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.

I get a lot of DMs. If you follow me on Twitter or Instagram (or, heaven forbid, both), you probably know this, because I post screenshots of them fairly often. Laughing with friends and followers at these messages is a key way I cope with receiving them.

That sounds bad out of context. Normally I would ask for consent before posting someone’s private communiqué to my public social media channels… but I make exceptions for people who choose to disrespect me by crossing stated boundaries, crudely complimenting my tits unprompted, sending me dick pics, etc. My rationale: if they didn’t want to be outed as harassers, they shouldn’t have harassed me. Or anyone. Ever.

But we are in the midst of a global crisis, and crises are like an altered state or an alternate reality. The rules are different; the parameters change. I’ve found myself signing sassy emails to lowballing advertisers with “Hope you’re well!” I’ve politely let telemarketers down instead of tersely hanging up on them. And yes, I have contemplated being nicer to the shitty men – and yes, it is always men – in my DMs.

Not all of them. That’s important to note. The dick pic senders, rape apologists, and misogynist harassers still deserve every inch of ire they get from me.

A recent Twitter poll set up by queer icon Allison Moon sought to determine how self-isolation is affecting people’s libidos, by quizzing couples who are isolated together about how their fuck-frequency has changed. It didn’t surprise me that more people reported a loss of sexual desire than an uptick – but what did surprise me is that the majority of respondents said their libido had stayed more-or-less the same. This leads me to suspect that some factors of this situation are boner-killers, while others are… boner-igniters? (Is that a thing? Please don’t light your dick on fire.)

I will now elucidate some of the factors I think might be contributing to the libidinal ambivalence of our current era…

Pro: You have more free time to kill and fewer activities to kill it with. (Some of you do, anyway, if you possess a certain level of privilege in this situation.)

Con: Many other activities can easily trounce sex in the battle for your attention. For instance – free Met opera streams, Animal Crossing, vying for a coveted grocery delivery time slot, your distant relatives’ COVID denialism on Facebook, the endless scroll of bad news on Twitter.

Content note: alcohol.

If you had told me a few months ago that soon I would spend most of my days cooped up inside, with none of my usual haunts and few of my usual habits available to me, I would’ve mourned book shops, theatres, and beloved sushi joints. I would have wept preemptively for the loss of long springtime walks through bustling streets, and eager journeys across national borders. I would not necessarily have thought to cry about bars.

But bars, I must confess, are what I miss the most about The Time Before – other than the safety, calm, trust, and optimism I had then that I (and much of the world) can no longer access.

I’m talking about bars here, you understand – not drinks. I can have drinks at home any time I like, and since my cocktail-whiz partner is staying with me and we’ve expanded my modest “home bar,” the drinks I can have at home are pretty damn good. No, what I miss is the atmosphere of a bar. The people. The process. The ritual. The vibe.

Your doctor knocks on the door of your hospital room, somehow hitting pause on all the tension and malaise in your body. His icy blue eyes have given you some of the only comfort you could find in the last few days. The rest of his face probably would, too, if you could see through his surgical mask (pale blue, of course, to bring out those beautiful eyes).

“Knock knock,” he says. “Just checking in. How are you feeling?”

You shrug. “The meds you gave me have taken the fever down a notch. Cough’s still coming and going. I’m not super great at breathing right now.” You laugh, and the laugh hitches in your lungs. The suppression of laughter, of self-expression, of communication – that’s the hardest thing.

“That’s how you’re doing, health-wise,” he notes, “but how are you doing really?” When you look mildly mystified, he continues: “Being quarantined can be very isolating. Many people have a hard time with it.”

Content note: COVID-19, global panic, alcohol, drugs, hypnosis, food, exercise, electrostimulation, rough sex.

It’s always weird when a crisis strips you not only of your routine but also of your core coping mechanisms. Normally if I was panicked about a global situation, I would grab a book and my headphones and go to a restaurant or bar to read and eat/drink alone, comforted by the solitude-among-people, the low-effort coziness, the sense of community with strangers. Or I would book an impulsive plane ride to go see my partner in New York. But obviously these measures do not hold up in the age of COVID-19, when we’re told over and over again: go nowhere, see no one. So, like many many others, I’ve been rewriting the rulebook of my own coping methods.

Here are some things I have found that help:

Content note: mentions of COVID-19/the novel coronavirus, as well as childhood sexuality.

I’m writing this from my bed, which I’ve barely left today on account of immense dizziness and nausea, side effects of a new drug I’m trying for my depression and chronic pain.

I’m also writing this from a time in history when “coronavirus” and “COVID-19” are the words on everybody’s lips. So, suffice it to say, sickness is on my mind.

When I attended the Toronto premiere of the documentary The Artist & the Pervert, which centers on the relationship between esteemed kink educator Mollena Williams-Haas and her genius dominant Georg Haas, the most striking scene to me by far (if you’ll pardon the pun) was a spanking that took place on the couple’s sofa.

It was the casualness, the everydayness, of the spanking that piqued my interest. This was not a thoroughly negotiated, carefully prepped scene; this was a moment of unrehearsed tenderness between two people who happen to be kinky. Watching a few playful swats devolve into a heavy beating felt equivalent to watching a vanilla couple melt from a chaste peck into a desperate, groping kiss. It was romantic, but not dramatic – unconventional, yet normal.

