-A blue and green plaid flannel shirt that I pulled out of his closet one morning after a sleepover and asked to borrow. I wore it so much that a few weeks later – when I realized, over coffee with a friend, that I needed to break up with the boy that very day – I looked down and saw I was wearing his shirt, and said, “I guess I have to go home and change out of this first, huh?”

-A playlist of romantic punk songs from the ‘70s.

At the time that I met my now-spouse, I was fantasizing about being collared far more often than I was fantasizing about getting married. The idea of being someone’s collared sub seemed not only more plausible to me, but also more desirable, more in line with my values and cravings at that time.

I loved the idea of being “owned,” and of dating a dominant who was committed enough to me and to our D/s dynamic that they’d want that commitment to be reflected in a symbol other people could see and understand.

Last night I fainted at a house party. It was for reasons that were medical, rather than alcohol-related (I’m 95% sure), but it still made me think about other times I’ve been the messy girl at the party.

I’ve been messy in the drunk sense, sure. Usually because I’m so socially anxious that I pick up a drink so I’ll have something to do with my hands and something to calm my nerves. I’ve been the girl who accepted too many shots of Jack or red plastic cups of spiked punch and started announcing “I’m so drunk!” through maniacal giggles to anyone who would listen. I’ve been the girl who tipsily flirted with people she shouldn’t have, went on too long about her obscure passions to people who may or may not have cared, or danced the Macarena to songs that were not the Macarena until the DJ finally gave in and played the Macarena.

I have also been a messy party girl in the emotional sense (though, let’s be real, usually this is exacerbated by alcohol in that case). I have cried on friends’ shoulders about recent heartbreaks, including heartbreaks involving people who were also at the party. I have needed to step onto the porch or balcony to collect myself in the chilly fresh air when an intractable crush or ex arrived with someone new on their arm. I have cried in the bathroom while subtweeting.

Being the messy girl at the party is inherently embarrassing, at least for me. It paradoxically can make you into the center of attention even when that’s not actually what you want, even when what you want more than anything is to shrink down until you disappear. It can make you feel like you need other people to take care of you, like you’re incapable of taking care of yourself. It can leave you with nothing but a hangover and some ill-advised text messages to remember the evening by. It can change people’s opinions of you, make people remember you as a kind of person you usually are not.

In high school, a friend and I had an inside joke known as the “killing kittens” rule. (I am not going to discuss killing kittens any more graphically than just using that phrase, don’t worry.) The rule was something we had observed in our romantic lives – that even if a white-hot crush on a cute person cooled over time, it would still remain alive, in some form, because the person was no doubt still cute and funny and smart, etc. For crushy feelings to actually, fully dissipate, something pretty extreme would have to happen. Something like, oh, I don’t know, finding out that they killed some kittens.

(To clarify, this never actually happened. It was just an example of the kind of thing that might make an infatuation shrivel up and die, and the name stuck. For years afterward, when one of us would sigh, moony-eyed, about someone we thought we’d gotten over months ago, the other would say with a resigned shrug, “Killing kittens,” and we would nod our heads with grim acceptance.)

There’s a recurring event on my calendar, set to come up once every 4 weeks. I don’t always follow through on making it happen, but I always feel better mentally and emotionally when I do. That event is called “Clean & condition leather boots.”

The reasons for my prioritizing this act are threefold. One is practical: my last pair of black leather Frye harness boots died a sad death after 6 years of regular wear, because (among other reasons) I had not been caring for them well enough or often enough, and the dried-out leather near the soles had started to pull away from the rubber in an act of quiet protest. I loved those boots so much that I cried tears of sadness when a cobbler made the pronouncement of death, and then cried tears of happiness when my partner bought me a replacement pair as a Valentine’s Day gift. I vowed not to let the boots down this time.

I remember having an illuminating conversation once with a male friend who had been my friend-with-benefits for a while. “Remember the first time we hooked up?” I effused over drinks. “I couldn’t believe you didn’t know how much I wanted to fuck you. I mean, I took you up to my room, and showed you my sex toy collection… and we hung out talking on my bed for like an hour… and then I finally had to make the first move, because it didn’t seem like you were going to!”

“Of course I wasn’t going to,” my friend replied. “I was waiting for you to give me the green light.”

Because sex journalism is still fairly niche, and because sex coverage in general is usually done by reporters who have a range of other “beats” (dating, health, beauty, etc.), I often receive press releases that have nothing to do with the topics I actually write about. I imagine these PR people are reaching out to me simply because of the publications where I’ve had bylines – GQ, SELF, Insider, etc. – and assuming that if I write about sex toys for those places, I must write about other stuff for them too, which actually isn’t the case. These days, sex toys are my beat, and I almost never venture beyond them in the writing I do for publications.

