I used to be a moderator of the AskWomen subreddit years ago, and it’s still my favorite place on Reddit. Most of the question-askers are men trying to “understand women,” and predominantly failing to do so because they don’t fully realize that women are humans, just like them. There are also many question-askers who are women themselves and are seeking perspectives and advice from other women on a plethora of issues. Overall it’s a really fascinating place – a relatively feminist “eye of the storm” in the center of the swirling cesspool that Reddit can be.

I’ve plucked a few questions from today’s AskWomen crop and will answer them here, because they’re thought-provoking and I like ‘em.

Have you ever been confused about whether the love you feel for someone is romantic or platonic? If so, how did you get to the bottom of it?

This is a scribbled journal entry from a few weeks ago that, upon reflection, I thought would work well as a newsletter here. Enjoy!

Content note: bruises, bondage, the U.S. immigration system.

You still make me feel the way I did when I was 15 and I mapped out my crushes geographically, spatially, in my mind. Sitting in English class on the 3rd floor, I always knew my first amour was in math class across the hall, that we’d pass each other for 5 or 15 fleeting seconds on our way to 4th period when the clock struck 2, and my mind was so full of these numbers and calculations that I could set aside my nerves while plotting and planning, or else use those nerves as a brightly-lit lens through which to see my mental blueprints more vividly.

There are a lot of “weird” kinks I’ve happily admitted to enjoying, but it’s interesting how after all these years of spilling my kinky guts onto the internet, there are still some psychosexual proclivities I can’t talk about without some degree of embarrassment or shame. Financial domination and sugar daddies are a couple of them.

There is a difference, incase you were wondering, although it’s less of a “column A and column B” situation and more of a Venn diagram. A sugar daddy (or whatever other sugary moniker you prefer to use for them) is a person who spoils their sugar baby with gifts and/or cash, and usually wields the power in that scenario; financial domination, on the other hand, puts the power squarely in the hands of the person being spoiled, to decide exactly how their financial submissive (a.k.a. “finsub” or, more colorfully, “paypig”) will spoil them, and how much money they’ll spend.

The center of the Venn diagram between these two kinks is where the power dynamic gets a little murky, and it’s the manifestation of money kink that I’ve always been most interested in. Having had an actual sugar daddy for a while, who materialized from the depths of the internet wanting to send me a monthly allowance and buy me pricey sex toys in exchange for risqué conversations by phone and text, I knew that the “normal” configuration of a sugar relationship wasn’t quite up my alley. Though I am very submissive sexually, having a sugar daddy crept into nonsexual territory for me, and with this particular partner, that didn’t feel like a good fit – I found myself rolling my eyes in annoyance at him more than I ever rolled my eyes back in pleasure.

When your sugar daddy calls the shots, you’re also relying on someone else to make decisions about what kinds of gifts you need/get/deserve, and that’s… not ideal, especially when you’re a femme with a lot of opinions about handbags and shoes and your sugar daddy is a man and knows comparatively little about these things. It’s not that I’d be ungrateful if he bought me something that wasn’t precisely to my taste; it’s just that I’d be thinking wistfully about how much further that same money could’ve gone if only I’d been in charge of how it was spent.

A story I’ve told many times, and will tell in a condensed form here: During my first date with Matt, after an hour or so of intriguing and flirtatious conversation, I wished aloud that we could go make out in an alley somewhere – but it was frigid December outside. Matt said, “That’s a solvable problem,” whipped out their phone, and fired up the Breather app, which allows you to rent nearby office spaces by the hour for meetings and such, like an Airbnb for businesspeople. We made our way to a fancy office building in midtown, took the elevator up 10 floors while stifled attraction pulsed between us, and then we shut the door and kissed for the first time.

Kisses turned to makeouts, and makeouts to spanking, and by the end of our 20-ish minutes in that room, I was thoroughly dishevelled and hooked on this dazzling person, without either of us having taken any clothes off. It was the closest we would get to having sex in-person for another month yet (though we whiled away the meantime with lascivious phone calls galore). Ah, memories.

Matt made the booking under the title “Important Meeting,” a respectability joke designed purely to make me laugh (which it did), complete with a briefcase emoji. As we talked on the phone about this last night almost 3 years later, I teared up. “It was an important meeting,” I said, knowing full well how cheesy the words sounded, “because I met you.”

