By Emily Ratajkowski

June 12, 2026

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Photo: Richie Talboy

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Sex As a Single Mom by Emily Ratajkowski

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I knew he was new to New York when he picked the bar. It was on a street that had felt cool and exciting to me in 2014, when I’d first moved to the city, and probably was, before the Australian café that does matcha art opened around the corner and women who could afford a uniform of Miu Miu bags and Alo sets moved into the fire-escape apartments. My date was older than me, and though I’d seen him on Instagram, he was more like a walking, talking Myspace page: bright hoodies, obnoxious gold jewelry, with a preference for passé hipster bars like the one he’d chosen.

“Washed” is what I would’ve called him to my friends if I’d been feeling honest and not just looking to get laid. Not get laid in the way men do, to quickly satisfy a physical urge — Lord knows I didn’t think there was any chance he was exceptional in bed or likely to make me come (besides, even if that were a possibility, I could do that at home in three minutes and experience the same mind-numbing seconds I would with him). What I wanted was his attention: I wanted to feel a man’s desire and to be reminded that I was a sexual being, not just a mother of a toddler. The lame bar would have to do.

I’d given birth two years earlier, a few months shy of my 30th birthday. “Pushing will be easy,” the nurse told me after I’d arrived at the hospital, nearly shitting myself on the linoleum floor, repeating “Oh fuck, oh fuck,” sounding like I was having the best orgasm of my life instead of experiencing the most agonizing pain I’d ever known. I was seven centimeters dilated, which impressed the staff. “For someone like you, you’ll be done in 30 minutes.” Instead, I pushed for four hours, ripping the muscle between my ass and my vagina in the process. My OB/GYN, in an effort to loosen me, had used her fingers to repeatedly spread my vagina, scratching both me and my son’s delicate, nearly translucent scalp. At home after being discharged from the hospital, I would find tiny scabs on the top of his head that matched the ones between my legs.

It was a violent transition into a new reality of screaming baby on my aching tit and ring on my swollen finger. And then, in a time period that felt both instant and excruciatingly slow, my marriage collapsed. Six months after my son was born, my husband and I stopped having sex. Less than a year later, we separated.

I hated the condescending way people looked at me in the wake of my breakup. Their furrowed brows, the pity in their faces as they delivered an “I’m so sorry, Emily.” I couldn’t stand my pathetic reflection in their eyes. They saw me as someone who was unwanted, who had been left. A reject with the burden of a needy, hungry, two-foot-tall sidekick.

Even as a kid, I reasoned that of all the things I could grow up to be, it was crucial to avoid becoming a single mom. The term itself could be lodged as an insult. Having a child with the wrong man was the fastest way to ruin your life as a woman — it meant having no freedom, no choices, no emergency exit. All baggage and no security.

But as I approached the relic of a bar, tucked away in the basement of a building, half expecting to have to perform some gimmick in order to enter, exhausted from endless hours of solo parenting — If I have to pick up a pay phone next to the door and say a password in 2023 — I did what I’d become remarkably good at in the wake of my separation. I tucked away the part of myself that could not bear the reality of what I’d become, the very thing I’d always known to fear: a single mother.

As expected, my date was in one of those bright-colored sweatshirts, leaning over the bar in a posture that didn’t flatter him. He gave me a friendly hug, the kind a co-worker would give to another after returning to the office from holiday break, which felt vaguely insulting and made me even more determined to fuck him. He’d been asking the bartender about a specialty cocktail, he explained in a nasally stoner voice. What would I like to drink?

The character I’d learned to embody after my divorce, in my period of compulsively dating, was a villain: Poison Ivy. Catwoman. Sexual but scary. And she drank gin martinis. Many, many gin martinis.

She was not tragic. Nothing close to a victim. No one needed to feel sorry for her. In fact, they should all be jealous.

