There is a document in my Notes app right now entitled “Porn + things to do.” It is exactly what it sounds like.

Sometimes at night lately, after Matt and I have watched an old Cary Grant movie or caught up on Stephen Colbert or laughed our asses off at a Zoom improv show, they’ve been assigning me the following task: pick 3-5 porn scenes for us to watch together, and make a list of 3-5 sex/kink activities I’d be open to doing afterward.

This borrows from the concept of a “palette of permission,” coined by kink educator Sinclair Sexsmith, which has been enormously influential to how I think about consent. There are always whiny people on the internet complaining that “consent culture” is annoying because you have to explicitly, verbally ask permission for each individual sexual activity you try to do nowadays. But I just don’t think that’s most people’s experience, or expectation, of consent. There are ways to be clear without being painfully explicit, there are ways to check in without stopping altogether, there are ways to pre-plan what you want to do together without it feeling like a checklist on a clipboard at a board meeting. Having a palette of permission is one such way.

There are some things that come up on my lists a lot – oral, dildos, impact play – because I’m almost always up for them. And there are also things that change from day to day, odder things I crave only at particular times, like financial domination, scratching, or pressure-wave clitoral stimulators. It’s nice to be able to reflect, each evening, on what my body is telling me it wants. Matt doesn’t have to do all the things on the list, but the list is a palette of shades they can choose from when they’re painting a picture for us both to enjoy.

The last big event I went to before coronavirus/quarantine/lockdown was a rock show at the Danforth Music Hall. It’s a big old creaky venue in the neighborhood where I grew up. My brother’s band was opening for a group called the Beaches there, and my whole family had tickets.

I had slept over at my parents’ house the night before, to spend time with them and to make transport easier. As was often the case, I had brought a couple of sex toys with me for the visit, because I have phone sex with my partner Matt most nights and usually they tell me which toys they’d like me to have at the ready. For that particular stay, one of the toys I had brought was the Carter dildo by New York Toy Collective. Mine is bright pink and blue swirled together; it had been given to me by Matt a couple weeks earlier as a Valentine’s Day present.

The dildo was in my large leather tote as we lined up to get into the show, but I didn’t think anything of it – that tote also contained the other trappings of my typical overnight trips, like a toothbrush and a weed vape and a bottle of my antidepressants. Even when we got close to the front of the line and I saw that the venue’s bouncers were searching everyone’s bags, it didn’t occur to me that any kerfuffle would occur. There was nothing illegal in there, after all. (Marijuana is legalized in Canada.)

I got to the front. A big, burly guy wearing an official-looking security lanyard asked to see inside my bag, so I unzipped it for him, while continuing to chitchat idly with my mom, whose bag was being examined by the next guy over.

Hello, friends. Seeing the incredible Amanda Gorman perform at the inauguration yesterday made me ache to write and perform poetry, something I used to do pretty often in high school. My skills are rusty AF but I wrote this today about the ways that Trump triggers me (in the literal, psychological sense, not the “own the libs” sense) as a survivor of childhood emotional abuse. He’s a super triggering guy; it is normal and okay if you found him unusually upsetting for a president – or even unusually upsetting for a despot – and it is normal and okay if you’re celebrating Joe’s win partly because it means you don’t have to walk around feeling triggered all the time anymore. (Content note for what’s to come: mentions of emotional abuse and yelling.)

it feels surreal to breathe again

in the absence of the angry men

This week, to distract myself from the lethal antics of the president, I’ve been playing a lot of the card game called… President.

Despite not really identifying as a “gamer” per se, for years I’ve played games on my phone when my anxiety levels are spiking – which, as I’m sure you can imagine, has been the case for pretty much all of 2021 thus far. (If that’s you too, I’m sorry, friend!) Usually I go with Scrabble or Solitaire, but lately I’ve been especially drawn to President.