I’ve dreamed of this type of day-to-day D/s for years. Knowing it would manifest differently in reality than in fantasy, I’ve nonetheless daydreamed about cleaning a partner’s kitchen in an apron and lipstick, curling up at a dominant’s feet while they hold my leash during a Netflix marathon, getting tucked in and told a perverted bedtime story by my devious daddy. I enjoy blazing-hot kinky erotica as much as the next sub, but it’s stories of this type of habituated dynamic that really fascinate me. What does kink look like when early passions have calmed and comforting routines have set in?

Earlier this week, on a depressed and lethargic afternoon, I laid with my partner on their couch. We kissed mid-conversation, and as the kiss deepened, I turned to face them and laid my legs across their lap. Thus enabled, they raised their fist and began – gently at first, and then more insistently – to land a series of hard punches on the meaty part of my ass.

I learned something about myself by using a sex toy yesterday. It certainly wasn’t the first time that has happened, but this particular epiphany is one I hadn’t had before.

It was a Satisfyer toy, one of those ones that various different companies call “air pulse stimulators” or “oral sex simulators” or whatever the hell the current term is. Basically, they use quick pulses of air to create the sense of being touched, without much actual touching going on. The overall sensation is (to me, at least) ethereal and ghostly, which doesn’t sound like the kind of thing that would get a person off, but hey. Not everything is as it seems.

I was telling a friend about the odd and thunderous orgasm I’d had with my new Satisfyer earlier in the day, and he said he’d been enjoying this type of toy lately too – moreso since he’s been receiving oral sex more regularly as of late. I replied that I’ve noticed a similar phenomenon in the past; it seems that the more my body grows accustomed to gentle, delicate sensations like oral sex, the more it can enjoy (or indeed, even perceive) such sensations. It’s an attunement, a recalibration. Traditional vibrators don’t cause permanent numbness, but there is a temporary desensitization effect many people experience from frequent vibrator usage, and oh boy have I been there.

My epiphany was this: my heart works like this, too.

Valentine’s Day invites us to paint a caricature of love. Valentine’s Day is to love as false eyelashes and high heels are to womanhood: one heightened manifestation of the thing, but by no means the thing in its fullness or normalcy.

The thing is, I would like every day to feel like Valentine’s Day, just as I would like to be the type of person who can wear false lashes and towering heels every day. In reality, I am complex and fallible, and so is love, so it isn’t possible to be “on” every minute of every day. If candlelit dinners and moonlit confessions were your daily life, they would lose all semblance of specialness. But Valentine’s Day calls on us to step into the fantasy that love could be like this all the time, that we could be like this all the time. It’s a fantasy I am very much open to – drawn to, even.

I just want the whole affair to be less pressured. The people who complain loudly about Valentine’s Day are usually decrying the burden of expectations: to spend money, to plan a perfect evening, to broadcast the perfection of your imperfect love on social media for all to see. I would love for the day’s mission to be the celebration of love, however that manifests for you.

Years when I’ve been single, I’ve often devised elaborate solo dates for myself, to bring a sense of specialness to a night that might otherwise be depressing. I’ve taken myself to musicals and plays and comedy shows. I’ve holed up in café windows with my laptop, drafting wildly romantic fanfiction stories about my favorite characters. I’ve filled a tote bag with beloved books and schlepped them to libraries or bookstores with big cushy armchairs for an afternoon of basking in other people’s ideas. I’ve gotten on trains or buses or streetcars, absurdly overdressed, for day-long sightseeing journeys while listening to podcasts. These are all, I think, courageous acts of self-love, because (cheesy as it is to say so) choosing and pursuing self-love is, itself, courageous.

I am an unfollowing evangelist.

Sometimes my friends will complain about someone in their social media spheres – this person has bad political takes, this person posts way too much salesy bullshit about the pyramid scheme they’ve been suckered into, this person constantly argues with me about reproductive rights – and my response is always, “UNFOLLOW THEM.” “UNFRIEND THEM.” “DELETE THEM FROM YOUR UNIVERSE.”

There are sometimes valid reasons to not do this – like, for example, if the person in question is your gossipy aunt who would definitely notice and would definitely relay that information to your mom ASAP – but even in those cases, there are steps you can take. Facebook allows you to “snooze” particular people, so you can shush your Bernie-bro cousin until the election hullabaloo is over. When you mute someone you’re following on Twitter, their replies still show up in your notifications, so you’ll see the stuff that’s relevant to you and none of the other bullshit. Soft-blocking – the practice of blocking and then quickly unblocking someone on Twitter, which swiftly and silently removes you from each other’s “following” lists – is a godsend, and can often be played off as a technological glitch if anyone inquires about the “accidental” unfollowing.

I really, truly feel that life is too short to spend time around people you dislike, or who dislike you – and interacting regularly with someone on social media is a modern way of “spending time with” them. True, it’s ideologically nutritious (as my friend Brent would say) to habitually absorb opinions you don’t agree with, so as to expand your mind and sharpen your convictions – but people whose opinions differ from yours don’t have to be dicks about it. If they routinely are, why keep them around? Why let them take up space, rent-free, in your head, firing up your nervous system a few times a week with their jabs and jibes?