“Divorced single mom”? What about, instead, “a woman who needs nothing from men”? I already had the kid and the motherhood experience so many of my friends secretly coveted while pretending to date casually. I had no illusions about the romance of marriage or a shared life together. I’d learned the hard way that being alone was better than most partnerships. I’d seen too much, discovered what many women do only when they get divorced in their mid-40s. I’d lived through the failure of a unit, yet I was barely into my 30s. This was my villain origin story.

Elder Millennial got something fizzy. A slice of pineapple decorated the rim of his glass, and he picked it up and sucked on it while we talked about the apartment he’d just moved into. He told me he’d been in L.A. for a long time (Eastside, obviously) and that he was about to turn 40. His career had lost the momentum it had a few years ago, and he’d decided, after breaking up with a live-in girlfriend, to try New York again. Conversation flowed easily as I positioned myself as Elder Millennial’s guide to the city, telling him where to drink and eat. I’m pretty sure he called himself a foodie, but I can’t be certain, since when the term was uttered I disassociated completely.

Like all good supervillain bitches, I was an urban creature. Being a New Yorker made being a single mom feel sexier. Bohemian. Or at least that’s what I told myself. I wasn’t driving a minivan to the grocery store; I was carrying my stroller up stairwells and yelling at loud neighbors through the apartment wall while still wearing my miniskirt and eyeliner from the night before. Erin Brockovich of Canal Street.

I ordered my third martini. His eyes softened, and his face got close to mine. He was trying yet another artisan cocktail, ordered as part of some male-bonding ritual with the bartender that made me wonder if he was more interested in being on a date with him than me. But as he turned toward me, I focused. I’d learned intimacy was quite an easy thing to create with men. He was giggling now, looking at my mouth.

“I wasn’t sure if you just wanted to grab a drink as, like, friends,” he said, swaying a bit. I touched his back as if I’d done it a hundred times before. “You’re pretty,” he said.

Perfect, I thought. He didn’t even think he had a chance with me walking into this, which meant that when I found myself on my knees in front of him an hour later in his half-empty apartment — filled with cardboard boxes, a fiddle-leaf fig (typical), and a bookshelf on which the books had been organized by color — I was especially satisfied by his expression when he looked down at me. He couldn’t believe I was putting his dick in my mouth. He told me I looked like Cleopatra when I gave head. I’d found everything I’d come there for — a praying mantis devouring her mate.

Before my separation, I’d never had a one-night stand. I’d never slept with someone the same day I met them. In fact, I’d only slept with eight people: four of whom had been live-in boyfriends, and one of whom was my male best friend in high school (we had sex once, and he shuddered and ejaculated the second he entered me). I didn’t fuck anyone I wasn’t pretty sure would fall in love with me, because I wanted to be precious.

I knew that boys didn’t treat girls they thought of as sluts tenderly. Boys didn’t fall in love with, want forever with, raise babies with, or take care of sluts. I wanted to be taken care of. Desperately. I tried to be a “good girl.” Keeping my body count low was insurance. I thought it meant no one would ever cheat on me, that I’d always be loved, happy, and safe.

None of that had turned out to be true. In the years leading up to becoming a mother, I came to resent deeply the naïveté and inequality that being a good girl left me with — the way every man I liked had slept with more women than I had men, the dissonance I experienced when they talked about a girl they’d fucked “casually” and were now friends with. There are girls who are capable of that? I wondered. I couldn’t relate, but I wanted to.

I decided to fuck my way into a new kind of woman. I wanted to destroy the Madonna, the special girl I’d worked so hard to be before an eight-pound baby had torn my vagina in two, and replace her with the whore.

“Let’s give them a taste of their own medicine,” I’d joke with friends. I thought I’d get some great orgasms and a few funny stories on the way, too.

“Sometimes you’re like a 40-year-old divorcée, and other times like a 22-year-old slut,” my friend said after watching me, in shorts and lip liner, navigate the cliquish politics of school drop-off. Was I punitive? Making many men suffer for the crimes of one? I honestly didn’t care.