It’s a card game where the goal is to get rid of all your cards, which (as with many such games) you’re only allowed to do in specific ways at specific times. Read the rules, if you’re curious. But the most important, and most characteristic, quality of this game is that whoever wins the round is dubbed the President, and whoever loses is dubbed the Asshole, and when the next round begins, the Asshole has to give the President their two highest cards, and the President can give the Asshole any two cards from their hand. Since high cards are useful in this game, what results is a situation where a person can win the first round and then be hyper-advantaged in the next round, which leads to them winning again, which leads to them being advantaged again, and so on and so forth. It’s easy to see why one of this game’s alternate titles is “Capitalism”; it could just as easily have been called “Privilege,” or “Generational Wealth,” or, uhh, “Donald Trump.”

I have fond-yet-weird memories of this game because, for a period of time that probably only lasted a few weeks but felt like several months to me, it was the go-to pastime of the “popular kids” I hung out with toward the end of elementary school. I don’t know where they had learned it; we were all about 12 years old.

Happy new year, y’all. It’s gonna be a weird one.

In the tradition of Gala Darling, one of my favorite whimsical fashion writers, who used to write wonderful blog posts about New Year’s Eve outfits and accessories, here are some outfits I’d love to be wearing tonight, in an alternate dimension where we could actually go out and do things.

When you Google the phrase “sexiest Christmas song,” you find thousands of people opining on this subject, often with very good takes. I think you’d be hard-pressed to argue against, for example, the indisputable sexiness of Eartha Kitt’s “Santa Baby” or Otis Redding’s “Merry Christmas Baby.”

But I have a different fave in this category which I’ll tell you about today: “That’s What I Want For Christmas” by SHeDAISY.

I first discovered SheDaisy (sorry, can’t bring myself to capitalize their name the stylized way they want me to, so the one above is the only one they’re getting) because my mom brought home their Christmas album Brand New Year from work. She was an entertainment reporter at the time, and CDs would often land on her desk that she thought I’d enjoy; this is how I discovered many of my favorite bands and artists around age 8–10. I didn’t know I’d fall in love with a holiday album put out by a trio of lady country singers from Utah… but then, falling in love is so often a surprise.

The whole album is fantastic, but for me “That’s What I Want” was always the standout. It has the retro charm of a 1960s lounge singer crooning love songs at a bar, replete with perfectly-attuned backup singers and a chill-ass band. The song was originally written by Earl Lawrence and performed by Nancy Wilson – beautifully, I might add – and her version is bittersweet. It begins, “When you said yesterday that it’s nearly Christmas/ What did I want?/ And I thought, ‘Just love me. Love me.’ That’s what I want for Christmas.” Nancy goes on like that, lilting and sort of sad, begging for love, never making it quite clear if she’s actually begging or just teasingly asking an already-won sweetheart for more love over the holidays. Since it was written in the ‘60s, it brings to mind a classic mid-century wife whose philandering husband, à la Jeff Sheldrake in The Apartment, never seems to be home when she needs him, and never seems emotionally present when he is. He’s still thinking about the checkout girl at the department store or his secretary at work or whoever his latest sweetest tart is. He’s not thinking about his wife, but she is almost always thinking about him.

In my youth, for a time, I believed in the Law of Attraction. Yes, that much-mocked worldview described in The Secret and lauded on stage by people like Louise Hay and Esther Hicks, wherein it is understood that “thoughts become things,” and “what you think about, you bring about.”

To be a bit more detailed (because oftentimes the actual nuts and bolts of this belief system are oversimplified when it’s being criticized), adherents of this view believe that your mood – both your current mood in the present moment, and the overall average of your moods from day to day – is an indicator of what you are currently attracting into your life. But your mood (often also referred to as your “vibration” in LoA lexicon) doesn’t just predict what’s to come – it creates what’s to come. Your job, therefore, is to make choices whenever possible that feel good, and avoid making choices that feel bad – in every area from “What career decision should I make next?” to “What should I eat for breakfast?” to “What should I think about right now?” Your mood is like a compass, pointing you toward choices that will lead you closer to the things you want, and you ignore that compass at your own risk.

Obviously, there are many problems with this worldview. I’ve never quite been able to reconcile it in my mind with problems like poverty, racial inequality, and chronic depression. There are many, many people left out of the picture when you view life through this frame, and so it is, at best, an incomplete way of looking at the world.

