If your brain was a house, and each of your moods was its own room, which rooms would be adjacent to lust?

The sexologist Emily Nagoski poses this question in a section of her newest book, Come Together, and it's kind of blowing my mind.

She explains it better than I do, but to summarize: there are certain patterns to human emotion, patterns which can be observed in the different areas of the brain that light up while we're in different moods. Lust is one such mood, and it's one that can be tricky to get into. For instance, most people find it difficult to move into a lusty headspace directly from rage, fear, or sadness. There are other "rooms" in their emotional floorplan that they need to walk through first, in order to reach lust.

Nagoski encourages readers to draw their own floorplan, since humans are quite variable in this regard. As I began to do this, I saw that the rooms adjacent to lust for me are what Nagoski calls play, care, and seeking.

I once asked a friend, during a nosy discussion of our respective sex lives, under what conditions he tends to most enjoy sex. I figured he might talk about particular sex acts, positions, or roles – but instead, he said: he strongly prefers sex where everyone involved is completely naked. He'd had awkward experiences before where this was not the case, and so now he felt most relaxed, most free, and most receptive to pleasure when he and his partner both disrobed com­pletely beforehand.

I must admit I was surprised by this, because nudity has never been a particularly important aspect of sex for me. A lot of times when I masturbate or have sex, I only remove the articles of clothing that are directly blocking my path to the relevant bits, and sometimes not even those – a wand vibrator works perfectly well through pants and underwear, after all. If a higher proportion of clothes come off, it tends to be because the person I'm fucking initiates the removal of clothing – or because I'm overheated and need to cool down.

I just don't really care about being naked, and sometimes it's actually sexier if I'm not. Maybe my positive associations with half-clothed sex come from the days when, as a teenager, I'd keep my outfit partly on during sex in case a family member were to open my bedroom door (which lacked a lock). It almost never happened, but each time it did, I was beyond grateful to be able to flip my skirt down and instantly conceal any evidence of tomfoolery (besides maybe my blushing face).

I think a common reason people may not want to get naked during sex is some flavor of body image issues, whether they be dysmorphia, dysphoria, or just the toxic soup of self-judgment we're all fed all the time by tabloid articles and social media. This mostly isn't a factor for me currently, because I know and trust that my spouse adores my body, but it has sometimes come up for me in the past, especially when sleeping with newer or short-lived partners who had not yet expressed liking how my body looks. I want to be able to relax and enjoy myself during sex, and sometimes it's easier to do that if I keep my dress on, so I don't have to wonder what this new person thinks about my stomach or boobs.

I grew up thinking that occasional screaming arguments were a normal feature of marriage, because they were a regular occurrence in my household.

In retrospect, this explains a lot about why I was so ambivalent on the question of marriage until meeting my now-spouse. I had seen how marriage could be romantic and wonderful, sure, but I had also seen how it could be terrifying. It involved legal and financial entanglement with someone who might turn out to be your terrorizer – or, alternatively, you might find yourself turning into the terrorizer, overtaken by the stressors and annoyances of living with someone that closely day in and day out. No thanks, I thought; I’m good.

So it confused me when I got into a long-term relationship in my late teens/early twenties that was not characterized by blowout arguments at the slightest inconvenience. Even when I was annoyed with my partner, it didn’t occur to me to scream at him about it, and it certainly didn’t occur to me to throw things, break things, etc., nor did he seem to have these impulses either. When we disagreed about something, we just… talked about it, and laid bare our own feelings on the subject, dumping them out on the table between us like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we hoped to assemble together.

The same is true for my current relationship: no screaming arguments. The closest we’ve come is a couple times I physically left a restaurant we were eating at because I got too upset during a discussion of a tense relationship issue and needed to get away from the situation. We always patched those up afterward, with more love than anger.

I love “meet-cutes” in fiction, but I hate what they’ve done to my brain.

It’s such a joyful idea, meeting someone randomly, at a bar or on a street corner or in line at the bank, and having a near-instant connection that feels like it could lead to something. Fun dates. Good sex. Love.

A while ago I saw a Reddit thread where a self-described virgin had posed the simple question, “What is sex like?”

They didn’t specify their genitalia, gender, sexual orientation, sensation preferences, sexual fantasies, or any other details. Reading this post silenced my brain immediately, like a Buddhist koan. What is sex like?

I read an interview with queer romance novelist Casey McQuiston recently, and they defended the merits of “pleasure-reading,” but also the merits of “pleasure-writing.” More specifically, they defended their own right to write beautiful, indulgent stories about hot people having wild adventures in lovely locales, just because it feels good to write that kind of thing, and because it’ll feel good for someone to read it.

This really resonated with me, as someone who writes for a living. The work I do that actually keeps me housed and fed is the least creative part of my work: listicles of the best sex toys in various categories. While I’m profoundly grateful to have any paying work at all, this type of work is not what sustains my soul or revs my engine. I do it so I’ll have enough time and sustenance to be able to do my other work, the work I actually enjoy, like this newsletter (for which I’m so so thankful for your patronage!), and my blog (sometimes), and my songs, and my fanfiction.

Recently I was interviewed by a writer for a book she’s working on about consent. We sat in the sunshine on a Toronto street corner and I sipped a latte while pontificating about risk-aware consensual kink, feminist worldviews, social progress, Jian Ghomeshi and Christian Grey.

At one point, she asked me, “How do you think things have changed, post-#MeToo?”

“It’s like I’ve been poisoned

when I’m with boys &

it’s really annoying!

