This week our good friend and talented writer, Emme Witt-Eden, a.k.a. “Mysterious Witt,” became a full-fledged author with the publication of her memoir: Confessions of a Middle-Aged F-Girl. (You can read our review here.)
She was generous enough to sit down with us for an interview about the book, writing, marriage, and of course, sex.
Promo for Confessions of a Middle-Aged F-Girl
L – Congrats on your new book, Confessions of a Middle-Aged F-Girl! And thank you for letting me (or us – me and my man, H.H.) read it ahead of time to write a review. We loved it! We each devoured it in about three days. When we got together to talk about it, we devoured each other. What a sexy ready. But it’s also so personal – I mean, it is a memoir after all. Since it is a memoir, as opposed to an autobiography, it only portrays a sliver of your life – from the time your marriage fell apart to your emerging as a self-aware, self-confident f-girl. Tell us how you’d characterize yourself in your marriage and before. I mean, in the memoir you say you “claimed” your sexuality, not “reclaimed it,” because you felt like you never actually had it to begin with, but what was your sexuality (real and fantasy life) like before?
EWE – Ha-ha! I wouldn’t characterize myself as a completely self-confident f-girl in my book. I was still suffering from quite a bit of insecurity and was working my way through this throughout the entirety of the book. But I did definitely find myself again through sex, even though I still met with other challenges, such as some bad matches in bed and a guy who totally broke my heart.
But back to the other part of your question. I would say that my sexuality has fluctuated quite a bit throughout my life. I was very prude and full of shame in my younger life, even if I had sex for the first time at 15. I really didn’t enjoy penetration and a lot of it was because I felt like I was doing something bad. I come from a very conservative family and sex was always framed as something that I was giving up to a man who would use me if I wasn’t careful (and prude). And even after I got married, I should still feel shame surrounding sex, because my parents definitely treated their sex life – or what I knew about their sex life – in that way. Sex was something to hide at all costs, they were not going to talk to me about it, and I was not allowed to ask about it. I hate to say, but as I came into my own as a young woman, I suffered quite a bit from the mother wound, meaning my mother had a very negative view of sex, and I, sadly, adopted that.
I only started to open up – sexually speaking – when I became a dominatrix after college (pre-marriage!). But I didn’t see that job as sexual. I thought domming was just about treating men like garbage. (If you’d like to learn more about this era of my life, please read my newsletter The Accidental Dominatrix.) Nevertheless, my job as a pro-domme helped me deal with some of my shame. Little by little, my body image improved, and I started to explore myself sexually. And yet, during that time, I still maintained the belief that I had to keep my body count low or no man would ever want to commit to me. I did not embrace, nor did I completely own my sexuality, in that era, though I was on my way to getting there. This is why I say that I only finally “claimed” my sexuality after I left my first husband, as even when I was working in the sex industry as a dominatrix, I was still quite prude and felt like I was always at the mercy of men whom I let have so much control over me emotionally.
Fortunately, after my divorce, I finally worked through these issues. Finally, I was able to enjoy sex just for sex – and that was incredibly liberating! In that regard, I say that I finally “claimed” my sexuality. I hope that makes sense.
And…. to fully answer your question, I would say that I did have some BDSM fantasies even when I was working as a pro-domme. I had the desire to be dominated, but for the reasons I explained, I wasn’t ever able to experience it in a satisfying way. Back then, kink wasn’t viewed as it is today, as this fun thing that’s pretty benign, just a way to spice up sex. Back then (this was the 90s), kink was seen as a pathology. Though I had kink fantasies, when I would tell my lovers about them, they always thought I had some sort of mental issue. This was extremely painful and I’m very glad that we’re much more open today about the healthy, normal reality of kink.
A little cross-endorsement from Emme Witt-Eden
L – You’ve been in the lifestyle for some time now. As I recall, you used to not show your face in your posts on Medium.com and other social media, but now you do. Does this mean you’re “out” to your friends and family? And, I guess most importantly, does your ex-husband David know about this memoir?
EWE – Yes, you’re right, there was a time when I didn’t show my face because I was very keen on protecting my family from scandal. LOL. But seriously, I have kids whom I wanted to protect. I was also protecting my conservative family from embarrassment and pain. I’ve already been told that I’ve hurt my family. Quite a few of my family members know about my dominatrix past. It’s just so much pressure on me to feel like I’m bringing people so much pain just for exploring and writing about my own sexuality. I know this sounds crazy! But to make everyone happy and to keep the peace I once decided to hide my identity.
Not just that, there’s a part of me that likes privacy. I have a social life with other parents from my kids’ school and I just don’t feel like having to explain some of my life choices to these people. And I think many of us are like this. We have a face we show one set of friends and colleagues and a face we show another. We might have a professional face that we show our workplace friends, but they don’t know what goes on in our bedroom. I’ve happened to have chosen to make a profession out of what goes on in my bedroom and so it’s created this tension. A lot of people are simply not the appropriate recipients of the spicy news of my sex life. So, when they find out about it, I have to first listen to their judgments, and then decide whether we’re going to continue to be friends. This has basically resulted in me having much fewer friends, because, as a rule, people are very close-minded.
