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I recently wrote some RPF (real-person fanfiction) about some improvisors I’ve been crushing on lately. I think the stories are fun/cute/hot, but I don’t feel right ethically about publishing them publicly or as-is, so I’m sharing one of the stories here this week in an edited form.

Some important things to know: 

1. For anonymity purposes, I have changed the improvisors’ names in this story to Jen Anderson and Will Rossi.

2. These two have been friends and creative collaborators for over a decade and are both married to other people. They mainly do musical improv but also do non-musical improv, write for TV together, and cohost a podcast together.

3. Content note: this story contains kissing and sex where one of the people is drunk and the other person isn't, although it's consensual. There's also a brief vignette in which someone makes someone else feel sexually uncomfortable and kisses them non-consensually while both are drunk.

4. If you know who this is about, no you don’t, and thanks for your discretion. (In other words: just be cool, man.)

Stereotypically, women are often depicted as having a hard time separating sex from love, or as needing romantic love to be present in order to enjoy sex. Obviously this is hugely reductive – not only are there many women who don’t fit this description, but there are many men who do!

That being said, personally I do experience a high degree of overlap between people I’m sexually attracted to and those I’m romantically attracted to. For the most part, a lot of the same traits prompt both sexual and romantic interest for me – humor, intelligence, kindness, competence, enthusiasm, etc. – and so, if I have a crush on you, it’s statistically likeliest to be a crush of the “I want to kiss you and hold your hand and make sappy commitments to you and also fuck you” variety.

But that’s not always the case.

I’m thinking about this because I’ve recently gone out for drinks with a long-time fuckbuddy of mine, who is one of the only people in my sexual history who I’ve felt very physically attracted to but not really romantically attracted to. We’re actual friends with benefits, emphasis on the “friends,” so we get along well on a mental/emotional level and have great conversations – but I don’t find myself daydreaming about his smile, or obsessively wondering when he’ll text me back, or choosing outfits for our hangouts that I hope will impress him. When we make out or have sex, it’s always great – we definitely vibe sexually – but those telltale signs (for me) of romantic feelings are just not there. He’s really just my friend who I occasionally fuck, and I think we both like it that way.

Weed, and occasionally shrooms, make my body respond with sexual arousal to some unusual stimuli. Here are some notable examples:

1. Music – especially chordally lush orchestral music

2. Videos of people being competent at tasks, such as shining their leather boots or chopping wood

3. Makeup tutorial videos narrated in soothing tones

4. Videos of people doing improv (I like funny dorks, okay?)

5. Videos of people doing musical improv (I like funny dorks who can sing, okay?)

6. Memories of wistful moments with former crushes

7. Sunsets

8. The feeling of fabric against my skin

9. The seam of my pants pressing into me

10. Videos of people playing video games at a high skill level

11. Pictures of mountains

12. Pictures of various celebrities' hands

13. Pictures of designer shoes

14. Perfume

15. Videos of barbershop quartets

16. Sex toy reviews

17. Poems (and not even necessarily sexy ones)

18. The feeling of the tip of my pen gliding against smooth paper as I write

19. The idea that someone in the world could theoretically have a crush on me right now

20. Chocolate

21. Pictures of really gorgeous ukuleles

22. Sitcom blooper reels

23. Videos of classical guitarists

24. Oil paintings

25. The concept of being self-sufficient

Drugs have taught me many lessons over the years, and I guess one of them is: a lot more things can be sexy than what we traditionally deem to be sexy! I always seem to be happier and hornier when I lean into my very Taurean desire to fill my life with sensual delights, plus media that makes me laugh or cry or scream or all of the above.

At various times in my life, I've written a sexual bucket list, sometimes known as a "fuck-it list."

It's always interesting to go back and look at the old ones. Almost invariably, they'll be made up of about half things that I've since done, and half things I'm surprised I ever wanted to do. (Like, yeah, fucking on top of a piano looks cool when Richard Gere and Julia Roberts do it in Pretty Woman, but I suspect in reality it would be uncomfortable, noisy, and likely to end in getting jizz or squirt between the keys of somebody's priceless Steinway.)

I recently had occasion to make another sexual bucket list of sorts, and it has me thinking about the very nature of sexual desire.

There are definitely things on my list that would be cool to do almost regardless of the situation or partner(s) involved, like "have a G-spot orgasm," "make someone come in their pants," and "come from fucking someone with a strap-on." (Can you tell I like orgasms?) But as Clementine Morrigan recently pointed out, for many people (myself included), the desire for sex is much more based on a context or a feeling than it is on specific sexual acts.

