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.

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.

There's a clothing-optional beach in Toronto called Hanlan's Point – actually, it's across the lake, on the Toronto Islands. It's one of only two officially recognized nude beaches in all of Canada, apparently. And somehow, until last week, I had never gone.

Oh, don't worry, I definitely knew about it. I've been invited, on several occasions, to go there for beachside birthday parties and summertime hangs with sex-positive friends. But I had never managed to actually go, and it's for a reason that's kind of embarrassing to admit: I was too nervous. But not about the nudity.

Being naked in public is no big deal to me, to be honest. Sure, it always feels weird for a few seconds when I first take off my clothes – say, when I'm about to get into the heated pool at my local sex club, or when I'm with a group of pals at Pride and we decide to walk around topless in the summer sun – but I quickly acclimate. Nude bodies are just bodies; they're not monstrous, or shocking, or worthy of judgment, as long as they're being displayed in appropriate settings. I've been going to events like all-nude Body Pride workshops and public porn shoots since I was 20, and I'm even more confident about my shape and size now than I was then. It no longer phases me to be naked in public (as long as I've consented to it and so have the people around me, obviously).

No, the thing that troubled me about visiting Hanlan's was much sillier. I was nervous about the travel. See, to get to the Islands, you have to take a ferry boat from a station at the southernmost part of the city. Because of the ways my anxiety manifests, the journey stressed me out on logistical and social levels. How would I know where to go? Would the ticket-takers look at me judgmentally, knowing I planned to strip nude on the other side of the ride? Would people think I was weird for taking the ferry alone, even if I was going to meet friends? How would I figure out when and where to actually get naked? Would people aggressively flirt with me, and if so, how would I fend them off? Did I need to bring a towel, a folding chair, a canister of pepper spray? What would I do if I needed to use the bathroom? And so on and so forth.

“Competency kink” is one of those terms that often makes people’s eyes light up when I mention it because they recognize this concept from their own life. I think many (most? all?) of us are attracted to competency, but there are people for whom competency can make or break an attraction, and I am one of those people.

Be it the local barista whose latte art is legendary, the fast-fingered guitar player busking on a street corner, or the movie star whose emotive eyes light up entire theatres, I can develop deeply intense crushes on people just because they’re so damn good at what they do. I think this is one of the reasons I value competence so highly in myself, too (and am self-critical when I perceive myself to be incompetent as something I am doing): I know that it not only makes me skilled or talented, but to a significant portion of the population, it also makes me hot. Win-win!

Here are 5 people who are all, frankly, attractive anyway, but are made even moreso by the fact that they’re extremely fucking competent. Warning: there is fangirlish gushing ahead.

1) The YouTuber who makes cocktail videos. There are multiple layers to this man’s competency. First, obviously, he knows cocktails: he can rattle off the history of seemingly any drink, and has both the mental and physical skills necessary to create entirely new recipes from his own imagination. He’s great with a shaker, can crack an ice cube into pieces with one strategic tap of a barspoon, and improvises new drinks the way a jazz sax player improvises a solo. But on top of his cocktail wizardry, there’s also his video production competence: his editing is always impeccable, his set is well-dressed, and he brings a telegenic whimsy to every video. If anyone was ever born to make YouTube videos about cocktails, it’s this man.

What do unscrupulous sex toy companies and sexually overconfident men have in common? Well, quite a few things. Both are prone to talking the talk without knowing how to walk the walk (or fuck the fuck). You can spend money or time on/with them in the hopes that sexual pleasure will follow and just end up disappointed. Your friends might say, “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” and you might know they’re right to be cautious but have trouble actually cutting ties. And people and sex toys can both look much prettier in pictures than they do when they’re actually in your bed.

But the key commonality I’m pondering today is this: both sex toy companies and self-important players might assure you that they can definitely get you off – and both might be spectacularly wrong about that.

I am always skeptical of anyone who claims to have a perfect (or very high) success rate when it comes to making people come, whether we’re talking about a Tinder cad or a sex tech corporation. Even setting aside the possibility that some of the people in their history have been faking or lying (and even if you think you know, you can’t really know for certain), centering orgasm to that degree is already sort of a yellow flag. Not everyone needs an orgasm to be satisfied, and IMO the question shouldn’t be “How and when am I gonna make you come?” but rather, “In what ways would you like me to give you pleasure?” For a lot of people, “give me an orgasm” will be on that list, but it’s nice to check.

