How to Write an Email Not Safe for Work

I am a digital girl, living in a digital world. My first internet experience happened when I was 16, on a locally run bulletin board system called Maggotland - text and ASCII on a 14.4K modem. My first email-based romance when I was 18, from the LAN connection in the lounge of my college dormitory, with a guy who lived three hours away by bus. Since then, a surprising proportion of my romances have occurred in the context of email flirting, email seduction, email romance, and email cockteasing throughout the workday until the second he comes to my place and throws me on the bed, having spent the entire day rereading my email.

Consequently, I've developed something of a fetish for writing email that is "not safe for work."

As the technology has developed, so has my facility with the electronic erotic. And over the course of my 10-year history in electronic romances, I've developed some skill at writing romantic, sexy, teasing, tormenting, fantasy-inducing email.

So I thought it might be valuable to write a how-to on erotic email, but alas! - it turns out there just isn't a pattern, there isn't a formula, there isn't a guide.

But there is the romance, the connection you have with the other person, your own lust, and the ability to translate your sexual arousal into language.

1.Start with your internal experience - literally, the memory of physical sensation - and translate it into adjectives, and built a narrative around them. Or at least, that's how I do it.

2.It doesn't have to be explicit, as you'll see in the emails below. Start low key and inexplicit if you feel shy. If your partner lusts after you and you lust after him or her, anything you write can be interpreted as erotic. Think what you could do in an email describing your trip to the vending machine to buy a candy bar, and then eating the candy bar. Really.

3.Above all, practice. You can start by writing erotic or romantic posts on anonymous bulletin boards. You can read what other people write, you can listen closely to your lover's fantasies, you can find inspiration and opportunities everywhere, if you look.

And, for your convenience and edification, here are some of my own favorite emails - NSFW, btw.

This one was written the morning after an overwhelmingly romantic and erotic evening. Flashes of the night (and the subsequent morning) were interfering my ability to concentrate on my reading, and I sent this email to tell him so:

(sunlight on the sheets) The source of cortical dopaminergic input (legs tangled together) comes from (nuzzling) cell bodies located in the ventral midbrain, (hands stroking my calf) which in behaving monkeys (kissing me) respond when the animal receives a reward (fingers sneaking up to brush my thigh) or a reward-associated signal. (the smell of your skin) These dopaminergic neurons pause in their firing when an expected reward is not received. (my hands wandering over your chest and belly) There is also direct evidence from humans that (your hand sneaking under my shirt) the dopaminergic projection to anterior (the taste of your lips) cingulate cortex is (fingers sliding) reward-related. (watching the tone of your abdomen) This finding (my legs wrapped around you) comes from an ingenious experiment (your eyes on me) in which blood flow in anterior (the hair of your chest brushing against me) cingulate cortex (tongue in my mouth) was monitored with (body tense over me) positron emission (my arms clasped around your neck) tomography in normal (mmpfh) subjects and in patients (whispering in my ear) with Parkinson's (hips rock up to meet his) disease.

oh it's gonna be a long day.
e

Reference
Allman, J. M., Hakeem, A., Erwin, J., Nimchinsky, E., Hoff, P. (2003). "Anterior Cingulate Cortex: The Evolution of an Interface between Emotion and Cognition." In Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 935:107-117.

To the same guy, two days after our first night together:

i've been imagining you in my flannel sheets, how warm your body will be, pressed against my back as we sleep. and then i imagine less wholesome things - the sensation of your beard against my thigh, your lips on my ribcage, your tongue everywhere, everywhere.
e

And there's the more abstractly erotic email:

i am caramels, i am trifle, i am a sugar-coated rose, i am strawberries in white chocolate and strawberries in dark chocolate and strawberries in milk chocolate and cherries in all of the above, i am crepes on a Paris street corner, a Scottish batter-dipped, deep-fried Mars bar, marzipan, gingerbread, green tea ice cream, and rock candy. i'm cinnamony mexican hot chocolate.

you, darling, are savory. filet mignon, fat greek olives, latke - the perfect comfort food, big, dark, dangerous oaky red wine, good beer - the other perfect comfort food, and fat bavarian sausage. bagels and lox with capers, smokey earl gray tea, espresso with hot milk. you are, in short, everything warm and powerful that my bones ache for on a bitter winter day like this, curled up under the blankets in the middle of the afternoon, mischievous, decadent, and slightly forbidden.

And my very favorite of all time, written to a long distance love after months apart:

Splurp.
Splurp. Splurp. Splurp. Splurp.
Spllurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp.
splurpsplurpsplurpsplurpsplurpsplurpsplurpsplurpsplurpsplurpsplurpsplurp splurpsplurpsplurp splurpsplurpsplurp splurpsplurpsplurp splurpsplurpsplurp splurpsplurpsplurp splurpsplurpsplurp splurpsplurpsplurp splurpsplurpsplurp splurpsplurpsplurp splurpsplurpsplurp splurpsplurpsplurp

Splurpsplurp!

Splurp.

The point is you can do anything, say anything, there are no rules. It's like Peter Pan's rules for flying - think lovely thoughts… and then send it out on the back of an electron.

Give it a try - and above all let me know how it goes!