That said, I had reason to believe in such things (ask me about my experiences with serendipity if we ever have drinks together sometime, and I’ll tell you stories I’d be too embarrassed to share here), and more importantly, there are some crucial tools and techniques I took away from my time of LoA dogma. These include daily gratitude practices (which science has proven make you happier), actively steering my mind away from thoughts that pointlessly upset me (key word being pointlessly), and conjuring the feelings I want to feel.

Despite my better judgment, I love the Sex subreddit. It’s a wild whirlpool of weirdness. Sometimes I go there hoping to dole out advice on vibrators and blowjobs, and find myself suddenly writing a philosophical essay about the function of pleasure in the world, or whatever. For today’s newsletter I thought it would be fun to answer a few of these bigger, more esoteric questions, plucked directly from the internet hellhole that is Reddit. Enjoy! (Also, while I have your attention, did you know that you can gift a subscription to this newsletter to someone in your life for the holidays if you so choose?)

“How do you figure out what you like?”

When I took a year off between high school and university because I didn’t know what I wanted to study, I spent a lot of time heeding little twinges of emotion that led me in one direction or another.

This seemed as sensible a decision-making strategy as any. See a documentary about sign language interpreters and feel a stirring of interest? Make a note of it. Read an article about flower arranging and feel an achy pull? Write it down. Hear a story about a friend winning a theatre award and feel a dark sadomasochistic envy? File it away.

Content note: slut-shaming, male misogynist anger.

Yesterday I got into a quasi-argument on Reddit with some 21-year-old dude who’s grossed out that his 21-year-old girlfriend has had sex before.

That’s a bit of an oversimplification, yes, but that was basically the gist of it. She’s had sex with a handful of other dudes – specifically, unprotected sex – and he’s grossed out by it because it doesn’t “fit with his values” and it shows she’s “reckless and irresponsible.” I encouraged him to do some research on unlearning slut-shaming, and also to think about other “reckless and irresponsible” things she could have done – like, say, driving without a seatbelt on, or starting a small fire by accident – and ponder whether those things would have upset him just as much. (Spoiler alert: they would not.)

One of my favorite columns on my sex spreadsheet is the one listing how many times I’ve had sex with each person noted therein. I updated it today and noticed that I’ve had sex with Matt 504 times in the 1,079 days we have known each other. And that’s not even counting phone sex. Yeesh.

I’ve known for a long time that sex is better for me when I’m having it with someone I’ve already fucked many times, and this is borne out in scientific studies that find women are less orgasmic during casual sex than they are in relationships. While a “relationship” in this context can be whatever you want it to be – a long-term friendship-with-benefits, an ex you’re still pals with and occasionally fuck, or just a regular ol’ romantic partner – these ongoing dynamics are far more conducive to good sex for me (and many others) than anything more casual or fleeting.

I’ve gotten in trouble on Twitter before for sharing this take, because it was interpreted as slut-shaming, or as a judgment on the merits of casual sex. To be clear, I wish I liked casual sex more, and I both respect and envy people who are able to have a great time rolling around in bed with a near-stranger who they know they’ll never see again. There is nothing wrong with casual sex itself as a concept – the execution is where it usually falls flat for me.

There is nothing to prevent you from, for example, asking a casual partner several questions about how they like their genitals touched before diving in, or inviting a hookup to bring their favorite sex toy along and show you how to use it on them, or staying up all night fucking your date again and again until you’ve gotten good at it. The trouble is that most people I’ve casually hooked up with have not done these things – and, to be fair, I usually haven’t, either. Maybe things would be different if I predominantly hooked up with other people in the “sex-positive queer kinky nerd” community, but most of my one-off sexual experiences have been with random vanilla straight cis guys from Tinder and OkCupid. Most of them are not all that interested in mid-bang check-ins or clitoral mastery.

One thing you might not know, if you haven’t been in a wedding party recently or just aren’t all that cognizant of “wedding culture” more broadly (for which I wouldn’t blame you), is that the “getting ready” part of the day has taken on an almost mythical role in the overall story of the event. I follow wedding blogs sporadically, and it’s not at all uncommon to see photos of a bride holed up in a hotel suite or sunny bedroom somewhere with her bridesmaid posse, all of them dressed in matching robes, giggling and chattering away as a hairstylist and makeup artist work their way around the room leaving conventionalized beauty in their wake.