When a sex toy company hyperfocuses on orgasm in their marketing copy, it makes me think about those PornHub ads that implore you, “Play this cartoon porn game and you’ll come in 40 seconds.” I don’t even want to come in 40 seconds. I want to feel a lot of pleasure and then come whenever it makes sense to come. Likewise, when someone who’s never made me come before tells me, in a DM or a sext or even over drinks, “I’m gonna make you come so hard,” or “I’m gonna make you come so many times,” I always just want to laugh. They don’t even know what’s involved in that, or if they’re physically and mentally capable of doing what it takes. And, again, they are painting a picture of sex that has orgasm as its sole goal, when (I feel like a broken record here) I’d rather have sex where pleasure is the focus.

It’s a bit embarrassing to admit this, as someone who literally makes my living writing about (among other things) the ethics of consent, but I am frequently complicit in my own sexual boundaries being steamrolled. (And yes, content note: this essay will discuss sex that is technically consensual but definitely reluctant.)

This is something I’ve been working on in therapy recently. I had started to notice that there would be many situations in which I didn’t really feel like having sex but nonetheless offered a blowjob or somesuch to whoever I was with, because of a nebulous anxiety I felt throughout my body that seemed to insist this was the only workable solution to what seemed like a very pressing problem. Given that I obviously know I’m well within my rights to say no to sex for any reason at all, this was a bit perplexing to me.

Of course, a history of trauma can make a person generally more prone to behaviors like fawning, freezing and submitting, especially when they’re in situations that are emotionally reminiscent of their trauma(s). But upon digging deeper on this particular issue with my therapist, I discovered that there’s a bit more to it than that. What I learned is that I pre-emptively offer sexual favors to dates because, underneath my seemingly sexually confident exterior, I have such a deep and pervasive sense of shame and worthlessness that I worry these dates wouldn’t like me if not for sex. I’m so afraid of that moment – “Oh, you don’t want to blow me? Well, that’s all I wanted here, so fuck this, I’m leaving” – that I proactively take steps to avoid it, by offering to do things I only sorta want to do. The trauma logic goes: it’s easier (at least in theory) to give head than to be faced with the certainty of my own unlovability.

GIven that I’m actively working through issues like this one in therapy, I’ve realized that I’m not in a good place right now to have casual sex, or even sex with people I’m casually dating, because I simply don’t trust myself to uphold my own boundaries and keep myself safe in that arena right now. I’ve seen how succumbing to these trauma-borne impulses can ultimately just re-traumatize me, and I want to step outside of that behavioral loop for a while so I can hopefully put an end to it.

I took some time off playing The Sims recently, not because I got bored of the endless shenanigans you can pull in that game, but because my computer had started to get too slow to comfortably run it. Passing time with your Sims just isn’t as fun when even the 3x speed-up function moves at a snail’s crawl.

But then I got myself a new computer (for almost entirely non-Sims-related reasons) and re-downloaded the game and all the expansion packs, and it’s been sorta nice to reconnect with the side of myself that can glance at the clock after a hyper-focused Sims session and realize it’s somehow 4:37 a.m. all of a sudden.

My mind often wanders during sex, especially sex with someone I don’t know well and am not all that emotionally intimate with. Usually it wanders to predictable places – do I look okay? am I making the right amount of sounds? are they having fun? – but sometimes it wanders to art instead.

I’m using the word “art” in the broadest sense here, one that includes writing and music alongside visual art. It’s a big, big part of my life, and consumes a lot of my waking hours – either actually making the art or just thinking about making it, which is part of the creation process too. Especially when I’m knee-deep in a particular project, I often walk around in a sort of haze, taking in what’s happening around me but secretly stewing on whatever artistic problem has been needling me. What’s the right line for the end of the second verse of that one song I’m writing? What’s the right angle (so to speak) for the dildo review on my docket? What strange thoughts of mine can spiral into a newsletter? (Hello, I love you, thank you for reading.)

