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Alex was the first person to ever share an Oh Joy Sex Toy comic with me. I was immediately enamored. Erika Moen’s weekly sex education comic is full of so many wonderful topics, reviews, and done with such an approachable spirit. I’ve shared TONS of her stuff on social media because who doesn’t love a comic about watersports featuring cute wolves or a fat-bodied review of the latest vibrator?
In this episode, Erika and I talk about how she got started as an artistic sex educator, and roll around in some of her favorite issues and guest artists.
We talk about visiting a porn set, why reviewing sex toys is so damn difficult, how sometimes you have to sacrifice nuance to get a conversation started, and pole dancing. Plus, how difficult is it to draw new kinds of bodies and shapes when you want to start creating something more inclusive? Erika shares all that and more.
Follow Dawn on Instagram.
In this episode, Erika Moen and I talk about:
- Erika got her start as a sex educator as a lesbian in the 90’s when she found loads of people kept asking really inappropriate questions about her sex life. They genuinely didn’t understand how lesbian sex worked, so she decided to do something about it.
- Using art and comics to make sex ed something approachable and non-threatening. People can’t learn when they’re being yelled at, so what if they’re being entertained, instead?
- The Liberator Chaise Lounger that Erika recently reviewed on Oh Joy Sex Toy. I want one!
- Reviewing sex toys and how different every single person is in what works for them. It’s tricky to make sex toy recommendations because if someone buys something expensive based on your enjoyment of it, but hate it, they’re stuck with it.
- Check out Erika’s How to Eat Pussy comic. It’s one of her favorites. Also, Porn Set Visit when they watched CrashPad film porn and Consent top the list, too.
- Oh Joy Sex Toy’s purpose is to touch on the topics Erika and team want to discuss, but each comic only has about 300 words. A lot of people have criticized Erika for not having more nuanced conversation about things like consent. She’s hoping it is a starter to a much larger conversation.
- Dawn’s jealousy of their visit to the CrashPad set and watching them create and film porn. Erika said it was powerful and transformative.
- Erika talks about all of the guest artists she’s had on OJST, and names a few favorites. I was especially moved by S.W. Searle’s on fat bodies and body positivity, called A Work In Progress.
- What’s next for Oh Joy Sex Toy? Erika goes over her wish list of what her and Matt are cooking up, including some personal journeys they want to fold into the comic, too.
- How, as sex educators, we evolve, change, and grow, which a lot of people don’t leave room for when they follow people like Dan Savage. Our opinions and experiences from 5 years ago are often not the same now, so modeling that change is a huge part of being a sex educator.
- As an artist, Erika had to learn how to draw bodies that were different from her own. She had to unpack her own fat phobia of larger bodies and all the different ways that bodies look and move to ensure Oh Joy Sex Toy included a super diverse range of bodies. It’s made her confront her prejudices.
- Oh Joy Sex Toy would not exist without Dan Savage. He inspired Erika deeply as a sex educator.
- Pole dancing and sex work. Erika got started pole dancing because of her love of strippers.
Resources from this episode
StripSearch, the reality TV show Erika was on, can be found here.
The water sports comic on Oh Joy Sex Toy that Dawn loved.
About Erika Moen
Erika Moen is the co-writer and artist behind the creation of the strips.
She has been doing webcomics since she was 15 years old and has been a full-time, professional cartoonist and comic book creator at Helioscope Studio in Portland, OR since she was 25. She is a cisgender, white, able-bodied, queer lady who was born June, 1983 and has been happily married to Matthew Nolan since October 2008.
Her work has been published by Dark Horse Comics, Image Comics, Villard, BOOM! Studios, Penny Arcade and Scholastic, among others.
You can check out all her amazingness at OhJoySexToy.com, on Twitter @erikamoen, on Instagram, and support all her work at Patreon.
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Episode Transcript
Dawn Serra: Hey, everyone. Dawn Serra here with Sex Gets Real. I am so excited to announce that this episode is sponsored by Hotels by Day. The first thing that popped into my mind when I was checking out their website and getting to know them a little bit was, way back in the day, when I was seeing Mr. 45, we were always looking for places where we could have our romantic little getaways in the middle of the day. It was nearly impossible to find a good hotel that did any kind of day rentals. Usually, we’d have to check in at 4:00 or 5:00 pm, and try and make something in the evening work.
Well, Hotels by Day has been around now for a little over a year. They do day stay bookings. So you check in in the morning, and then you check out in the evening. You get to book for the day, which honestly, for those of you who had a huge, exhausting Thanksgiving weekend with family, and you just need a little me time, this could be the perfect solution. You just book a hotel for the day, check in – you’ve got it all afternoon, you can relax, you can use the bath, you can take yourself out for lunch. Whatever it is, Hotels by Day is completely changing the way that we do hotels and making them more on demand.
Dawn Serra: You can go to Hotels by Day to see what kind of hotels are near you. They’re adding new properties all the time. When they launched, they had hotels only in New York and Chicago. Now, they have over 450 properties, and they’re adding them all the time. For those of you who are looking for a hot rendezvous spot to do something super sexy in the middle of the day or you just need a little me time moms and entrepreneurs I’m talking to you. You can check out hotelsbyday.com and see what they’ve got going on. I am so excited to have them on board. Be sure to use promo code SGR5off for Sex Gets Real 5% off. That means if you decide to book with hotelsbyday.com, you get 5% off your first stay.
The rest of the episode is coming up next. I interview Erika Moen from Oh Joy Sex Toy. We talk all about art for sex education, and what it’s like running an online comic. We talk about this really fun watersports comic that she had on as a guest artist on Oh Joy Sex Toy. We talk about pole dancing and sex work and all kinds of really fun stuff. So stay tuned. Here comes the rest of the episode.
Dawn Serra: Hey, everyone. This week, I am going to have an amazing chat with someone whose work I greatly admire and share regularly on social media. You’re probably already familiar with her. But I want to welcome you to the show Erika Moen.
Erika Moen: Hi guys.
Dawn Serra: Hi! Let me tell everybody about you, and then we’re going to just roll around in so much goodness.