I participated in a wedding like this a few years ago, and despite the fact that my ex from high school was also in the bridal party (awkward), somehow the getting-ready ritual made everything feel smoothed-over, at least for the moment. We were supplied with the requisite matching robes (turquoise, monogrammed); we blasted the radio and bopped along. A hyper-focused and hyper-competent woman with big hair glued individual fake lashes to my eyes and spackled foundation over my imperfections. Everyone was in the type of good mood you can only really get into when you’re on vacation or taking time off work or eating/drinking/living on someone else’s dime for the day. Our disagreements were set aside, and our glasses were rose-tinted and half-full.

It was, comparatively, an odd experience getting ready for my own wedding during a pandemic. There could be no hotel rooms, or cavalcades of bridesmaids, or strangers wielding powder puffs and barrel brushes. My spouse-to-be was not suiting up in a suite down the hall, but rather, in the other room (I made them promise not to peek until my whole look was complete). There was chill music playing on the stereo, selected by Siri, and I sat in front of a mirror in the entrance hall of my love’s apartment, surrounded by swirling tulle and a million eyeshadows. I felt relaxed, not nervous – and focused, not ebullient. It was game time.

I had worried it might make me sad to eschew what felt like an important tradition of femininity in favor of a safer and more solitary process. But truth be told, it took me right back to the days in my early twenties when I would regularly spend an hour in front of the mirror in my attic bedroom at my parents’ house, getting ready for a party or a club night or an orgy. I would listen to Usher or Death Cab or whatever was cool back then, and apply glitter to my eyelids like a prophecy. I would trace my lips with sticky pink gloss like casting a kiss-summoning spell. I would comb and slick my hair into ridiculous shapes like a slutty femme peacock.

In the lead-up to my wedding, which is in 2 days (!!!!), I’ve been doing something I wish everyone could and would do before getting married: talking to my therapist about it. A lot.

In my view, it’s not weird at all to second-guess yourself when making a decision of this magnitude. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re making the wrong choice or that you’re conflicted; it just means you’re being careful and considered, and getting curious about your own motivations.

So with the help of my therapist, I’ve been working through a bunch of my baggage about marriage, my doubts about my own “marriageability,” my worst fears on the subject of long-term love. And with every session, I just become more and more certain: I am marrying the right person for me.

There are so many ways I know this – too many to fit here, too many to fit into the dozens of blog posts I’ve written about Matt, too many to fit into my wedding vows. So today I’ll just talk about one of the ways I know for sure that they’re the person I should be marrying.

The period of time before a breakup – when you know with near-certainty that the breakup is coming, but the shoe hasn’t quite dropped yet – brings some of the worst feelings I can imagine.

Your blood runs cold with panic. Your heart throbs fast with nerves. Your neurons pulse with uncertainty. You flip through all the possibilities in your mind, over and over again, trying to puzzle it all out so you won’t have to actually face the pain. Depending on what kind of relationship you’re in and what kind of partner you have, you can be stuck in that hell-place for hours, or days, or weeks, or months. (Hopefully not years, but I’m sure it does happen.)

This election feels to me like the last time I went through this agonizing horror. My boyfriend in the summer of 2017, not exactly a king of warmth and affection to be begin with, had iced me out all of a sudden, emotionally pulling away from me so hard that my anxious traumatized brain started to sound the alarms. The terrifying message blared throughout my mind as if by loudspeaker: He’s going to leave you. You’re not worthy of him. You’ll never be worthy of anybody. You’re a fraud, an unloveable fraud. Cool, thanks, brain. That’s great to know.

It felt like a trap, because to reach out and ask what I was really wondering (“Are you mad at me?” and “Are you planning to break up with me?”) would just confirm, to him and to myself, that I was as emotionally needy and broken as he probably already suspected. Open communication has always been my number-one recourse when worried about a relationship; it feels awful and sometimes even borderline-abusive when that option begins to seem inadvisable or impossible.