A couple of years ago, when I decided to show my face, several things had happened. I realized that I wasn’t going to get ahead in my writing career unless I started revealing what I look like. And when I did, I knew I would lose people. And so I basically had to get to the point where I was so tired of hiding parts of myself that I realized it was better to lose everyone. I’m just not interested in perpetuating the balancing act of ensuring certain people like me by hiding so much of myself. I’m finally ready to own up to who I am and that’s why I started showing my face. Of course, I still write under a pseudonym for now. Part of that is to just protect myself from trolls. It’s a crazy world out there, I’ll tell ya. Oh, and David does know I’ve written about him. He doesn’t care enough about my writing to give a crap, though. God, I’m glad we’re divorced.
L – Are your kids old enough to know about your “alternative” lifestyle? Have you told them or did they find out? Or will you be telling them at some appropriate time?
EWE – My kids still aren’t old enough and it’s really not appropriate for me to talk about it with them. However, my second husband, the man whom I’m currently married to, really applauds the way that I talk about sex with my kids. I’m very open and I talk about sex in a very calm and clinical manner. I don’t clam up and feel shame or tell my kids to stop asking questions. My current husband wasn’t like that with his kids and so he looks at my openness as this wonderful thing. I am able to guide my children as they learn about their sexuality, and I can do this in an open and honest way. And that is the result of the life I’ve led. But when the time is right, when my children older, I will tell them more about my life. I no longer feel shame. I’ve led the life I have because I’m curious and felt like a major part of my humanity was basically off-limits to me because I’m a female. I simply decided to explore those taboo territories. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Emme Witt-Eden
L – In the book you mention taking a creative writing class (and crushing on the professor). Would you workshop your erotic stories in the class, or did you keep it PG for the other students (and the hot professor)?
“Hey Emme, where you going?”
“My creative writing class.”
EWE – Hells no, I never workshopped my erotic stories in class. But I was writing a novel about the implosion of my marriage. It was basically a thinly veiled memoir, and a couple of those chapters did make it into Confessions, though in different form. I published a lot of the other stories under a different account on Medium. Yep, I get around… But no, I have never workshopped my erotic stories, and honestly, even my novelized stories have scandalized people. Sometimes I really hate other writers. I find writers to be the most conservative group of creative people. Musicians and visual artists are so much more chill.
L – What inspired you to turn your shorter works of writing into a book-length memoir?
EWE – Once again, I felt like I could get farther ahead in my career by actually having a book. A book gets people’s attention the way shorter pieces don’t, even though my shorter pieces have been quite lucrative. But writing a book is also a huge risk. If a shorter piece bombs, it’s no big deal, you just write another one. If a book bombs, then you’ve spent quite a while writing it and that sucks. Fingers crossed this project does well.
L – Care to share some of your favorite authors and/or books?
EWE – In the last year, I’ve been reading a lot of Annie Ernaux, Virginie Despentes, and Guadalupe Nettel. In my heart, I’m a literary fiction fanatic. Oh, and Maggie Nelson’s books are the bomb.
L – Care to share some of your favorite erotic authors and/or books and/or porn?
EWE – I like Japanese porn a lot because the actors tend to look like they’re actually enjoying the action, instead of just acting for the camera. American porn is so histrionic with the actors acting so fake, continually looking toward the camera because they know they’re being filmed. It’s obvious it’s a performance, and as a female, that’s a turn-off for me. Men probably don’t notice it, but I do. I’m not sure how you categorize your Match, Cinder & Spark series, but your man, HH, writes some of the best erotica I’ve read! And the photos and art of you are – well, let’s just say “inspiring”!
Emme Witt-Eden getting off to Match, Cinder & Spark, Volume V: Shorter Shorts, in public. An author, avid erotica reader, dominatrix, and exhibitionist!
L – I noticed in the memoir that, with all the f-girl shenanigans you got up to, there was no girl-on-girl, anal, bondage, or water sports. You make it very known in the book what you do and don’t like. Are those not on your kinks list or did you grow into them later?
EWE – Oh, there was a little bit of bondage in the first chapter of Confessions. You’ll have to wait for the girl-on-girl action for the new book I’m writing. In terms of anal, that’s not something that I typically engage in as a hookup, so there wasn’t much in this book. Luckily, my current husband is the one who gets to enjoy having his dick up my ass. In terms of water sports, that’s something I explored as a dominatrix but honestly, I’m not really into that.
L – What advice, if any, would you give to young married mothers who are in committed, but rather unstimulating relationships, somewhat like you were in just at the start of the memoir?
EWE – My advice? Well, they committed to this guy for a reason, so they might as well make the best of it. I would advise doing everything they can not to let the passion die. I would schedule date nights and sex. A lot of people don’t like to schedule sex because they think that’s not romantic. Well, this is just the way it is once you get married and have kids. We can no longer drop everything and have sex whenever we want. So schedule sex. Don’t, and watch the passion fizzle away.
Then again, if you’ve tried everything and it’s still not working out, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with considering a divorce. That or an open marriage. Non-monogamy is no longer perceived as the crazy thing it once was, so I think it’s a great way to deal with mismatched libidos
L – Any bucket list goals you hope to achieve this year?
EWE – I really want to get the sequel of this book done!
L – What can we expect from future publications by you?
EWE – You can expect my second book in this series: Confessions of a Middle-Aged F-girl in Costa Rica. And then my third: Diary of a Middle-Aged Sugar Baby.
L – Thanks Emme! We cannot wait to see those books come out as well as a prequel about your time as a dominatrix!!!
You can find Emme Witt-Eden, a.k.a. Mysterious Witt here:
F-girl dating Instagram: @mysterious_witt
Kinky consultant Instagram: @emmewitteden