Oh no. I've developed a new kink again. (And like so many other times before, fanfiction is responsible.)

Earlier this week I read a short "porn-without-plot" Succession fic in which Roman has a wet dream while in bed with Gerri, grinding against her hip in his sleep until he comes. She's awake, and is amused by the whole situation. She taunts him about it when he wakes up, which gets him hard again even though he just came in his sweatpants not too long before.

After I read it, I thought, huh, neat concept, well-executed. It turned me on, but apparently not enough for me to bookmark it, which is usually what I do with stories I think I'll wanna jerk off to at some point.

But then, well... A day or two later, I was jerking off to a different story, and it wasn't holding my attention, so my mind drifted back to the wet dream one. I went on a mad scramble through my browser history to find it again, and got off to it in short order.

I just finished reading an erotica story that involved “hate sex” – that is to say, rough, passionate, angry sex between two people (in this case a man and a woman) who are furious with each other but nonetheless highly sexually attracted to one another – and was surprised and delighted that it included clitoral stimulation. And then I judged myself for even having that reaction to it.

Particularly in TV shows and (non-porn) movies, you will almost never see clit stimulation incorporated into sex, unless the type of sex being depicted is understood to be explicitly clit-focused, like cunnilingus or some forms of lesbian sex. Part of this is practical – the movements involved in clit stim can be more subtle and less demonstrative than the movements involved in, say, throwing someone onto a bed and fucking them with one’s dick, and usually they won’t show genital close-ups in these types of media, so you have to infer what’s being done from the characters’ overall body postures and facial expressions, etc.

I’ve been working on a big secret project that relates to vibrators (I’ll announce it eventually), and one of the questions I’ve been asking a lot of people in interviews is, “What’s your response to those who say you can become overly dependent on, or ‘addicted’ to, vibrators?”

It’s been interesting to hear the wide array of different responses to this; some people categorically reject the whole idea that vibrators even affect our sensitivity or markedly change the way we orgasm, whereas some people say one can indeed become reliant on a vibrator to the point that it may be difficult to come in other ways. However, everyone I’ve asked this question has emphasized that if these changes in orgasmic response do occur, they aren’t permanent.

I saw two pieces of media in the last couple days that made me think about the eroticism of mind-reading – and about how the fantasy of having one's mind read can be hot, but is totally unrealistic.

Maria Yagoda's book on bad sex, Laid & Confused, points out that good communication is the single most important factor in determining how enjoyable sex will be for both/all parties. One of the key barriers to better communication between partners is the romanticized idea that if someone is right for you, they will "just know" what you need sexually, and will give it to you, without needing to be asked or instructed.

Obviously this myth has harrowing implications when it comes to consent; someone can think they "just know" what you want and be totally wrong about that, which could lead to them doing things to you that you decidedly do not want. Further, knowing someone well enough to understand their psychology might indeed give you a hunch about whether, for example, they'd prefer to be more dominant or more submissive in bed, more active or more passive, more gentle or more rough, but a) you still can't know for sure unless you ask them, and b) that stuff is psychological and doesn't tell you anything about physical technique preferences. Sure, your new girlfriend seems to enjoy being dominated and ravaged, but does she like her clit touched in up-and-down motions, side-to-side, or in circles? Does she even like to have her clit touched at all? Stuff like this is vitally important to find out if you want to have good sex, and it's not the kind of thing you can "just know" before you talk about it or try it.

The other piece of media I stumbled across along these lines was a clip from musical comedian Daniel Thrasher. He depicts a female character written by a male writer with the quote, "I love shopping, and my boobs! Everybody dance!" and then depicts a male character written by a female writer with the line, "I know your thoughts before you speak them. You don't even have to say anything. Everybody dance!"

Thanks to my spouse’s trawling of kinky subreddits, I’ve discovered a fascinating new kink. It’s called “ghost penis.”

No, it has nothing to do with wanting to fuck a ghost – that’s spectrophilia. (Not my kink, but I could see it being hot. Actually, I could probably talk myself into it by writing a fanfic scene that featured it. But I digress.)