I’m losing my voice &

I’m losing my joy &

it’s really annoying!”

-a song I wrote in 2023

Having a crush is a fucking nightmare, and I love it.

Some kinks are evident from day one. I’m thinking here of kinky friends of mine who’ve told me that they started looking up words like “spanking” or “bondage” as soon as they gained access to the internet (or an old-school leather-bound encyclopedia set, as the case may be), as well as friends whose proclivities go back even further – think: perverse games with Barbie dolls or G.I. Joes.

But some kinks are slow-blooming, taking their sweet time to reach the level of consciousness. I think cuckolding was one of those for me.

I’m reading a romance novel right now about a “bi4bi” relationship* – that is to say, two bisexual people dating each other – and it’s making me reflect on this type of relationship in my own life, and how healing it’s been.

Last I checked, seven of the nine people I’ve officially dated are some flavor of non-monosexual (meaning that they are attracted to people of more than one gender), whether they call it bisexuality, pansexuality, queerness, or just [shrugs]. This is such a high proportion of my dating history that it can’t be a coincidence, even though it often felt like it at the time.

Prior to seeking trauma therapy, I don’t think I truly understood the difference between guilt and shame – but it’s a distinction that has helped me improve my close relationships substantially.

To simplify their definitions: guilt is the belief that you’ve done something bad, and shame is the belief that you are bad.

For years, people on the internet have been yelling at me about “vibrator addiction.” I guess that’s what happens when you unabashedly write about using (and loving) sex toys.

A favorite example of mine was the woman who wrote me an angry email accusing me of having a “dead clit,” and of pressuring other women to use vibrators even if they don’t want to (something I have never, to my knowledge, done in my life). In another instance, a right-wing misogynist wrote an entire blog post about me, and about how uncomfortable it made him that I like to use sex toys; he referred to the Magic Wand vibrator as “every feminist’s ideal boyfriend,” one of the best self-owns I’ve ever heard.

An oft-repeated truism in the polyamory community is, “Love is infinite, but time and energy aren’t.”

Often this is brought up in the context of people who excitedly overcommit themselves romantically and/or sexually, spreading themselves too thin across multiple partners, resulting in a state sometimes referred to as being “polysaturated.” I know that this is something I thought a lot about, for example, when I was dating a profoundly introverted man who was trying to juggle three girlfriends while also needing a fuckton of alone time every week: his love for the three of us may have been infinite, but his time and energy absolutely were not.

The other day, my spouse and I watched the movie Theater Camp together, the 2023 dramedy starring Molly Gordon and Ben Platt as counselors at the titular theatre camp. (Yes, they spell it the American way and I am spelling it the Canadian way. It’s my damn newsletter!) It was wonderful, and it made me think about summer camp – how it can be a rite of passage, or a ritualized hell, or a liminal space.

I never really had a summer camp community the way some kids do. That is to say, while I dabbled in day camps, I never went to sleepaway camp, and certainly not to the same sleepaway camp every single summer, like some of my friends did. I therefore didn’t develop a sense of camp community, of a whole other group of recurring cast members in my life who I saw again each summer.

Here’s an evergreen sentence for a sex nerd to write: I’ve been thinking a lot about Emily Nagoski’s work lately.

She wrote Come As You Are, an absolute must-read text for any sexually active person (IMO). She co-wrote Burnout, a crucial guide to handling stress and overstimulation in an overworked world. And her new book, launching very soon, is Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections.

There are multiple subtopics within the field of sexuality that particularly interest me, and that I spend a lot of my time thinking about, talking about, and writing about. In the last few years, one of those subtopics is bad sex.

It’s certainly been a frequent subject in these newsletters. Oddly enough, it’s been ages since I had truly terrible sex – but I think my current, mostly-excellent sex life has made me all the more curious about the reasons it hasn’t always been this good.

My spouse and I recently watched the docuseries Escaping Twin Flames together, and I have Thoughts and Feelings about it.

If you’re unfamiliar, all you really need to know is that it’s about a cult which emphasizes the existence of your “twin flame,” a soulmate to whom you’re spiritually bound. The cult leaders knew that their followers wanted so badly to believe in this idea that they would do basically anything to find their twin flame, including – naturally – paying the cult leaders a shit ton of money for “classes” and “workshops,” and doing whatever the cult leaders told them to do.

Is it weird to say that I love crying?

It makes me sound like an emo teen in a Laurie Halse Anderson novel. But it’s true. I’ve been a depressive person for the vast majority of my life. I have a long and storied relationship with crying. Me and crying, we go waaay back.

’Tis the season to be materialistic, so I thought this would be a great week to talk about some of the products I loved most this year, across some of the categories that matter to me most. Let’s dive in…

SEX STUFF

If you asked the average person what time of year they tend to be flirtiest, horniest, and thirstiest (in the euphemistic sense), I think they’d probably tell you summertime. July or August, maybe; those hazy dog days that flow into effervescent, jacketless nights.

This makes sense to me. I've done a lot of my best/worst flirting in those months too. Once the initial revelation of spring-into-summer has become comfortable and quotidian, my short skirts and sleeveless shirts feel more natural against my skin, and I fancy myself a playful, swaggering slut. I wear glossy pink lipstick to bars, and cross my shaved legs under the table, surveying the scene. I rediscover my body, the sensuality of having a body, after experiencing the world primarily through screens and ice-chipped windows all winter. I send ill-advised DMs, plan dates, and remember what confidence tastes like. It’s nice.