We’d had “Matt teaches Kate how to make a Southside” on our ever-growing Things We Should Do Together list for a while, but I didn’t know it would happen the way it did.

“I’m going to make a Southside while talking you through every step as I do it, and then you’re going to make one for me,” Matt said.

“Oh, and you’re going to do it naked.”

Being completely naked in a kitchen is a very particular mood. (I was not even permitted, as I sometimes am, to keep my socks on.) It’s all cold tile and granite and chrome. Each step feels pronounced, each touch of your unprotected skin against any surface that isn’t someone else’s body. I’d barely finished tossing my last garment on the floor when Matt pushed me up against the screaming-cold refrigerator, making me gasp like I’d just been dunked in icewater, and kissed me, hard. I love learning all the various unexpected and random ways their sadism can manifest.

Thus satisfied – and definitely smirking – they began to make my drink. Muddled mint leaves, sweet simple syrup, good dry gin, fresh-squeezed limes. I observed each step, taking mental notes. I willed myself not to let Matt shake the thoughts out of my head like an Etch-a-Sketch when they agitated the drink in their metal shaker, home-bartender biceps tensed and working hard. I watched them double-strain the green drink into a chilled coupe and float a mint leaf delicately atop it. We each took a sip: perfect.

My process was slower; I spent more time scanning the counter for the components of each next step. I muddled messily, poured precariously. I needed help with the juicer because my hands are weak and full of pain zaps. But I built the drink successfully, eventually, and then we got to the shaking.

“Would you mind not looking at me for this part?” I asked. “I know that’s weird, but… it’s an anxiety thing.”

It’s an anxiety thing is always shorthand for something much more complex, and in this case it was: I’m nervous that I will do a bad job at this thing I know you value (having heard you comment admiringly or questioningly on many, many bartenders’ shakes), and that you will see it and think me less attractive for it, and I’m also worried that my many jiggly bits will jiggle when I jounce the drink around, in a way that would be imperceptible if I had clothes on, and that that, too, will make you love me less, even though you’ve seen me jiggle –  in some cases made me jiggle – in all manner of situations both silly and sexy.

So I don’t want you to watch me shake this drink because I think it will shake your resolve to love me, somehow.

I’m sure Matt didn’t know all the parts of this internal apprehension, but they knew some of them. They knew me well enough to agree to close their eyes while I walked around the corner into the living room and shook the hell out of that drink where no one could see.

It was delicious – not as pretty as the one Matt had made, but I would’ve gotten a good grade, had I been graded. We retired to the sofa with our Southsides. “Can I put my clothes back on?” I asked, and Matt laughed and said yes.

Now I sometimes make drinks for my roommate in our tiny kitchen, and when I get to the shaking part, she always dances. The ice thrashing against metal makes a rhythm that inspires in her a bodily need to move. I don’t hide anymore when I shake our drinks; I just watch her and we laugh together as the cold metal begins to frost over in my strong, practiced hands.

I love movies. Always have. My mom was an entertainment reporter the whole time I was growing up, so I watched “adult” movies (not porn… although, that too) even when I was too young to reasonably be doing so. I was 8 when I saw Cast Away, for example. Who takes an 8-year-old to see Cast Away?! My mom, that’s who. Because she intuited, correctly, that I would love it.

Anyway, one of the best and weirdest things about movies is the sex scenes they sometimes contain. Here is an incomplete list of movies I think should’ve had some fuckin’ in them. (Caution: there are spoilers in here for every movie mentioned!)

Cast Away (2000)

Okay, so, while we’re talking about it… I want to know everything about Tom Hanks’ character’s masturbation habits when he’s stuck on the island. Early in the film, we see him sharing passionate intimacy with his girlfriend Kelly in kisses, slow-dances, and gift exchanges, and I have to imagine their sexual connection is A+ too. So surely he jerked off thinking of her a lot when he was alone and stranded? He’s even got a photograph of her to use as wank fodder. Frankly I don’t expect that this would be a happy or sexy scene – probably more like “morosely masturbating while weeping in a cave” – but it would certainly help deepen his character and further illustrate his plight.

1. The amount of time it takes to get from your apartment to the airport – including in rush hour, including when public transit in your city is a mess, including when your suitcase is so heavy you think you’re going to fall down the subway stairs as you haul it.

2. Which airports – and terminals therein – you like and which you hate, a distinction that will likely hinge on the demeanor of the employees and the variety of food available.

3. How many podcast episodes you need to have pre-downloaded on your phone to get you through your typical journey.

4. How long it takes you to stop feeling bereft and out of whack once you’re back home, alone.

5. How long you can be apart before your heart starts to literally, sincerely ache.

6. The sex toys that, if you don’t pack them, you’ll later curse yourself and wish you did. (Plus their chargers, if applicable.)

7. How many condoms or other safer sex supplies you tend to need for the duration of a weekend.

8. What to say to a customs agent in order to spur the fewest follow-up questions. (I am always “visiting friends.” Always.)

9. The areas of an airport in which you can and cannot use your phone, and how to use yours sneakily where you’re not supposed to.

10. How to conjure intimacy via text, with selfies, sexts, and inside jokes.

11. What your brain and body tend to need after the ordeal that is travel (weed, cocktails, and a hot bath are common choices for me) and how to procure those things quickly in any city you regularly visit.