I wish I could say I’d started to date slowly — that there was some period of grief or reflection as a newly single person, a healthy pause before my mania — but the truth is just a week after my split, I found myself in Brooklyn, a shell-shocked and sleepless version of myself, wearing what seemed to me like the kind of outfit a girl who goes on dates wears, a crop top and black pants that all of my friends had approved via a mirror selfie, sitting across from a DJ. Of course a DJ. Always a DJ.

“I just need a distraction,” I’d said, tasking my friends, who had giddily gotten to work by texting every unattached and (relatively) unembarrassing man they knew. DJ was the closest man in the vicinity and the lowest stakes — he lived only two blocks away from the apartment I’d shared with my ex and our son, had been sober for nearly a decade, and was a friend of a friend of a friend.

I’d just ordered my first martini when, perhaps to make up for the fact he didn’t drink and in an attempt to seem edgy, he brought up how incest “actually runs in my family.” I choked on the slime of an oyster as he continued, describing the time his mother and sister had caught him watching incest porn, miming with his hand the motion of touching himself hard and fast. “It was some sibling shit.” He shrugged, describing the offending video.

Yes, men raised in New York are uniquely disturbed characters from man hell.

Later, in the Uber back to Manhattan, he told the driver to turn up Bad Bunny and enthusiastically nodded his head to the beat, attempting to sing along.

That was my introduction to the dating scene. I didn’t fuck him, okay?

But he was an anomaly. There was Vegan Graffiti Artist with impeccable posture, Chef who thought he might have chlamydia, Spanish Gen-Zer who couldn’t stop sending me nudes, heavily self-medicated Son of a Billionaire with questionable politics, several Italians, and, of course, another DJ. The list goes on but, for legal reasons, will not.

And then there was the Elder Millennial: obsessed with dental hygiene, psychedelics, and dirty talk. He had approached the subject coyly at first, like it was something he was kind of embarrassed about — the way a kid will test you to see if you’ll talk to them about their dorky obsession of the moment. Do you like Godzilla? What about Star Wars?

“Do you like dirty talk?” he’d asked.

“Let’s see,” I’d responded, climbing onto his bed in a pair of lace underwear.

For a man who needed to talk quite a lot in order to get his dick hard, he didn’t have much of a way with words: “Do you like that, you, you streetwalker? You dirty whore?”

I suppressed a giggle. Whatever happened to slut? At least there was something kind of cute about slut. Still, I was game. I liked to feel him attempt to demean me when I was sure there was no way he actually could.

Elder Millennial wasn’t traditionally handsome, but he was tall and he was a functioning adult with enough money to keep his studio in Echo Park while renting a place in New York. Which is to say he did just fine with the ladies. He was the kind of guy who other men couldn’t believe got laid (“But he’s ugly”) and of whose desirability women all shared an unspoken understanding.

Still, it shocked me when, two weeks after our first meeting, he showed me photos of the girl he’d been seeing before me. She was exceptionally beautiful with thick eyebrows, a delicate nose, and massive, soft breasts. She was also in her early 20s. I wasn’t jealous — though I was slightly disturbed by their questionable age difference — but there was something that struck a nerve: I sensed that he had never considered why so many women were available to him. All he knew was that after he was done fucking one woman, another different yet equally intriguing one would appear just behind her.

His innate entitlement motivated me. I knew I’d be the one to end things with him, and that felt right. It felt like my responsibility, like I owed it to the world, like I was the only one for the job. Take that, motherfucker.

In these months of dating post-separation, I learned two things. The first was that many men are turned on by motherhood. At a party just a month after my separation, a sister to several famous single moms consoled me immediately with “Men don’t care, by the way, about, like, the you-having-a-kid thing.” I exhaled. At the time, her comment felt monumental, like she was addressing the exact thing no one wanted to say but that I’d been so scared of: that, as a single mother, I was unlovable, used up and discarded. I soon came to find out that it was quite the opposite of “They don’t care.” In fact, they liked it. There were many men who experienced the loneliness that comes with years of selfishness. They were particularly attracted to the idea that being a parent meant self-sacrifice was a given in my life. Did they want me as their mommy? Maybe.