There’s a phenomenon known as “arousal non-concordance” which is discussed in Emily Nagoski’s book Come As You Are, probably the sex book I recommend to people most often. Arousal non-concordance is a mismatch between your level of physical sexual arousal (erectile tissues swelling, presence of pre-cum or vaginal lubrication, etc.) and your own subjective assessment of how aroused you are.

Arousal non-concordance is said to be much more common in women than men. I think there are a variety of reasons for this. One might be that women are societally encouraged to view ourselves as sexual objects rather than subjects, and to view it as more important to be desired than to express desire, and so we may not be as directly or regularly aware of our own desires and what they feel like in our bodies. Another reason is that we are statistically more likely to be survivors of sexual assault, and it’s scientifically well-established that sexual trauma can contribute to a feeling of dissociation or disconnectedness from one’s body.

If you were interviewing me on a kink podcast and asked me what my biggest/main kink is, I’d probably say DD/lg. It’s the easiest one to communicate in a soundbite, and one that many kinksters will recognize by name. It’s simple – in definition if not in practice – and is indeed a big part of my sexuality.

But my REAL biggest kink is something more abstract, less immediately identifiable as a kink, and much harder to explain.

An internet pal of mine recently tweeted, “Hey does anyone know where I can put all this yearning?” and I sighed because it was just too fuckin’ relatable.

This is a pal who writes fanfic, which I also do, and I think fanfic is one of the many pursuits (like watching porn, reading romance novels, or devouring a TV show that has a tense will-they-won’t-they romantic storyline) that can simultaneously stoke yearning and become an outlet for it. It can make you yearn – for people you want to fuck, experiences you want to have, emotions you want to feel – and it can also, to some extent, scratch that itch in and of itself. But not completely.

(Content note: the movie scene I’m talking about in this essay depicts dubious consent. Also there’s some pretty graphic/sexy description of the scene in here.)

It took me a long time to get around to watching Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, Volume 1. I knew it was supposedly an epic film featuring real sex acts, so naturally, I was intrigued. But it wasn’t until sometime in the last year or so that I finally saw it. My spouse and I watched it together and marvelled at all the wild sex scenes.

Content note: This essay is about sex that is boring, disappointing, unsatisfying, inequitable, and/or dissociative, but is nonetheless consensual. I do mention rape briefly in order to differentiate it from what I'm actually talking about in this essay.

I just started reading Maria Yagoda’s new book on bad sex, Laid and Confused, and it’s making me ponder the myriad of factors that have led to some of the worst (consensual) sexual experiences of my life. (I’m not gonna talk about non-consensual encounters here because that’s a whole other issue, though I do think there are some societal factors that are partly responsible for the proliferation of both rape and bad sex, including abysmal sex education, widespread cultural misogyny/homophobia/transphobia/etc., and the chronic undervaluing of female sexual pleasure and sexual agency. But I digress.)

Why am I so obsessed with unrequited love stories, both in fiction and in real life?

It’s honestly kind of annoying. Throw a character with an unreturned crush into a piece of media I like and I’ll ruminate on their situation more than is strictly comfortable at times, fantasizing and pondering (and writing fanfiction). Tell me a story about your own unrequited crush and, if we’re friends, I will be fascinated to know all the little details you’ve picked up over the course of your fixation.

And of course, when I myself have an intense unrequited infatuation going on… Well, in a way, I become the truest version of myself, but in another way, I become absolutely sick with despair and can’t focus on much else.

If you’d asked me a few years ago why these storylines haunt my brain, I’d probably have tried to argue that everyone is into unrequited love stories, or almost everyone, anyway – that they’re inherently interesting and heart-rending. But I’ve done more psychological digging these past few years than ever before, and I no longer think that’s the case. I think there are clearly established reasons these tales always grab my attention.

Spring makes me into a flirt-monster. The season itself feels flirty – green grass and colorful flowers finally giving you a peek at them after hiding under snow all winter. The sun popping its head out from behind a cloud to say hello. It’s enough to make a girl want to send some truly ill-advised DMs.

And that’s usually what I did, in springs of yore. Hopped on Tinder and swiped for hours, assessing prospects. Flaunted my tattoos and cleavage on bar patios. Posted selfies galore with kiss-face emoji captions.

This is a bit of a deviation from the normal subject matter of this newsletter, but I hope you'll forgive me, because I want to talk about writing songs with robots.