12. Time zone conversions. Like the back of your hand.

13. What sex feels like when you haven’t had it in a while.

14. What sex feels like when you’ve had it 10 times in the past 2 days.

15. How to answer when your mom asks “What did you do with [your partner] during your trip?” and the actual answer is “had sex all weekend.”

16. How to quiet the visceral sense in your stomach and bones that you are in the wrong place – that you belong with your person and your person isn’t where you are so you must therefore be in the wrong place, even if you’re in your own home.

17. How to make a packing list that more-or-less ensures you’ll never forget anything crucial.

18. How to deal if you realize you forgot something crucial. (Most such things, I have found, can be purchased at CVS.)

19. How to talk about your beloved to people who have never met them and adequately communicate just how charming and gorgeous they are.

20. What you want the future of your relationship to look like, and how hard it will realistically be to make it so. (If there are visas involved, I send my condolences and solidarity.)

21. How many pairs of underwear you need to pack for a weekend trip, keeping in mind not only the number of days you’ll be away but also the number of times you might soak through your current pair and need to change them midway through the day.

22. The best websites for finding good deals on flights. (I like SkyScanner.)

23. A quiet prayer or affirmation you can say to yourself when there’s turbulence on your flight and you feel like you’re going to die and you don’t want to die before you get to kiss your sweetheart again.

24. The particular emotional hell that ensues when jet lag and travel stress intersect with the guts-deep sadness of goodbye.

25. How to get through each day on wishes, texts, and hopeful promises.

I used to cap off every year by making grand, ambitious lists of sexual goals for the year to come. Try a new kink, date a new person, acquire a new sex toy, that sort of thing. If I was like a kid in a candy shop back then, now I’m more like a gourmet candy connoisseur, each consumption decision careful and considered – which isn’t necessarily an upgrade, given that the kid is probably having more fun (albeit accompanied by more stomachaches). Ah, such is life.

My one major sex goal for 2020, by comparison, sounds simple but is deceptively complex. It’s to learn to orgasm in a way that is new to me.

This exact desire is a frequent subject of discussion on sex-related forums and threads. Mostly it’s brought up by people with vulvas who want to learn to have vaginal orgasms – a statistical rarity and, some people say, maybe even a myth. These folks want to bend their bodies’ capabilities through sheer willpower, usually in order to please their partners and perhaps smooth over some sex-fuelled relationship tensions. I understand their reasoning, but I am no longer interested in chasing impossible goals solely so I can be “normal” by standards I don’t even believe in. Fuck that patriarchal cissexist heterocentric noise.

No, when I say I want to teach my body a new kind of orgasm, that’s a goal borne of my own pursuit of pleasure. As I’ve careened further down the asexuality spectrum, I’ve started to find that sometimes my genitals just don’t want to be touched – which would have been pretty unthinkable to me even a few years ago. Often I still want intimacy in those moments, and maybe even pleasure, but my junk is just… checked out. Not interested. Incapable of giving a fuck (so to speak). Hence my increased interest in alternative avenues of pleasure.

Happy holidays and impending new year, friends! I have some suggestions today for rituals you could do to cap off your year and ring in the new one. Some of these are woo-woo, because I’m one of those insufferable “spiritual but not religious” types, and some are not. Take what you love, make it your own, and let me know how it goes!

1. Wear red underwear on New Year’s Eve, perhaps purchased specifically for the occasion. This is supposedly an old tradition, meant to bring you good luck in the sex and romance sector of your life for the year to come.

2. Make a list of commitments you’re going to make in the new year that will lead you further down the ethical path you want to take. These could be as involved as “start volunteering for my local queer youth hotline” or as simple as “stop using the word ‘crazy’ because it’s ableist.” Consider sharing your list with a friend (or the internet) so you’ll feel more accountable to it.

3. Think hard about your 2020 goals while having your first orgasm of the year. (For bonus points, time it so you orgasm right at midnight!)

4. Make a playlist that you intend to be your soundtrack for the year to come. Put songs on it that make you feel the way you want your next year to feel.

5. If you don’t have anyone to kiss at midnight and you want to, try looking for a midnight date on Tinder or somesuch. There are other people out there who want to be kissed!

6. Take a leaf out of Alcoholics Anonymous’s book and make amends for the ways you fucked up this year. (It’s okay. We all fucked up in one way or another, every single one of us.) Send some heartfelt apology texts or emails. You’ll feel better and someone else might too.

7. Make a list of new kinks/sexual activities you want to try in the new year. Start researching how to do them, if you like.

8. Dance hard enough that you start sweating and glowing. (There are always lots of places to go dancing on New Year’s Eve.) Think of it like a cleansing ritual for your body and vibes. ✨

9. Think about one significant change you’d like to make to your appearance in the coming year. Haircut? New tattoo? Start wearing lipstick? These may seem small but they can make a huge difference in your self-perception and the way your life feels to you.

10. Email a few of the people you follow online, but don’t know IRL, to let them know how their work enriched your life this year.

11. Delete a bunch of apps from your phone, especially ones you never use or ones that needlessly stress you out.

12. Start planning any travel you want to do or events you want to attend in the new year. Having a roadmap of the year to come will keep you on track and excited about your future.

