My wife: Having one of those days where I’m attracted to almost everyone for no discernible reason. Does that ever happen to you?

Me: When I’m ovulating sometimes, yeah

My menstrual cycle has wrought a fuckton of havoc on my life over the years, sometimes making me life-ruiningly depressed and anxious, or causing embarrassing carnage when a menstrual cup leaks in public. But there is one way in which this hormonal rollercoaster has often been fun instead of harrowing, and that’s the horniness I experience when I’m ovulating.

The word “horniness” feels insufficient, because it isn’t strictly sexual by any means. It’s not limited to a desire to get my rocks off – although, let’s be honest, there is a lot of that; my personal record is 20 orgasms over the course of 5 days. (That might not seem too impressive compared to people who are a lot more multi-orgasmic than me, but trust me, anyone who has had sex with me is reading this and going, “Wait, what? How is that possible?!” because under normal circumstances I am a one-and-done gal!)

No, the joys of ovulation (for me) are moreso in the mental and emotional “horniness” it instills – the desire to see and be seen, to flirt and fluster and get flustered, to spread my wings and be a social butterfly, if just for one week of the month.

I’ve kissed people for a lot of reasons in my life. I’ve kissed on a dare, on a date, on a drunken impulse. I’ve kissed to win someone over or win someone back. I’ve kissed to seem cool, to seem hot, to seem up for anything. I’ve kissed to arouse, to tempt, to silence and to mollify. I’ve kissed because it seemed like the right thing to do, or because no other option seemed possible. I’ve kissed because I was lonely, horny, scared, jealous, sad, cold, or delirious.

I have not often kissed purely for pleasure. I should do that more.

My relationship to kissing has always been highly contextual. In high school I thought I “just wasn’t that into it” because the few kisses I’d experienced were awkward, more prone to making me dissociate from anxiety than dissolve into moans. By my early twenties, I’d had a few too many overzealous tongues thrusted down my throat, and wasn’t sure I’d ever learn to like kissing; it took a very patient, sweet man with soft lips and a tongue-tie(!) to convince me that I could actually enjoy making out.

That kind of “kissing chemistry” has been relatively rare in my life. I have it with my now-wife, natch (probably wouldn’t have gotten this far with her if I didn’t!), and there are a handful of people in my dating history who kissed me so deliciously that I missed their lips far longer than I missed them. By and large, though, within the last decade, when I’ve gone on dates with new people, I’ve been more nervous than excited for the kissing bit – because odds are always decent it’ll turn me right off, if we’re not a good fit in that arena. I’ve even gone so far as to set a no-kissing boundary with certain dates, when I just didn’t feel like rolling the dice.

Two memories, one painful, one less so:

A sweaty summer’s night outside my local comedy theatre, golden marquee lights blazing above the crowd of improv stragglers smoking weed on the sidewalk. I’m talking to a teammate of mine who is both funny and sweet, a deadly combination for me. Trembling, I take a deep breath and ask him, “Have you noticed that I’ve been flirting with you?” It’s the first time either of us has mentioned my massive crush on him, despite it being so effervescent that it often overflows into drunken giggles and romantic improv scenes.

But he doesn’t respond with the enthusiasm I was hoping for. There’s a confusing conversational volley where he won’t commit to saying “Yes, I’m interested” or “No, I’m not”; he keeps waffling on what he actually needs to say. When I start to get frustrated and ask him point-blank for clarification, he gestures at my wedding ring – having met my wife when she came to a show a few weeks previous – and he says, “I’m not looking for anything casual.”

Taken aback, I furrow my brow. “I’m not, either,” I say, slowly, because to me, it’s the most obvious thing in the world. I wasn’t even particularly trying to fuck this man; I moreso wanted to take him to shows, laugh with him for hours, stay up until 3 a.m. having deep philosophical conversations with him. None of that is casual to me. I’m not sure where my communication took a wrong fork in the road, but it must have happened somewhere along the line – or else why would he be under such a mistaken impression?

Dear sadistic doms & tops,

You get a bad rap, but I know (and hopefully you also know) that you conjure magic.

When you sink your teeth into my neck, or drag your nails up my thigh, or beat a bruise into me with a wooden paddle, my eyes roll back in my head and I say a silent prayer of gratitude – because you take my thoughts away, and no one could ever give me a better gift than that: a reprieve from myself.

When you tug on my hair at the base of my skull, or land a leather flogger fast and hard on my back, or pour blazing-hot wax on my skin, I let all my focus flow to the places that hurt – and in so doing, I close up shop on the parts of my brain that I hate, the parts concerned with being polite and respectable and good. All that matters is getting through the pain, and so that is all I focus on. And in that beam of blinding light, my brain becomes beautiful, defragmented, free.