Erika Moen: OK. I’m super stoked for that.
Dawn Serra: Good. Erika Moen is co-writer and artist of Oh Joy Sex Toy, which is a weekly sex education web comic – that I’m sure listeners have seen me share – that you started back in April 2013. Erika is a freelance cartoonist who’s had her work published in all kinds of amazing places. She also regularly teaches classes and guest lectures in high schools and colleges all around the country. I love this bit that you’ve been happily married to Matthew Nolan, who’s a cowriter and editor of Oh Joy Sex Toy with you since October 2008.
Erika Moen: Yeah. We just had our anniversary. We didn’t realize it. I was down in San Francisco. Yeah. It was like, “Oh, shit! Today’s our eight year wedding anniversary. Fuck. We’re really bad at this.”
Dawn Serra: Well, happy anniversary.
Erika Moen: Thank you. I can’t believe eight years have gone by and 11 years together. I don’t feel like I’m old enough to have been in a relationship that’s over a decade. But here you are.
Dawn Serra: Here you are. Exactly. Oh Joy Sex Toy is something that I completely adore.
Erika Moen: Thank you.
Dawn Serra: You’re welcome. You not only have covered so many really incredible topics, and you review toys, but you do it in a way that I feel like is so personable and approachable through the use of your comics. I know one of the things that I love the most is all of the comics tend to use these gender neutral bodies. I’ve seen so many different sized bodies and colored bodies, and it’s just such a fun comic that covers so many things. So what was the impetus for you starting this?
Erika Moen: Well, first of all, thank you so much.
Dawn Serra: You’re welcome.
Erika Moen: OK. It’s been, well, over a decade in the making. Because if we go back way, way back to the beginning, I was in college, and I’d figured out my sexuality. I had nailed it down. And I was definitely a lesbian. The thought of touching a guy… I mean a cisgender guy. But back in those college days, cis and trans wasn’t part of the lexicon.
Dawn Serra: Right.
Erika Moen: But, yeah. Just the thought of touching a man made me feel physically ill, and I was exclusively attracted to women. I was like, “Well, that sounds like a lesbian, right?” I figured it out. I had a girlfriend, and we would be out and about. Strangers would come up, and they would ask really intimate, inappropriate questions. Some people were just being jerks. They were just like, “Woo, woo. Lesbians. How do you do it?” I’m like, “Yeah, there’s been assholes.” But then other people were genuinely like, “I don’t understand. What do you do for sex?” They’re coming from a place of genuinely not being able to comprehend it. My personal–
I don’t know if motto is the right word, but the way I approach ignorance is that nobody learns anything when they’re getting screamed at. If there’s a kid who’s learning how to read mispronounces a word and you’re like, “Hey, idiot. It’s pronounced like this. What are you? Some kind of dummy? I thought you already know that.” That’s not how people learn. That shuts you down from learning. I’ve come at it from the point of view of like, “OK. Well, if somebody genuinely doesn’t know, their ignorance is not necessarily maliciousness. It’s an absence of knowledge.” And I want to help people understand. If I can help somebody replace their ignorance with some knowledge, then yeah, I’m going to do that, and be friendly and welcoming, and help facilitate you to learn stuff.
Erika Moen: So I did a comic all those years ago, probably 12 years ago now, that was called Girl Fuck. It was baby’s first introduction to how cisgender lesbians would do it with each other, and why they would do it with each other. Just talking about something like the most basic stuff. My future husband saw it, and he’d been a fan of mine for years. We’d never communicated. We weren’t in contact with each other. He’d never reached out or anything. But for years, he’d been reading these comics I was putting online. So then we met up in real life, and I fell for him real hard, and had to go through a bunch of sexual identity revaluation.
Dawn Serra: Yup. As we do.
Erika Moen: You know, life. Before we were even a thing, he was saying, “Hey. That Girl Fuck comic you did, you’re really good at talking about sex and making it approachable and understandable and explaining stuff. You should do more of that. You should do more sex education. You should talk more about sex.” I was like, “Yeah, that’s a good idea. I’ll do that someday.”
Then we go through a decade of that little conversation over and over again. It’s like, “Yeah. I’ll do it. I’ll do it.” Then I was like, “You know what? OK. I think it’s time. I really want to do this book for teenagers about how to become sexually active safely – for the most part – as safely as you can, and just talk about sex in a really upfront way.” Of course, I do comics, so it will be illustrated. I didn’t want to leave anything to the imagination. Everything… You could just open this book and be like, “Oh, so that’s what oral sex looks like,” or “Oh, so that’s where the prostate.” Just really friendly, really approachable, much like Oh Joy is today. I spent a year working on the first draft of that book. I called it the Teen Sex Book, but that title could be misconstrued as something else.
Dawn Serra: In our porn world, yes.
Erika Moen: Right, yeah. But, yeah. I spent a year working on that. Then I reached a point where I was overwhelmed. I just couldn’t work on it anymore because I felt so unqualified. It felt so immense, and who am I to take on this subject? Because I’m not formally educated in these things at all. I got my degree in comic books. Everything I know I learned from Planned Parenthood, Wikipedia, and Scarleteen. I am no fucking expert. I was just so overwhelmed by the enormity of the project I’ve taken on.
Then I went on a reality TV show. It’s called “Strip Search.” It was about cartoonists competing with each other for webcomic-themed projects. The winner was going to get $15,000. I was like, “Woo! I could use $15,000.” Also, it was being put on by the Penny Arcade guys. They have this business manager named Robert Khoo. Or, they had. He just left the company after over a decade. The thing about the Penny Arcade dudes is that they were just doing the webcomic the way all of us webcomicers do. We’re making the comic and putting it up online. We don’t necessarily know how to make a living from it. But we’re passionate and dedicated and fixated on this obsession of ours. So we just keep doing it. You make a little bit of money, but it’s nothing you can live on.