Matt and I are both overanalytical nerds, so we have returned many times to reread the Breather profile for this small, well-lit room that looms so large in our personal history together. And, y’all… its description is so hilariously, unknowingly on-point that I almost feel like I’m being punked.

For my monthly writing assignment this time around, my Sir asked me to write 3 short ‘n’ sexy vignettes about scenes I want to do or fantasies I’ve been pondering. “They should center on things you find hot or are interested in trying,” Sir wrote, “and will serve as fodder for fantasizing, dirty talk, or scene planning.” Sounds good to me! Here’s what I came up with…

(Content note: alcohol, hypnosis, bruises, DD/lg language / ”daddy.”)

1. My French maid uniform is far too short. Consequently my “good girl” tattoos peek out the bottom, especially when I stand on tiptoes to reach the top of your fridge while I’m dusting. An astute viewer would also note the presence of some fading bruises along the tops of my thighs.

Are you a person who dreams much about sexual or romantic matters? And if so, have you ever found yourself developing an attraction to someone based almost solely on how they appeared to you one night in a dream?

One of the first times this happened to me was with the actor Donald Sutherland. I must have been about 16 when I had this experience, which is a bit odd because the guy is 57 years older than me… but then, I have always been into older men. I recall that he was caring and considerate and that I woke up 400% more attracted to him than I’d been when I went to sleep.

Another time, I had dream-sex with Jennifer Lopez. I know, I’m very fortunate. The thing is, as blazingly hot as J-Lo obviously is, curvy feminine women are not my usual “type” – so I wonder how much of this dream had to do with challenging internalized biphobia, or queer femme erasure, or my own worn-deep notions of what “my type” even is… or maybe I should stop analyzing it and just appreciate that I got to have dream-sex with Jennifer fucking Lopez.

I bring this up because last night I had a dream I moved into a large apartment, where 8-10 roommates already resided, and one of them was this boy I went to high school with (let’s call him Chris). Chris was exceedingly handsome, and a few years older than me, and vaguely popular in the way that a nerdy punk-rock kid can be popular at an arts school. I still remember, with unsettling immediacy, the time my mom was dropping me off at school one morning and Chris happened to saunter across the crosswalk in front of us as we waited at a traffic light. “WHO is THAT?!” my mom asked. “He’s so CUTE!” (Fear not: he would’ve been about 18-19 at the time, and my mom is not a cougar.) I had to agree with her, though I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I wasn’t and have never been the type of bubbly blonde brave boy-pursuer she was in her youth. Me hooking up with Chris was about as likely as a mouse hooking up with an eagle.

My dad, bless his tech-savvy heart, generously bought me an iPad mini when I was too young to have enough money to buy such things for myself. It ended up being a stroke of technological luck because, soon thereafter, I got an office job where the work was slow and sporadic but we weren’t allowed to use our phones at all while on the clock. This meant that employees who could afford an MP3 player, iPad, or other non-phone media-playing device could while away the boring hours listening to music, podcasts, or audiobooks, while those who only owned a phone had to either stare at a blank screen in silence or try to strike up conversations with other workers to pass the time. This blatantly classist policy still makes me angry when I think about it. I wish I could’ve bought an iPad for everybody there.

My closest friend at that office was an Eastern European girl who loved to gossip with me about our respective sex lives; mine was frequently ridiculous at that time, so there was a lot to gossip about. (I will never forget her calling me a “social butterfly” because literally no one else in my life has ever or would ever call me that. I am a social caterpillar at best.) Sometimes I brought a headphones splitter to work and we would listen to old episodes of sex podcasts together, or pick out an album on Spotify to groove to. The work we were doing, despite being kind of boring and repetitive, was “adult” in nature (technically I signed an NDA so I can’t tell you what it was, but Playboy commissioned and paid for an article about it which I completed a year and a half ago but has still never been published, so, uh, look out for that eventually, I guess) so there was a culture within the all-women office of… not quite sex-positivity, but certainly openness about sex. (I still recall a raging – and very loud – debate between two coworkers about whether or not the term “gangbang” inherently meant non-consensual sex.) So periodically, someone would come across a strange porn clip or unusual nude pic in their idle web-surfing, and before long, we’d all be looking at it on our screens and giggling up a storm.