13. Unfollow people you dislike, or who make you feel bad, on social media. You don’t need ‘em.

14. If you’re into sadomasochism of any variety, do a heavy scene the intention of which is to cathartically clear out last year’s bullshit and make room for the new year’s delights. For example, last year my partner made me list my 2019 goals between hits during a spanking scene; they’ve also made me list my achievements in the same way, since I’m not always good at recognizing how far I’ve come.

15. Work your way through these Reverb journal prompts to help you reflect on your year and look ahead to the new one. (I like to do my heavy-duty journaling at cafés or cocktail bars.)

16. Take to heart the old maxim that the way you spend the first day of your year sets the tone for the other 364 days to come, and make your January 1st incredible in every way you can. If something goes awry and your New Year’s Day disappoints you for some reason, just try again the next day until you have a day you’re happy with, and make that day your ideal to strive for, going forward.

17. Start a sex spreadsheet!

18. Take stock of the new people you met this year, in both personal and professional contexts, and what you learned from each of them.

19. Go through your condom stash and throw out any that have expired. While you’re at it, get rid of any bottles of lube that have gotten old and gross, and toss any sex toys that aren’t body-safe.

20. Take a hot bath and ritualistically exfoliate your whole body with a scrub or a body brush. Don’t forget to moisturize afterward!

21. Text one person who you think is cute and tell them you think they’re cute. (To paraphrase Natalie from Love Actually, “If you can’t say it on New Year’s, when can you, hey?”)

22. Make a list of things you want to let go of – insecurity, impostor syndrome, that one ex you keep thinking about – and then burn the list (safely!). This is best done at a bonfire with a crew of friends all doing the same, especially if you each dramatically read your lists aloud before tossing them into the flames. Catharsis ahoy!

23. Go for brunch with friends on New Year’s Day. Quell your hangovers with diner food and coffee.

24. Clean out your inbox, downloads folder, purse(s), fridge, desk drawers, and so on. New years are fresh starts!

25. Have a loved one shoot some photos of you – perhaps sexy ones, nude or in cute underwear. Create a record of who you were – and how gorgeous you were – at the start of the year.

Do you have any treasured New Year’s rituals? Feel free to hit “reply” and tell me all about ‘em!

There are so many strange and beautiful things on Etsy. Today I glanced at these mermaid leggings and thought about their kink implications. Could one roleplay, I wondered, as a mermaid who has just awoken to find she’s in a human woman’s bedroom, her human-woman legs attired in iridescent leggings instead of iridescent scales? After the terror and panic passed, would she want to explore her new life, her new body?

I imagine dipping my fingers beneath the waistband, having never possessed a waistband before, and feeling the smooth flesh beneath. Wet and salty, but not like the sea. Hungry and hungrier with each touch. How long would I last before seeking out another human to show me the tidal rhythms of my own body? Would I wear my shiny leggings on a date to the beach, a month or two into a nascent human romance, and keep my tender truth inside as my beau looked at my long, salt-strewn hair and declared, “You look just like a mermaid”?

I can’t imagine a more perfect wedding dress than this strapless cotton and tulle gown by Cleo & Clementine. Wedding-night sex has long interested me, moreso as a kink concept than as a real-life desire. (It’s not that I don’t want to get married – if you’ll forgive the unintentional pun, “I do” – I just know myself well enough to know that a full day of socializing, eating, drinking, dancing, and high anxiety is far likelier to make me sleepy or weepy than horny.) I enjoy the thought of bundling into bed with my beloved once our formal attire has been shed, and having the ritualized, emotionally weighty sex known to follow nuptials. The historical associations of this type of sex with virginity, pain, and blood are horrible in reality and hot in fantasy, as are so many of the trappings of patriarchy.

I had most of my hair cut off today and, predictably, it is making me Feel Things.

It would be neither original nor particularly interesting for me to observe that hair can become tangled up with identity – mostly because people who don’t know you very well will assess you based on your hair (among other factors), but also because it is a daily part of how we shape our presentation for outside eyes. When we look in the mirror to discern whether we look okay, oftentimes we’re looking at our hair.

Mine had become heavy and useless, like a knit blanket in summer. I wore it up every day, fashioned it into fluffy shapes to keep it out of my face. Where once it had felt regal and feminine, it now merely got in my way. When I explained this to my hairdresser, he nodded gravely and said, “It’s time.” And then he took out his scissors and snipped off hair that had taken years upon years to grow.

The other important reason for this change is that I want to look queerer – which is a strange idea, when you think of it. I am queer at all times, queer in every outfit and every iteration. A rose is a rose is a rose; a bi girl is a bi girl is a bi girl. But flagging has always been an important part of queer culture, and it is important to me, too. Single bisexuals are more-or-less floating in space, sexual identity-wise, in that people are less likely during those unpartnered interludes to incorrectly infer that you are straight or gay; partnered bisexuals, on the other hand, tend to get hammered down into ill-fitting descriptors, like a star-shaped block that a toddler tries to wedge into a square-shaped hole. I’ve dated people all across the gender spectrum, and every time, I felt it: the narrowing of perceptions around me, the “Aha, we’ve finally got her figured out,” the winnowing away of my multisexual truth.

It is snowing today in Toronto and it feels like nothing counts.

