Profile for Emily McCombs

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Girl Talk: I Responded To A Missed Connection Ad

Emily McCombsDecember 15, 2010 //

I’ve accomplished a few really great things in my life — losing 100 pounds, getting sober‚ but I’m not sure anything has been as personally satisfying as the day that I had a Missed Connection posted about me.

If you’re not familiar, Missed Connections is the section on Craigslist where dudes post about hot girls they saw but were too afraid to talk to, and vice-versa. The idea of being chosen, spotted out of all the rest as uniquely attractive and compelling is like a low-rent fairytale that takes place on the R train instead of in a castle. Keep reading »

Girl Talk: I Was A Dominatrix For A Day

Emily McCombsNovember 4, 2010 //

I flogged a man last night.

Despite my Bettie Page-lite haircut and a propensity for sexual experimentation, this is not something I have done before. I did have a very brief flirtation with the field of professional dominatrix-ing, but I never got beyond the training phase due to both a poor collegiate work ethic and feeling massively silly. And in my personal life I tend to swing firmly toward the “S” in the “D/S” yin-yang.

But in all my genital adventuring, I have never gone for the type of melodramatic, overwrought boning that I think of as “sex nerdery.” Spank me, call me names, hold me down, but don’t make me wear some kind of pleather costume or call you “master” while you do it. Keep reading »

What’s Wrong With Dressing Slutty On Halloween?

Emily McCombsOctober 25, 2010 //

Yes, we’ve all heard that “Mean Girls” quote about how Halloween is the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut. And I’ll admit that the “sexy costume” craze has led to some weird combinations, like Sexy Chewbacca and Sexy Skunk. But every year, in the weeks leading up to our scariest holiday, the slut-shaming rises to a dull roar, and everybody starts saying things like, “When did Halloween become an excuse to dress up like a slut?”

The answer is ALWAYS. When I was in 6th grade, I begged my mother to let me dress up as a hooker, because Halloween has always been about dressing up like a slut. And you know why? Because it’s fun! Keep reading »

PG Smut: Undercover Sex From My Formative Years

Emily McCombsOctober 4, 2010 //
grease porn jpg
“Grease!”

I will never understand why, but for some reason this movie is considered appropriate for young girls everywhere. And if anyone has ever wondered why they love “Grease” so much, let the answer be heard: It’s dirty! I didn’t get it at the time when Rizzo says, “OK, so what do you guys think this is, a gang bang?” But I had a pretty good idea what happened if you climbed into the backseat of Greased Lightnin’, that “real pussy wagon.”

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Girl Talk: I Recovered A Repressed Memory Of Abuse

Emily McCombsSeptember 27, 2010 //

At age 37, while working as an incest writer and researcher, Meredith Maran accused her father of molesting her. Based on a combination of “symptoms” like depression and guilt and disturbing incest dreams, the accusation would ignite an estrangement that kept her children from spending time with their grandfather for the next eight years.

Ten years later, she retracted those claims, confessing that she’d been caught up in the whirlwind of repressed memory fever that overtook the nation in the ’80s and ’90s. These experiences are outlined in her new memoir, My Lie: A True Story of False Memory, released this month. When I received a review copy of the book, which was being called “fearless” and “brave” in the back cover blurbs, I cracked its cover with some trepidation, because I had also recovered a memory of childhood abuse.

The difference is that my memory is true. Keep reading »

Girl Talk: Life As A Tattooed Lady

Emily McCombsSeptember 20, 2010 //

I live in New York City, where every third person on the street has some kind of ink. So it’s easy for me to forget that tattoos often have a whole different set of connotations in that wide swath of country between the East and West coasts.

Luckily, the internet never hesitates to remind me. Since I started starring in a weekly web series, I’ve been called everything from a “tattooed longshoreman” to a “goblin.” (The goblin comment was probably unrelated to my tattoos, but it was still super mean.) And when a piece I wrote on weight loss for The Frisky ended up being featured on CNN.com, the photo featuring my tattooed arms quickly overshadowed the article’s content. Keep reading »

Girl Talk: I Was Raised A Fundamentalist

Emily McCombsSeptember 7, 2010 //

In my life as a 27-year-old media professional in New York City, the subject of God is not one that comes up a lot. Even when it does, I am reluctant to join the conversation, because my vocabulary is often different from that of almost everyone around me. Keep reading »

Girl Talk: I Lost 100 Pounds (And Found Out What The World Thinks Of Fat People)

Emily McCombsAugust 9, 2010 //

I come from a small-ish town in Oklahoma where we’ve never met a vegetable we couldn’t fry and the only thing more super-sized than our portions are the huge church complexes that alternate with fast-food restaurants along our roads.

So it maybe isn’t such a big surprise that by the time I graduated from high school, I weighed 260 pounds. My prom dress was a size 24, and my mother had to help me zip it up, a five-minute ordeal during which we grunted and cursed at one another. My aunt had to custom-make my graduation gown, a huge white tent in which I resembled the Stay-Puft marshmallow man. Keep reading »