Erika Moen: Then Robert Khoo came along. He’s like, “Hey, kids. I have a business degree. I’m going to make this a career for you. You should be making a living off of this.” He took his business smart, and they kept making the comic. Robert Khoo turned it into business money. I was at a point in my career where I had a bit of a name. I was doing this full time. But Jesus, I was not making a living at it. And I felt really lost. I didn’t know what I should be doing. I wanted to be contributing to my household. I mean, in the most minor sense, I was paying for the rent of our apartment, and that was it. Nothing more. I felt shitty. I wanted to be pulling more weight, which I know, not all marriages, it’s not all 50/50. You can’t always blah-blah-blah. My husband was very supportive. He was like, “No, no, no. I believe in this. I want you to be working on this. I’m floating the difference.” But I knew he can’t do that forever.
So I was like, “I really want to talk to Robert Khoo. I want to get some guidance. I want some professional insight from somebody who knows how to do the business end.” If I did this reality TV show, I would be in the same proximity as him. So I did a TV show, and I did get to sit down and meet with him. I was like, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” From that conversation, I gathered, “OK. I should keep pursuing the comics and sex angle. This huge book that I’ve been working on, it’s great, I still want to do it someday. But right now, I should be doing bite-sized pieces that I can just share on the internet right now, and give my audience what they want.”
Erika Moen: I came back to my husband, and I was like, “Baby! Revelation. I’m going to do these sex ed comics, right here right now.” He’s like, “Oh, my god. That is what I’ve been telling you to do for a decade now. But OK. So glad you came to that realization.” And that’s where Oh Joy came from. Sorry, it was a super long story.
Dawn Serra: Oh. It’s OK. I had no idea you were on a reality show. That’s awesome.
Erika Moen: Yeah, you can still watch it. It’s a “Strip Search.” Well, I guess if you search for “Strip Search” on YouTube, you’re going to get some varied results. Maybe Penny Arcade Strip Search. Yeah, that was in 2013. I made it halfway through.
Dawn Serra: Well, I love that you have this– I love how you came to this very organically of, “I have this talent and I love doing art. I’m just so passionate about getting this information out because of the experiences that I’ve had.” Now, you have this webcomic that, to me, is such a beautiful invitation to people to talk about things like pegging or watersports or herpes. Through your illustrations, which feels so much less scary and threatening than real people sitting in front you, I think that it’s such a wonderful conversation starter for so many people.
Erika Moen: Thank you. Thank you so much. That is the exact goal.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, yeah, it’s great. In fact, I was just looking yesterday, I think, or this morning at your latest on the Liberator Lounger.
Erika Moen: Oh, yeah. I love that thing.
Dawn Serra: Oh, my god. I actually emailed my husband this morning and said, “OK. I’ve wanted one of these forever, but now after reading Oh Joy Sex Toy, we need one.”
Erika Moen: Well, I hope you like it. I feel nervous about recommending super expensive things like that because it’s like, “OK. This totally worked for me. I absolutely loved it. But everybody’s different.” What if you get it and it’s not the right fit? Then you spend so much money on it, and it’d be like, “God damn it, Erika! I’m so mad at you.” But anyway.
Dawn Serra: I feel the same way. I was recently, maybe earlier this year, talking about the “Womanizer.” So many people loved it. A couple of people really hated it. I had some mixed reviews about it. But it was intimidating for me to be talking about it in my experiences because if someone did go spend the $200 on the toy, and then totally hated it, that’s shitastic. I can’t do anything with it at that point.
Erika Moen: Yeah. Well, in my reviews, I really try to come at it from a, “This is my point of view, and everybody’s different. Even when there’s toys that I hate, I say, “This is why it didn’t work for me. But if you’re somebody who likes this kind of stimulation, that kind of fulfilling sensation, then maybe this would be the thing for you.” I try to very much emphasize that everybody’s body is different.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. I think sometimes people get a little frustrated, like, “I just want someone to tell me what to do. Tell me what’s going to work.” But that, unfortunately, in the real world, not in the Cosmo sex guide world–
Erika Moen: One size doesn’t fit all.
Dawn Serra: Exactly. Yeah. We can’t make those guarantees as sex educators.
Erika Moen: Yeah.
Dawn Serra: I would love to know what some of your favorite Oh Joy Sex Toys are, either from a research perspective or from an illustration perspective or even just from the reception that they got?
Erika Moen: OK. My how to eat pussy comic.
Dawn Serra: Oh, yeah.
Erika Moen: I’m really proud of that one. It got a really great reception. In fact, that was one of the first comics that got all cropped up and went viral without any credit or links back to me. Meh. Yeah. I’m really proud of that one. Let’s see here. Hey, baby. What Oh Joy comments are you most proud of?
Matt Nolan: Visiting a porn set.
Erika Moen: Oh, yeah. Visiting a porn set. When we visited the Crash Pad porn set. Our consent comic– Although, the consent comic, I have mixed feelings on because I am proud of it. I put off doing it for so long because that’s another immense subject that I just feel so insecure about covering because who am I? I feel like I did get across the basic basics of consent. But there’s so much more to consentI that I just didn’t have the time or the space or the room to be nuanced to cover. So the kind of consent I was covering was, you just met somebody at a party. This is a stranger, and you’re going to go hook up with them. Here’s how consent should work in that context. It’s not so much consent between people who have been in a relationship for 20 years. That consent looks different than meeting the stranger consent. I don’t know.
When you’re talking about consent, of course, you don’t want to leave any wiggle room for anything that could be interpreted as non-consensual. So the way I presented it was very black and white. There’s a lot more nuanced and gray in there. Especially when we’re talking about relationships that have been going on for so much longer. Because like my husband, I’ll walk up and I’ll grab his butt. That’s OK because we have an established relationship. I know he’s cool with it. Da-da-da-da-da. But you couldn’t walk up to a stranger and grab their butt.
Dawn Serra: Right.
Erika Moen: I’m like, “Ah! It’s just consent is such a big topic.” I did the best I could in the space I had available. It’s very much like baby’s first introduction to 101 consent, but there’s a lot more to be said. So, yeah. That’s my mixed feelings on it.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. I mean, hopefully, if nothing else, some of the content that you create serves as an easy and a safe way to start the conversation and just start thinking about things in a new way. So that then there’s that, instead of being closed off of like, “Oh, talking about sex is hard and consent bleh,” and thinking, “Well, actually, this is cute. This is something I think I could do and think I could talk about.” Now, there’s some curiosity to actually go start having bigger conversations. I think that’s a really powerful contribution to the conversation.