It’s that December feeling, that hazy-holiday feeling, that end-of-semester feeling, that “fuck it, whatever” feeling. The snow cushions our intentions, muffles the din of the world. As we count down to New Year’s Eve, we throw caution out the snow-caked window, because there is only so much time left to create memories and be brave.

This was the mood that permeated my first date with my now-partner, and I’m half-convinced the date, let alone the entire relationship, would not have happened if not precipitated by December. December is a month when, if someone DMs me out of the blue to ask me out for coffee in a different city, I might just say yes.

In high school, December was exam time, when classes abruptly ended and we students were left to manage our own schedules for a while, almost like adults. We made 11 a.m. Starbucks runs with our friends before retiring to someone’s house for “study parties,” luxuriating in the novelty of not being in class during class hours. When an exam loomed, we would wander through the deep snow on our school’s campus and through the big glass doors, eyes darting around for people we knew. Some of my headiest high school memories are of those days, when crossing paths with your crush was less assured and thus more special when it did happen, in hallways, on snowy lawns, in the Pizza Pizza across the bridge where we all fortified ourselves between long essay-writing sessions trapped in the gym. The eerie quiet soundtracked our pubescent excitement. I could more easily say “You’re cute!” or “You know I’ve had a crush on you all year, right?” under the guise of yuletide truthfulness. It all felt justified and it all felt desperately important.

It is American Thanksgiving, which, as a Canadian, I find strange. Christmas is hot on the heels of this holiday; how much turkey can one person eat within a month? How many sweaters can one person wear and how many rude relatives’ questions can one person deflect?

But I digress... Here, in the spirit of this problematic holiday, is a list of some things I’m grateful for:

• Music so good you want to grind it into your bones, soak it up through your skin, roll around in it instead of getting up and going to work.

• Meals lovingly prepared for you by someone whose eyes go warm and soft when they glance across the kitchen at you, making you feel like, “Yes. This.”

• The way Twitter and other such mediums allow so many of us to access a coveted feeling of renownedness and belonging that can sometimes be the difference between total despair and begrudging grit.

• Word nerds, book nerds, etymologists, agents, editors, voracious readers, overthinkers and graceless dorks.

• Bright colors assembled in ensembles like armor. An unfuckwithable pink cardigan that is feminine but not soft. Dresses that are like “suffragettes, but make it fashion.” Boots that suffer no fools.

• Podcasts you can lose yourself in, that make you laugh until you cry and momentarily forget about the world that lurks outside your headphones.

• Having a partner who feels like home and safety and rightness, whose scent balances your brain, whose kind words stitch you back together day by day.

Happy Thanksgiving, my loves!

Last night Matt and I cuddled on the couch and watched this excellent video by spanking fetishist Jillian Keenan about “how to find your spanking soulmate.” I sat there sipping a perfect cocktail made for me by my beautiful partner to cap off a night spent at a kink workshop, and knew I had already found my kinky kindred, my perverted paramour, my lascivious love. I do not take for granted how rare that is, how lucky.

Jillian notes in her video that, all things considered, it’s very likely your perfect kink partner lives in a different part of the world than you do. This is the blessing and the curse of the social internet: you can find the exact right person for your mind, body, and relationship style, but you’ll probably need a passport (not to mention an air travel budget) to spend time with them. It’s both wonderful and unfair.

For me, though, this is worth the trade-off. I’d rather be with someone who “gets” me, satisfies me, makes me happy, and who I can genuinely do those things for, too – even if I can’t always physically be with them – than attempt to make conversation with locals who go “Huh?” at my jokes and “Uhhh…” at my kinks. Depth of connection can transcend national borders, but sometimes you can’t even figure out how to connect with someone who’s sitting right across from you. I know which I’d choose every time.

That said, I have thought a lot the past few years about how finding a partner who shares all your kinks is an overrated concept. Sure, it’s nice as hell if it happens, but it absolutely isn’t necessary. Every sexual proclivity is a site of enjoyment and potential connection; every encounter with a perv from a different branch of the pervert tree will widen your horizons and teach you about yourself. “Fun” and “hot” are casual friends, not a married couple; it’s lovely when they hang out, but sometimes they show up to the party at totally different times, or don’t cross paths for months, and that’s fine. You’re still likely to have a good time.

If you told me, when I first started noodling around on computers at age 8 (already a sex nerd, already entranced by text-based instructional masturbation websites) that typing words into a computer of sorts would one day register to me as Having Sex, I doubt I would have believed you. I mean, I wouldn’t have entirely understood what you were saying… but if I had, I wouldn’t have believed you.

I was interviewed for this Guardian piece about sexting recently, and it got me thinking about the role sexting plays in my life. I have a folder on my phone, not-so-creatively entitled “sexxxty,” containing screenshots of good sexts I’ve received over the years, intermingled with (of course) the occasional languid nude selfie and solicited dick pic from beaux of yore. Here are some of my favorite sexts I’ve received, and what made them so great…

“My favorite toy is your mouth.” -a then-fuckbuddy in April 2016 upon being asked what sex toys I should bring to the threesome we were planning with my best friend

This is a prime example of how hyperbole in sexts sometimes works a treat. Was this man’s favorite sex toy really my mouth? No. We both knew he possessed a decent-sized collection of stimulating accoutrements, crowding his nightstand and outing him as a sex nerd (hence, um, planning a threesome with both hosts of a podcast called The Dildorks). But did it make me feel good to hear him say this (or, rather, to read it on a screen)? Sure did.

