Thanks to my spouse’s trawling of kinky subreddits, I’ve discovered a fascinating new kink. It’s called “ghost penis.”

No, it has nothing to do with wanting to fuck a ghost – that’s spectrophilia. (Not my kink, but I could see it being hot. Actually, I could probably talk myself into it by writing a fanfic scene that featured it. But I digress.)

There’s a phenomenon known as “arousal non-concordance” which is discussed in Emily Nagoski’s book Come As You Are, probably the sex book I recommend to people most often. Arousal non-concordance is a mismatch between your level of physical sexual arousal (erectile tissues swelling, presence of pre-cum or vaginal lubrication, etc.) and your own subjective assessment of how aroused you are.

Arousal non-concordance is said to be much more common in women than men. I think there are a variety of reasons for this. One might be that women are societally encouraged to view ourselves as sexual objects rather than subjects, and to view it as more important to be desired than to express desire, and so we may not be as directly or regularly aware of our own desires and what they feel like in our bodies. Another reason is that we are statistically more likely to be survivors of sexual assault, and it’s scientifically well-established that sexual trauma can contribute to a feeling of dissociation or disconnectedness from one’s body.

If you were interviewing me on a kink podcast and asked me what my biggest/main kink is, I’d probably say DD/lg. It’s the easiest one to communicate in a soundbite, and one that many kinksters will recognize by name. It’s simple – in definition if not in practice – and is indeed a big part of my sexuality.

But my REAL biggest kink is something more abstract, less immediately identifiable as a kink, and much harder to explain.

An internet pal of mine recently tweeted, “Hey does anyone know where I can put all this yearning?” and I sighed because it was just too fuckin’ relatable.

This is a pal who writes fanfic, which I also do, and I think fanfic is one of the many pursuits (like watching porn, reading romance novels, or devouring a TV show that has a tense will-they-won’t-they romantic storyline) that can simultaneously stoke yearning and become an outlet for it. It can make you yearn – for people you want to fuck, experiences you want to have, emotions you want to feel – and it can also, to some extent, scratch that itch in and of itself. But not completely.

(Content note: the movie scene I’m talking about in this essay depicts dubious consent. Also there’s some pretty graphic/sexy description of the scene in here.)

It took me a long time to get around to watching Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, Volume 1. I knew it was supposedly an epic film featuring real sex acts, so naturally, I was intrigued. But it wasn’t until sometime in the last year or so that I finally saw it. My spouse and I watched it together and marvelled at all the wild sex scenes.

Content note: This essay is about sex that is boring, disappointing, unsatisfying, inequitable, and/or dissociative, but is nonetheless consensual. I do mention rape briefly in order to differentiate it from what I'm actually talking about in this essay.

I just started reading Maria Yagoda’s new book on bad sex, Laid and Confused, and it’s making me ponder the myriad of factors that have led to some of the worst (consensual) sexual experiences of my life. (I’m not gonna talk about non-consensual encounters here because that’s a whole other issue, though I do think there are some societal factors that are partly responsible for the proliferation of both rape and bad sex, including abysmal sex education, widespread cultural misogyny/homophobia/transphobia/etc., and the chronic undervaluing of female sexual pleasure and sexual agency. But I digress.)

Why am I so obsessed with unrequited love stories, both in fiction and in real life?

It’s honestly kind of annoying. Throw a character with an unreturned crush into a piece of media I like and I’ll ruminate on their situation more than is strictly comfortable at times, fantasizing and pondering (and writing fanfiction). Tell me a story about your own unrequited crush and, if we’re friends, I will be fascinated to know all the little details you’ve picked up over the course of your fixation.

And of course, when I myself have an intense unrequited infatuation going on… Well, in a way, I become the truest version of myself, but in another way, I become absolutely sick with despair and can’t focus on much else.