The other night, a hot dom touched me for nearly 2 hours, making me gasp, whimper, curse, moan, cry, and (eventually) come. Weirdly enough, they were located about 2,500 miles away from me at the time.

Let me explain… We were using a sex toy made by Lovense, which is (IMO) the best company currently making long-distance-compatible toys. With minimal effort and practically no technological know-how required, you can connect a Lovense toy to the company’s proprietary app on your phone via Bluetooth, and then invite a far-away lover to control the toy’s vibrations from their phone.

If it sounds like I’ve given this sales pitch a few hundred times, well, that’s because I have… but this piece isn’t an ad for Lovense toys (although they are very damn good!). Instead, I’d like to discuss how using this type of toy together can meaningfully deepen your connection with someone, can feel almost like they’re actually in the room with you, and can even help you get better at fucking each other, long before you ever do so IRL.

To be fair, though, I have sort of fucked this person IRL – they fingered me excellently on a park bench on our first date, before flying back to the west coast, leaving me thirsting for more of their touch. But there’s only so much you can glean about what someone likes in bed when you’re both fully clothed, shrouded in darkness, and, well, not in bed. They thoroughly unraveled me in that park, but I knew they could render me an even wetter, more desperate little mess, given half the chance to learn my body and my responses. And as I’ve written here before, there is absolutely nothing hotter to me than feeling someone get better at fucking me in real-time, purely because they’re so motivated to do so.

I have to tell you a story that I think is deeply romantic, although it starts in a place where you wouldn’t think romance could sprout: an email asking me to postpone a podcast recording.

I’ve received a good few of these over the years. Usually the person remains vague: “Something came up.” “Having a bit of a personal emergency.” “Scheduling issues on my end.” Sometimes you’ll get a bit more detail: “Pet died.” “Grandma died.” “Laptop died.”

But this woman – a wonderfully vivacious and intelligent psychotherapist – wrote what is, by far, my favorite podcast postponement request I’ve ever received.

In the time since we’d booked our interview, she explained, she had fallen “madly in new love with a wildland firefighter,” whose work travels were unpredictable and sporadic. A sudden opportunity had come up for her to meet him someplace that weekend, so that they could spend a day or two together – but the flight conflicted with the podcast interview we’d booked.

I have a go-to response when asked, by someone who presumably doesn’t have a vagina, “What does it feel like to get fucked?”

Usually I say, “You have a hole of your own, you know. You could go try it out with your fingers right now, if you’ve got some lube on hand!”

But the truth is, that’s a bit flippant – not only because some people are just curious and don’t actually want to be penetrated (which of course is their prerogative), but also because – for me and for many others – vaginal penetration feels pretty dramatically different from anal penetration. Some elements are similar, both psychologically and physically, but some (at least for me) are distinctly divergent.

So incase you’re curious, today I thought I’d try to distill what it feels like to be vaginally penetrated…

Last week, on a first date with a gorgeous dom, I did something I’ve never done on a first date before. I asked them if they wanted to leave a mark on me.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I am a total slut for hickeys, bruises, and the like, and have requested them many times from various people over the years. But I’ve become pickier about who I let mark me and when. Too many times in my twenties, I’d look in the mirror the day after a mediocre date and see a hickey on my neck, or a handprint on my ass, and feel weird about it. I barely wanted to remember those lackluster encounters the morning after they happened, let alone a week later, when their marks still persisted.

Part of the issue was that those were mostly vanilla boys from Tinder, who didn’t seem to understand the gravity of marking me. Marks were always important to me, even before I realized I was submissive, and so it always felt hollow and sad to carry around a reminder on my body that I’d failed to connect with someone in the ways I’d wanted to. Sure, they had marked my skin, but few were kind enough, interesting enough or brave enough to mark my heart.

“Alright, time to put on the Kate Sloan costume,” I said out loud to my reflection the other night, as I prepared to go on a date with someone who knows me from the internet.

I’ve said this to myself a lot of times over the years, sometimes with delight, sometimes begrudgingly, and sometimes uncertain quite how I felt. But this week, it felt good. Like me. Like home.

An open secret I will share with you newsletter folks: Sloan is not my legal last name and never has been, although I adopted it nearly two decades ago and have consistently been known by that name by most of the people in my personal and professional life alike. I originally changed it for Internet security reasons, as an anxious little 14-year-old making her first Facebook profile – but then friends throughout high school would call me Sloany and K-Slo and sometimes just “Kate Sloan!” shouted in full across the cacophonous lobby of my high school, and the name already felt as much a part of me as my right arm.