Erika Moen: Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. As an insecure artist, but I do look at the comics as introductions to these subjects. Every single one, there’s so much more to say. Then I get letters from people like, “You left out this, and you’re erasing this.” It’s like it’s just a starter. It’s just the introduction. It’s not a comprehensive thing.
Dawn Serra: Yeah.
Erika Moen: I always want to do more, but I have restraints. I have a format in place that necessitates very condensed information. If you were to just take all the text of the comic, it comes out to about a paragraph of information. Each comic is roughly 400 to 500 words. Maybe 600 if we’re really pushing it. That’s not a lot of words to convey everything you need to know about a subject. So it’s very much the most condensed summary you could possibly find.
Dawn Serra: I will just say that I am wildly jealous that you got to be on a Crash Pad set. That’s one of my bucket list things of like, “Oh. The podcast should come to the porn set.” But I love that – that Oh Joy Sex Toy of porn set visit. I would love for you to just share with our listeners a little bit about what that experience was like.
Erika Moen: Oh my gosh. It was– I hate to sound all hippie dippie woo woo, but it was kinda transformative. It was so powerful. Because it’s one thing to watch porn on your screen and be OK with that. But it’s another thing to be next to people who are having sex and be present in that scenario. I was really nervous going into it because what if it’s people doing stuff that I don’t want to see? What if it’s stuff that’s my personal squicks It’s like I don’t want to harsh their vibe by my own personal reactions. I was very much like, “OK. I got to practice my poker face.” My goal was to be as invisible as possible on set.
But then when we were there, and there were people– Yes, there was definitely stuff I was watching, I was like, “I’m super into that.” Then there’s other stuff where it’s like, “That’s not really my thing.” But even when it was the “that’s not my thing,” thing, I was overwhelmed with how beautiful I found it. I was not expecting that reaction. I didn’t think I was that, I don’t know, one with nature where you’re just like, “Everything is beautiful. Nature.” Still, it’s just like, “Oh my god. These people are having such a connection.” The sex they were having was beautiful. They were having the sex that obviously was important to them. They’re having it the way they wanted to have it and seeing people do that. Of course, obviously, they’re doing it for an audience at the same time, but I was really blown away by how powerful that was.
Erika Moen: For people that aren’t familiar with Crash Pad, it’s queer porn. It’s very much driven by the performers. It’s not like “OK. You’re going to come in. First, you’re going to do anal, and you’re going to spit in her mouth and da-da-da-da-da-da.” It’s like the performers are the ones who come in and say, “This is what we’re going to do. This is what we’ve talked about.” They’re in charge of how it all comes out. Which is not to say the other kind of porn world is all scripted and stuff is bad. It’s not. Absolutely, there’s room for all of it, and one’s not better than the other. But to see two people coming in, and they’re like, “This is the sex we decided as human beings we’re going to have,” it was really powerful.
Dawn Serra: That is definitely a bucket list item very early on in the Sex Gets Real podcast. Our first interview was with a fetish porn star Lance Hart. We had a conversation after the interview where he was like, “Hey! If you’re ever in the area, you’re welcome to come by and hang out for a day of shooting.” In that moment, I had no idea that going to a porn set and actually experiencing it was like a bucket list item. But the hunger inside of me when he made that invitation was like, “This needs to happen at some point.” Because I think exactly what you just described would be just such a wonderful thing to see not only the performers and how they’re navigating the scene, but also what it’s truly like to create porn and to create something like that, to be a part of the production. That’s something that I think so many of us forget about when we’re watching porn.
Erika Moen: Crash Pad does pride itself on including the human moments. But there were still things in it that didn’t quite make the cut. I remember, at one point, the lube was out of reach. One of the performers had to be like, “Can you pass me the lube?” Then when Shine – Shine is the director, Shine Louise Houston – went to pass the lube, the bottle was a little bit slippery, so it just shot out of their hand across the room. I don’t think that made the cut in the final form, but it was fun.” I mean, all this, “Oh, it was so powerful and beautiful.” Also, it was very human. There were silly moments. People would take breaks to laugh. The lube bottle would fly across the room. Yeah. A whole range of emotions going on.
Dawn Serra: What an amazing experience. I love that you are able to turn that into something for all of us to enjoy and go along on the journey with you.
Erika Moen: It meant so much to me to be able to do a comic that was– Matt and I call them Adventure Comics, where instead of a toy review or sex education, we’re like, “Hey. Here’s an adventure we went on.” I love getting to tell these stories that have more of a story to it, and take our reader with us on some little adventure. I really miss telling more.
The comics I used to tell before Oh Joy were very much story comics, primarily autobiographical. It would just always be about, “Here’s the thing that happened.” With Oh Joy, I don’t have so much of a chance to tell those kinds of stories now. So getting to do that with the Crash Pad comic felt so good to take our readers on a little journey together, and it has a beginning, middle, and end. I love telling stories like that.
Dawn Serra: You’ve work with a lot of different sex educators and sexperts. You’ve covered all kinds of things from touch therapy to BDSM. I mentioned the watersports one just because– I loved your watersports one so much because watersports isn’t necessarily something that I’m into. But the way that you navigated it with animals and made it something that was soft and sweet and inviting. Maybe it’s not so gross and squeaky, which is I think what a lot of people are afraid of. Then to follow along on this, it’s genuinely cute, the expressions on the faces. Then you end up with this wonderful introduction to a somewhat taboo topic, through these really sweet little characters you created. I’d love to know, who are some of the people that you’ve worked with where you feel like you were either surprised by what you learned or something that you never thought you’d end up covering, and then you created a comic around it?