Making art is arguably one of the most erotic things I ever do, depending on how you define “erotic.” Some people say that eroticism is about pleasures of the body, whether those pleasures be having great sex, eating a big slice of cake or wading into the ocean. (Or perhaps all three at once, if you’re lucky.) But I also think there can be something genuinely erotic about the spark of joy and recognition I feel when a piece clicks into place within something I’m working on: the perfect metaphor, the perfect rhyme. It’s a visceral “aha!” moment that feels as intense, as rapturous and exciting, as when a partner stumbles across exactly the right spot on my body and touches me there in exactly the way I need.

I think one of the reasons these moments feel so powerful for me is that they give me a sudden, intense boost of self-esteem. I mean that in the literal sense: esteem for myself, respect for myself. An entire day of moping around, staring at a blank screen and feeling like a washed-up hack can be counteracted in one singular moment, when I have a sudden idea that even I have to admit is brilliant. It helps me remember why I make art in the first place (aside from the obvious: money, survival), and that I am indeed talented enough to “deserve” the money and survival that art-making affords me. (I’ve put “deserve” in quotes because capitalism is fake and everyone deserves to survive, regardless of the work they do or don’t do. Deservingness is a feeling, not a fact.)

For six years, I wrote down every single sexual encounter I ever had in a spreadsheet. It documented data like number of orgasms had by me and my partner(s), number of times I’d previously slept with each partner (to track whether my enjoyment increased after multiple encounters, which it usually does), which sex acts we did and which sex toys we used. As of this year, I’ve stopped keeping track, and it feels good.

I think my initial efforts to chronicle my sex life in this way were borne from desperation and insecurity. After a year-and-a-half-long dry spell in the wake of a long-term relationship ending, I finally started having sex again – sporadically and nervously – and it felt so momentous that I wanted to write it down, so I could look back on each entry and feel proud of myself. At first it was just a list I kept in a notebook, but then I decided to go whole-hog and make it into a digital file I could access from any of my devices. As my eyes swept over each row, my confidence grew, as I could see empirically that I was desired. (It's not that simple, but it felt like it was.)

Of course, because it’s my job to write about my sex life, I quickly came to realize that my spreadsheet was useful to me on a professional level as well. I could glance back at the data to see how often I’d used various sex toys, to revisit certain sexual memories in order to write about them, and to summarize overall trends in my sexual satisfaction (like that fucking in an alley never resulted in orgasm for me but fucking in my own bed, with my own toys, almost always did). I even started packaging each year’s data in a neat little “sextistics” blog post come December, which always filled me with glee to put together because of how nerdy it all was.

Many people in my life expressed confusion about my spreadsheet habit, including some of the people I had sex with. I used to whip out my phone post-bang to make some notes in my file, sometimes explaining to my date in a jokey tone what I was doing. Mostly it was greeted with slightly bewildered amusement, but sometimes people seemed so mystified that I had a hard time imagining why they were even attracted to me at all if they were put off by sexual nerdiness.

Content note: I talk about sexual coercion / pressure in this essay but it’s not the main focus of the piece, and none of the sex I talk about in this essay was non-consensual, just sometimes a bit reluctant.

I’ve long thought that enthusiasm is one of the most important qualities in a sexual partner. As a person who has what the sexologist Emily Nagoski would call “responsive desire,” I often don’t feel much of a pull toward having sex until someone else has conveyed their own desire and gotten the ball rolling. In other words, whereas for some people, desire precedes the process of pursuing and achieving physical arousal, for me it works the opposite way: it’s often only once I’ve become physically aroused (by touching, or kissing, or porn, or erotica, or whatever) that I actually feel any mental or emotional desire to have sex.

Sixth-grade graduation wasn’t a big deal, but felt like one. We were moving on from elementary school to middle school, a demarcation that many institutions don’t even have. We felt so important, at age 12 – like we’d reached the top of the social pyramid at our little school. We were high on the achievement of it, paired with the anxiety about splitting up and going off to middle schools where our entire mental database of social experiences up to that point could mean nothing in the face of new, shifting dynamics.

We didn’t get drunk at the 6th-grade graduation, because, well, we were 12, and it happened during the daytime, supervised by teachers we'd known since we were 4 years old. But the energy crackling between us did have a drunken fizziness to it, that disinhibiting sense of “this could be our last chance” and “will any of this matter tomorrow?”