Some of the things I find most embarrassing about myself are the sociocultural tricks I’ve fallen for, hook, line, and sinker. Like, yes, I do sometimes want a fancier and more expensive lipstick instead of a drugstore one, simply because it is fancier and more expensive. And yes, I do sometimes feel like I would be “incomplete” without at least one romantic partner, even though my therapist and I are both quite certain that that’s bullshit. And yes, I do find engagement rings stunning, romantic, and magical, even though I know they are (like so many romantic accoutrements) merely an invention of patriarchal capitalism.

As you may already know if you are, like me, a nerd about such things, the engagement ring as we know it today was essentially invented by the De Beers diamond company to sell more rocks. It has the feel of an age-old tradition but actually is not. This symbol of long-lasting love, this pinnacle of conventional romance, is just an idea some marketing exec came up with in the 1940s. Bummer, huh?

However, just because something is a construct doesn’t mean it’s inherently bad. I like femininity and New York City and the diatonic scale, and these are all types of constructs. The engagement ring may be an odd idea hocked by shady diamond dealers trying to monetize love, but it has its silver linings, and it can be reclaimed, or subverted, or just enjoyed for the silly tradition that it is.

I fully don’t mean to say that everyone can, should, or must partake of this tradition. An engagement ring can be (and often is) ridiculously expensive, can be (and often is) exploitative of miners and other people involved in jewelry production, and can be (and often is) a sparkly and ultimately meaningless symbol of an emotion that is arguably better communicated by the comparatively unglamorous day-to-day realities of showing someone that you love them.

But when my now-betrothed (!!), Matt, and I discussed engagement rings, we agreed that we both liked this tradition and wanted a ring to be a part of our story. They went through a lengthy and detailed shopping process, and the ring they eventually chose for me is absolutely perfect. I swoon every time I look at it.

Someone asked me today how I think about my engagement ring in relation to my collar – another romantic object purchased for me by my love, intended to symbolize a dimension of our relationship. There is a lot of overlap in how they make me feel. I’m aware of both when I’m wearing them; they’re noticeable against my skin, and their absence is equally noticeable to me when they’re removed. They each remind me of commitments I have made, and commitments that have been made to me. And they each, in some fundamental way, feel like part of my body, an extension of my self, an outpost of my consciousness and identity.

In fact, tomorrow I’m going to see the jeweller who sold Matt this ring and I may need to leave it there for a few days while they resize it, and the thought of doing that is oddly sad. It’s not that I’ll miss flashing the sparkles at anyone who asks (it’s COVID times and diamonds don’t translate great over Zoom!), but more that I’ll miss the sense of comfort and love I feel whenever I notice the ring on my hand.

Sometimes I have these terrible nightmares where I “wake up” from my relationship with Matt and find that the entire thing was a dream – that I lost it all, as easily as one could lose one’s progress in a video game by turning it off before saving. When I actually wake up from one of these panic-dreams, nowadays my first impulse is to check for my engagement ring. Feeling it there is such a sweet sigh of relief every time. It means I haven’t lost anything, I still have this love and so much to look forward to, I still have a good grasp on reality and my reality is that I am loved by someone exceptional and kind.

I didn’t know I could feel this way about a piece of jewelry. But then, it isn’t just a piece of jewelry. Dammit, De Beers, you got me good.

I just finished reading Angela Chen’s excellent new book Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, & the Meaning of Sex. As a seminal asexuality text, it’s everything I could have hoped for – which is to say, among other things, that it made me ponder my own place on the asexuality spectrum.

If you don’t know, asexual people are people who don’t experience sexual attraction. This does not mean they never have sex (some do) or that they never get into romantic relationships (some do) or even that they don’t like sex (some do). It just means they are not attracted to anyone on a sexual level, which doesn’t necessarily preclude them from developing attractions on aesthetic, platonic, or romantic levels. They differ, in this way, from allosexual people (i.e. non-asexual people, i.e. the majority of people).