Erika Moen: Oh. The watersports comic is a great example. That was made by an artist called Sicklyhypnos – I believe is how it’s pronounced. They’re a furry artist. It’s funny because people were like, “Why did you do it with animals?” It’s like, “Well, we didn’t actually–” I think the artists asked, “Is it OK if I do this as a furry comic?” ‘Cause that’s the kind of art they do is furry stuff. We’re like, “Yeah, sure. Of course.” But we didn’t have any political agendas behind it. We got furries who were like, “Oh, you’re making furry stuff look weird and scary because you throw piss into it.” Then we got this piss fetishes people who were like, “You’re making pee stuff look weird and scary because you threw furries into it.”
Dawn Serra: Meanwhile, I’m like, “It’s also cute.”
Erika Moen: Of course, if Sicklyhypnos is listening to this, the majority of people were like, “Oh, this is really sweet and lovely.” Pee stuff is also, I’m totally cool with people being into that and having that be their thing. You go guys, definitely not my thing. Seeing this really cute comic that was talking about why somebody would be into it and how joyful it was for them, it opened my mind a bit more – I guess I want to say. I still definitely had my squick factor about seeing some of those depictions of urine going in mouths and stuff. But the rest of it where they were talking about why people are into this, I was like, “Oh, OK. This makes more sense now. OK. All right. I could appreciate it more. Plus your other comics that I thought were fantastic. God, we’ve had so many.
Getting to work with guest artists, I feel like one of the strongest points of Oh Joy. Because Matt and I, we’re cisgender, we’re white, we’re both not straight, but we’re in an opposite sex relationship. We’ve got the street passing privilege, and we got to get married when it was still illegal for gay people to get married. We’re very conscious that we just have our lived experience and our point of view because how could we have another point of view? By getting to work with these guest artists, we can have these other points of view from dramatically different backgrounds come in and share our audience with them. Also, I love paying cartoonists. I love having the power to commission cartoonists. But that’s not answering your question.
Erika Moen: OK. Recently, we had Vestibulodynia by the cartoonist Cap. That was talking about an affliction with the vagina and the vulva that causes extreme vaginal vulva pain.
Dawn Serra: Oh, yeah. I saw that one.
Erika Moen: So many people that were like, “Oh, my god. I have that,” or “Oh, my God. I think I have that. I’m going to go talk to my doctor now.” Oh! I love doing the period sex comic, which I guess it’s not a fully guest comic. But my friend wrote it – Tracy Puhl. She runs the reusable menstrual product company, GladRags. She wrote it, and I made a couple little edits in there, then I drew it. It was so much fun to collaborate with my longtime friend and to talk about menstrual health, and how you can still have sex on your period, and how to do it with minimal mess. That was fun.
Oh! “A Work in Progress” by S.W. Searle. I don’t actually know how to say her last name. But it was talking about body image, fat representation, and intimacy. Just talking about there’s a real lack of showing bigger bodies and disabled bodies and bodies with imperfections – if you want to call it that – and how they’re not shown having joyful sex and being sexual beings in a positive light as opposed to a joke. It was a comic about not feeling worthy to be a sexual person, and learning how finding communities where people were sharing pictures of themselves with all their “imperfections.” And being sexual and proud of their bodies, and what a difference that made. It’s a beautiful comic. There’s so, so many. “BDSM Safety” by Abby Howard. I love that comic.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. That one is a really good one.
Erika Moen: Abby Howard is such a phenomenal cartoonist. Yeah, it’s a fun introduction. It’s silly, and it’s smart. All about here’s the very, very basic introduction to BDSM stuff. Just tons. I can fill the entire podcast talking about guest comics.
Dawn Serra: Well, I’m also just hoping that in hearing the diversity of the topics that you’ve not only covered yourself and all the different toys and stories, but having all of these guest comics come on and share about things like BDSM and watersports, that listeners will be curious to come take a look, if they haven’t already, and everything that you’ve done. You have such a huge archive of so many amazing discussions. It’s really fun to roll around in them and laugh along with you. I think one of the things that I really admire is that you’re so honest in your toy reviews, like, “I really gave it a go. I really tried, and I just couldn’t really find something that worked for me.” And allowing conversations around sex and pleasure and sex toys to not always be 100% like, “Yay! It worked. It was great.”
Erika Moen: It’s funny you say that because in my negative reviews, I try not to be a dick about it. I try to say, “This didn’t work for me.” I try not to just slam on a toy because as somebody who creates stuff, I know it takes so many hours and days and weeks, even years to make something. So much energy gets put into making these things. Even when it’s a dud, I know people worked hard on this. So I try not to be like, “What kind of idiot made this? Only dumbasses would da-da-da-da-da.” I want to be like, “OK. Here’s why it didn’t work. Here’s what could be better.” Because I approach my negative reviews like that, they still come off as sounding positive. So people are like, “You only get positive reviews.” It’s like, “No, no. I actually don’t. I’m just not negative and mean about it.” They can’t tell it’s a negative review.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. I think that’s so important because you’re also – this is my sex educator lens – I think you’re also modeling that you can be honest and upfront about what’s not working when you’re talking about sex. It doesn’t have to be negative or rude or off putting or feel like a rejection. Because the way you’re talking about how the sex toys feel in your body, you could easily just replace that with how someone else is touching your body or the things that people are asking you to do. There’s a way to say, “I’m really glad that we tried this. I’m just finding it’s not working for me. Here’s what might work for me better. Maybe we can try that.” I feel like what you’re really doing is just modeling really good open communication.
Erika Moen: Wow, thank you. That had never occurred to me. Thank you very much.
Dawn Serra: You’re so welcome. OK. You’ve covered a billion topics and lots of different sex toys for lots of different bodies. I’d love to know, is there something that you haven’t covered yet that you’d really like to?
Erika Moen: Oh, god. We have a list of subjects we still want to cover–
Dawn Serra: Oh. That’s cool.
Erika Moen: None of which I can remember right now. Let’s see here. Oh, I want to do one on fisting.
Dawn Serra: Yeah.
Erika Moen: Anal douching. Let’s see here. Matt and I were talking recently about how we want to start doing some more personal comics, which I know it sounds my sex, how much more personal can you get? But we don’t so much talk about our– We have boundaries, and Oh Joy is… You can’t tell, but you don’t actually learn a whole lot about what goes on behind the scenes with Matt and me in our relationship and in our sex life by reading the comic. You can infer stuff, and you can make assumptions. But we don’t really put it out there, like, “Oh, yeah. When Matt was doing this thing to me, this is how it affected me.” That kind of thing. We’re thinking we want to tell some more personal stories. Not so much like, “This is how we do it.” But just like personal behind the scenes relationship stuff a little bit.
