I recently finished reading Don’t Call It a Cult, Sarah Berman’s diligently reported book about NXIVM (pronounced like “Nexium”), a cult based in Albany, New York. Founded by pathological liar and arrogant shithead Keith Raniere (and that’s putting it charitably), this group used discourse about “self-actualization” and “self-development” to legitimize the increasingly wacky and abusive classes, rituals, and initiation activities they required entrants to participate in.

But they also used non-consensual hypnosis, which is pretty fucked up.

In her book, Berman gives a little history on neurolinguistic programming (NLP), a method of communication aimed at (among other things) controlling and influencing people through the use of sneaky, low-level hypnotic techniques in conversation, such as mirroring body language and verbally evoking specific emotions.

Some of my hypnokinky friends use NLP in consensually pervy ways, but NLP is also a calling card of almost every abuser I’ve ever heard of in the hypnokink community. It is so synonymous with non-consensual control that many classes on pickup artistry teach NLP techniques. (Anything the pickup artists are into is automatically deeply suspect to me.)

I minored in psychology when I went to journalism school, and while those teachings have been hugely helpful to me in my career (dissecting research studies, understanding psychosexual phenomena, etc.), they’ve perhaps been even more useful to me in my personal life.

I remember sitting in the back of a lecture hall one sleepy morning, having chosen that far-away seat on purpose so the professor wouldn’t see me scrolling through Reddit or Twitter. (Bad girl.) I looked up mid-lecture to find that the instructor was explaining the theory of multiple intelligences. My eyes widened and I switched tabs to my note-taking app, suddenly desperate to absorb what was being taught.

What I didn’t appreciate, at the time, was that this professor had a pretty leftist, intersectional, progressive view of what intelligence is and how it functions. I’d just thought she was lecturing about boring brain stuff (god, if I ever have to hear another goddamn explanation of what the amygdala does…), but I realized in that moment that she was imparting something much more useful: an entirely new way of thinking about a trait I considered of utmost importance.

See, I’d always been one of those snobs who prefers to date smart people, whatever the hell that even means. I even identified as sapiosexual for a time, which I now understand is a weirdly appropriative term that misidentifies an elitist, often classist and racist preference as a sexual orientation. But I’d had reason to question the simplicity of that viewpoint in recent years. For instance, I’d dated a few people in high school who had various combinations of ADD, ADHD, autism, and dyslexia, so I’d come to understand (far too late; mea culpa) that misspelled texts and showing up late to dates did not necessarily mean a person lacked intelligence or respectfulness. But I did not have a concrete, scientific way of thinking about this revelation until that lecture on multiple intelligences.

I had a romantic/sexy dream last night about a local improvisor/comedian who, in real life, has no idea who I am. This happens to me far too often, if I’m honest.

I know it’s boring to hear about other people’s dreams so I’ll be brief. We were seated beside each other at a low-lit dinner party, surrounded by people, but somehow we created a bubble of erotically-charged intimacy between us with a volley of flirty jokes and double entendres. He quirked a handsome eyebrow. I blushed, giggled, and ate my salad. He complimented my outfit, my body, in his hot British accent. I bit my lip and thought about fucking him in the kitchen, the bathroom, the back yard, anywhere. But instead we just sat there and flirted. At the end of the evening, we said good night, and I felt the familiar bidirectional pulse between heart and cunt that is too complex and wonderful to be adequately described by simple words like “excitement” and “arousal” and “infatuation.” I woke up flushed, turned on, and mildly miffed it wasn’t real.

It’s hilariously demisexual of me to have had essentially a sex dream that contained no sex, just conversation. But in truth, I think flirting often turns me on more than dirty talk, and sometimes even more than sexual touch, depending on whose touch it is. Flirting is a tease; it’s sexy because of what could be, not what is.

It (often) requires social finesse and fluidity, a form of intelligence I’ve always found impressive and wished came more easily to me. It (often) requires boldness, the ability to figure out what risks are appropriate to take and the wherewithal to take them. It (often) requires a split-second assessment of what the person you’re flirting with is likeliest to respond to, and what will get their panties wet versus make them get up and leave. The more I think about it, the more I suspect good flirting (the kind I consider good, anyway, which isn’t universal) is hot to me primarily because it’s an exercise in cleverness, confidence, and mastery of someone else’s mind.

The other night I was watching Bo Burnham’s new Netflix comedy special Inside with my spouse (highly highly highly recommend) when I suddenly shouted, “I’M SO DEMI FOR BO.” My spouse laughed because they knew exactly what that meant.