One of the more philosophical points made in the book is that the feeling of sexual attraction can’t be fully grasped by those who’ve never experienced it – which is part of why so many ace folks take a long time to realize they’re ace. (The other, and more pressing, reason is that asexuality just isn’t very widely known about or understood.) This concept reminds me of how lots of color-blind people don’t realize they’re color-blind until a test tells them so, or of how you can taste a food that’s new to you, like black truffles or guava fruit, and realize that you had no way of even predicting what those foods would taste like because you can’t really imagine something you haven’t experienced. I’ll never know whether you see the same color as I do when we both look at a blue flower. I’ll never know whether cinnamon creates the same sensations on your tongue as it creates on mine. I’ll never know if your sexual attraction feels anything like mine does.

This is the reason I’ve struggled to place myself on the asexuality spectrum time and time again. I’ve definitely wanted to fuck people before (many people), but often it’s less a tactile desire to touch/kiss/penetrate them and more a desire to connect with them more deeply, reward their brilliance, or have an adventure. I definitely have a libido, but often it’s slow to rouse and not directed at anything in particular. I definitely find sex pleasurable, exciting, and satisfying, but often it’s about intimacy, sensations, and catharsis more than it’s about animal lust.

During the period of my life when I was playacting as a more sociable and emotionally slutty person than I actually am, I once went on a date with a new partner after spending the previous night sleeping over at another partner’s house. The one I was staying with was a kinky fucker (well, actually, they both were, but I didn’t know the full extent of that yet), and because we’d been discussing shaving fetishism among numerous other kinks, he offered to shave my legs for my date.

As kinksters are wont to do, we first discussed our motivations for pursuing a scene such as this – and he clarified, crucially, “I’m into it for service reasons. It’s not, like, a cuckolding thing for me.”

I was glad he called this out by name, because my experiences with non-monogamy have often felt laced with quiet cuckold feelings. It’s hard not to internalize the tropes of this kink (hopefully sans the racist aspects some people incorporate into cuckolding, which are obviously very troubling and are not what I’m talking about here), and to bump into them while navigating the choppy psychological waters of dating multiple people in a world that tells us we should only date one at a time. Unless you’re one of those people who’s blessed to find polyamory instantly easy (and tbh I usually doubt these people are telling the full truth), you probably have to fight against your ingrained emotional responses to access a mindset more in line with your values and ethics, at least some of the time. Culture tells us another dude stealing your chick is an egregious harm requiring aggressive retaliation, and another chick stealing your man is an invitation for catty sabotage – so sometimes you may have to swallow those societally-induced impulses before responding in a way you’re actually okay with. (Not sure what the common “infidelity” tropes are for non-hetero orientations and non-cis people, frankly, because our culture has far less to say about them!)

While some people neatly sidestep these tropes altogether, I’ve often been intrigued by the idea of wading right into them – consensually, knowledgeably, communicatively, and carefully. My partners over the years have differed a lot on the subject of how much they wanted to hear about my interactions with other partners – some preferred to hear nothing at all, some wanted just the basics, some wanted elaborate descriptions of me getting railed by someone else’s dick. Cuckolding often felt like the elephant in the room. I was aware, always, that going into too much detail – or the wrong kind of detail – could make a person “feel cuckolded,” and that this was generally something to be avoided.

The Sims franchise, developed by Maxis, has made a lot of strides since I installed my first Sims game circa 2000. For one thing, in the most recent iteration, you can set a Sim’s gender (which determines their pronouns) separately from their body shape/type, whether they prefer masculine or feminine clothing, can pee standing up, or can impregnate or be impregnated by other Sims. This still isn’t a perfect system by any means – make “nonbinary” an option, Maxis! – but I do find it thrilling that it’s possible to make trans Sims now, and to put your cis Sims in gender-non-conforming outfits. (Shhh, don’t tell anyone that I gasped and giggled aloud when I made a handsome butch-lady Sim and put her in a pale pink suit with bright pink eyeshadow.)

But while these in-game gender innovations are fairly new, The Sims has always been impressively progressive when it comes to sexual orientation. As the fan-created Sims Wiki puts it, “In The Sims series, every Sim is technically bisexual, as he/she can be directed to have a crush on, fall in love with, engage in romantic interactions and [have sex] with a Sim of either gender, provided they are of the appropriate age group(s).” It’s amazing to me that companies like Disney have been so slow to put adequate queer representation in their works, while Maxis has been here the whole time like, “You wanna make your game super queer? Go right ahead!” In the latest version of the game, there are even bi/pan/lesbian/nonbinary/asexual pride flags (plus too many other kinds to list) that you can buy for your Sims and hang on their walls. It’s a small touch, but I almost cried when I first noticed it, because I felt directly catered to as a queer Sims player.