ChatGPT and other such AI services aren't exactly ethical, not least because they're trained on tons of material created by people who didn't consent to be drawn upon in that way, and because sometimes their working conditions are exploitative. So, needless to say, I feel conflicted about using them at all. But I've been very curious about them, and have used ChatGPT to generate cocktail recipes, emails, fanfiction scenarios, and discussion questions for my podcast, among other things.

But my particular fascination lately is using them to help with my songwriting. It's simultaneously super helpful and totally atrocious. Let me explain.

Since I've been writing and recording a new song every week for nearly a year and a half, sometimes I run out of steam, inspiration-wise. My process has gotten much more streamlined and systematized over the time I've been doing this challenge – these days I usually write first-draft lyrics on Thursday, put them to music on Friday, and practice and record on Saturday – but there are still plenty of times when I get stuck. ChatGPT has been helpful in times like these, but only if I'm very specific with my inputs. Usually I'll type something like:

I’ve been writing and reading fanfiction for almost as long as I’ve been on the internet. I don’t recall how I first discovered FanFiction.net – then the biggest hotspot for such stories, although these days ArchiveOfOurOwn.org is the place to be – but I definitely remember staying up way past my bedtime, scrolling endlessly through slash fic.

It gave me a kind of satisfaction that is much easier to find on the internet nowadays than it was back then – the satisfaction of knowing you had found “your people.” The people who obsessed about the same things you obsessed about, and were nerdy in similar ways to you. The people who noticed that that one character always wore a particular necklace, and wanted to speculate on what that necklace meant. The people who wondered about, and wrote about, the traumas that had made these characters who they were. The people who, like me, wanted to know what it would be like if two particular characters fucked each other, even if the original media property’s showrunner or author evidently didn’t think they ever should.

The other night at dinner with my spouse: I’m buzzing with fulfillment. The feeling of knowing what I was put on this earth for, and knowing that I’m good at it.

Usually. Mostly.

As I wrote in a song this week, turning 31 (tomorrow, on the 23rd) is making me reflect on all the things I’ve learned, and all the things I still want to learn.

I think boundary-setting of various sorts is one of the most vital skills you can learn as an adult – and most people do learn it when they’re adults, I think, rather than when they’re kids or teenagers, because kids and teenagers are not encouraged to have boundaries. They’re encouraged to do what their parents/guardians/teachers tell them to do, even when they don’t want to. So it makes sense that it takes so many of us decades to learn what we should have been taught from the very beginning: that our bodies and minds are our own, that we have the right to speak up when we’re being mistreated, and that we ought to have some say in the parameters of our own lives.

I commented to my spouse recently that I haven’t felt much of anything for anyone, in a romantic or sexual way, for quite some time. The exception being, as I put it, my “fictional boyfriends” – the characters from various media properties that I fixate on, in fanfiction or livetweets or fantasies.

There was a sad tone in my voice when I said it, but upon further reflection, I don’t think I am actually sad about this state of affairs. It just feels like I “should” be sad about it, but I’m not. Navigating a burgeoning romance has long been my ultimate idea of a good time; it’s something I’ve pursued relentlessly for much of my adult life, and (when I had other stuff on my plate) it’s been something I judge myself for not pursuing. But does that really serve me, and does it really need to take up that space in my life and in my brain?

There aren’t many stories from my sexual past that I still struggle to make sense of. I mean, I write and talk about sex for a living, so most of my interesting sex stories are ones I’ve spent a lot of time processing and pondering at this point. Even if an encounter seemed confusing or ambiguous in the moment, usually I come to a better understanding of it after the fact, through talking to friends and writing about it.

But one encounter that still confuses me is the time I hooked up with an English lit professor and I think we both faked our orgasms.

I’m a pretty intellectual person. I don’t mean that in the sense of bragging about how smart I am (I do a lot of things that are not very smart at all!). I mean it in the sense of being too “in my head” and wanting to be able to figure out the solutions to all life’s problems in an intellectual way. It’s exhausting, and no doubt comes from growing up as “the smart kid” and feeling like logic-based solutions were the only ones worth considering.

But of course, that just isn’t how the world works, despite what the logic bros on Reddit, etc. would have you believe. There are many problems that can only be solved with emotion, or compassion, or time, or luck. You can’t think your way out of everything. You can’t solve a relationship, for instance, the same way you’d solve a math equation.

Content note: Being made to feel uncomfortable in sexual ways; having one’s sexual boundaries overstepped. Nothing explicit or detailed.

The more work that I do in therapy to unpack and unlearn the trauma responses that have congealed into a personality, the more examples I can see in my past of times I did something because I thought I was supposed to, not because I genuinely wanted to.