The second thing was simple wisdom anyone’s grandmother could probably bestow. The more I seemed not to need a man, the more desperately he needed me. So when Elder Millennial told me he was pretty sure he was in love with me after just three weeks, I felt a flicker of familiar anxiety in my chest. I told myself there was nothing for me to worry about. I had the upper hand: I knew there was no chance of falling in love with him. I didn’t even like him, really. But it was more than that. He didn’t offer me anything more than relatively superficial escapism. I wasn’t getting off on the sex as much as I was getting off on being romantically inaccessible for the first time in my life. I was that bitch — too busy with my work, friends, and divorce. Too preoccupied with the love and care I took pleasure in giving my child to want anything more from him.

Still, I continued to see him. I’d seen a tweet about “doing it for the plot” that I’d begun to repeat a bit too often in those days, as if it were a mantra.

Elder Millennial had his own mantras, and not just the ones he repeated while inside of me. “Animal brain” was the term he’d coined and repeated, usually after downing a few of his tropical cocktails. He was half explaining himself, half philosophizing. It was pretty simple, really: He’d often behave during sex in a way that didn’t align with who he was as a well-meaning, campaigned-for-Obama-twice type of guy. With “animal brain,” you could be violent, cruel, whatever you wanted. “But, by that logic,” I offered after one of his many late-night rationalizations, “you could use it to excuse anything.” I told him that as a kid, I once destroyed an ant farm in my parent’s dirt driveway. It was so satisfying to do, but of course I’d felt guilty watching the colony descend into mayhem.

After any one of our evenings spent together, feeling the beat of an encroaching hangover-induced migraine and knowing that my son would be awake early, hungry, and with a diaper to change, I would silently dress and slither out of Elder Millennial’s front door. I had rules: Never miss bedtime and basically no sleepovers. These were natural and easy to abide by. There was nowhere I’d rather be than when I woke up with my toddler, so no matter the number of martinis, I’d be fully dressed and out the door to relieve the sitter and be ready for my son’s 6 a.m. “Maamaaaa!” Witnessing this, he’d tell me he thought I was a good mother. “Single moms, man! Y’all are ah-mazing. Women are ah-mazing.”

Later, he’d call me a whore in order to come.

“Hot,” my married friend purred, titillated by the thought of sex with someone, anyone, other than her husband.

But it wasn’t, and after a month of cooperating with the dirty talk, I began to reach a breaking point. The novelty of our initial connection was wearing thin. I started rolling my eyes when his name would pop up on my phone in the morning or when, my expression concealed with his face buried in my neck, he’d whisper “That pussy is all mine” into my ear. And while I’d gotten used to receiving his “I love you”s, I decided I needed to gently and politely let him know that I wasn’t so sure if we should be exclusive.

I could tell that Elder Millennial had started to catch on, at least a little bit, to the dead-eyed supervillain I’d been playing all along. I certainly wasn’t giving cozy. When we were lying in bed and I said I thought we should slow things down, he shook his head, uncomfortably scratching his arm and then his head. His baritone voice became squeaky, like a child’s.

“But you seeing other people … that … could embarrass me,” he stammered, staring at the ceiling.

In the middle of my ongoing divorce, I paid a visit to my lawyer’s office on the Upper West Side. He was a father in his 50s whose classic New York accent endeared him to me immediately. Most of our interactions up to that point had been on the phone, and the intimacy of an in-person meeting made me anxious. I waited for him in the expansive reception area on the building’s 37th floor, a space silent save for the occasional suppressed coughs of the middle-aged woman at the front desk. He came out of his office to greet me, a hand extended in front of him, and I stood up, suddenly feeling self-conscious about the minidress and knee-high boots I’d worn to the meeting. I felt instantly that I’d let him down, shown him that I had no idea what we would be up against if we ended up in court. This was not the kind of outfit to wear to prove to a conservative judge that I was a good mother. But the lawyer was a kind man, or at least a polite one, and as he led me down a gray corridor to a small conference room, he gave no indication that he thought my ensemble was in any way inappropriate.