I’ve always played The Sims in an excessively queer way; I’ve actually heard from many of my peers of various sexual orientations that they did this while growing up, too. In my youth I think it was a way of mentally practicing for, or processing, the beautifully bisexual life I envisioned for my adult self. But why have I continued doing it into adulthood, when my real life is every bit as bi as I ever hoped it would be?

Well, for one thing, there are just a lot of queer people in my life, and it makes sense for my Sims to reflect that reality. If I’m gonna spend hours building a gorgeous house I wish I could live in IRL, obviously I’m gonna live out extravagant versions of my dream lifestyle in that house, including sexually and romantically.

Content note: discussions of gender dysphoria and body insecurities.

I always like to listen to the very first line of lyrics in new albums from my favorite artists, because – much like the first sentence of a book – I think they can tell you a lot about what the writer wants to say, and what they want you to take away from the piece of work as a whole.

So it definitely caught my attention when I heard the opening lines of Nathan Stocker’s new album Big What: “I gotta shed my stranger skin / To fuck with a body that I feel good in.”

If femininity is a performance, sometimes I feel like a very bad actor. There are aspects of my gender presentation that I ace on a regular basis – winged liquid eyeliner, shopping efficiently for particular occasions, matching hair accessories to outfits – but there are also components of conventional femininity that I’ve never quite been able to get a handle on. Keeping my body uniformly and consistently shaved is one of them, heat-styling my hair is another, but perhaps the one that’s most obvious to me on a daily basis is my nails.

I’ve never been much for nail polish, careful filing, or going for regular manicures. I’m a chronic nail-biter (anxiety ahoy!), plus I play musical instruments, and I tap-tap-tap on a keyboard all day for a living, so long nails don’t really fit comfortably into my lifestyle. On the few occasions I’ve visited a manicurist (usually either in a fit of indulgent self-care or in preparation for an event far too fancy for the likes of me), they’ve always commented on how short I keep my nails. With very few exceptions, my nails are never even long enough to protrude past the edge of my fingers. “Doesn’t that hurt?!” people will ask, and… no, not really, because I’m so used to them being this length. When they start to get longer, a mental itchiness overtakes me because it just feels so wrong to have talons where usually I have stubs.

However, sometimes in moments of sudden gumption, I’ll make a promise to myself that shit is going to change. I’ll paint my nails – a careful and slow process, both because I’m bad at it and because I know I won’t have the energy to do it again for a while so I take my time with base coats and topcoats – and suddenly I’ll feel like a new woman. Sure, it’s always weird for the first few hours, when I feel like a cat whose collar has been swapped out for a diamond necklace – who thought this was a good idea?! – but then I start to lean into the traditional femininity being signalled by my new-looking hands. I feel somehow delicate, considered, beautiful.

Nails make a big impact on your presentation and the overall effect you create in the world. I think, in our culture, impeccably-kept nails signal either that you’re well-off enough to have someone attend to yours on a regular basis, or that you care enough about your aesthetic to keep them looking nice yourself. Both statements feel like status symbols. With depression and fatigue and a freelance writer’s constant feast-or-famine cycle pressing down on me, I often feel like I’m just clawing my way through life, barely able to keep up with the day’s bare-minimum tasks, let alone additional upkeep – so there is something particularly decadent about having colorful, sparkly nails. The ritual of painting them is an investment in self-care and self-esteem, and I am reminded of my commitment to those goals each time I glimpse my glinting nails.