Here’s what it meant: I’m demisexual, meaning I don’t develop sexual attractions for people until and unless I have an emotional connection with them – but due to the paradoxical, parasocial nature of the internet, sometimes wires get crossed in my brain and I feel like I have an emotional connection to someone I have not, in fact, ever spoken to or even been in the same room as.

This is complicated because, being an online creator myself, I know for a fact that when people think they know you because they know your internet persona, they are usually wrong. It doesn’t matter how open you think someone is being online – there are always parts of them you don’t see. And that’s actually a good thing. As Bo points out several different ways in his special, the internet can be an addictive whirlpool of validation blended with devastation. I used to give nearly my whole self to the internet, but I don’t anymore. Some things really are too vulnerable, too personal to share, or just none of any strangers’ goddamn business. That’s valid as hell.

So the Bo I know is only a fraction of the real him. That’s how it is, and how it has to be. And yet, because I’ve been watching videos of him since I was about 17 years old, the demisexual part of my brain is like, “Hey, we know that guy!” which inevitably leads to a feeling of “Hey, we’re attracted to that guy!” which is when I take stock of the inner anguish of an unrequitable crush and yell mournfully at the TV, “I’M SO DEMI FOR BO.”

Content notes: discussions ofcuckolding porn, “cheating,” blowjobs/deep-throating/face-fucking, incest roleplay

Last night I bolted awake from some unsettling, half-remembered dream, and couldn’t get back to sleep again, so I tried watching some porn. Hey, why not?

In my hazy state, a lot of my normal “go-to’s” weren’t quite doing it for me. I was a few searches in when I happened upon a video by an amateur performer named DickForLily, entitled “business partner's wife sucks my cock while her husband plays racing.”

I’m writing a book for Laurence King Publishing right now called 200 Words to Help You Talk About Gender & Sexuality. It contains definitions of 200 words, ranging from “heterosexual” to “demigirl” to “polyamory” and beyond. Although the finished manuscript’s word count will total only 20,000 (100 words for each of the 200 definitions therein), it has proven to be an absurdly huge undertaking. How do you define concepts that make up people’s identities, communities, worldviews? How do you describe, in universalizable and comprehensible terms, what makes someone [insert marginalized identity here]?

The answer to these questions, mainly, is research. When writing about an identity I don’t hold myself, or a phenomenon I haven’t experienced firsthand, I’ve been diving into the scientific studies and personal essays and intimate blog posts where people discuss the ideas I am defining. I’ve been looking for key themes, motifs that arise again and again, and then condensing them into one small paragraph. It is not easy to do. It is weighty work, and I am taking it very seriously. My spouse Matt, who is queer and nonbinary, reads through my new chapters at the end of every work day and critiques the most minute of word choices, suggests additions or subtractions, offers alternate perspectives and resources to seek out. I make diligent notes, dive back into my research, and write some more.

There have been some days lately when I’ve intentionally chosen words I think will be easy to define, words with fairly straightforward definitions, like “gay” or “tucking” or “virgin.” It turns out that even writing these seemingly basic definitions is not as simple as it seems, especially since I’m trying to include a bit about the history of each word in its definition and, in many cases, an acknowledgment of the ways each term or concept has been critiqued or rejected by certain populations.

But there are also days when I think, “Hey, I have some spare mental energy today. Let’s do a hard one.” Yesterday was one such day. Yesterday I decided to try to define the word “gender.”

Recently my friend Brent asked me, on a Patreon bonus episode of our podcast Question Box, “What’s an unusual word or phrase you’ve typed into a porn site search bar?” I knew the answer immediately, because I’d searched something odd pretty recently: “typewriter.”

I was (and am) having a bit of a moment with regards to typewriters. I’d seen the documentary California Typewriter, which had sold me on the idea that a vintage manual clunker could tune up my creative process in significant ways. I’d instructed my finsub to buy me a bubblegum-pink Brother Deluxe 220 on eBay. I’d watched several ASMR-esque videos on YouTube of typewriter dealers clacking away on their wares to prove the keys still struck true.

And then, of course, because I’m a perv and I wonder about the sexual implications of just about any new idea I encounter, I searched “typewriter” on PornHub.

There wasn’t much to be found. One of the two results was utterly unrelated, and the other involved a woman being “stuck in a typewriter” although what she was actually stuck in was a washing machine (not sure how one could mix those two things up but okay). That’s why today I’m gonna write a little typewriter porn for you. ‘Cause why the hell not. I’ll include some clicky-clacky eye candy, too.

