Meet Valerie McPherson of Author of Smart Swipe
I am a first generation high-school and college graduate and the first in my family to attend grad school. Education has always been important to me but I have been even more amazed by the influence teachers and other service field individuals had on me growing up. So I knew I wanted to impact people’s lives just like they did.
I went into the field of Sociology where I got to learn so much about our social world and I was intrigued.
While in college I joined several organizations, the most impactful was the Odyssey.
It’s a writing platform with several topics and I wrote on many social issues a lot of which pertained to modern dating.
The opportunity to write a book came along and I knew I had to take it. It would be a chance to showcase a topic I wanted people to read about and learn from, that’s when Smart Swipe came along.
As I experienced college there was one phenomenon that was happening to me and a hundred other students, that was the hookup scene. Sex was always a hush hush type of subject and I had feared being called derogatory names for enjoying sex.
When I started to think about why we think of sex as such a taboo subject I looked back at my sex Ed classes, the media and how people spoke of it. They made sex to be such a bad thing with only consequences attached to it.
I knew that needed to change, and writing this book was going to help me.
It was going up conversation about the college hookup scene and what it means to be sex positive . All I had to do was start the conversation and build off of what’s already out there.
Not at all! When it comes to writing a book I had a lot of writers block. I constantly questioned whether I wanted to put this out there and if I was doing a good job at it. But I was constantly told that my work is good, the message is good and that I am good. So I pushed away all those negative thoughts and started to really want this. Writing a book my last semester of Undergrad was challenging and it definitely took a lot of my time but I knew it will serve a greater purpose. And at the end, it all worked out.
Smart Swipe is a book that explores college hookup culture. It is a sex positive outlook on the culture that tends to be neglected in the media. In my book I share the stories of real college students and their hookup experiences, their emotions and ask them several questions pertaining to the topic. I share my own story and much of it reflects on the use of apps like Tinder or Bumble. Smart Swipe is raw and unapologetic because it’s a conversation that needs to be heard.
Success is when you are positively influencing others. That influence will help them change something about their life whether it’s something physical or something that’s more of a mindset. Success looks different for all but for me , it’s knowing that I’m making an impact on someone. As I always say it can be one, one hundred , one thousand and maybe one million and that would make me feel successful.