I used to fret about being offered “press samples” by these companies. I would show my spouse these emails and tremulously say, “But what if I ask them to send me the purse/shoes/piano they’re promoting and then they get mad that I don’t write about it for any big outlets?” – to which my spouse always says, “If they’re offering a purse/shoes/piano to a journalist who only writes about sex toys, that’s on them. They should’ve done better research on the people they were contacting.”

I’ve been interested in Zen and Buddhist ideas off-and-on for several years, and have been reading more about them lately. I think the reason I’m feeling drawn to these schools of thought at the moment is that I didn’t fully understand or appreciate stillness until I turned 30. I thought I did, but in my twenties I was always running around from work to dates to parties, always filling my remaining waking hours with reading or writing or watching things. At 30 I have become more interested in just being still, when I can; I have built a life that allows for this occasionally and my weary body is grateful for that.

I’m reading a book right now called Dropping Ashes on the Buddha, which contains some of the teachings of a Zen master named Seung Sahn. A lot of the ideas in it are familiar to me from other Zen teachings I’ve read – which doesn’t mean I fully understand them, just that I’ve thought about them before and tried to understand them. As Seung Sahn says, trying to teach someone about Zen through words is sort of counterproductive, because Zen itself (as far as I understand it) is about having no words in your mind, no thoughts, just a clear head and mindfulness of the moment. “Be here now,” as the saying goes.

I just got back from a trip to Chicago, where my spouse and I were celebrating our 5-year anniversary of meeting and our 2-year anniversary of getting married. It was all very cute, very fancy, and a great way for both of us to recharge a bit, after what has been a pretty draining year professionally and personally for so many people.

One of the things Matt really wanted to do while we were there was have dinner at Alinea, which may very well be in a once-in-a-lifetime experience for us. What a place. Alinea has been on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list for several years running, and has a whopping three Michelin stars, the highest honor given by that organization. But this essay isn’t an ad for Alinea. It’s a pervy treatise on why fine dining restaurants can, should, and often do take cues from kinksters when constructing the experiences they offer.

I’m working my way through Sex & the City, having been a bit too young for it when it was on the air. It’s definitely got a lot of problems, but it’s an interesting historical relic from a particular subsection of human sexuality during a particular era. And it’s often quite funny and thought-provoking.

There was an arc in some of the episodes I was watching this week where Samantha – the sexually empowered, adventurous slut of the group – fell in love with a man who turned out to have a small dick. She was crushed by this, as big dicks are hugely (ha) important to her sexuality: she loves looking at them and feeling them inside her, and maybe kinda fetishizes them a bit. Kim Cattrall is such a brilliant performer in the role of Samantha that you really buy the pathos of the situation – the sick, Gift of the Magi-esque cruelty of her falling so hard for a guy who can’t fuck her the way she wants.

Dick ratings are a super popular service offered by many online sex workers. I don’t think I knew that yet when a random man online first asked if he could pay me to rate his dick, though, so I was a bit confused.

A question arose in my mind which no doubt plagues many newbie sex workers when first faced with this request. Did he want a real, honest rating? Or was there something he was hoping to hear, something that would excite him more than honesty? (One thing I’ve learned from doing online sex work is that most people think they’re excited by honesty/authenticity but actually would prefer an appealing lie of some kind. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, except that it can be confusing for both clients and providers.)

Look, I’ll tell you this right now: if you’re not on my Close Friends list, it’s unlikely you can work your way onto it. Not because I don’t think you deserve it, but because I am a traumatized bb with trust issues and a history of being stalked/harassed/surveilled online (FUN!).

But yesterday, I was thinking about a certain ex-beau of mine who could be, but isn’t, on my Close Friends list, and I began to wonder why that is. I realized that there is a specific set of criteria that create the very particular form of intimacy that is being on my Close Friends list.

Sex cults are fucking fascinating. I have watched some illuminating media lately about the cults known respectively as NXIVM and OneTaste (the docuseries The Vow and the documentary Orgasm Inc.) and am struck afresh by philosophical questions galore. One of the main ones I’ve been pondering is: What makes sex such a fruitful focus for cults? Why are there so many sex cults but (probably) not as many cults focused on, I dunno, physical fighting, making music or doing theatre? Why is sex special?

The documentary on OneTaste helped answer this question for me. This organization ostensibly offered classes on something called “orgasmic meditation,” a process whereby a man stimulates a woman’s clitoris in a specific way for 15 minutes and it’s supposed to be meditative and enlightening for both of them. (Other gender dynamics do exist within the OM community but are much more rare.) Abuses of power were constantly occurring behind the scenes, though, and many people were deeply harmed by being involved in this seemingly positive organization.