I’m reading the excellent book Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality by Hanne Blank, and have arrived at the chapter about sex. Hallelujah.

One of the interesting lessons from this section of the book is that when the female orgasm went mainstream – i.e. when “marriage manuals” started instructing men to give a shit about more than just their own pleasure – the goal-of-all-goals immediately became simultaneous orgasm during penetrative sex. Because of course it did.

Blank notes in one section that this type of orgasm was euphemistically referred to as “true marriage” – as if no marriage could be legitimate, in the eyes of the church nor the eyes of society, if this achievement was not accomplished. Sure, yeah, that makes sense: assign a near-impossible task in an area of life where most people at the time know next-to-nothing, and give them only obliquely coded instructional books to guide them. Cool society ya got there.

While I’m glad female orgasms were acknowledged and semi-prioritized (albeit not enough and millennia too late), it seems ridiculous that “during PIV and simultaneously with one’s partner” was held up as the gold standard for women’s climaxes, considering that even today – when we have the benefit of information about the clitoris, countless sex position guides, and access to vibrators – achieving simultaneous orgasm is difficult. I mean, how many people do you know (who have PIV sex at least semi-regularly) who’ve ever even achieved it?

Hi friends! Apologies for the lack of a letter on Thursday, the day these usually go out. I was frantically packing 3 suitcases (!) for my return to Toronto after 6 months of staying in New York with my spouse.

I hope to get back to more substantive writing here soon, but for this week I thought I would share an example of an actual writing assignment that my spouse/dominant tasked me with this week. It’s not that I think it’s a particularly great piece of writing or anything – it’s not – but I do think it’s potentially instructive for other kinky couples, especially long-distance ones.

The assignment was as follows: “Pick 5-7 things (media, sex things, date ideas) you think we should do together over the phone once we’re apart and write up to 100 words about each of them.” The implication – not spoken or written, but known to both of us, I think – was that this task was assigned to me as a way of bridging the gap between being physically together and being far apart again. It’s always a difficult transition period, made all the more so in some ways when our time together was long enough that it felt like we were actually living together (and we essentially were).

Below is what I wrote; I hope this perhaps inspires you to think about difficulties you face in your relationship and the kinky-yet-intimate writing assignments that could potentially ease them in some way, if you’re inclined toward that kind of thing.

I often feel that kink is a mindset, perhaps even more than it’s an activity or an interest.

Let me explain. Once the “thought technology” of kink infects your brain, if you’re a certain type of nerd, you’ll start seeing it everywhere. I watch stand-up comedians and think about how they’re “topping” their audience for laughs, optimizing each joke to squeeze out maximal reactions, like a tickling top testing their tied-down partner’s limits with a feather duster. I watch politicians give speeches and note their verbal rhythms, perfectly attuned to how the human brain will hear and feel their words, like a masterful emotional sadism top. I watch couples flirting at restaurants or in parks and pick up on body language that spells out “dom” or “sub” or, occasionally, “closeted foot fetishist.”

Sometimes this paradigm is a way for me to avoid uncomfortable feelings – for instance, when watching a casually abusive romantic relationship in an old movie, I’ll sometimes assume/pretend the couple in question is actually in a D/s dynamic, if I’m just not feeling up to mentally processing the actual abuse on screen. (As a survivor of emotional abuse myself, sometimes I’m just like… nah.) I feel similarly about the Daniel Bedingfield song “All Your Attention.”

One of the oddest sexual attractions of my life occurred in a Value Village thrift store when I was 15.

I was perusing the aisles, scouting out cute vintage items, as I did on a near-weekly basis at that point. I looked at cowboy boots, silk scarves, cotton dresses. Vinyl records, cracked homewares, tattered paperbacks. Nothing in particular caught my eye.

Content note: This essay contains discussions of sexism in medicine, as well as (briefly) graphic descriptions of painful rough sex in porn that may or may not be fully consensual.

As I was lying here holed up in bed this morning for the 3rd day in a row with excruciating pain radiating through my neck, shoulders, arms, hands, hips, knees, and ankles, I stumbled across this article about a new study which found that women’s pain is not taken as seriously as men’s.

The article notes that during the study, “when male and female patients expressed the same amount of pain, observers viewed female patients' pain as less intense and more likely to benefit from psychotherapy versus medication as compared to men's pain, exposing a significant patient gender bias that could lead to disparities in treatments.” As I read this, I rolled my eyes, laughed, and thought, “YA THINK???”