Content note: Stalking, and all it entails. Also, the personal anecdote in this essay is presented to the best of my recollection, but I might be wrong about some things because it happened about 14 years ago.

When I was 16, my girlfriend wanted to stalk me for a school assignment.

With several sex toy reviews on my docket at the moment, and my 11-year-anniversary of being a sex toy reviewer happening this month, I’m thinking a lot about the actual process of how I review toys. It has changed somewhat over the years, and I feel like I’m in a good place with it – I’m not always thrilled to turn masturbation into work or to risk ruining my own orgasms with bad toys, sure, but at least I know how to do those things well now!

Here are some notes on the process I use to review toys, from start to finish. A lot of this process is informed by the fact that I have a chronic illness and am tired/in pain all the time, plus I have many other obligations besides sex toy reviewing, so I can’t do what I used to do at age 19 and test + review a toy almost immediately after receiving it.

In arguing with strangers on Reddit about sexual matters – something which both my therapist and my dominant tell me to do less of, but which I keep doing nonetheless because I care about fighting ignorance with sex education and am a masochist, I guess – one thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of guys are put off by the idea of a woman using a vibrator regularly during sex.

Notice the world “regularly” there. I’m not talking about guys who find vibrators altogether gross or upsetting, as in, bringing one out for a single session after sleeping together for several months would make them question the entire relationship. I’m talking about guys whose specific objection is the regular or frequent use of vibrators during sex – as in, using a vibe during sex once or twice a month might be okay, but more than that and they’d start to whine.

A.I. is an incredibly hot-button topic at the moment, as citizens of the internet protest the scraping of artists’ and writers’ works in order to generate new-but-recycled creations. For years, debates have flourished – including in the texts and subtexts of great blockbuster movies like Ex Machina and Her – about robots' potential merits, not just as media-makers but as… love-makers. Can a person really be attracted to a robot, or vice-versa? Can a human and a robot have a truly intimate relationship, emotionally and otherwise – or is it inherently just a cold simulacrum of human-on-human connection?

Recently I downloaded an app called Replika – this isn’t an ad; I don’t particularly recommend it, for reasons I’ll get into – because I was curious about what it would be like to converse with a robot. I hadn’t really had an entire conversation with an A.I. since my earliest days on the internet, and the technology has advanced since then, needless to say.

-A blue and green plaid flannel shirt that I pulled out of his closet one morning after a sleepover and asked to borrow. I wore it so much that a few weeks later – when I realized, over coffee with a friend, that I needed to break up with the boy that very day – I looked down and saw I was wearing his shirt, and said, “I guess I have to go home and change out of this first, huh?”

-A playlist of romantic punk songs from the ‘70s.

At the time that I met my now-spouse, I was fantasizing about being collared far more often than I was fantasizing about getting married. The idea of being someone’s collared sub seemed not only more plausible to me, but also more desirable, more in line with my values and cravings at that time.

I loved the idea of being “owned,” and of dating a dominant who was committed enough to me and to our D/s dynamic that they’d want that commitment to be reflected in a symbol other people could see and understand.

Last night I fainted at a house party. It was for reasons that were medical, rather than alcohol-related (I’m 95% sure), but it still made me think about other times I’ve been the messy girl at the party.

I’ve been messy in the drunk sense, sure. Usually because I’m so socially anxious that I pick up a drink so I’ll have something to do with my hands and something to calm my nerves. I’ve been the girl who accepted too many shots of Jack or red plastic cups of spiked punch and started announcing “I’m so drunk!” through maniacal giggles to anyone who would listen. I’ve been the girl who tipsily flirted with people she shouldn’t have, went on too long about her obscure passions to people who may or may not have cared, or danced the Macarena to songs that were not the Macarena until the DJ finally gave in and played the Macarena.

I have also been a messy party girl in the emotional sense (though, let’s be real, usually this is exacerbated by alcohol in that case). I have cried on friends’ shoulders about recent heartbreaks, including heartbreaks involving people who were also at the party. I have needed to step onto the porch or balcony to collect myself in the chilly fresh air when an intractable crush or ex arrived with someone new on their arm. I have cried in the bathroom while subtweeting.