Dawn Serra: Yeah.
Erika Moen: I don’t know. I’m scared because that makes you vulnerable. But I don’t know. I don’t know. I feel like we might have some things to say just about– You can’t be with somebody for 11 years and not have some evolutions you’ve gone through and some lessons you’ve learned together. Yeah. I’m sure as soon as this is over, I’ll be like, “Oh, wait. Here’s everything I want to do in the comics.”
Dawn Serra: “Here’s 20 more things.”
Erika Moen: Oh! Actually, my husband, Matthew, he wrote a Patreon post for our patrons on Patreon, where he does talk about stuff that we want to cover. I need to go in and edit it before I post it. But yeah. If you back us for $1 on Patreon at patreon.com/erikamoen. You can read that in the next few days.
Dawn Serra: Oh, awesome. OK, good. Well, we will definitely make sure people check out your Patreon because they should.
One of the things that I think is also really fascinating– Because you just used the word evolution, and I think that’s so important for all of us as people who are talking about sex to constantly be sharing with our audiences of– Actually, I’m just going to interrupt myself and say, a lot of people really like to pick on Dan Savage for some of the things that he said over the years. I talked to him earlier this year, and he was talking about–
Erika Moen: Did you?
Dawn Serra: Yeah.
Erika Moen: Sorry. Do you have an interview with him?
Dawn Serra: Yeah. I interviewed him for an online summit that I did at the beginning of the year.
Erika Moen: OK, cool. Awesome. I’ll go check that out.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, it was really fun.
Erika Moen: Sorry to interrupt. Go on.
Dawn Serra: But one of the things he was talking about was people like to bring up like, “Oh, Dan Savage is anti-trans or anti-bi.” He said, “I’ve been doing this for 20 years. Those things were true for me at some point. But I’m allowed to change and evolve and grow, and I have. The things I believe now are not the things that I believed even a couple of years ago because I’ve learned so much.” I think that’s really important for all of us to constantly model that the things I believed about sex are understood to be true, even about my own body three, five, ten years ago, have now changed because I’m constantly taking in new information and having new experiences. I would love to know just from all of the comics that you’ve done and all the research and the learning and the toys you’ve tried, what do you think personally has been one of the biggest points of growth or change for you through doing this process?
Erika Moen: I would say I’ve become a lot more accepting of people doing stuff that I’m not into and I don’t necessarily understand. As long as everybody’s a consenting adult, if that’s what you guys are into and nobody is doing this non-consensually, fucking yeah, go for it. You got my blessing. It may not be my thing. It may actually hit some of my squick buttons. But I definitely don’t think, “Oh, well. You shouldn’t do that,” or “Oh, that’s morally wrong.” Go for it.
Other things that I’ve learned? Representation. I’ve become so, so, so much more conscious of how I depict people. OK. Well, here’s the thing. Maybe I’ll probably say this wrong and people will probably get mad at me for saying this, but bear with me. But before I started Oh Joy, I pretty much was doing autobio comics. So I was drawing myself and my husband and the people in my real life. I live in Portland, Oregon, which is notoriously one of the whitest–
Dawn Serra: The whitest city in the US.
Erika Moen: Yeah. And that’s not great. I really do love Portland, but we have a real race problem. So the people that I was drawing in my comic, my old autobio comic, I’m pretty sure it was maybe 99% white folks and white folks who are cisgender and who have body types that look like mine and my husband’s, which is pretty slim.
Starting Oh Joy, I knew from the get go, from the beginning, I was like, “OK. I want lots of different people to see this and to see a representation of themselves.” What I was not expecting was that I didn’t know how to draw other types of bodies and other types of ethnicities. I’d really be happy to learn. It’s made me so much more observant of people when I’m out walking around. It’s made me really look at my ingrained prejudices. Oh, god. Please don’t let this soundbite be taken out of context, but my own fatphobia. ‘Cause we’re raised in a society that tells us a message, and I’m not immune to that. Since starting the comic, before, I did have some prejudices, and not to say, “Oh, it’s all in the past.” Because we’re all learning. We’re all growing. But I would see a plus-sized body, and I would default to thinking, “Oh, that person is unhealthy.” Now, when I’m walking down the street and I see plus-sized bodies, that’s not my first assumption now. I probably don’t have some options now.
Erika Moen: Now, I’m much more likely to pay attention to how does clothing hang on them so I can draw that better? And really paying attention, too. There are so many different plus– It’s not like there’s one plus size body. There are so many different ways that people’s bodies look and the way their flesh sets on them. So I’m so much more observant of that now, and paying so much more attention to fashion and how people dress themselves. And before I never really gave a fuck. I never really cared. It’s made me a lot more observant. It’s made me confront my prejudices that I had growing up in the society that we have. It’s made me a lot more conscious of that. Please don’t scream at me, anybody, for this. I’m learning, I’m growing, and I’m trying to–
Dawn Serra: The listeners are used to me saying all of these things. I mean, I’m in a fat body. I’ve talked many times about my own internalized fatphobia, of not only feeling ways about myself. But then seeing other people in fat bodies who were putting their fat bodies on display, and me really feeling horrible about that, and how it took me years to start unpacking that and confronting it. You’re so right. We’re all on this journey. But because we’re all swimming in this nasty soup of oppression, it takes time and it takes work to find ways to peel the layers of that onion off, so that we can start really deciding for ourselves what the stories are versus the stories we’ve been told.
Erika Moen: Yeah, yeah. From studying all these different bodies, not just in real life, but I’ve subscribed to all these different Tumblrs that are celebrating different bodies, different ethnicities, different hairstyles, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. From paying so much more attention to that, things that I either a.) had no opinion on or b.) found unattractive, I found out that I actively think these things are attractive. Not to say like, “Oh. I want to fuck em” way but just like, “Oh, wow! That’s really actually beautiful.” I had not realized that before. So, yeah. I’d say my opinions of beauty have changed a lot.
