Erica Force was raised in a sex-positive household by a single mother who purchased her first vibrator for her when she was 15.

“I started to become sexually active pretty young with myself and that was always fostered,” said Force. “My mom always said, ‘Come to me with questions. I want you to learn what I know to be the truth to the best of my knowledge instead of you learning it from others in school or getting misinformed.’”

Growing up, Force felt like she was the only one among her friends who were knowledgeable about their bodies and who had a supportive parent when it came to sex.

Today, Force, who is 30 and based out of San Antonio, Texas, is a professional sex coach, sex educator, and sex-positive influencer.

“I was never a good student,” Force said. “I struggled a lot, especially through college.” She got a bachelor’s degree in health administration with a concentration in management. Working in the field, she noticed a lack of sexual health information and structure when it came to healthcare. “It was just so mechanical.”

Five years ago, Force moved to San Antonio with her partner who is in the military. The couple had been moving a lot, and Force encountered a lot of issues getting a job within the healthcare management field. “So, my grandfather, he was like, ‘You need to find something you’re passionate about and something you can do while you travel around the country.’”

So Force found a sexologist, a doctor who put together this amazing education center and boutique.

“I walked in and I said, ‘You’re gonna hire me. I’m gonna work from the bottom, I’m gonna learn this industry. Whatever you can give mentor-wise, I’m here for it,’ which was amazing,” Force said.

Her assertiveness worked. While working at the boutique Force started at Sex Coach U with Dr. Patti Britton. She got certified as a sex coach and it was around that time – three or four years ago – that she started her sex-positive Instagram account, @s.xuallectual, which today has 12.8K followers.

If you go on @s.xuallectual, you’ll find a daily dose of sex-positivity.

One tile says “May orgasms be with you.” Another just says “slow kissing.” Some posts feature images of positive sexuality, usually a femme who is experiencing pleasure in some way.

There are posts about BDSM, gender, STIs, anatomy, and polyamory.

“I myself am polyamorous,” Force explained. “My partner and I have been together for going on 11 years now. For the first six years, we went through this whole series of break ups to be with other people. We’d still be sleeping with each other, get back together, then break up again. We didn’t have the knowledge, words, or education on what an open relationship even was, or could look like, because that is not something that we as a society provide as an alternative if monogamy just doesn’t work.”

Once she and her partner decided to be polyamorous, Force came out to her mother, who despite being so sex-positive, had to take time to be ok with it. “There were a lot of tears when I came out to her but she got it eventually, through me answering a lot of questions which I knew she’d have.”

Force has found that one of the most difficult aspects of being polyamorous is the communication required to keep all relationships healthy. Counseling others on their non-monogamous relationships is part of the work Force now does as a sex coach.

It helps that in liberal circles anyway, non-monogamy and polyamory are becoming more mainstream. “Even if it’s not fully accepted by everyone, it’s definitely way more out there as an option,” Force said.

The next step according to Force? “Accurate, positive representation of polyamorous folk in the media.”

On Being an Influencer

With 12.8K followers, Force can definitely be considered an influencer. Anyone following her can see she gets a lot of engagement, gratitude, and praise for the types of content she creates and curates.

When asked about the creation of her Instagram account, Force said it all fell into place naturally. “I didn’t have Facebook, and Instagram felt like exactly the type of platform I needed to document my sex education journey, this picture journal, this outward installation of my thoughts.”

It took a while for her to “get her groove” but she “shows up,” scours the internet for content that she genuinely loves, and people have responded. Never a fan of hashtags, she has gained momentum through loyal followers sharing her content, and her followers have grown from there. Force says her following has increased the most over the past year.

Dealing with FOSTA/SESTA

Like so many others who work in the sex space, Force’s Instagram account has been affected by the April 2018 passage of FOSTA/SESTA.

She describes what’s been happening as censorship. At first, things seemed to be fine, but then a little over a year ago, her posts started getting flagged and being taken down.

Force loves to have people interact via her stories. “Many times, people may not be comfortable enough to engage through a comment on a post, so I love putting up interactive questions that people can respond to on my stories.”

Force points to an example of one such story, where she set up a poll, asking vulva owners about their preferences when it comes to oral sex and foreplay. What gets you aroused? What really takes you to that next level?