Being the messy girl at the party is inherently embarrassing, at least for me. It paradoxically can make you into the center of attention even when that’s not actually what you want, even when what you want more than anything is to shrink down until you disappear. It can make you feel like you need other people to take care of you, like you’re incapable of taking care of yourself. It can leave you with nothing but a hangover and some ill-advised text messages to remember the evening by. It can change people’s opinions of you, make people remember you as a kind of person you usually are not.

In high school, a friend and I had an inside joke known as the “killing kittens” rule. (I am not going to discuss killing kittens any more graphically than just using that phrase, don’t worry.) The rule was something we had observed in our romantic lives – that even if a white-hot crush on a cute person cooled over time, it would still remain alive, in some form, because the person was no doubt still cute and funny and smart, etc. For crushy feelings to actually, fully dissipate, something pretty extreme would have to happen. Something like, oh, I don’t know, finding out that they killed some kittens.

(To clarify, this never actually happened. It was just an example of the kind of thing that might make an infatuation shrivel up and die, and the name stuck. For years afterward, when one of us would sigh, moony-eyed, about someone we thought we’d gotten over months ago, the other would say with a resigned shrug, “Killing kittens,” and we would nod our heads with grim acceptance.)

There’s a recurring event on my calendar, set to come up once every 4 weeks. I don’t always follow through on making it happen, but I always feel better mentally and emotionally when I do. That event is called “Clean & condition leather boots.”

The reasons for my prioritizing this act are threefold. One is practical: my last pair of black leather Frye harness boots died a sad death after 6 years of regular wear, because (among other reasons) I had not been caring for them well enough or often enough, and the dried-out leather near the soles had started to pull away from the rubber in an act of quiet protest. I loved those boots so much that I cried tears of sadness when a cobbler made the pronouncement of death, and then cried tears of happiness when my partner bought me a replacement pair as a Valentine’s Day gift. I vowed not to let the boots down this time.

I remember having an illuminating conversation once with a male friend who had been my friend-with-benefits for a while. “Remember the first time we hooked up?” I effused over drinks. “I couldn’t believe you didn’t know how much I wanted to fuck you. I mean, I took you up to my room, and showed you my sex toy collection… and we hung out talking on my bed for like an hour… and then I finally had to make the first move, because it didn’t seem like you were going to!”

“Of course I wasn’t going to,” my friend replied. “I was waiting for you to give me the green light.”

Because sex journalism is still fairly niche, and because sex coverage in general is usually done by reporters who have a range of other “beats” (dating, health, beauty, etc.), I often receive press releases that have nothing to do with the topics I actually write about. I imagine these PR people are reaching out to me simply because of the publications where I’ve had bylines – GQ, SELF, Insider, etc. – and assuming that if I write about sex toys for those places, I must write about other stuff for them too, which actually isn’t the case. These days, sex toys are my beat, and I almost never venture beyond them in the writing I do for publications.

I used to fret about being offered “press samples” by these companies. I would show my spouse these emails and tremulously say, “But what if I ask them to send me the purse/shoes/piano they’re promoting and then they get mad that I don’t write about it for any big outlets?” – to which my spouse always says, “If they’re offering a purse/shoes/piano to a journalist who only writes about sex toys, that’s on them. They should’ve done better research on the people they were contacting.”

I’ve been interested in Zen and Buddhist ideas off-and-on for several years, and have been reading more about them lately. I think the reason I’m feeling drawn to these schools of thought at the moment is that I didn’t fully understand or appreciate stillness until I turned 30. I thought I did, but in my twenties I was always running around from work to dates to parties, always filling my remaining waking hours with reading or writing or watching things. At 30 I have become more interested in just being still, when I can; I have built a life that allows for this occasionally and my weary body is grateful for that.

I’m reading a book right now called Dropping Ashes on the Buddha, which contains some of the teachings of a Zen master named Seung Sahn. A lot of the ideas in it are familiar to me from other Zen teachings I’ve read – which doesn’t mean I fully understand them, just that I’ve thought about them before and tried to understand them. As Seung Sahn says, trying to teach someone about Zen through words is sort of counterproductive, because Zen itself (as far as I understand it) is about having no words in your mind, no thoughts, just a clear head and mindfulness of the moment. “Be here now,” as the saying goes.

I just got back from a trip to Chicago, where my spouse and I were celebrating our 5-year anniversary of meeting and our 2-year anniversary of getting married. It was all very cute, very fancy, and a great way for both of us to recharge a bit, after what has been a pretty draining year professionally and personally for so many people.