Sometimes when I’m telling people about my first book, 101 Kinky Things Even You Can Do (which is coming out in October and which you can preorder now!), they ask, “Did you pitch that idea, or did the publisher ask you to write a book along those lines?” The truth is, it’s kind of neither. Or maybe both.

The commissioning editor at Laurence King Publishing asked if I’d like to have a phone meeting about possibly writing a sex book for them. I didn’t really know what kinds of ideas she would go for, in part because she didn’t really know; LKP had never published a sex book before. I prepared a few ideas before our call, and hoped for the best.

When I told her the ideas I had, none of them were quite right, but as she told me about the kinds of projects she’d worked on for LKP, these words jumped into my brain: “101 unusual kinks & fetishes.” I spoke them aloud almost as if they had been foisted on me from some superconscious entity beyond our human realm of comprehension, and the editor said, “YES! Something like that!”

Several back-and-forths later, the idea had been transformed into something more basic (and more marketable): 101 kinky things even you can do. (The “you” there is implied to be a beginner to kink, or perhaps a curious vanilla person – although it’s also intentionally open-ended.) I signed the contract, and just like that, I’d started working on an introductory kink book – something I’d never set out to do, or even imagined I would ever do.

Hi folks! In early 2020, the editor-in-chief of a major conservative Canadian newspaper reached out to me to say he admired my work and that his paper was trying to bring in more young readers, so he was wondering if I’d like to start writing a sex column for them. I was confused – it’s a seriously conservative publication! – but readily agreed to write the first column he suggested I write, which was about what to do when your partner discloses they have a spanking kink. However, after I had already written and filed it, I found out that said editor-in-chief had left his position, and I got bounced around between a bunch of different editors, all of whom must not have shared his belief that this right-wing newspaper needed a sex column. So, instead, I’ll share it with you all today. It was, to say the least, a fun challenge trying to condense all the crucial 101-level info about this kink into a short print column, especially knowing that many of the folks reading it could be anti-kink (or, for that matter, homophobic or misogynistic). Yikes. Hope you enjoy!

Has your partner expressed an interest in being spanked? While this kink might seem unusual, it’s actually one of the more common ones: a 2015 study found that 33.1% of Canadians have fantasized about spanking or whipping someone for sexual pleasure, while 32.6% have fantasized about being spanked or whipped. So there’s a 1-in-3 chance anyone you meet could have this proclivity – and your partner might well be one of them. Exciting!

Incase you missed the memo on kink, here’s a primer: while a lot of pursuits that fall under the BDSM umbrella (bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, sadism, and masochism) may appear scary from the outside, they can also be (and should always be) 100% consensual. Just as non-consensual sex is rape, non-consensual BDSM is abuse – but that doesn’t mean that the enthusiastically-desired version of either activity is inherently wrong or harmful. Sexual masochism, among other fetishes, was once widely considered a mental disorder – but so was homosexuality, for instance, and we now know it’s a perfectly valid sexual orientation.

Content note: This essay contains discussions of ruined orgasms, CBT (cock and ball torture), chastity, and D/s. Also, if you’re wondering about why I’m still using Substack when Substack was outed as being pretty shitty recently, there’s a note at the end explaining the situation.

My partner and I have been watching a lot of Velvet Veronica videos lately. If you haven’t heard of her, she’s a Canadian porn performer/producer who specializes in soft femdom, mostly manifesting as controlling her “pet” by controlling his dick. Handjobs, edging, chastity, orgasm denial… She’s all about taking ownership of his cock as a way of tormenting him. And he loves it.

One of her favorite things to do is ruin her partner’s orgasms – and, to be fair, he also seems to enjoy this quite a bit. If you don’t know, to ruin someone’s orgasm is to take away stimulation at a crucial moment, when the orgasm itself has already been triggered and can’t be stopped. This results in a phenomenon that looks like a normal orgasm from the outside, but is experienced by its recipient as being weak, unsatisfying, or practically nonexistent.

I’m being interviewed later today by a journalist about an erotic massage I received three and a half years ago. That same erotic massage was also once reported on (badly, I might add) by The Sun.

