A couple of sex columnists leaving New York to come home to Kansas City seemed like a strange coincidence to me. So I decided to see why Marcelle Manhattan and Emily Farris were leaving the Big Apple for the City of Fountains.
Warning: Reading this at work is probably not a great idea.
Marcelle Manhattan, not her real name, sounds like she's ready
to settle down -- though that's hard to believe after reading her racy posts on Sexegesis. The blog mixes truth and fiction and follows the life of a sexually
awakened woman. She calls it "fictionalized nonfiction."
For example, Manhattan says a friend didn't believe that she started masturbating in preschool.
"Actually
that's one of the things that was true," she says. "Everything that
happens in the blog is true. There's no incident that is completely
fabricated. But it's also not nonfiction. It's also not a diary or a
pure recording of events. It's fiction and as I write it, I treat it as
a fiction writer would. ... A lot of details change."
Manhattan,
31, left KC to go to grad school in Boston in 2003, but then dropped out and moved to New York. She says she left Kansas City to find a more liberal,
intellectual and cultural place. She needed out of KC. Needed to live in
other places.
But now she's no longer in her 20s, and her priorities have changed.
"I've gone off, and I've had my adventure. And I
realize what's really important to me is kinda the same thing that was
important to me all along.
"Now that I've done it, I just wanted to come home. Be
near family. Be near friends. Settle down. I want to get married and
all of that stuff. And I think KC is a really wonderful place. It's
home."
Manhattan wants to move back as soon as she can, but probably won't be back until the summer.
Emily Farris came back in December.
"I didn't want to become a Sex and the City character," Farris
says of her time in New York -- although things haven't exactly been peachy since moving back.
"Saturday night, when I was sitting at home, I thought maybe I'm just
fucking Bridget Jones in Kansas City."
Farris had written for Nerve.com since November 2007. She was a freelance writing "Dating Advice From," which used to be "Sex Advice From." Just another sign that Nerve is toning down its sexy quotient. Farris also writes Scanner, a pop culture blog with a sexual twist. She's also just started writing a column for The Frisky called "Sex and the Show Me State."
"My
dad won't Google me anymore because I wrote an article about colonic
irrigation for this little magazine a couple years ago," Farris says.
"And there was a line in it that said, 'My ass had finally lost its virginity.' My dad freaked out."
Her dad has good reason. Farris tells me that her writing is self-deprecating. For
example, she'd probably write about the time she got so drunk
that the next morning, she woke up with her vibrator still going off
between her legs.
Farris, 26, left New York after eight-and-a-half years because she was
tired of spending a lot of money to live in a tiny space.
"I can do what I do from anywhere, so I thought I'd do it here for a little while," she says.
Like Manhattan, Farris heard her biological clock. Some day -- not soon -- she wants to get married and have kids.
"There's a part of me that, I'm not going to lie, thinks that will happen here."
Farris isn't dating right now, although she posted an ad on Craigslist
seeking a bearded hipster. "Racists, Republicans and homophobes need
not apply," she wrote. She's yet to meet the bearded hipster of her
dreams. So far, it's been a lot of old men, guys with poor grammar and
motorcycle enthusiasts.
"The dating isn't looking like the brightest possibility. I only got one dick in my inbox this time."
Right now, she's living by what she calls the vagina rule: "I will only live with someone who's putting it in my vagina or has come out of my vagina."
Welcome back, ladies.
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