Gabrielle Kassel on Sex Education, Smut, and Queer Joy

The Bothered Blog by Gabrielle Kassel

June 2026

In honor of Pride Month, queer sex educator and journalist Gabrielle Kassel joins us to talk about writing sex for a living, queer acceptance in society and the influence of algorithms in shaping access to sex education. Gabby has made it her mission to help people have the sex they want—safely and on their own terms—and our conversation also explores the role smut can play in understanding one’s own desires. 

This interview is adapted from our podcast series, Bothered Stories: Smut Talks (Apple|Spotify). 

What does “queer” even mean, anyway?

Allison: You’ve spent your career dedicated to sex education and wellness. Since it’s Pride Month I’d love to talk about what “queer” means to you?

Gabby: With any identity category, I’m big on letting the person who identifies that way tell you what it means to them.

To me, queer means against the norm, or other than the norm. The expectation is that you’re going to be a straight cis person who ends up with a person of a different sex and gender than your own. For me, my queerness is a way of naming that that’s actually not what I want. Instead, I have the potential to be attracted to people of all sorts of genders and all sorts of bodies and anatomies.

There’s also kind of this political charge to queer. Historically, it was used against the LGBTQ community as a slur. So for me, reclaiming queerness is a way to feel empowered in my otherness. It’s also a way to hold myself accountable to continuously advocating for the rights of minority people across the identity spectrum.

Sexuality as a Multi-Pronged Umbrella

Allison: You’ve shared a framework for sexuality that I found really helpful. Can you explain it?

Gabby: I like to explain sexuality as this giant umbrella under which are all these little prongs that make up your sexuality. One of them is sexual orientation. But under that umbrella is also relationship orientation, gender presentation, how many times you like to have sex, how you define sex, your sexual history, your fantasies, what pleasure products you use, if you like smut, if you like porn.

It’s all of the things that make us sexual, pleasure-seeking—or not—people.

When you define sexuality in this really expansive way, the idea of exploring your sexuality actually feels less scary.

Gabby’s Journey to Sex Ed Expert 

Allison: You write about sex for a living. How did that happen? 

Gabby: I majored in queer studies and English, so, in a lot of ways, I was writing about queer sex already in college.

My first job was as a fitness intern at Women's Health Magazine. Whenever I could, I’d suggest queer sex-themed stories. Time and time again, the editors would say, “well only 10% of the population is LGBTQ so the risk of writing a story on one of those topics is that it’s only going to get 1/10th the readership of our traditional stories.” 

But then Google changed their search algorithm so that when people searched terms like lesbian sex or scissoring, the first thing that came up wouldn’t be porn, it’d be educational content.

So for the first time, publications would get a tremendous amount of site visitors, because people were looking for porn and then stumbling onto educational articles.

And because I had been saying, “hey, let me write an article about girls kissing other girls,” editors would reach out and say, “I know this is a little bit more salacious or sexual than what you've initially been pitching, but do you want to write a story about lesbian sex more broadly?” I said yes every time. And very quickly that became my niche.

How algorithms went from promoting sex ed to selling vibrators 

Allison: Big tech companies have a huge impact on what people can access. And right now we’re seeing more censorship, less visibility. Can you talk about that?

Gabby: These days, most people notice that when they Google something—anything—the first thing that pops up is a place for them to go shopping.

Historically, if somebody Googled “how to stimulate the G-spot?” informational articles about anatomy and pleasure would come up. Now, it isn’t educational articles, it’s sex toy sites. Literally, the first page of Google results is sponsored content designed to encourage somebody to spend money. 

There’s a lot of downsides to this, obviously. People aren’t getting sex educated, which means they’re not as aware of their bodies as they need to be in order to safely offer consent. But it also means there’s this perpetuation of the idea that sexual wellness is something you need to  pour a ton of money into, or that it's not something you're gonna have access to unless you buy X, Y, or Z products. And that's really concerning.

Applying smut to sex IRL 

Allison: I publish smut for a living, so I have to ask: what kind of smut do you like?

Gabby: I love reading. It’s one of my main hobbies. I really like romance novels, I really like erotic novels, but I tend to be drawn to storylines and elements in the category of Weird Girl Lit. 

My dream sex scene is not necessarily one that would be traditionally classified as sexy. I want something that is so weird as to be grotesque, like a scene full of specific descriptions of body fluids. I want my erotica with an absolute side of freak. But real-life freak. 

Allison: What can erotica or smut teach us that’s useful in real life?

Gabby: First, a point of caution: people think that watching porn means you know how to have sex IRL. That’s like watching Grey's Anatomy, and then thinking that means you know how to operate. I feel quite similarly to written porn or erotica or smut. 

That said, I think all these things can have value in our own sex lives. And I think the biggest value is that they normalize sex as a thing for us to spend intellectual, emotional, and mental energy on.

Once you normalize sex in any way, it makes communicating about it easier. For instance, in smut there's so much language around sex. And especially living in such a puritanical culture, with very limited sex education, that language is huge. Because how can we communicate to ourselves, and our lovers what we like if we don't have the words for it. And smut literally gives us access to so many different words.

Smut also gives you access to a lot of different kinds of sex. Then you can figure out whether or not the thing you are reading is actually the thing you want to try, and that’s going to require true self-reflection, collaboration, honest conversation and trial and error. With (of course) the caveat that there can be things that we really enjoy reading on the page that we have no interest in trying out IRL. But even still, that is valuable to us, because the more information we have about what we like, the better.

On queer acceptance—and rising conservatism

Allison: We’re coming off the heels of the Heated Rivalry craze, and it feels like queer acceptance has grown enormously. But at the same time, we’re seeing rising conservatism. How do you make sense of those opposing realities?

Gabby: I think the queer yearning in Heated Rivalry really spoke to people. But I will say, as a journalist, getting work in the queer sex space has been harder in the last 24 months than it had been in the previous eight years. 

There was this time when Heated Rivalry was having its moment where we were able to write about queer sex because people were so into the show.

Now, nearly six months later, sex education just isn’t getting posted anymore. Magazines are not commissioning sex-ed articles, especially queer sex-ed articles.

I don’t want queer sex education to only be able to exist when a piece of media captures mass attention.

Publications never really cracked the code on how to make money from sex articles. People were reading them, but publications weren’t profiting from them because brands didn’t want to advertise alongside sex content. And now AI is summarizing information without people ever clicking through to the articles.

Most of it has to do with dollars and capitalism.

Gabby’s Answers to Lightning Round Questions

Allison: I have a lightning round of questions for you to wrap us up:

Most important piece of sex advice? Rework the definition of sex in your brain to move away from sex equals P and V to the understanding that sex is any meaningful act of pleasure.

Most underrated sex toy? Lube–it’s affordable and it can so quickly increase pleasure and change sensations.

Most underrated quality in a lover? Curiosity and generosity 

Most underrated quality in erotica? I like weird stuff. Give me body fluids, the juicier the better. 

What are you constantly curious about? How people can cultivate desire for themselves and for their partners outside of sex, like in the way we make ourselves tea or get ready for bed. What does it look like to increase ease and sensuality in our day-to-day lives? 

---

About the Author

Gabrielle Kassel (she/they) is a queer, pleasure-forward sex educator and journalist who writes at the intersection of sexual wellness, queerness and holistic health. Through a mix of personal narrative, expert-backed insight, and investigative reporting, she creates sex education that’s accurate, inclusive, and actually reflective of people’s lived experiences. With bylines in Cosmopolitan, GQ, Women's Health, Well+Good, Healthline, and more, she covers everything from strap-on play to ambiamory to hormone health—with clarity, curiosity, and a whole lot of honesty.