If you’d asked me a few years ago why these storylines haunt my brain, I’d probably have tried to argue that everyone is into unrequited love stories, or almost everyone, anyway – that they’re inherently interesting and heart-rending. But I’ve done more psychological digging these past few years than ever before, and I no longer think that’s the case. I think there are clearly established reasons these tales always grab my attention.

Spring makes me into a flirt-monster. The season itself feels flirty – green grass and colorful flowers finally giving you a peek at them after hiding under snow all winter. The sun popping its head out from behind a cloud to say hello. It’s enough to make a girl want to send some truly ill-advised DMs.

And that’s usually what I did, in springs of yore. Hopped on Tinder and swiped for hours, assessing prospects. Flaunted my tattoos and cleavage on bar patios. Posted selfies galore with kiss-face emoji captions.

This is a bit of a deviation from the normal subject matter of this newsletter, but I hope you'll forgive me, because I want to talk about writing songs with robots.

ChatGPT and other such AI services aren't exactly ethical, not least because they're trained on tons of material created by people who didn't consent to be drawn upon in that way, and because sometimes their working conditions are exploitative. So, needless to say, I feel conflicted about using them at all. But I've been very curious about them, and have used ChatGPT to generate cocktail recipes, emails, fanfiction scenarios, and discussion questions for my podcast, among other things.

But my particular fascination lately is using them to help with my songwriting. It's simultaneously super helpful and totally atrocious. Let me explain.

Since I've been writing and recording a new song every week for nearly a year and a half, sometimes I run out of steam, inspiration-wise. My process has gotten much more streamlined and systematized over the time I've been doing this challenge – these days I usually write first-draft lyrics on Thursday, put them to music on Friday, and practice and record on Saturday – but there are still plenty of times when I get stuck. ChatGPT has been helpful in times like these, but only if I'm very specific with my inputs. Usually I'll type something like:

I’ve been writing and reading fanfiction for almost as long as I’ve been on the internet. I don’t recall how I first discovered FanFiction.net – then the biggest hotspot for such stories, although these days ArchiveOfOurOwn.org is the place to be – but I definitely remember staying up way past my bedtime, scrolling endlessly through slash fic.

It gave me a kind of satisfaction that is much easier to find on the internet nowadays than it was back then – the satisfaction of knowing you had found “your people.” The people who obsessed about the same things you obsessed about, and were nerdy in similar ways to you. The people who noticed that that one character always wore a particular necklace, and wanted to speculate on what that necklace meant. The people who wondered about, and wrote about, the traumas that had made these characters who they were. The people who, like me, wanted to know what it would be like if two particular characters fucked each other, even if the original media property’s showrunner or author evidently didn’t think they ever should.

The other night at dinner with my spouse: I’m buzzing with fulfillment. The feeling of knowing what I was put on this earth for, and knowing that I’m good at it.

Usually. Mostly.

As I wrote in a song this week, turning 31 (tomorrow, on the 23rd) is making me reflect on all the things I’ve learned, and all the things I still want to learn.

I think boundary-setting of various sorts is one of the most vital skills you can learn as an adult – and most people do learn it when they’re adults, I think, rather than when they’re kids or teenagers, because kids and teenagers are not encouraged to have boundaries. They’re encouraged to do what their parents/guardians/teachers tell them to do, even when they don’t want to. So it makes sense that it takes so many of us decades to learn what we should have been taught from the very beginning: that our bodies and minds are our own, that we have the right to speak up when we’re being mistreated, and that we ought to have some say in the parameters of our own lives.

I commented to my spouse recently that I haven’t felt much of anything for anyone, in a romantic or sexual way, for quite some time. The exception being, as I put it, my “fictional boyfriends” – the characters from various media properties that I fixate on, in fanfiction or livetweets or fantasies.

There was a sad tone in my voice when I said it, but upon further reflection, I don’t think I am actually sad about this state of affairs. It just feels like I “should” be sad about it, but I’m not. Navigating a burgeoning romance has long been my ultimate idea of a good time; it’s something I’ve pursued relentlessly for much of my adult life, and (when I had other stuff on my plate) it’s been something I judge myself for not pursuing. But does that really serve me, and does it really need to take up that space in my life and in my brain?