It was sometime during my year at that job that I discovered the joys of watching porn on an iPad. For one thing, it was much more subtle than pulling up a clip on my office-assigned computer, where a supervisor (or, in one case, a hot repairman who came to fix the air ducts) could walk in at any moment and see what I was ogling. But even when I wasn’t at work, it was clear that the iPad was the best tool for the job. It felt more intimate than watching porn on a computer – you could get closer to the iPad, prop it up next to you in bed, without worrying about a laptop overheating on the mattress. It was small enough to allow for secrecy and a sense of clandestineness, but large enough that you could see all the details of what was happening on-screen. Gradually I began to load up my iPad with favorite porn clips, mostly ones purchased from indie queer porn sites. I discovered some of my earliest kinky inklings back then, curled up in bed staring rapt at the spankings and whippings and strap-on fuckings that glowed in front of me.

That iPad is super old and barely works anymore; I keep it at my parents’ house now as basically a Netflix and Scrabble machine to use occasionally when I visit. But recently I bought myself a new one – an iPad mini 5 in space grey, refurbished – because my chronic pain and fatigue have been making it tricky to sit at a computer for long stretches, and I figured it would be easier to write on a smaller, more touch-oriented device.

My partner got on a plane last week (wearing a mask, toting hand sanitizer, living in fear) to head back home to New York, after staying with me here in Toronto for 4 months of quarantine.

It’s been a shock to my system in a lot of ways, and my body and mind are still playing catch-up with the reality of the situation. But I’ve also started to notice and reconnect with some of the benefits of being far apart, the way we normally are in our LDR. One of them is that my body once again becomes solely my own, a private zone over which my influence is the only influence.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with other people’s tastes dictating how you choose to groom and attire yourself, so long as you are happily consenting to whatever it is that they want. But for a person with depression and/or chronic pain (or just, y’know, a lazy personality), sometimes it can be nice to take a vacation from the expectations others may have of you and your body.

Matt, to their credit, has never once pressured or shamed me for anything body-related. I’ve never experienced with them anything akin to the horror stories I’ve heard from friends of dudes who threw tantrums about leg hair or refused to perform oral sex because they “didn’t like the taste.” (Side note: did you see that /r/relationships post about the woman whose boyfriend gaslit her into thinking she smelled bad so that she would stay with him? Don’t be that guy. Ever.) But nonetheless, since Matt is my partner and my dom and my forever-crush, I am conscious of wanting them to think I’m cute and sexy. So when they’re around, I keep my body hair in check, shower regularly, keep up with my skincare routine – all things I should be doing normally, and usually enjoy when I do, but that I don’t always commit to when left to my own devices.

It’s a well-known kink truism that many things you’ll try are nowhere near as scary, difficult, or upsetting as you’d imagined they would be. I have certainly found this to be the case. Getting slapped, or zapped, or stepped on: all of these things made me jitter with nerves before attempting them for the first time, but turned out to be not only less painful than I thought – they were also more emotionally satisfying than I predicted. Even after 5+ years of being a practicing kinkster, I still surprise myself – and my partner – from time to time.

Ice was one of those odd revelations. We first tried it on a baking-hot summer afternoon when it was proposed almost more as a cooling-off strategy than as an enactable fantasy, but ice has always meant something to us. One of the first purchases I made to help myself feel closer to Matt early in our relationship (there have been many) was a silicone freezer tray that produces giant, 2-inch ice cubes, perfect for serving with bourbon or scotch. I remember I had a bottle of leftover sweet vermouth in my fridge from one of Matt’s recent visits, and even after I ran out of whiskey to mix with it for Manhattans, I would pour the vermouth over a big rock with a twist of lemon and sip it in my little armchair in my little bedroom, feeling sophisticated and loved. Drinks can do that sometimes. I bet if I sampled sweet vermouth now, I’d be transported right back to that place of hopeful, excitable love.

It was that same freezer tray that produced the ice cubes we started using for temperature play, many months later. Chunky cubes made more sense than standard-issue smaller ones, because my partner is a sadist.