So it made sense to keep the name when I started doing sex journalism – not only because I liked it and because it had been mine for years, but also because there is already a famous thinker in the sex-and-gender-writing space who shares my legal name, whose books I incidentally recommend to people all the time. (If you know, you know.) And so I became Kate Sloan pretty much everywhere except tax forms and the doctor’s office. Which, in itself, helped reinforce what I already knew to be true: I felt better, happier, most myself, as Kate Sloan.

There are a lot of things I find harrowing about heterosexual culture, and one of them is the expectation – not universal, certainly, but not uncommon either – that both partners have full access to each other’s phones. The very thought makes me shudder.

I hear about this most often in the context of cheating – either in the aftermath of an actual affair, or in the hypervigilant haze of an imagined affair looming on the horizon. Often, it’s a woman posting about her boyfriend: “I just don’t trust him, so I look through his texts regularly to make sure he’s not cheating on me.” The boyfriend might or might not have agreed to this overstep. Sometimes it’s a woman posting about a boyfriend she doesn’t even have yet: “Is it reasonable for me to require an open-phone policy in my relationships going forward? My last partner cheated on me and I can’t go through that again.”

(To be fair, there are also tons of men who enact this type of surveillance against their girlfriends and wives – to say nothing of the fact that queers can have control issues too – but I don’t hear about those other cases as often. Perhaps it’s because men are seen as more prone to cheating, and so straight women may feel more justified in surveilling their partners; perhaps it’s just that men’s “ownership” and surveillance of their female partners is more normalized in our patriarchy than the inverse.)

I understand the impulse to spy on your partner. Trust me, I do. In my most terrifyingly triggered states, I have narrowly resisted the temptation to flip through partners’ journals, rifle through their nightstands for evidence of betrayal, and (yep) read their texts. The only thing that kept me from doing so, apart from the fear of being caught, was the deep-down knowledge that it would only hurt me and my relationship. These impulses to snoop are understandable, especially for those of us who have lived through partners’ lies, excuses, and affairs, but acting on them can cause way more damage than it heals.

Whenever I mention to a new person that my wife and I are in a polyamorous marriage, I expect some kind of reaction, since our culture has such a fraught relationship to non-monogamy. But despite how many times it’s happened, I’m still always a little thrown when someone’s immediate response is, “Oh, I could NEVER do that!!”

This happens more often than I can possibly express. It’s quite strange. I don’t go around proselytizing about polyamory (anymore, at least), because I believe people should choose whatever relationship structure works best for them. And yet, even when I merely mention my own relationship structure briefly in passing, there is a high likelihood that the person I’m talking to will loudly declare their own unsuitability for non-monogamy. Like… okay. Thanks for sharing, champ!

Anyway, having encountered this so many times, I thought I’d share with you my 5 favorite responses when this happens, ranging from sassy to compassionate, incase they help you navigate the same situation someday…

When you first enter the world of consensual non-monogamy, a maelstrom of emotions often accompanies the change. You might feel confused about the new social rules you’re operating under, nervous about joining a whole new dating scene, and simultaneously thrilled and overwhelmed by the colossal freedom you now face.

And if you have a partner, you might watch them going on their first few dates outside the relationship, and notice yourself feeling jealousy. Or envy. Or both. And that might hurt a hell of a lot.

It was the sex educator Reid Mihalko who first taught me the difference between jealousy and envy. I attended his 8-Armed Octopus of Jealousy workshop at age 25, as a desperate attempt to combat the constant jealousy I faced in my relationship at the time. I sat near the back, shameful tears sliding silently down my face, as I took notes on emotional self-regulation and common triggers. Reid explained that for some people, jealousy was less about being upset that someone else “gets to have” your partner, but rather, it could be about wanting what your partner has, which is slightly different from jealousy: it’s envy.

Jealousy proper was definitely my main issue at that time; I would dissolve into a hysterical heap of self-hatred whenever my then-partner went on a date with someone else, because on some level I wanted him to want me and only me, and my safety felt threatened whenever that proved not to be the case.

Content note: This piece is about love addiction, and also touches on other addictions such as alcoholism and gambling.

Have you ever felt like you needed the love of a specific person in order to survive, and without it, you would die?

It’s sort of a trick question, because we have all been through this experience – in childhood, when the love (or at least care) of our parents or guardians was literally key to our survival. When that loving care is withdrawn or inconsistent, though, we can sometimes carry that pain with us into our adult lives: the pain of needing love so badly you could die, and of fearing that you’re not “worthy” or “good” enough to deserve that love anyway.

What’s hotter to you: sex that’s pre-scheduled, or sex that happens spontaneously?

I think most people would immediately and enthusiastically say the latter. Spontaneous sex is constantly held up as the gold standard of hot sex, and I can understand why: It’s thrilling to imagine that someone’s desire for you could be so intense, so unbridled, that they (consensually) “just gotta have you.” And likewise, it can be delicious to experience that urgent desire yourself – to cast aside the respectability of everyday life and let yourself be swept away.