There aren’t many stories from my sexual past that I still struggle to make sense of. I mean, I write and talk about sex for a living, so most of my interesting sex stories are ones I’ve spent a lot of time processing and pondering at this point. Even if an encounter seemed confusing or ambiguous in the moment, usually I come to a better understanding of it after the fact, through talking to friends and writing about it.

But one encounter that still confuses me is the time I hooked up with an English lit professor and I think we both faked our orgasms.

I’m a pretty intellectual person. I don’t mean that in the sense of bragging about how smart I am (I do a lot of things that are not very smart at all!). I mean it in the sense of being too “in my head” and wanting to be able to figure out the solutions to all life’s problems in an intellectual way. It’s exhausting, and no doubt comes from growing up as “the smart kid” and feeling like logic-based solutions were the only ones worth considering.

But of course, that just isn’t how the world works, despite what the logic bros on Reddit, etc. would have you believe. There are many problems that can only be solved with emotion, or compassion, or time, or luck. You can’t think your way out of everything. You can’t solve a relationship, for instance, the same way you’d solve a math equation.

Content note: Being made to feel uncomfortable in sexual ways; having one’s sexual boundaries overstepped. Nothing explicit or detailed.

The more work that I do in therapy to unpack and unlearn the trauma responses that have congealed into a personality, the more examples I can see in my past of times I did something because I thought I was supposed to, not because I genuinely wanted to.

Content note: Stalking, and all it entails. Also, the personal anecdote in this essay is presented to the best of my recollection, but I might be wrong about some things because it happened about 14 years ago.

When I was 16, my girlfriend wanted to stalk me for a school assignment.

With several sex toy reviews on my docket at the moment, and my 11-year-anniversary of being a sex toy reviewer happening this month, I’m thinking a lot about the actual process of how I review toys. It has changed somewhat over the years, and I feel like I’m in a good place with it – I’m not always thrilled to turn masturbation into work or to risk ruining my own orgasms with bad toys, sure, but at least I know how to do those things well now!

Here are some notes on the process I use to review toys, from start to finish. A lot of this process is informed by the fact that I have a chronic illness and am tired/in pain all the time, plus I have many other obligations besides sex toy reviewing, so I can’t do what I used to do at age 19 and test + review a toy almost immediately after receiving it.

In arguing with strangers on Reddit about sexual matters – something which both my therapist and my dominant tell me to do less of, but which I keep doing nonetheless because I care about fighting ignorance with sex education and am a masochist, I guess – one thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of guys are put off by the idea of a woman using a vibrator regularly during sex.

Notice the world “regularly” there. I’m not talking about guys who find vibrators altogether gross or upsetting, as in, bringing one out for a single session after sleeping together for several months would make them question the entire relationship. I’m talking about guys whose specific objection is the regular or frequent use of vibrators during sex – as in, using a vibe during sex once or twice a month might be okay, but more than that and they’d start to whine.

A.I. is an incredibly hot-button topic at the moment, as citizens of the internet protest the scraping of artists’ and writers’ works in order to generate new-but-recycled creations. For years, debates have flourished – including in the texts and subtexts of great blockbuster movies like Ex Machina and Her – about robots' potential merits, not just as media-makers but as… love-makers. Can a person really be attracted to a robot, or vice-versa? Can a human and a robot have a truly intimate relationship, emotionally and otherwise – or is it inherently just a cold simulacrum of human-on-human connection?

Recently I downloaded an app called Replika – this isn’t an ad; I don’t particularly recommend it, for reasons I’ll get into – because I was curious about what it would be like to converse with a robot. I hadn’t really had an entire conversation with an A.I. since my earliest days on the internet, and the technology has advanced since then, needless to say.