Content note: drugs, hypnosis, blowjob porn.

My partner gives me a writing assignment every month, and the completed pieces are not always good enough (or sensical enough) to share with you, but this one is, I think. Here’s the prompt I was given: “Write me a 500 to 1,000-word piece of erotica inspired by something on our sex/kink to-do list that we haven’t done yet and that you find hot. Additionally, your character should refer to me as Miss at least once in the piece. Exploring some gender ideas we’ve talked about and giving me more ideas of fun ways to fuck you. Seems good.”

My favorite porn star has a dick in her throat, and I have smog in my head.

Content note: trauma, panic, breakups.

Why, given that it’s been more than two years since my worst breakup ever, does my body still tense up when I walk through his neighborhood like I’m parading toward my death?

Why, while riding in the passenger seat of my mom’s car, did I start to sweat, breathe faster, go fuzzy-brained, and cry a little when we drove by his street earlier this year?

Shannon Bell – feminist poli sci professor, philosophy genius, and erstwhile professional squirter – calls the G-spot the “female phallus.” Or sometimes she uses that term to refer to the entire upper wall of the vagina, a cluster of complicated nerves and erectile tissue rather than a discrete “spot.”

If we can sluice the cissexism off this idea (not all vagina-havers are female and not all female people have vaginas), and reduce it simply to the notion that a vagina might contain a phallus every bit as real, responsive, and stiffen-able as the penis, it becomes revolutionary. It becomes life-changing. It becomes the kind of thought that makes me go “Whoooa” when I’m high and even sometimes when I’m not.

I’ve been thinking a lot about queer sex lately, and trying to parse what it means to me, exactly. Certainly I felt queer when I was pinned under a fragile cis femme in a dainty slip at age 16 while she shoved her strap-on cock inside me. I recall feeling queer when a petite androgyne bent me over a coffee table and spanked me until bruises bloomed on my skin. But I have not always felt queer while having sex with cis men, even though my bi identity means I’m queer in everything I do. You can’t really blame me for feeling that way, when certain segments of the queer community are so quick to call bisexual women traitors or impostors for the high misdemeanor of dating or fucking a cis man.

The two people I’m fucking now both have penises but are not cis men, and the difference is stark. They use their cocks less like oblivious battering rams and more like a finger or a toy: all precision and focus, stroking, noticing, recalibrating. They are happy, too, to have sex involving no penetration at all. Sex that teases me to precarious heights of pleasure through just rubbing and touching and being with me. Sex that feels qualitatively queer.

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.

Content note: watersports (i.e. piss play) and mentions of drinking pee. Also a moment of gender dysphoria.

The Multnomah Whiskey Library in Portland is one of the fanciest bars I’ve ever been to. It stocks over 1,500 different liqueurs – mostly whiskeys, of course – in a multi-shelf setup reminiscent of the library frequented by Belle in Beauty in the Beast. It’s low-lit and ornate, and bartenders pour your order right in front of you, at your table, slowly tilting expensive tipples onto ice cubes for your drinking pleasure.

I wasn’t expecting to do a watersports scene at this place, of all places, and yet, in classic perv fashion, I did.

On November 21st, 2017, my friend Clara (not her real name) invited me over to her house and cooked me dinner. We caught up about our lives, drank boozy bevs, and laughed a lot. Everything between us was as normal as could be: no lingering tensions about the many conflicts we’d been through together in our ten years of friendship, which kicked off in a fateful tenth-grade math class. At the end of the night, I thanked her for the meal, told her to sleep well, and headed home. I had no idea that I would never see her again, at least not in the context of her being my friend.

See, over the next few months, Clara first got distant and then completely ghosted me. This was not uncommon for her: spells of bad mental health sometimes rendered her unable or unwilling to answer texts for months at a time. Her last text to me – on January 7th, 2018 – was a picture of a book called Priestdaddy, snapped in a bookstore at the mall. “This immediately made me think of you,” she wrote – and then never texted me again.

In March, I wrote, “Hey friend, I miss you! Wanna hang soon?” No answer.

In April, I wrote, “I’m playing a show at the Social Capital Theatre on Friday if you feel like having a fun night out. I miss you, friend.” No answer.

I once tweeted that choosing my outfit for first dates always feels to me like dressing as a “cool girl” for Halloween. It’s a balancing act, crafting an ensemble that communicates aloofness I don’t actually possess. My natural inclination would be to wear a party dress and a hair scrunchie on every date, and not everybody is into that “goodie two-shoes on picture day” vibe right off the bat. So I often end up wearing a T-shirt tucked into a casual skirt, or – in an even more performative gesture of chillaxed-ness – jeans.

Jeans and I have a fraught relationship. I wore them in middle school because it was the done thing, and then matriculated at a performing arts high school full of weirdos who made me feel safe casting off my pants (…metaphorically) and slipping into dresses and skirts. These twirly garments refracted my internal sense of femininity into something externally clockable. When I tiptoed back into denim-land one momentous day in sophomore year, it was, characteristically, in the least chill way possible: with sky-blue skinnies and cowboy boots and pigtails, a caricature of a tomboy I wasn’t. I attempted to strut but mostly just slithered, nervous everyone was staring at my thick thighs and muffin top, now exposed by pants as taut as sausage casings instead of curtained behind a forgiving skirt.

