Content note: drugs, alcohol, and hypnosis.

We were high a lot of the time that we were in Portland. Portable weed vapes were readily available in stores, after all. That drug cast a vibrant glow over my memories from the trip. I am always awed by traveling to unfamiliar places, and I am always awed by Matt; stoned, I was extra-awed by both.

One late night, at a fancy restaurant, I sipped wine through a druggy haze while gazing lovingly at my beautiful partner across the table. We were waiting for our entrees when I glanced up and noticed it: to my right, a wine rack, several wine glasses hanging from it upside-down. One of the glasses, having just been haphazardly slid into place by some rushed-off-their-feet server, was seesawing back and forth a little in its spot. Dangling. Swinging, like a pendulum, or a pocketwatch.

I’m mesmerized by hypnokink. Lately I have been losing myself in the work of Sleepingirl and Mr. Dream, scrolling through their blog posts late at night, plowing through the Two Hyp Chicks podcast, falling into these oeuvres like a trance.

Erotic hypnosis isn’t new to me, having dated a hypno pervert for nearly two years now. But this thirst for practical info and first-person accounts is new. I’m an obsessive person and have become fixated on certain kinks for periods of time before, and there always comes a point where I want to move from disinterested, clinical explanations of the thing to dirty stories of people actually doing the thing. I mean, would I have gotten half as focused on spanking as I did if I’d never read “spankophile” Jillian Keenan’s electric book peppered with impact-play eroticism, Sex with Shakespeare? Doubt it.

The thing that Sleepingirl, in particular, captures so well about hypnosis is the intimacy of it. Nobody really explained this aspect to me when I first threw myself into this kink, probably because, to hypnokinksters, it’s often so obvious one might forget to mention it. Of course this sex act you fetishize, which is predicated on extreme focus and listening and paying attention to your partner, might feel romantic to you. Of course you’d feel more connected to someone when they’re manipulating your mind with carefully-chosen words than you do while doing “normal couple things” like scrolling Twitter across from each other at the dinner table or holding hands absentmindedly as you stroll down the street.

There are a lot of misconceptions about hypnokink – listen to Matt’s episode of the Bed Post Podcast for more on that – and one of them, maybe, is that it isn’t romantic. This is the same narrative that’s been used to suppress and oppress queers and kinksters for generations: if you can PR-spin a particular relationship style to seem dirty, illicit, “all about the sex,” you can strip its practitioners of their humanity, and their love stories. It’s why, still to this day, many right-wing cretins will talk about the supposed horrors of (consensual!) anal sex instead of proposing any actually valid arguments for why gay people shouldn’t exist. Love isn’t a prerequisite for respect or acceptance – after all, aromantic people exist, and rough, casual anal sex is just as valid as getting married and having babies, all of which you can do in the same lifetime or even in the same week if you want (kudos!). But love is often part and parcel of alternate sexualities and their expressions – whether or not it’s the romantic kind of love – and to ignore that is to dismiss, dehumanize, and “other” the people who traverse these less-traveled-by routes of erotic connection.

Content note: This essay talks about knife play (including surface-level non-bleeding cuts on the skin) and fear play.

This morning I woke up with shallow red marks criss-crossing over portions of my skin. They congregate on my arms, my thighs, my chest. They were given to me last night by someone I love, wielding a massive, heavy knife.

My interest in knife play phased into existence about 2 years ago. Maybe I’d been watching too much American Horror Story, but I’d begun to eroticize wild-eyed men wielding weapons and glamorous women who could cut you in two. The therapist I saw when I was in university – who I’m no longer seeing – would have a field day with this information, because she helped me work through recurrent nightmare-visions that I was being stalked by armed men in my own home. Prevailing anxieties crept into my mind from all angles at that time and one of their manifestations was this unfounded (?) fear of steeled invaders. For weeks-long stretches, I slept on my family’s living room couch instead of in my own bed, longing to feel centered in safety, convinced somehow that the middle of the house was more secure than its edges. I kept the light on and stopped watching horror movies and cuddled my cat close to my chest. With these measures (and therapy) to help me, I eventually set those petrifying visions aside. So it was odd when they came roaring back years later as – of all things – sexual fantasies.

My partner came out as non-binary this week and so I am incensed afresh by people who refuse to use their loved ones’ new pronouns.

There are lots of ways to refuse to do this. There’s the outright refusal of people who deny singular they/them pronouns are a thing in English (false), or who deny that anything or anyone outside the gender binary should exist (also false). But there is also the more subtle refusal of people who “have a hard time” with pronoun changes, and who use the supposed difficulty of the task as an excuse to continually misgender people they claim to care about.

Regardless of your reasons for getting someone’s pronouns or other gender descriptors wrong, it is still a hurtful and inconsiderate thing to do. So I’m writing this as a cis person to give you the advice I wish someone had given me, when I met my first trans friend and had to whip my mealy mouth into submission and drill “ze/hir” pronouns into my lexicon:

PRACTICE. Really. Practice using your loved one’s new pronouns. It’s very simple.