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.

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?

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.

When I was a teen, I had an eccentric sense of style. Of course I did; I went to an arts school.

I often described my aesthetic as a blend between “a 1950s housewife, a 1980s teen queen, and a British schoolboy.” You can see hints of these elements here and there in my old outfit photos: sequins, neckties, red lipstick. I had fun getting dressed every day and it showed.

While the intensity of my look mellowed somewhat over the years as I trudged into adulthood, the “British schoolboy” component is definitely the one I’ve lost touch with the most. See, in high school, I dated exclusively women and nonbinary people until my last year, having come out as bisexual in the 10th grade – and in those contexts, I felt more desirable (and more desired) when I dressed with an androgynous or even masculine flair. I felt strong and put-together in my blazers, bowties, jeans and boots. It sometimes felt like drag – fake and theatrical, given my overarchingly femme gender identity and expression. But sometimes it felt exactly right. And I think it had to do with who I was dating.

My inner androgyny has never really faded – I still have plenty of days where I wake up feeling butch or boyish – but my confidence in dressing that way has definitely eroded to some degree. Dating mostly men for many years put me in a patriarchally-driven “feminine = sexy” mindset, especially since so many of those men vocally loved when I dressed girly. I loved it too – most of the time. But not always.

Yesterday I stood before my dresser, pawing through my underwear drawer for something to wriggle into after a shower, and had the thought, “Should I wear these pink ones? No, they’re too nice. I should save them.”

Immediately, I had the next logical thought: “Save them for what?”

In my early twenties, the daily decision between “good underwear” and “garbage underwear” carried more weight than panties would seem to. If I was headed to a university lecture, a coffee date with a friend, a family brunch, or some other event where sex was absolutely 1,000% not going to happen, I would pick something faded and stretched out from the Hanes 2006 catalogue. (If you know, you know.)

But there would be days – maybe once a month, maybe a few times a week, depending on what was going on in my admittedly absurd sex life at the time – when I would make the conscious decision to slip into something lacy, or silky, or satiny, and most assuredly stain-free. I would do this, optimistically, if there was even a 20% chance I might be having sex in the coming hours. It felt like casting a spell, setting an intention, and the intention was confidence and self-assuredness in a moment that had yet to come.