He made small talk as we reviewed paperwork, and though it felt ridiculous to discuss the weather and my son’s recent interests given the weight of the events that brought us here, the chatter provided relief. Then he dropped his pen and looked at me directly, his tone shifting. “Y’know, I see a lotta cases,” he began. “Women who are abused emotionally, sexually, physically, monetarily. Last week, I had a client who we’d been working with for months, gathering the information we needed to make sure her divorce would be seamless. Her husband was awful to her, just awful. Okay?”

I nodded, unsure of what he was going to say next.

“She called me yesterday and told me she was no longer divorcing him.” He paused, a practiced performer. “You should be proud of yourself,” he said. “Most women don’t leave.”

I left his office that day with an unexpected gift: a new kind of understanding of myself. Leaving my marriage wasn’t about seeking anyone’s attention or approval. It was the opposite. A hard choice that came with a lot of pain and at a great cost. Becoming a single mother changed the way people looked at me, exactly as I’d feared it would. But it also allowed me to finally see myself. I wasn’t left; I left. I knew then that being able to leave, to say “no,” was the only real superpower I’d gained through divorce. I was brave. Really, actually brave.

Still, I felt nervous walking to Elder Millennial’s apartment later, repeating the lines I’d rehearsed in my head and with my friends. “Just be direct!” they had told me. I sat on the floor, cross-legged, feeling oddly exposed. I was taking off my costume and going off script. “Look,” I began, “the dirty talk isn’t really working for me.”

“Of course! It’s only fun if it’s fun for both of us,” he responded too quickly, as if reading from his own script. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

I wondered the same thing. It occurred to me then that, despite my performance as the supervillain, a character I’d believed made me impenetrable, I was just as misguided and vulnerable as I’d been in my 20s when I was playing the good girl. I’d never been connected to my own desires. It was all ridiculous, a silly game of performances with no substance. What was left for either of us? I knew then that I’d never see him again, so I kissed him — hard. I wanted to be the praying mantis one last time.

Which is maybe why, mid-thrust, when I felt the sting of a slap, a hard one, harder than any he’d delivered before, with the hiss of his words “I didn’t ask for your feedback, bitch,” I almost started to cry. I was there for power, but I’d forgotten: Animal brain, I thought, waiting for him to come.

https://archive.ph/YF8St

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5875651&forum_id=2Firm#49949247)

“I wasn’t sure if you just wanted to grab a drink as, like, friends,” he said, swaying a bit. I touched his back as if I’d done it a hundred times before. “You’re pretty,” he said.

Perfect, I thought. He didn’t even think he had a chance with me walking into this, which meant that when I found myself on my knees in front of him an hour later in his half-empty apartment — filled with cardboard boxes, a fiddle-leaf fig (typical), and a bookshelf on which the books had been organized by color — I was especially satisfied by his expression when he looked down at me. He couldn’t believe I was putting his dick in my mouth. He told me I looked like Cleopatra when I gave head. I’d found everything I’d come there for — a praying mantis devouring her mate.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5875651&forum_id=2Firm#49949295)

2. she wants to advertise herself for yachting to gross old men

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5875651&forum_id=2Firm#49949465)

well, i'm hard

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5875651&forum_id=2Firm#49949384)

women like being treated like shit rofl

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5875651&forum_id=2Firm#49949405)

i just shuddered and ejaculated

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5875651&forum_id=2Firm#49949410)

Elder Millennial wasn’t traditionally handsome, but he was tall and he was a functioning adult with enough money to keep his studio in Echo Park while renting a place in New York. Which is to say he did just fine with the ladies. He was the kind of guy who other men couldn’t believe got laid (“But he’s ugly”) and of whose desirability women all shared an unspoken understanding.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5875651&forum_id=2Firm#49949422)

>“She called me yesterday and told me she was no longer divorcing him.” He paused, a practiced performer. “You should be proud of yourself,” he said. “Most women don’t leave.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5875651&forum_id=2Firm#49949463)