The Year in Sex

All the strange, beautiful places desire took me in 2025

I don’t remember my New Year’s resolution for 2025, but I’m pretty sure it was something completely sexless, like “organize my files” or “go to the gym three times a week.” That definitely didn’t happen. Instead, I ended up chasing desire around the world and having a year full of unexpectedly wild, intimate, and meaningful experiences as I reported on the new frontiers of sexual culture.

An essential part of this project has been a curiosity about how desire manifests in real life—and the more time I spend in these spaces, the more convinced I am that the pursuit of pleasure is a lens into so many bigger questions: loneliness, power, gender, technology, capitalism, intimacy. I’ve found myself in rooms I couldn’t have imagined a year ago, but somewhere between the flights, deadlines, and late-night debriefs with friends, I forgot to post about a lot of it.

So in the spirit of the new year (and accountability), I’m sharing the moments that defined 2025 for me—many of which will become stories here in the year ahead. Consider this a behind-the-scenes glimpse at what I’ve been up to, and a preview of what to expect from Pleasure-Seeking in 2026.

Me reading at Night of Desire

2025 was the year Pleasure-Seeking became real—taking on a life of its own and pulling new people, opportunities, and experiences into my orbit. It’s also the year we went from a newsletter to a real-life community, with IRL events that have been called “both vulnerable and fun” (Dazed), “buzzy” (PAPER), “unforgettable” (Office Magazine), and “the hottest spot in town” (Page Six).

With the help of Substack, I hosted a sexy, steamy literary reading in a Russian bathhouse, which also meant MC’ing a 100-person event in a swimsuit (thank you, beta-blockers). It required vulnerability from me, but also from the audience—all of whom stripped down on a Tuesday night to listen to readings about desire in a room full of strangers. The energy in the room was magnetic, and notably, almost no one was on their phone.

The Chelsea After Dark, photographed by Michael O'Donohue (@m_odonohue.)

Our next Pleasure-Seeking event—a literary salon–meets–burlesque show at the historic Chelsea Hotel—was just as thrilling. It showed me that this isn’t just a newsletter, but a community of cool, sexy people who are willing to get out of their comfort zone, take a risk, and push the boundaries of their social world. I’m told multiple people got laid as a result of these events, and am now cooking up some plans for Valentine’s Day—so if you want to sponsor/collab, hit my line.

I started 2025 with a fire ceremony at the Chelsea Hotel—burning a note with the things I want to let go, and writing down what I want to hold onto—and ended it with another kind of fire ceremony: an act by my friend Lydia Lux, one of several fabulous people who gifted me performances at my 31st birthday party.

Somewhere in between, I spent a weekend at a legal brothel in Nevada and interviewed the courtesans. I partied with Ottessa Moshfegh at the Chelsea Hotel, and danced my ass off at the one-night revival of Studio 54. I went to fetish fashion parades and queer gangbangs, BDSM workshops and erotic hypnosis demonstrations. I even spent a week at sea, reporting a story I truly can’t wait to share with you.

Left: Ottessa & I at the Chelsea. Right: Dance party at Studio 54

I participated in a BDSM speed dating event at a Parisian dungeon, shadowed Erika Lust on a porn set in Spain, and attended more than a dozen sex parties—from international fetish events to upscale New York soirées and an erotic brunch at a polyamorous commune. I also spoke with male virgins at stoplight-style singles mixers, interviewed 70-year-old swingers, and spent time at a “girlfriend experience” video game cafe, where a kinky “play party” turned, instead, into a pop-punk dance party. Here’s the only documentation I have:

Back in New York, I got splashed with trash water at an underground queer wrestling match (worth it), went to the nude sauna with people I love, and narrowly avoided riding the Cyclone at Coney Island after my friend told me he rode it eight times in a row to get over heartbreak.

Left: Queer joy at an underground wrestling match. Right: Fetish fashion show in Montreal

There were plenty of misadventures too: ending up in a Miami ER right before an important travel assignment, getting stuck in an elevator at an immersive theater event with ten other people, and getting pepper-sprayed in the face by a complete stranger that same week. I lost my favorite beret in Montreal, found it on a French girl’s head, then lost it again on the Paris Metro. I cried a not-insignificant amount, avoided emails I owe people (sorry), and became briefly, unhealthily obsessed with finding the perfect apartment (hmu if you have any leads.)