I’ve been working a lot on my songwriting this year, and reading books about the craft, and watching interviews with other songwriters about their process. It’s easy to feel, amid all this learning and working, that songwriting itself is a good (or at least neutral) force in my life – but actually it’s been the source of some pretty deep humiliations and awkward situations in my past.

Of course, this is true of many different types of writing I’ve done – being an oversharer can cause issues, regardless of medium – but there is something about songwriting that makes it particularly prone to embarrassing me. Songs, more than any of my other writing, often feel like something that happen to me, rather than being something I intentionally sit down and craft. Like an improvised monologue, or a stream-of-consciousness journal entry, they are frequently the summation of whatever thoughts and feelings have been swirling around my mind lately. Sometimes I’m not even totally aware of how I feel until I see it on the page or hear myself singing it out loud.

Content note: This is an essay about alcohol and sex, and touches on some of the consent violations that can occur when these things are mixed. Nothing particularly graphic or violent is contained herein.

I’ve been reading a great memoir about a woman’s recovery from alcoholism (The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, if you’re curious) and, while alcohol addiction isn’t something I’ve personally struggled with, there’s a lot in it that I’m resonating with – particularly the stuff about addictions being a response to a persistent inner feeling of lack and unlovedness, and the stuff about how alcohol can make the notion of consent a bit fuzzy even when it’s clearly not.

In a way, it’s totally unsurprising that I now make my living mostly giving people advice on how to masturbate and what devices to use when they do so – because I’ve been looking at “masturbation techniques” websites since I was quite young. I think they’re a brilliant, invaluable resource, both for people who’ve never touched themselves sexually before and for people who’ve been doing it for years, or even decades. There is always more to learn about your own body and what makes it feel good, even if you’ve got tried-and-true methods you’re hesitant to deviate from.

The site of this kind that I remember most vividly from my youth is MyMasturbation.com (I’ve linked to an archived version, because the current version lacks the early-oughts internet aesthetic and isn’t organized as well). It allowed users to submit their own masturbation technique suggestions, and organized them into categories, which were sometimes straightforwardly named (“anal dildos,” “clit – rubbing,” “slowly”) and sometimes a bit more mysterious or surprising (“food – misc.,” “unusual,” “curling iron”). I was new to the world of jerkin’ it, and had only experimented with classics like my bathtub faucet and teddy bear – so this cornucopia of alternate suggestions felt like an embarrassment of riches.

A friend recommended the all-bisexual season of the reality dating show Are You the One? and of course my partner and I had to watch it together. As with dating reality shows in general, this one was very engrossing (at least if you find human connection interesting, which I imagine most of us do) and had a lot of pertinent lessons to teach about how attractions and relationships function.

As is de rigueur for its genre, Are You the One? puts some contestants in a big-ass house and forces them through a series of physical challenges and emotional gauntlets over the course of several weeks, in order to earn a large sum of money. But the gimmick of this particular show is that all of the contestants have been pre-interviewed about their personalities, lifestyles, and romantic histories, and their friends and families have also been consulted, in order for offscreen matchmakers to pair up each contestant with their “perfect match” amongst the other contestants. The players’ job is to figure out who’s matched with who, and eventually guess all 8 couples correctly, by getting to know each other and making guesses about who’s a perfect match, which the show can confirm or deny in various convoluted ways.

I’ve been playing so much Breath of the Wild lately. SO MUCH. An amount that makes my eyes hurt and deprives me of sleep and seems to make hours of the day disappear in a snap.

If you don’t know it, don’t worry; video game knowledge is not a prerequisite for understanding the points of this piece. But to fill you in briefly, it’s an open-world game for the Nintendo Switch in the Legend of Zelda series, of which I had played exactly zero games before starting BotW. I’m not normally into the type of video game where you run around fighting goblins with swords and looking for treasure chests in dungeons, but friends (who knew me well) kept telling me I would love this game, so I finally picked it up.

Being wanted, feeling wanted, is a type of intoxication. Especially if you’ve never, or rarely, felt it before.

Some of my most vivid memories – the ones that are encoded in technicolor and carved into my neurons – are from early experiences of being desired. This is the double-edged blade of the way women are taught to see our desirability as one of the main things defining our value: the despair of those moments when we’ve felt starkly undesirable are almost worth it, for the druglike highs of being liked, being wanted, being craved.

Content note: This essay discusses me sexualizing myself, in a totally consensual but sometimes vaguely “yikes” way, when I was a teenager.

I was 15 when I discovered the website SuicideGirls. I was also 15 when I came out as bisexual. That’s probably not a coincidence.