One of the things Matt really wanted to do while we were there was have dinner at Alinea, which may very well be in a once-in-a-lifetime experience for us. What a place. Alinea has been on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list for several years running, and has a whopping three Michelin stars, the highest honor given by that organization. But this essay isn’t an ad for Alinea. It’s a pervy treatise on why fine dining restaurants can, should, and often do take cues from kinksters when constructing the experiences they offer.

I’m working my way through Sex & the City, having been a bit too young for it when it was on the air. It’s definitely got a lot of problems, but it’s an interesting historical relic from a particular subsection of human sexuality during a particular era. And it’s often quite funny and thought-provoking.

There was an arc in some of the episodes I was watching this week where Samantha – the sexually empowered, adventurous slut of the group – fell in love with a man who turned out to have a small dick. She was crushed by this, as big dicks are hugely (ha) important to her sexuality: she loves looking at them and feeling them inside her, and maybe kinda fetishizes them a bit. Kim Cattrall is such a brilliant performer in the role of Samantha that you really buy the pathos of the situation – the sick, Gift of the Magi-esque cruelty of her falling so hard for a guy who can’t fuck her the way she wants.

Dick ratings are a super popular service offered by many online sex workers. I don’t think I knew that yet when a random man online first asked if he could pay me to rate his dick, though, so I was a bit confused.

A question arose in my mind which no doubt plagues many newbie sex workers when first faced with this request. Did he want a real, honest rating? Or was there something he was hoping to hear, something that would excite him more than honesty? (One thing I’ve learned from doing online sex work is that most people think they’re excited by honesty/authenticity but actually would prefer an appealing lie of some kind. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, except that it can be confusing for both clients and providers.)

Look, I’ll tell you this right now: if you’re not on my Close Friends list, it’s unlikely you can work your way onto it. Not because I don’t think you deserve it, but because I am a traumatized bb with trust issues and a history of being stalked/harassed/surveilled online (FUN!).

But yesterday, I was thinking about a certain ex-beau of mine who could be, but isn’t, on my Close Friends list, and I began to wonder why that is. I realized that there is a specific set of criteria that create the very particular form of intimacy that is being on my Close Friends list.

Sex cults are fucking fascinating. I have watched some illuminating media lately about the cults known respectively as NXIVM and OneTaste (the docuseries The Vow and the documentary Orgasm Inc.) and am struck afresh by philosophical questions galore. One of the main ones I’ve been pondering is: What makes sex such a fruitful focus for cults? Why are there so many sex cults but (probably) not as many cults focused on, I dunno, physical fighting, making music or doing theatre? Why is sex special?

The documentary on OneTaste helped answer this question for me. This organization ostensibly offered classes on something called “orgasmic meditation,” a process whereby a man stimulates a woman’s clitoris in a specific way for 15 minutes and it’s supposed to be meditative and enlightening for both of them. (Other gender dynamics do exist within the OM community but are much more rare.) Abuses of power were constantly occurring behind the scenes, though, and many people were deeply harmed by being involved in this seemingly positive organization.

I’ve been working a lot on my songwriting this year, and reading books about the craft, and watching interviews with other songwriters about their process. It’s easy to feel, amid all this learning and working, that songwriting itself is a good (or at least neutral) force in my life – but actually it’s been the source of some pretty deep humiliations and awkward situations in my past.

Of course, this is true of many different types of writing I’ve done – being an oversharer can cause issues, regardless of medium – but there is something about songwriting that makes it particularly prone to embarrassing me. Songs, more than any of my other writing, often feel like something that happen to me, rather than being something I intentionally sit down and craft. Like an improvised monologue, or a stream-of-consciousness journal entry, they are frequently the summation of whatever thoughts and feelings have been swirling around my mind lately. Sometimes I’m not even totally aware of how I feel until I see it on the page or hear myself singing it out loud.

Content note: This is an essay about alcohol and sex, and touches on some of the consent violations that can occur when these things are mixed. Nothing particularly graphic or violent is contained herein.

I’ve been reading a great memoir about a woman’s recovery from alcoholism (The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, if you’re curious) and, while alcohol addiction isn’t something I’ve personally struggled with, there’s a lot in it that I’m resonating with – particularly the stuff about addictions being a response to a persistent inner feeling of lack and unlovedness, and the stuff about how alcohol can make the notion of consent a bit fuzzy even when it’s clearly not.