Left: Outside a Paris Fashion Show before losing my beret, captured by @Holga_chic_. Right: Me after getting pepper sprayed on the subway and crying off my makeup

Somewhere amidst all this, I wrote nearly 50 stories—for Pleasure-Seeking, and for magazines like Playboy, ArtReview, Hyperallergic, and Elephant, where I launched a column called Figure Study. Some of the most exciting pieces aren’t even out yet, but here are a few favorites I haven’t mentioned yet:

• A deep dive into the unspoken etiquette of apartment sex—told through my own dispute with a prudish neighbor, interviews with Pleasure-Seeking readers, and some truly hilarious 311 calls. This one was so popular that Substack stats are telling me it was shared multiple times in ~drumroll please~ Slack.

• A feature on how economic pressures are shaping sugar dating in 2025, from so-called “salt daddies” to the men skipping meals to keep up.

• A very personal essay on desire, emotional labor, and the quiet cost of performative sex in Babygirl.

• An essay for ArtReview on fetish, capitalism, and sex as a way of seeing—and subverting—the consumerist imagination.

• A reported feature on how people are using AI to explore taboo kinks—from chatbot dominatrixes to alien fantasies. This one’s in the latest issue of Playboy, edited by the genius Magdalene J. Taylor.

I was profiled for the first time in Byline, a magazine I love—and couldn’t have chosen a better person for the job than fellow sex writer Alessandra Schade, who you should follow on Substack here.

Portraits of me for a profile in Byline, shot by Shana Jade.

My work was also written about in places like Dazed, PAPER, Page Six, Office, Autre Magazine, and Marie Claire, which called Pleasure-Seeking “the hottest reading material” and me “the modern-day Carrie Bradshaw.” TBH, the experience of being perceived on this level always throws me for a loop—but that visibility has also led directly to new opportunities. So if you’re one of the people who’s taken the time to shout out my work, support me directly, or pull me into an exciting project, THANK YOU.

I’m giving you the highlights reel, but there was also grief and loss on a scale I can’t quite describe. If 2024 was a series of hard knocks, then 2025 was about the all-encompassing, harrowing, and ultimately rewarding work of self-reinvention—something that wouldn’t have been possible without all the wonderful people in my life. Sometimes, it’s the little gestures that stand out, like how when a painful anniversary aligned with Easter, my friends staged an egg hunt at the Chelsea Hotel to cheer me up.

I interviewed somewhere between fifty and one hundred people this year—sexologists and sugar daddies, porn directors and virgins, orgasmic manifestation experts, incels, and everything in between. I walked into so many rooms (and in one case, onto a literal ship) having no idea what to expect, and for the first time, felt that my work reflects who I am and the very particular way my brain is wired. I’ve felt very burnt out, and very lucky, often at the same time.

I’ve been surprised and overjoyed to find that desire thrives in rooms few people are talking about—that, in traveling the world to find them, I’ve been exposed to communities and subcultures I didn’t know existed, that are more interesting to me than the sexual discourse that’s mediated through our screens. I feel like I’ve just barely scratched the surface, and I can’t wait to keep hunting for the most exciting stories no one’s telling in 2026.

One of the podcast episodes coming to you soon, ft. Noelle Perdue of Porn World (“I look like your scheming advisor,” she says.)

This year, I’m manifesting an abundance of opportunity—plus the time and money to make good on the projects I’ve started. I’m relaunching the Pleasure-Seeking video podcast soon (watch this space), and continuing to work on numerous somewhat-secret projects across events, writing, and film.

Every paid subscriber makes it possible for me to get into the kinds of rooms where the best stories are born, and to write about them with the time and care they deserve—so if you want more Pleasure-Seeking in your life this year, now is a great time to upgrade.

Thank you, truly, for being part of this community. I can’t wait to share 2026 with you.

XOXO,
Camille