Thinking about these two weird facts, it’s hard not to arrive at the conclusion that female pleasure – and particularly, female pleasure that has been actively pursued by its recipient – is still stigmatized and still somehow not as common as it could or should be, despite the prevalence of theatrical female orgasms in mainstream porn and even some mainstream movies and TV shows. (“Theatrical” does not equal bad or unethical or worthy of shaming, by the way, and some of those orgasms are real. But the point still stands.) It is still considered remarkable that I paid some people to touch my bits and get me off – so remarkable that a journalist reached out to me to ask me about it literally years later. Can you even imagine a cis man’s erotic massage being spotlighted and marvelled upon in this way?

On the other hand, though, there are men’s rights advocates and other “manosphere”-dwellers who would argue that this evidence suggests the opposite of what I’m saying: that male pleasure is seen as unimportant, while female pleasure is worth revering, talking about, writing step-by-step guides about, and dissecting in an article years after the fact. That’s a fair point too. I actually think we’re both right, in some ways: male pleasure, including male masturbation, orgasm, and patronage of sex workers, is taken as par for the course, as natural and normal as the progression of the seasons, whereas female pleasure is simultaneously marginalized and pedestalized. There are similar-but-not-identical phenomena surrounding the pleasure of anyone who’s not a cis man, I think, but of course I’m a cis woman so I can only really draw on those experiences when discussing these issues.

The phrase “how to make her cum” brings up 1.3 million results on Google; “how to make him cum,” only 1.1 million. (Apologies to my nonbinary friends; “how to make them cum” brings up only 191,000 results. *womp womp*) A 2017 study found that women’s orgasms bolster their male partners’ masculinity and self-esteem, especially for men with “high masculine gender role stress.” The study authors suggest this means that the “focus on women’s orgasms, though ostensibly for women, may actually serve men” and that “women’s orgasms do function—at least in part—as a masculinity achievement for men.” Hmm.

Yesterday I had a conversation with my therapist about structural dissociation, and “parts work,” and integrating different aspects of one’s personality into a cohesive whole. As I understand it, these types of theories are controversial in the psychology world (but what theory isn’t, frankly?), perhaps because of their passing resemblance to debunked Freudian models of the split self. But that doesn’t mean they’re not useful, if just as a metaphor to help you understand your own brain.

As I was pondering this in the bath after my therapy session, I wondered if I would ever find a psychological model that neatly explained all my issues and experiences, like the twist at the end of a mystery novel: Ohhh. Of course. But the more that I do therapy and learn about how brains work, the less certain I am that any theory of the mind can universally make sense of human thoughts, fears, traumas, and experiences. Our psyches are just too tangled and constructed for there to exist some primordial backend explanation that covers all the bases and sheds all the light.

But my desire for an omni-sensical Answer To It All persists nonetheless. And it feels very much like my belief in a soulmate, a perfect match, The One.

This, too, is something I’ve had to dissect with therapists before. Every time I started dating someone (or, occasionally, just met someone and wished I was dating them) who struck me as deeply perfect for me, I started whipping up elaborate romantic fantasies about our idealized future together. Everything clicked into place: bleep bloop, engage soulmate mode! But then, inevitably, each of these people would eventually disappoint me, or betray me, or break up with me, or just start to bore me, and I was forced to re-draft my entire imagined future in my mind. Often this new future looked bleaker and wearier than what I’d craved before, which contributed to the crushing grief that accompanied these relational tribulations. It was as if I’d lost the key to a very important door and didn’t know how I’d ever open it. What was behind the door? Eternal happiness, I suppose, or the false promise of it.

My friend is in a new-ish relationship, and I asked him how it’s going. “It’s going great,” he said. “We have really good conversations.”

This, as far as I’m concerned, is one of the best litmus tests of a relationship’s long-term potential, and ability to make you happy now and in the future. Sure, there are other things that matter – do they treat you with respect? make you laugh? make you come? – but conversations are the way we typically spend so much of our time in any kind of relationship, so it’s a huge deal when they’re good.

I have a healthy respect for non-awkward silence – which definitely exists, despite the protestations of people who are terrified of “dead air” – but sometimes silence can signal a lack of anything to say. The death knell of one of my longest-term relationships was the realization that I didn’t really want to talk to my partner anymore. I no longer got excited to share good news with him, or ask his opinion on a recent movie, or discuss philosophical quandaries into the wee hours. For the last few months of our relationship, most of the activities we did together were non-conversational – and by that, I don’t mean that we were having tons of sex. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Bad conversations are also usually the centerpieces of bad dates for me. In my Tinder years, I’d often rush to the sex part just to get through the horrifically awkward “date” part. If I could go back and do it all over again, I like to think I’d adhere to higher standards – i.e. believing that bad conversations are a perfectly valid reason to say, “Well, I’m gonna head out,” and go home and masturbate to The Office fanfiction instead of having lacklustre sex with a boring bro just so I don’t have to talk to him anymore – but who the hell knows. Craft beer and social anxiety are not a great combination as far as making good decisions goes.