What they don’t necessarily tell you, when you read about cheeky ice-cube explorations in Cosmo and its ilk, is that this shit hurts. It’s not pain in the traditional sense, but more like the pain you feel when you get tickled too hard for too long: your muscles tire out from tensing, your body screams for relief, but you likely won’t have any bruises or scratches to show for it when you’re done.

Recently I was telling my therapist about a classic struggle faced by introverted polyamorous people like me – and, I suppose, also by polyamorous people who are too busy to date, or who have limitations or marginalizations that make it harder for them to date, or who are just not in the mood to date at the moment, or who are… living through a global pandemic. (Remember dating?!)

I’m talking about the struggle of feeling like you’re not dating “enough” to “earn” the polyamorous label. Whether you have one steady partner, or none, or just not as many as you had hoped or expected you would when you entered this lifestyle, it’s easy to feel that self-doubt start to creep in: Can I really call myself non-monogamous if I am, in practice, not currently non-monogamous per se?

As I talked about this mild yet persistent insecurity of mine to my therapist, I found myself doing what I often do in therapy: explaining out loud to myself why I’m wrong. This is one of the magical things about a therapist whose perspective you respect and who knows how to listen in just the right way – they can sometimes drag insights out of you without even needing to say anything. You work so hard to make yourself make sense to them that you end up talking yourself out of whatever absurd maladaptive cognition you’ve previously talked yourself into.

“That’s bullshit, though,” I said of my own polyamory inadequacies. “It’s like bisexuality. You don’t have to be dating people of every gender at all times to be a valid bisexual. So of course you don’t have to be dating multiple people at all times to be a valid polyamorist.”

Content note: mild cock and ball torture, hypnosis, explicit sexy stuff.

It’s funny how your list of limits can shift over time, as you wade deeper into the tumultuous waters of your own sexual psyche. What once seemed absolutely out of the question can start to seem intriguingly hot, sometimes gradually and sometimes all of a sudden.

I don’t quite remember when that happened for my partner with CBT (the cock and ball torture kind, not the cognitive-behavioral therapy kind or the computer-based training kind, although we fuck with those too). I assumed it would remain a non-option as it had with almost every other penis-possessing person I’ve dated – but sometime last September, on a trip to Portland, we wandered into CBT land together. At least, that’s what my sex spreadsheet tells me.

One of my biggest kinks is one I have no name for. My blog post about it is called “You Know What I Like”; the entries most reflective of it on my FetLife profile say “you knowing exactly what I need” and “a partner who observes… and remembers.” I guess you could say it’s a fetish for people who pay attention to my sexual preferences and put that information into action – but that’s not as pithy or catchy as an official -philia name like “gnophilia” would be.

Two movie vignettes illustrative of what this kink is, and what it is not:

In American Pie 2, our hero Jim gears up for a visit from Nadia, a gorgeous exchange student with whom he previously humiliated himself by prematurely blowing his load twice while she was trying to have sex with him. Not having apparently paid attention to any of the numerous clues she gave him – such as the contents of the porn magazines from his bedside drawer that turned her on in the first place, or the way she positioned his fingers on her body – in the lead-up to their reunion he focuses only on his own dick. (It gets mildly injured in a slapstick freak accident we need not go into here because IT DOESN’T MATTER, JIM, JUST USE YOUR MOUTH AND HANDS.) Despite claiming to be someone who wants his partners to have a good time in the sack, he makes no visible effort to deduce or execute what Nadia likes because he fully buys the heteropatriarchal (not to mention cissexist) narrative that BABES WANT COCK and that COCK = ORGASMS. C’mon, Jim; I know you’re only like 19 in this movie but you could do so much better if you actually tried.

By contrast, the time-travel flick About Time shows protagonist Tim shagging his date Mary (played by the ever-magnetic Rachel McAdams) for the first time at the end of a lovely evening, doing an okay job, and then… rewinding time so he can take another crack at it. (I mean, you can hardly blame the guy; have you seen Rachel McAdams?) And then he does it again. And again. By the end of the montage, he’s figured out how to satisfy her so thoroughly that she inquires about going for a Round Two. This line is meant to get a laugh, I suppose, but it demonstrates a fundamental truth about sex that young men are so seldom taught: people will want to have more sex with you if you make sure they have a good time in bed, and the way to do that is to focus on them and their needs, not you and yours. (The same principle applies in conversation. The most interesting people are the most interested people.)