Then just also from a practical standpoint, of learning how to draw this stuff. You think, “Oh, you’re an artist. You can just draw.” But, no. When you only draw the exact same thing over and over and over again, learning how to draw something else is challenging. I’ve tried different techniques and different approaches and different cartoon styles for drawing different people. I’ve had people take screen captures of those efforts and be like, “This is not how you draw fat people. This is offensive.” It’s like, “Whoa. OK. Sorry. I’m just learning. I’m trying.” So, yeah.
Erika Moen: My husband sent me a note to– Also, to get less serious. Another thing that we’ve evolved on with the comic is learning not to compare toys to other toys as much as we’ve done in the past. Because you’d think it’s great like, “I’m sent a million sex toys. That’s every girl’s dream.” But it turns out, the sex toys that were my favorites before we started are pretty much still my favorites. All these brand new toys that jiggle this and swivel that, they’re not for me for the most part. I do a lot of reviews where I’m like, “OK. Well, this is alright, I guess. But I still prefer my magic wand and a butt plug.” And so many reviews for that. People were like, “OK. All right. You like what you like. Can you just focus on this one toy please?” I was like, “Oh. OK. Right.”
Dawn Serra: “But it doesn’t work the way I want it to?”
Erika Moen: Yeah. So now, I’m just trying to focus more on just talking about that toy specifically and not doing the, “But if you really want a good time, pick up the magic wand.”
Dawn Serra: How does it feel to illustrate your husband’s experiences?
Erika Moen: Fine. Fun. I’ve been illustrating his experiences even before we started Oh Joy because I was doing my autobio comic. My name was on it as a creator, but behind the scenes, he was like, “Oh, this would make a good comic.” You’d look at things and be like, “Oh, the pieces on this one doesn’t really work.” We’ve been collaborating together just for over a decade. So doing a comic about my experience or doing a comic about his experience doesn’t feel too different for me. Although, that is something I have to be aware of because I can miss out. I can skip over the nuance of his own experience and just put my own assumptions in there. Just be like, “Oh, it was my opinion.” Obviously, this must be his, too. He’ll be like, Wait, wait. Hold up, hold up. I actually don’t think that.” I’m like, “Oh, whoa! Sorry, buddy.”
Dawn Serra: But, hey, that’s a good lesson for all of us. I think we all tend to do that. Whether we’re illustrating our partner’s experience or just thinking about it.
Erika Moen: Yeah, yeah.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. Aside–
Erika Moen: Oh.
Dawn Serra: Oh sorry, go ahead.
Erika Moen: Let me just make a little interject. I want to go back to Dan Savage.
Dawn Serra: Oh, yeah.
Erika Moen: OK. Oh Joy Sex Toy would not exist without Dan Savage. For everything problematic he said, and that’s all legit, and all the criticism, and people are so entitled to their feelings, absolutely validated, validated, validated. But Dan Savage, modeled to me how you do this. The way he has approached talking about sex, being so frank and funny, and making it feel like you’re talking about sex with a friend. Also, the example he set of evolving, of changing his opinion, of taking feedback. Yeah, he may be snarky about it in the moment, but he fucking incorporates and evolves his opinion based on people who say, “Actually, no. I am this identity. I am in this group, and you straight up got this wrong.” And he evolved.
I think he’s a fucking great example of somebody who is learning in public and adjusting his views. He makes space for so many people to come onto his platforms, his column, his podcast. He brings on people of different experiences, of different identities too. And he gives them his audience, his thousands and thousands of people. He says, “OK. Hey listen. This is out of my depth. I don’t actually know what the fuck I’m talking about in this subject. You do. Come on. You talk about it.” That’s what we do with Oh Joy. He’s been such an influence. Oh god. So much of Oh Joy, I feel like I’ve just regurgitated things he said, and I drew pictures next to it. He’s been a huge role model in how I approach talking about sex, and how I approach sex education. So, yeah. All the criticisms, valid. Absolutely, people so entitled to their feelings. He’s also done a world of fuckin good for a lot of people, myself included.
Dawn Serra: Has he been on Oh Joy Sex Toy yet?
Erika Moen: No, but I have talked to him about it. So there might be a stroke someday in the future, but he’s very busy. That’s one of my bucket things is to do a comic with Dan Savage.
Dawn Serra: Oh. Well, fingers crossed that manifests in the near future for you. I would love to pivot away from Oh Joy Sex Toy just a little bit and spend our past couple of minutes or last couple of minutes talking about I follow you on Instagram–
Erika Moen: Oh, do you?
Dawn Serra: Yes. I know one of the things that you do is pole dancing.
Erika Moen: Yes.
Dawn Serra: I would love to hear how you got into pole dancing and what pole dancing is for you?
Erika Moen: OK. Well, I got into pole dancing because I really like watching strippers. I think they are incredible. I mean, I’m making a blanket statement. I’m sure there’s strippers out there who aren’t incredible. But for the strippers that are here in Portland that I go and I see at Devil’s Point and Lucky Devil Lounge, holy shit! They are phenomenal. They do all this– I mean, I love the sexy stuff. Don’t get me wrong. I go there because I do like looking at naked girls doing sexy things. But in addition to that, they do these pole tricks, and they are just motherfucking Cirque du Soleil acrobats. It’s incredible. I would go there, and I would watch them. I was just like, “You are magicians. This is magic. Physics doesn’t apply to you.” I very much just admired that and was in awe of it.
Then, I saw this ad for a pole dance studio here in Portland, Oregon called Ecdysiast. I looked at this ad for a year in our own weekly paper. They ran the ad for a year. I didn’t just look at the same paper for a year. Let’s be clear. There was a party that’s like, “Oh, my god. I could learn how to do this stuff that I think is magic. But at the same time, I didn’t feel worthy.” Because I’m not athletic, and I don’t do sports. I danced around my kitchen, but that’s it. I’m not what I would consider a dancer at all.