Her story was taken down. Then there were a few instances where she couldn’t post anything, nothing would load, and she couldn’t even do stories for a while.

It got to the point where she decided to change her handle so the “e” in “sex” is taken out. If you notice, she never spells out the word sex, she abbreviates it to “s.x.” Once she did that, she noticed that she didn’t have any more trouble posting.

“All of my content is education-based and opinion-based, and ultimately trying to do good in the world.” Force said. “It’s frustrating that the robots of Instagram can’t seem to distinguish between sex-positive material and sex-trafficking.”

Insta’s Ups and Downs

Force has definitely been sucked into the Gram and at times has felt drained by it. She likens these phases to the time she did a six-month stint as a cam girl, using the name Camilla Belle. “What I took away from that experience was that I was filling the need in people’s lives to have someone reliable and constant. While it was purely virtual, I was that person who was there for them from 6pm to 9pm, unless there was an emergency.” While she is no longer working as a cam girl, Force approaches her work @s.xuallectual with the same amount of dedication, recognizing that she is providing that same kind of reliable companionship (and education) to her fans.

“Instagram can be so fun and rewarding, but it can also feel like we’re living more on Instagram than real life,” Force admits. “At the same time, if people are going to be on Instagram, I want to use my platform to teach people, or even to just simply counter the negative messages. Instagram can feed into certain negative aspects of our culture of competitiveness, weird body images stuff.”

One of her biggest goals is to close the orgasm gap via sex education. A term that is relatively new, the orgasm gap describes the fact that in heteronormative/CIS relationships, men tend to have much more orgasms than women.

“We’re now starting to see that the orgasm is there and it’s been there for a long, long time,” Force explained.

How does one close the orgasm gap? According to Force it’s education, communication, and patience and self-love. Through her coaching, Instagram, and workshops, she teaches what most do not learn in sex ed or from their parents. She teaches anatomy (did you know the clitoris has 8k nerve endings, twice as many nerve endings as the penis?), she encourages self-exploration and communication, and fosters an environment where people can be open about their preferences and experiences.

Interestingly enough, she gets a lot of masc clients. “I feel like male-identified people are really wanting to figure out how they can satisfy a vagina, or a woman, a person, a soul, a whole being and that’s because they’re realizing that just sticking it in somewhere is not doing it for us, we’re done with that. There are a lot more men looking to enhance their skills and expand their knowledge.”

When I asked her what her favorite thing to teach is, her response was anal sex workshops. “Everyone has an anus, so everyone has an association with it. I put it in a way of, hey, I get it, you poop out of there,” Force explained. “You don’t necessarily think of it as the sexiest thing. So, I try to reframe people’s minds around different levels of pleasure you can potentially get from that area.”

Force adds that so many people have such bad, negative, horrific past stories when it comes to anal sex. “You hear so many people talk about instances of ‘it slipped into the anus and ‘whoops’ type of thing, which… there is never a ‘whoops’ in my mind. That means that that person is not present. They are not paying attention, they are not with you.”

Force does a lot of work with couples around finding anal pleasure. She finds a particularly joy in helping cis straight men get comfortable with anal play. “Right now in San Antonio there is a lot of ‘If you do anything with my anus, I’m gay,’ which is so untrue. I love breaking that down for people. I’m personally a big fan of pegging. That’s the next-level class after intro to anal.”

Whether in person, on the phone, or on Instagram, Erica Force is doing her best to fill in the giant gaps so many of us have when it comes to sexual education. “I love sex educating because so many people are walking around not knowing what their body function is, how it’s all made up, how we have all of these different parts. I like teaching people how these parts play together, and how much pleasure they can bring us.”

Force is pregnant and documenting the ups and downs of pregnancy on a separate Instagram from Sexuallectual. You can find that at erica_force.

“My biggest truth with pregnancy is that while one can be very excited and happy at the creation of life, it doesn’t negate the fact that for some, it can be a big struggle and really suck at times,” Force says. “We shouldn’t have to feel like bad parents or that part of our mental and physical health needs to be hidden. The first trimester of my pregnancy quickly became very isolating, until I began taking my truth on @erica_force and was met with others who were also struggling or who had struggled as well.”