Friends, I hope you’re taking care of yourselves as best you can. I hope you’re finding ways to cope with the onslaught of bad news and bad opinions that the world is serving up these days. Lately I’ve been finding it calming to donate money to good causes (like the Black Youth Project and Critical Resistance and the Center for Transgender Equality) whenever I’m overcome with a sense of “?!?!???!?” and hopefully that helps the folks it goes to. But when I’m lying in the dark at night, still seized with overwhelming worries about our world and what’s to become of it, I’ve been finding it weirdly steadying to think about… places I want to go when they reopen, and what I would wear.

In that spirit, here are 5 outfits I put together for various situations I hope or foresee myself getting into when the world opens its doors again. They’re full of extravagant items from UrStyle that make me smile even if they’d make my wallet cringe. I hope these inspire you to think about where you’d like to go, when you’re able, and what celebratory ensemble you’ll throw together for the occasion.

Content note: trauma, childhood discipline, Daddy Dom/little girl roleplay.

I’m seeing a new therapist – and by “seeing,” I mean “having regular phone sessions with,” because these are COVID times, baybeee – and she is wonderful.

Stressful times such as these are apt to bring forth all the old traumas, fears, and insecurities that have been stagnating in your psyche for years – and if I feel this way, I literally can’t imagine what it’s like right now for people more directly affected by our current events, like Black people, teargassed protesters, or those suffering from the coronavirus’s takeover of their own body or the body of someone they love. Just observing the world’s current goings-on from my small but safe apartment has been enough to send me into spirals of stress, anxiety, and resulting chronic pain flare-ups that leave me useless and groaning motionlessly in bed day after day. It’s not a pretty picture.

I probably don’t have to tell you that it has been a wild week in the news. Police violence against Black people would be horrible even if it was a one-off incident, and it’s not: it’s a centuries-long pattern, under-acknowledged and under-addressed (by white folks, anyway). Here’s a webpage where you can learn more about this injustice and how you can help.

One way to combat racism in yourself – not only for your own edification but also so that you can more effectively combat it in others – is to broaden the perspectives you absorb through the media you consume. To that end, here are 10 books by writers of color that I think you’d like.

Content note: discussions of racism, abuse, trauma, transphobia, and race play.

Mollena Williams – The Toybag Guide to Playing with Taboo

Hello, friends! Today I am working on edits for the manuscript of my forthcoming book 101 Kinky Things That Even You Can Do, which will be published in the fall of 2021. One of the things my editor suggested I cut was this chapter on autofellatio, to be replaced with something else, since, y’know, sucking your own dick isn’t exactly something that just anyone can do. (The chapter was a hold-over from the book’s original concept, “101 unusual kinks and fetishes.”) I’ve decided to share this passage with you before erasing it from existence forever. Enjoy! (Also, if you can orally stimulate your own genitals, congrats.)

Autofellatio is the act of sucking one’s own penis for pleasure. This requires a deep front-bend only attainable by the most flexible of folks, and perhaps a longer-than-average penis. An urban legend has circulated that rock star Marilyn Manson had some of his ribs surgically removed so he could self-fellate, suggesting that this elusive act is both revered and taboo.

Though autofellatio is remarkable in and of itself, it can also be incorporated into kink scenes if you so desire. A submissive might be called upon to put on a show for their dominant, for example, and could be heckled or praised, depending on their performance. An autofellator could also be offered rewards or punishments depending on their ability (or inability) to perform this skill. You don’t actually have to be able to do it in order to have fun trying!

It seems to me that a lot of vanilla folks with little to no knowledge of the kink community think of perversion like a lightswitch: either you’re kinky or you’re not. It makes sense – a lot of our popular media portrayals of BDSM conflate bondage with spanking, or put animal roleplay on the same plane as schoolgirl/teacher roleplay, or show sex workers delighting just as much in stepping on balls as they do in mud-wrestling. True, most kinksters have more than one kink – but we’re not magically into every perverted thing just because we’re into some of them.

I often wish my kink palette was wider, and to be fair, it has broadened significantly over the years. But here are some things I just haven’t been able to get into yet, despite really wanting to.

