This is a particularly fun interview and probably one of our first. Written in 2002 (yup, you read that right), even the terminology is different as the web was a very different place at the time. In fact, we didn't call it the "Internet", it was the "World Wide Web" (that's what the "www" is in front of website URLs). The internet was young and we had been online since 1994, in one incarnation or another. Internet Explorer was the browser of choice and Jimmy Wales just launched Wikipedia...how things have changed.

1) What was your main goal in founding Sssh.com?

Several years ago, I read an interview with a woman who was brought up to believe masturbation is shameful and dirty. She felt so badly about the natural urge for self-gratification that she would masturbate through a sheet, because she felt if there was a barrier between her hand and her body, then she wasn’t actually doing anything “wrong.” She hoped that would make her feel better about the act, but it didn’t. Instead, she was riddled with guilt.

I was heartbroken by that story. It's truly shameful that, in this day and age, women still feel guilty about their sexuality. I find it upsetting that any woman should feel bad because she takes charge of her own healthy pleasure. So, I started looking to see what kinds of content was available for women…and, at the time, I couldn’t find anything. Nothing. It was almost as if female sexuality/pleasure was being brushed under the rug. When I asked other webmasters about it, I felt like they were giving me the proverbial pat on the head while saying, “There, there, dear. Women don’t look at porn, and they certainly don’t pay for it. Now run along.”

The more I thought about that, the angrier I became. I’m a woman, and I can tell you for a fact that women do like sex. We are just as sexual as any man. I wanted to create a space where women with all sorts of sexual interests and experiences could find the movies, articles, and stories that they enjoyed, from their perspective. A site that embraced our sexuality and pleasure as something that was healthy and positive. I wanted to counteract these intolerable messages that there’s something wrong about women enjoying themselves and their partners. I knew I could do this. It was just a matter of presentation—of not reinventing the wheel.

With a remarkable staff and thoroughly amazing members, Sssh.com accomplished that.

2) What made you realize there was a market for erotica for women?

I spent two years in the late 1990's researching and analyzing successful women’s products and creating a survey where we asked women what they would like to see and we even asked them to submit their sexual fantasies, which help mold our content.

At the same time, romance novels were selling like hotcakes. Romance always has accounted for a huge percentage of the fiction sold annually, and in recent years the statistics indicate a boom in erotic romance sales. There is a market for high-quality erotica and romantic fantasy for women, presented in an aesthetically pleasing way and combined with education and community. Print magazines like Cosmopolitan have proved that for more than a century. The challenge no one was meeting lay in translating that sort of environment to the web.

3) Were you always this comfortable with female sexuality?

You know, I believe I was. Sex was never an issue in my family. I was never made to feel this is “wrong” or this is “right.” In fact, I was a little surprised to realize so many people feel sex is shameful or dirty. My parents were very open in their attitudes—not libertines, but open and honest about everything. Sex and sexuality were just another part of life.