesterday about how to get read on Medium. The slightly tongue-in-cheek, slightly cynical author said the answer was to “be a woman and write about sex”. She argued that female authors who write about sex tend to have really large following. I’m kind of new here, so I don’t really know if that’s true. But as a guy who likes to write about sex and relationships, it made me think.

Is it hard — or easy — for a guy to curate a following writing about sexual issues? I’m new here, but I did have a blog on another platform for a few years. I wrote about sex and relationship issues there and, despite being very part time and doing no promotion on social media, I got up to a few thousand followers. I told a colleague about this, kind of teasing him about the incredible effort he out into his blog to get the 1,000 followers he had. He said “I write about economic theory; you write about sex. Of course you have more followers”. Fair point.

So, sure, lots of people are interested in sex. But are they interested in a guy’s perspective on it? I hope so. But I’ve noticed a couple of things…. and I may be totally wrong.. these are just my perspectives and they are based on a very short time on this platform.

• It seems that the majority of sex and relationship writers are female. I’m guessing that this is probably reflective of the broader writing demographic. I’ve never seen stats on it, but I would guess that a significant majority of hobby writers and semi-professional writers are female. Irrespective of genre. That said, I am also guessing that, specific to the sex and realtionship space, there is more interest amongst females. There is something to that stereotype that women are more comfortable talking about these issues.
• It seems that the majority of sex and relationship readers are also female. On my old blog, most of my readers and probably 75% of my commenters were female. As above, maybe women are simply more interested in engaging on these issues.
• As a male writer, the times they are a changin’… a little. I’m a happily married guy writing about sex and relationships. As such, I frequently write of shared experiences or shared observations I’ve had with my wife. 10 years ago, as I wrote about these, it always seemed…