1. Tickling. Don’t get me wrong, I have been tickled a fair bit over the course of my storied sex life. One of my past partners quite possibly even had a fetish for it, though sadly he was too much of a dick for me to stay with him long enough to meaningfully play with that. I’ve eventually come to consider tickling a hard limit of mine, because the physical and mental exertion of that particular type of consensual assault is just too much for me. But it can be sexy to me in theory, or in fantasy: it’s hot to imagine being overwhelmed by someone through a means that looks so innocent and lighthearted but is actually dastardly beyond measure. The lightheadedness brought on by laughing very hard for a long time is also similar in some ways to subspace, or even trance. Until I figure out how to find tickling sexy IRL instead of horrible, I’ll have to stick to just laughing my ass off at funny folks on Netflix and YouTube as foreplay.

2. Ruined orgasms. Why have I watched so many porn videos of this kink despite absolutely hating anything that approaches it in real life? I hate when my orgasms are ruined; I hate when my partners’ orgasms are ruined; hell, if a friend told me they had a ruined orgasm last night (and didn’t specifically seek one), I’d hate that on their behalf! But when I watch videos or read erotica of someone deliberately pursuing a ruined orgasm (or consensually being subjected to one), I feel a twinge of arousal. Something in there is satisfying for me… but when I jerk off to the idea of a ruined orgasm, I still want the session to end in a real, actual goddamn orgasm!

3. Leather. I have a leather fetish in the sense that suburban middle-aged moms might use that word, i.e. I have an aesthetic and tactile fondness for leather objects that exceeds the average person’s but is primarily nonsexual. I like to stare at leather handbags and boots online; I feel like a foxy bitch when I stroll around in my leather jacket and matching gloves; I usually shout something like “Step on me!” at the screen when a hot person on TV is dressed in leather. But I have never, to the best of my recollection, actually jerked off thinking about leather, and I kinda wish I could. Not only would this be a fun fetish to play with (I’m thinkin’ boot worship and olfactory Pavlovian conditioning), but it would also connect me to the age-old and fascinating leather fetish culture. Some people still use the word “leather” when they mean BDSM or kink, and fuck if that doesn’t make me wanna bury my nose in the crotch of someone’s leather pants and like it.

4. Lipstick. Another thing for which I have an aesthetic affection that doesn’t quite deviate into lust. I used to write marketing tweets for a porn clips site known for its vast variety of off-the-wall fetish content, and every time a lipstick clip came up, I shivered in my boots a little. There’s something so powerful about a femme smoothing glossy pigment onto their lush lips, knowing full well they’re having a knee-weakening effect on the observer. In the past I’ve relished the feeling of walking down the street with a collar on, carrying the quiet knowledge that my sexuality was represented on my physical form in a public space and no one necessarily even knew; I think that feeling would be amplified even further if I had a lipstick kink. Every day could be a magical sexy adventure – or at least, that’s what the fantasy tells me.

5. Pet play. This is listed on my FetLife profile as something I’m “curious about,” but in truth, I think I’d always feel too silly doing it to explore it fully. Even roleplaying as a little girl – now the bread and butter of my kink life – initially felt so ridiculous and cloying to me that I almost didn’t pursue it despite knowing it was likely my biggest fetish. So maybe I’m wrong, and maybe pretending to be a kitten could actually be intensely sexy to me if I could push past my initial reticence and embarrassment about it. In the meantime, it feels safer just to fantasize. (Can I drink bourbon from a bowl instead of milk?)

Has anyone else found themselves adopting strange obsessions during the coronavirus lockdown? Are you fixating on pantry pasta recipes? Going down Greek mythology rabbit holes? Scouring the internet for discontinued Betsey Johnson prom dresses?

One of my oddest fascinations as of late is with barbershop quartets. I told my partner I wanted to write about this and they jokingly suggested I title the piece “The Erotics of Barbershop,” even though it isn’t an erotic thing, not really. Or is it?

A week or so ago, I woke up with a seemingly random song lodged in my head, as I often do (does this happen to you too?). It was, of all things, “Bananaphone,” the classic goofy kids’ tune penned by legendary Canadian children’s performer Raffi. To satisfy the mental itch brought forth by this fruity earworm, I typed the song’s name into YouTube… and that’s when I discovered the Newfangled Four.