I myself used to prefer sex of the spontaneous variety, so I get it. But scheduled sex actually has a lot of merit, I’ve learned – and for some people, it might be the solution to a stagnating sex life.

It’s important to note, first of all, that not everyone even experiences spontaneous sexual desire. As sexologist Emily Nagoski points out in her groundbreaking book Come As You Are (which all sexually active adults should read, and I don’t say that lightly), some people’s desire is of the responsive variety, meaning that they don’t randomly get turned on out of the blue – something has to happen to turn them on, whether that’s watching porn, deliberately pondering a hot fantasy, making out with their partner, or whatever else.

(Alternate title: A no-strings-attached cunnilingus hookup with a much older man, part 3 of 3!)

It's interesting, isn't it, that this is the third week in a row that I've written about my RandomActsOfMuffDive encounter, and I still have yet to write about the actual cunnilingus. It's almost like I'm avoiding it... but I promise I will get to it this week!

Where I left off last time, I was cuddled up in a corner booth at a cocktail bar with a man old enough to be my father. He was kissing my neck, but only because I’d asked him to. It was his studious attention to my boundaries and comfort that made me want to see him again: every escalation in our physicality had happened at my explicit request. The vibes were good. I thought about him for much of the following day, and decided I trusted him enough to let him between my legs.

We scheduled a date at his place. I took the subway to his ritzy Manhattan neighborhood, and strolled its sun-dappled streets. The breeze rippled softly against my skin through the silky black nightgown I'd opted to wear to our connilingual rendezvous.

(Alternate title: A no-strings-attached cunnilingus hookup with a much older man, part 2 of 3!)

How uncomfortable do you feel when you don’t know what’s expected of you?

I have a long and storied history with nonreciprocal cunnilingus. My first-ever sexual partner, nearly two decades ago (oof!), was a friend-with-benefits who adored going down on me; she could even reach orgasm from doing it. I suppose, in that sense, the term “nonreciprocal” may not be exactly right: we both enjoyed it, both craved it when we were apart, both got sweaty and glowy and starry-eyed from the pleasure of it. Sex can be magic like that.

As both an act and a fantasy, unreciprocated oral clearly does something for me – I’ve pursued it as both a giver and a receiver at various times in my life. As a socially anxious person who often feels like she’s “doing things wrong,” I think I find it comforting to know exactly what my role is. By contrast, in a “normal,” reciprocal sexual encounter, roles may shift fluidly over the course of a session – and sometimes it stresses me out to try to intuit when those shifts are “supposed to” happen, especially with partners I don’t know very well. (I know, I know, sex is a story we write together and not a script we have to follow – but try telling that to my trauma-brain when I freeze up with anxiety mid-bang!)

For this reason, there’s something soothing about an encounter where I’m either only receiving or only giving – where that is the explicit agreement, the thing we both want. It’s also weirdly nostalgic for me, hearkening back to those early days of my sex life, when the best way to satisfy my then-partner was to lie back and let her lick me.

It makes sense, then, that I’ve been fascinated by the /r/RandomActsOfMuffDive subreddit for at least a year (as regular readers of this newsletter are already aware!). It’s a forum created with the aim of “matching mouths with pussies” – cunnilingus connoisseurs gather there to seek out willing partners for no-strings-attached oral.

Recently a man was seducing me, and he said: "I want to take you to bed, but I also want you to know that even if you only want to cuddle, that'd be lovely. When I woke up today, my only goal was to make sure you had a nice day.”

Naturally, I blushed and giggled... and then giggled some more. "You're doing a thing that I sometimes teach people to do, when I teach sex ed workshops," I told him.

"Oh yeah? What's that?"

Ignoring his hot, borderline-cocky smirk, I continued: "I call it the Chinese finger trap thing. And that's not a vagina joke."

“Eroticism requires separateness. In other words, eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other.” -Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity

“Keep a tender distance, so we’ll both be free. That’s the way it ought to be.” -Stephen Sondheim, ‘Marry Me a Little’

“Maybe some space would be good.” -Together, 2025

Sometimes I get obsessed with a sex-related question and just can’t let it go. I’m sure some of my fellow sex nerds reading this can relate. Human sexuality is just too damn interesting!!

A couple summers ago, one of the big questions I contemplated was: Do stone cis men exist?

If someone is “stone” in the way I’m using it here, that means they get most (or all) of their sexual pleasure from giving pleasure. They prefer not to receive any genital touch during sex, and may even keep their clothes on the whole time while pleasuring a partner. It is an identity most often associated with lesbians; you may have heard the phrase “stone butch” before, arguably the best-known manifestation of stoneness.