Erika Moen: But then finally, I sucked it up after a year. I went and do their little taster class. They show you just the very basic, easy peasy things, and I loved it. I loved it. I signed up for the full course. And it makes me feel so strong. It makes me do things that I didn’t think I’d ever be capable of doing. I know the word empowered gets thrown around a lot. But I really do mean it. I feel empowered in it.
I know there’s a lot of concern about, “Oh, appropriating sex worker culture for civilians and disregarding the sex worker past it came from and downplaying it.” Like on Instagram, there’s all these hashtags of folks who’ve taken up pole dancing, and then they hashtag their picture #notastripper.
Dawn Serra: Right.
Erika Moen: It’s like, “Bitch, please! Who do you think made up that move? My school is taught– It was founded by, at the time, they were strippers. Now, they are former strippers, but still that’s where they came from. That’s where they learned this. A good number of the teachers have been current or former strippers. It acknowledges and embraces and tells the students like, “This came from the strip club. This move right here, this is striper move number one.”
Appropriation is something that I’m doing my best to learn about and understand. Who am I to say, “This isn’t appropriation,” or “This is appropriation?” But the school I come from very much celebrates and says, “This is who made this up. This is where it came from.” There’s no whitewashing of it. There’s no cleaning up the sex worker past of it. It’s very much like, “No, this is where it came from, guys. You should go to the strip club, and you should see girls doing this–
Dawn Serra: And you should pay them.
Erika Moen: And you should pay them. Yeah. For me, the hashtag would be, #notasgoodasastripper.
Dawn Serra: I have to say I have seen some pictures of you on Instagram doing your moves. Just literally, in my fat body, that would not be something I’m capable of doing anytime in the near future. So for me, it’s very awe inspiring of just wow.
Erika Moen: There are plus-sized strippers though. I’m sure there’s body restrictions on some things, but I know I’ve definitely seen some plus-sized folks doing cool stuff that I can’t fucking do. There’s lots of room for variation in there.
Dawn Serra: Yes, definitely. Yeah. I love any excuse for us to, one, find ways to express ourselves and to develop new relationships with our bodies in ways that feel really authentic and yummy. Also, just to be able to just peel that curtain back on sex work and show that it’s not the dark, scary myth version that we’ve been told as just the blanket story for sex workers. But there’s lots of people who have lots of different experiences and lots of different reasons. We should invite those dialogues in. I feel like pole dancing is such a beautiful way of doing both of those things.
Erika Moen: Yeah. Oh, god. I remember, I was in this class with one of my favorite former teachers who she’s moved on now. But we had a student who said something disparaging about strippers. And the teacher– Oh, god. How did it go? I just remember the student says something like, “Oh. But you’re not like that,” to the teacher or “You’d never do something like that.” The teacher says, “Actually, yeah. I am a stripper right now.” The teacher wasn’t snarky about it. She wasn’t mean or anything about it, which she could have been entitled to, absolutely. But it was just like, “Oh, actually, I am a stripper. OK, moving right along. Dah-dah-dah-dah-dah.” You could see the shock on this girl’s face as it blew this girl’s mind, where somebody that she was learning from, somebody she respected, somebody who she saw as talented and a normal person was like, “Wait a minute. You’re a sex worker too? What?” It was just such a casual learning moment that wasn’t made a big deal of, but you could tell somebody’s opinion just completely got turned upside down right there at the moment.
Dawn Serra: I love those moments. I love it when they happen for other people. I love it when they happen for me. Even though those moments sometimes hurt or are really embarrassing, I love those moments when someone offers me a perspective or an idea that hadn’t occurred to me in that way before, and I have to really re-evaluate all the things.
Well, I know that we’re right at the end of our hour, and I want to respect your time. So I would love for you, before we wrap up, to let everyone know how they can find you online and on social media, to not only stay on top of all of the Oh Joy Sex Toy stuff that you do, but just to hear about the classes and the lectures that you’re doing.
Erika Moen: OK. Yes. ohjoysextoy.com is where you can find it. Oh is spelled OH, so it’s ohjoysextoy.com. I have other websites, but they’re so neglected. Just go to ohjoysextoy.com. You can follow me on Twitter at @erikamoen, and Erika is ERIKA MOEN. It’s not Erika with a C. My husband is @plustenstrength on Twitter. If you want to support what we’re making and what we’re doing, Patreon is one of the best ways to do that. If you go to patreon.com/erikamoen, you can support us. You can’t search for us on Patreon because we do adult content, and they don’t show adult things if you search for them on the site. But if you go directly to the URL, my full URL, that’ll take you there. People don’t need to sign up for a lifetime to support us forever. You can just sign up for a month and give us $1. We’re grateful for that. That is awesome. Let’s see. You can follow me on Instagram at @fuckyeaherikamoen. Don’t follow Erika Moen because she’s just some poor blonde lady who keeps getting tweets people talking about sex stuff at her. But, yeah, @fuckyeaherikamoen. I don’t know. I’m on the internet. If you Google my name, you see all this stuff.
Dawn Serra: Well, I will have links to Oh Joy Sex Toy, to both of your Twitters, to Patreon for this episode of Sex Gets Real, so that it will be nice and easy for all the listeners to follow you and check out all the work that you’re doing with a couple of clicks.
Erika Moen: All right, cool.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. I just want to thank you, Erika, so much for being so generous to come on the show. It’s a weekend for listeners who aren’t aware that we’re doing this. I really appreciate you taking a little bit of time to come on and just share about the learning you’ve done and the work that you’re doing. I think it’s such a wonderful contribution to the world.
Erika Moen: Oh. Thank you so, so much for having me on and talking to me and listening to me. Also, thanks for being my first conversation of the day. So you guys got to hear my brain warming up in real time. Because I’m on the West Coast. I’m in a different time zone.
Dawn Serra: Well, thank you so much. I just want to thank all of the listeners for tuning in. If you have any questions about anything you heard today or if you have anything that you’d like me to cover down the road, any stories or questions, please go to dawnserra.com. There’s a contact form that you can submit questions anonymously. You can also follow along on Facebook and Twitter at Sex Gets Real. Until next week, this is Dawn Serra. Bye.