This quartet of lads, I realized as I watched their adorable take on Bananaphone, has all the appeal of a boy band like One Direction – except the group most likely to become enthralled by them isn’t teenage girls, but people like me: music nerds who always swooned over class clowns instead of hot jocks. These boys’ videos have racked up literally millions of views, and I have to wonder: how many of their viewers are reacting to these clips the way I am – as if my blazingly talented high school crush just sauntered out of choir practice, winked at me, and invited me over for a two-person Sondheim listening party after school?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of the “happiness setpoint,” which I learned about from some university psychology class long ago. It’s the phenomenon by which humans tend to return to one particular happiness level, unique to each individual, regardless of positive or negative events in their lives. Perhaps the best-known example of this is a 1978 study which monitored the happiness levels of recent lottery winners and recently-injured paraplegics, and found that both groups basically returned to their pre-event levels of contentment within a matter of months. We habituate to our circumstances. We return, inevitably, to our setpoints.

I’m thinking about this because, to say the least, it’s a weird time to be happy. When national or global crises take place, there seems to be an unspoken (or sometimes spoken) moral imperative to feel and perform misery in an act of empathy toward those affected, or even just to communicate that you understand the gravity of the situation. Little attention is paid to the idea of cultivating happiness under these circumstances, because “how can you be happy at a time like this?!” But that perspective, though understandable, ignores two key facts: 1) there are many situations in which no amount of worrying and crying can actually improve things, and 2) stress and sadness are bad for your health.

It can feel virtuous to be loudly sad about a sad situation. And obviously, if you’re not emotionally affected at all by what’s going on in the world right now, that’s a cause for concern. But I’ve grown tired of the attitude that to express or experience any happiness right now is some kind of moral failing. I’m sad and struggling and angry and anxious about everything that’s happening, just like everybody else, but I also know it’s neither productive nor healthy for me to feel that way all the time. Stress responses in the nervous system can weaken your immune system and can also weaken the emotional reserves you have available to support and care for other people – and yourself. Assaulting your brain with a daily stream of horrible news might feel like the responsible and ethical thing to do, but it’s only beneficial up to a point. Past that point, it becomes useless at best and detrimental at worst.

There are many ways of locating that “sweet spot” of sadness, the appropriate amount of despair to let into your heart every day before you shut the door to more. I’ve been experimenting with a new regimen of only checking Twitter twice a day, and keeping it off-limits via a site blocker browser extension the rest of the time. I don’t need more than two stress-hormone spikes per day (although usually I encounter more, in one form or another), and I’m unlikely to miss any truly crucial news developments in the matter of hours between each peek. In between, I can read my books and play my video games and do my work, knowing contentedly that I don’t have to stress until the next dedicated window of Stress Time.

The other day I set down my Kindle e-reader, midway through a novel about a pandemic that destroys civilization, and asked my partner Matt, “How many books should I be reading in a typical month?”

What followed was a pause, the type of pause that always feels to me like a trust fall, like a momentary wobble on a tightrope, the audience gasping and unable to tear their gazes away until this endless instant concludes.

Kink is a trust fall; you’re constantly hoping and wishing – or, if you’re lucky, trusting and knowing – that your partner will respond to your request or command or flirtation with an enthusiastic “yes,” however that “yes” happens to manifest. Even years into relationships, when you know the rhythm and parameters of your dynamic, it can be easy to forget that the person you want also wants what you want. I’m not always good at remembering that the ways in which I like to be controlled, guided, taken care of, are not flaws of mine in my partner’s eyes, but instead, opportunities for creativity and connection. They want what I want and I’m grateful for it every day.

Their thoughtful pause came to a close with a simple pronouncement: “Four. Four books in a month is a good amount for you.” It was, I have to assume, a calculation borne from my typical reading habits, the speed at which I can reasonably consume words. Part of being a dominant (so I gather) is not only listening to what your submissive tells you about their desires and limitations, but also observing those things firsthand, to help fill in the blind spots we all have about ourselves. I may know I physically can’t kneel for long periods of time, but it’s my dominant who’s likelier to know exactly how long I can typically kneel for. I may know I can read several books in a month if I want to, but it’s my dominant who’s likelier to know the sweet spot for me – the maximum number I can read and still enjoy and absorb the material, without tipping over into resentment or overwhelm.