In a way, it’s totally unsurprising that I now make my living mostly giving people advice on how to masturbate and what devices to use when they do so – because I’ve been looking at “masturbation techniques” websites since I was quite young. I think they’re a brilliant, invaluable resource, both for people who’ve never touched themselves sexually before and for people who’ve been doing it for years, or even decades. There is always more to learn about your own body and what makes it feel good, even if you’ve got tried-and-true methods you’re hesitant to deviate from.

The site of this kind that I remember most vividly from my youth is MyMasturbation.com (I’ve linked to an archived version, because the current version lacks the early-oughts internet aesthetic and isn’t organized as well). It allowed users to submit their own masturbation technique suggestions, and organized them into categories, which were sometimes straightforwardly named (“anal dildos,” “clit – rubbing,” “slowly”) and sometimes a bit more mysterious or surprising (“food – misc.,” “unusual,” “curling iron”). I was new to the world of jerkin’ it, and had only experimented with classics like my bathtub faucet and teddy bear – so this cornucopia of alternate suggestions felt like an embarrassment of riches.

A friend recommended the all-bisexual season of the reality dating show Are You the One? and of course my partner and I had to watch it together. As with dating reality shows in general, this one was very engrossing (at least if you find human connection interesting, which I imagine most of us do) and had a lot of pertinent lessons to teach about how attractions and relationships function.

As is de rigueur for its genre, Are You the One? puts some contestants in a big-ass house and forces them through a series of physical challenges and emotional gauntlets over the course of several weeks, in order to earn a large sum of money. But the gimmick of this particular show is that all of the contestants have been pre-interviewed about their personalities, lifestyles, and romantic histories, and their friends and families have also been consulted, in order for offscreen matchmakers to pair up each contestant with their “perfect match” amongst the other contestants. The players’ job is to figure out who’s matched with who, and eventually guess all 8 couples correctly, by getting to know each other and making guesses about who’s a perfect match, which the show can confirm or deny in various convoluted ways.

I’ve been playing so much Breath of the Wild lately. SO MUCH. An amount that makes my eyes hurt and deprives me of sleep and seems to make hours of the day disappear in a snap.

If you don’t know it, don’t worry; video game knowledge is not a prerequisite for understanding the points of this piece. But to fill you in briefly, it’s an open-world game for the Nintendo Switch in the Legend of Zelda series, of which I had played exactly zero games before starting BotW. I’m not normally into the type of video game where you run around fighting goblins with swords and looking for treasure chests in dungeons, but friends (who knew me well) kept telling me I would love this game, so I finally picked it up.

Being wanted, feeling wanted, is a type of intoxication. Especially if you’ve never, or rarely, felt it before.

Some of my most vivid memories – the ones that are encoded in technicolor and carved into my neurons – are from early experiences of being desired. This is the double-edged blade of the way women are taught to see our desirability as one of the main things defining our value: the despair of those moments when we’ve felt starkly undesirable are almost worth it, for the druglike highs of being liked, being wanted, being craved.

Content note: This essay discusses me sexualizing myself, in a totally consensual but sometimes vaguely “yikes” way, when I was a teenager.

I was 15 when I discovered the website SuicideGirls. I was also 15 when I came out as bisexual. That’s probably not a coincidence.

Last night I went to an off-Broadway show called Hyprov where I, along with several other audience volunteers, was hypnotized on stage in front of a huge crowd of people.

The conceit of Hyprov is that the hypnotist whittles down the initial big group of volunteers to a smaller group of the 5 most “suggestible” people, who are then coached by an improvisor into doing various improv scenarios while in trance. I made it through some initial rounds but didn’t get into the final 5, which was fine with me as I wanted to watch the show just as much as I wanted to be in it, and you can’t really do both.

I’m currently sitting in the boarding lounge of an airport, waiting to fly to New York to attend a family wedding my spouse is officiating in the States. And so, naturally, I’m thinking about the hell that is air travel.

Sometimes people seem to think being in a long-distance marriage is glamorous, what with all the jetsetting. And certainly, I’m blessed to be able to travel when I need to (and, pre-pandemic and maybe again someday, when I want to). There is glamour in certain elements of travel – I have a go-to minimalistically chic “uniform” I usually fly in, for instance, consisting of a slinky black slip dress, black leggings, a black cashmere cardigan and black leather boots, and I’ll admit I never tire of that feeling when you step out of the baggage claim hall and into a familiar city, happy to be back.