Nails are one of those odd things that women are told to care about for attractiveness’s sake even though men don’t really seem to care about them much. Like a great eyeliner wing or a structural sharp-shouldered dress, flashy nails mostly seem to not even register on straight men’s radar – or if they do, they may even be a source of scorn (“How do you type with those things?” “Do they have to be so bright?” “Ow, you’re poking me!”). This is perhaps one of the reasons they’re such a powerful, and often seemingly unattainable, symbol of femininity for me. I’ve spent so many fruitless hours of my life trying to attire myself in ways that would make men think I was pretty that even now, at an age when I would’ve liked to have already internalized my inherent worth outside of romantic partners’ approval, it still feels strangely rebellious and guilt-inducing to spend time on aesthetic pursuits no man will ever compliment me on. And true, men aren’t the only people I date (in fact, it’s been a while since I dated one) – but that’s not the point. The point is that questing for potential paramours’ lust and praise is not, in and of itself, the best way to inspire yourself into an aesthetic that truly resonates with your most authentic inner self. You can get hints that way, sure, because in navigating your own ideas of desirability for others, you will inevitably encounter your own ideas of desirability for yourself. But I think it’s an incomplete picture.

When my nails are done, I either feel like an ice-cold rich bitch from a Gossip Girl novel, or the bright and badass queer femme I show up as in my juiciest fantasies. Both of those are powerful and useful brainspaces for me to be in, depending on what I’m up to on any given day. I know well-appointed nails aren’t necessary for me to feel good and sexy and cute, but I also know that they can help me to feel that way – so why not spend more time on them, more often? Why not devote myself to this occasional self-care activity that I know has such a high self-esteem output for a relatively low effort input?

It’s interesting how sometimes, in exploring the intersections of gender and aesthetics, you can stray so far from dominant cultural paradigms that you find yourself looping back around to the traditional trappings you had earlier rejected. This is what I love so much about queer femme as an aesthetic and as an identity: some parts of it are based on conventional (i.e. straight, cis) femininity, some parts are exaggerated versions of that, some parts are invented completely anew by queer femme geniuses – and all of it is accepted, and joyful, and desirable (rampant femmephobia and femme erasure notwithstanding). I love that I’ve been raised in queer and progressive communities open-minded enough that heels, makeup, and painted nails often feel to me like paraphernalia I’ve picked up of my own volition, rather than weaponry forced into my hands by society (though obviously, they are a bit of both). It feels strikingly powerful to know that huge swathes of your appearance were chosen by you, to meet certain goals that you, personally, define as important for yourself – and every time I look at my sparkly, girly nails, I remember all the queer femme heroes who fought so hard so people like me could one day feel this joy.

Later today I’m doing a podcast interview with the author of Polysecure, a new book about how attachment theory intersects with non-monogamy. It’s packed with eye-opening information, but one of my favorite revelations in the book is that routines and rituals within relationships are a valuable route to more secure-feeling attachments.

It makes sense. Our attachment systems are developed in infancy and childhood through, in part, observing how available (or unavailable) our caregivers are to us. When one of our attachment figures is frequently absent – either literally, physically absent, or just mentally/emotionally “not there” when we’re together – it can cause ruptures to our sense of safety in those connections. Routines give us comforting patterns by which we can predict when we’ll next have access to the feelings of safety and love we experience around our attachment figures when they’re present and emotionally attuned to us.

I notice this effect every time my partner Matt shows up to one of our planned phone calls, or follows through on a promise they made earlier to send me dinner, or settles in with me to watch the online improv show that makes us howl with laughter every week. My body palpably relaxes, like: Ah yes. The comforts I was expecting have indeed materialized. I was right. I am safe. This is a powerful sensation for just about anybody, but especially for people who have trauma around abandonment and/or past attachment figures’ erratic and chaotic behavior.

When Matt had to go back to New York in July after spending 4 months cozily quarantining with me in Toronto, I felt scared and unsettled. Some of it was normal, adult fear – what if they get the coronavirus? what if the borders stay closed and we can’t see each other for a long time? what if their country sinks even further into fascism and I can’t do anything to help? – but some of it was that deeper, older, more primal fear, of the disruption of security. How could I know I was safe – in my relationship or in my life – if there was no one in my bed to cuddle me when I awoke from a nightmare, no one to bring me a cocktail and massage my feet at the end of a busy day, no one to whisper filthy compliments against my skin while fucking me in exactly the right ways?