1. My ex sent me a message out of the blue last week. Messages from exes are always surprising to me even if we have continued to correspond semi-regularly post-breakup. He was just saying hello and that he was glad to see I’d been doing well (became a wife, becoming an author) but some of my friends seemed to think he had an ulterior motive. As the conversation progressed slowly and asynchronously, the way digital missives often seem to in the globally traumatic coronavirus era, I’d report to my friends what he was saying and they’d ask “When is he going to get to the point?” Presumably they thought he’d eventually admit to wanting me back, or ask me on a Zoom date, or at least inquire about whether I’m still non-monogamous. But he didn’t. The conversation simply fizzled, as they do. Having known this person briefly but intensely in the summer of 2016, I figured all along that he was truly just reaching out to say hi. This is a lonely time; people are doing lonely things. I don’t think it’s so odd that he was reaching back to an old connection in this age when making new connections is so hard. I might not miss him, exactly, but I miss trekking across the city for a date, hanging out in diners, smiling moonily at someone cute in a public place without our masks on. I don’t know if my ex really missed me so much as the naïve stretch of time we spent together, before everyone knew the definitions of words like “pandemic” and “superspreader” and “N95.”

2. I am writing an article about the A-spot today for a publication and am once again thinking about Dr. Chua Chee Ann. He’s the Malaysian gynecologist who “discovered” the A-spot. He suggested his female clients stimulate their own A-spots before sex with their husbands, which he taught them how to do in his office, since those husbands were not providing enough (or any) foreplay. Doing so, he said, would help with arousal and lubrication, making sex easier and more pleasurable. I think the work he did was admirable, and it has definitely helped many people, but I still find it odd that a cis man “found” a pleasurable spot within these cis women’s bodies and suggested they use that spot to circumvent their husbands’ sexual incompetence, rather than to pursue their own independent pleasure. I know he’s a gynecologist treating people who perceive their sexual relationships to be dysfunctional so he can’t very well say “Here’s a long dildo and some information about your erogenous zones so you can stop fucking your intolerable husband until he figures out his pleasure isn’t the sole point of sex,” but come on, dude. If these women’s best-ever sexual experiences were in their gyno’s office and not their marital bed, that might be a cause for concern. Maybe you should be teaching the husbands this stuff, too.

3. Yesterday I finished reading the excellent novel The Humans by Matt Haig. It’s about an alien who gets sent to Earth to go undercover as a human for nefarious reasons, and Haig says he thought of the idea because he went through a period of frequent panic attacks that made the world seem terrifying, unnavigable, alien. There is a scene in the book where this extraterrestrial-in-a-human’s-body has sex for the first time, and is enthralled. “I wondered why [humans] weren’t prouder of it. Of this magic,” he muses. “I wondered why, if they had to have flags, why they didn’t just opt for one with a picture of sex.” It made me think about one of the central tensions in the field of sexuality, the tug-of-war between boundless pleasure and deep shame. Much has been written about the function of sexual shame in our society, and how it ultimately serves as a way to control people, especially women and queer people and people of color. We put up barriers of shame, one after another, so that even if you work through the one that says you should be ashamed just to have sex, you have more messages to contend with that say you should be ashamed of the way you have sex, or the frequency of the sex you have, or the desires and fantasies you entertain. I think Matt Haig’s alien is onto something when he describes sex as “a physical and psychological merging that conjured a kind of inner light, a bio-emotional phosphorescence, that was overwhelming in its gorgeousness,” and says we should put it on a flag. Although maybe it should be more of an abstract representation, since, y’know, they fly those things outside schools sometimes.

One of the best things about Valentine’s Day is its color palette. There, I said it.

When I was younger and studied fashion magazines on the regular, I had certain ideas about what colors could and could not be paired together. Most notably, I avoided wearing blue with green, brown with black – and pink with red. These just seemed like incontrovertible fashion rules to me. As a personal style nerd attending an arts high school, honestly I could’ve worn way wackier stuff than I did and gotten away with it just fine, but I was still nervous to violate certain norms for whatever reason.