I mostly eschewed jeans again until university, where social anxiety coupled with a more conservative environment (i.e. no more teens in tutus and combat boots en route to improv practice) made me feel pressured to conform – to “dress my age.” People my age were wearing jeans almost daily, so I gave them another go. This time they made me feel pleasantly invisible, blissfully unremarkable. I tucked the cuffs into Bean boots and spent entire winters that way, trundling to class and back home on snow-caked streetcars, sitting in lecture halls with coffees and bagels, praying no one would see through my denim disguise.

Now, at 27, I’ve finally come to view jeans as a comfortably occasional thing for me. It’s a relief not unlike downleveling a romantic relationship to a friendship-with-benefits that suddenly runs smoother than ever before. Recently I tugged my partner into a Madewell fitting room and almost ceremonially zipped and buttoned myself into a pair of high-waisted navy skinnies. The effect was instantly magic: I felt clued-in, cool, and curvy. “That denim isn’t your typical style makes it even hotter when you do wear it,” Matt told me later, once money and pants had each changed hands. “In your new jeans, I find myself staring at your curves for what feels like forever.” I had tapped into the casual confidence of People Who Look Good in Jeans, a club to which I’ve never quite managed to procure full membership but which I drop in on from time to time.

Like many people – perhaps even most people – I grew up thinking of myself as fundamentally unattractive. Our culture is built to make us feel this way, so it can sell us face masks and skinny jeans and curling irons. You know this. But what’s less obvious is the way this sad truth can affect interpersonal dynamics in sexual relationships.

Good, ethical sex is predicated on informed, ongoing consent. Consent is predicated on the assumption of an egalitarian power structure between partners (even if they are playacting a power imbalance, as I often do). And it’s difficult to feel empowered or on equal footing with someone if you believe that they are beautiful and that you are ugly.

I’m not retroactively marking large swathes of my sex life as nonconsensual; I knew what was happening and I said yes anyway, often enthusiastically. But now, with the wisdom of (comparative) age, I often wonder how things would’ve been different for me during my “slutty phase” if I had believed – truly believed, in the core of my brainstem – that I am hot.

I would not have sat through the self-involved tirades of Tinder libertarians over bad bar food I was ridiculed for eating. I would not have swiped through dating apps with increasing desperation at 3 a.m., fruitlessly chasing proof of my loveability. I would not have laughed at jokes that weren’t funny or sucked dicks that weren’t washed. The sexually closed-minded often argue that sluts are sluts because they have low self-esteem; while this flat-out isn’t true (I know tons of happy, confident, self-adoring sluts), I don’t think I could’ve become a slut if my self-esteem had been higher, simply because my standards would have gotten higher too and thus my dating pool would have narrowed. I would have still wanted the same amount of sex with the same number of people, but fewer people would pass muster. What’s a slut to do?

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.

Landed: back in the Toronto airport, back in my regular life. Swaying softly against my suitcase on the subway. Lugging those pounds of dirty laundry and well-loved sex toys down my little street and up the steps in front of my little apartment building. Everything feels so little now, in memory’s shadow of New York, Matt’s New York, even me.

The day is a blur of catching up on emails and catching up on sleep, and then at night, Matt calls me. Their sadness sounds heavy in their voice, the same way mine feels in my chest. “How are you?” I say, the way people do when beginning a conversation.

“I miss you!” they whine in this way that’s like repeating a prayer. In long-distance relationships, “I miss you” becomes an incantation, a mantra, a forever-truth bubbling under the surface of every conversation and sometimes demanding to be spoken aloud. I miss them too, already, so much that I start to cry when I say it. But crying is okay.

“I cried when I left work today,” Matt says, trying to soothe me, “because I viscerally realized you weren’t going to be in my apartment this time when I got home.”

A couple months ago, I polled my Twitter followers for their thoughts on the concept of the “soulmate.” Being a largely non-monogamous bunch, many of them posited that it’s likely incorrect and even harmful to imagine there is only one person each of us is “meant to” “end up” with. When I was a kid, I swallowed Disney ideology hook, line, and sinker, and genuinely believed there was a fateful person out there, wandering the earth, looking for me as I looked for them – which seemed cosmically unfair, because statistically that person probably lived on another continent and maybe didn’t even speak English.

But at some point during my tumultuous teen years, I saw the movie Kissing Jessica Stein, and in addition to validating my burgeoning bisexuality, it gave me the gift of this line: “I don’t even believe [in soulmates] anymore. I don’t believe there’s just one person [for each of us]. I think there are, like, seven.”

This is a heartening concept even if you’re not polyamorous. It’s a comfort to know you could lose one soulmate – through death, distance, negligence, or any other trouble that can befall a relationship – and not have to give up on deep love forever. Plus, if we all have seven soulmates, then probably at least one of them lives within reach and speaks your language.

The most common quality my Twitter followers ascribed to a soulmate (or “great love,” if you want to be less woo-woo and more poly-inclusive) is that the two of you just “get” each other. You “click.” I’ve reflected a lot on this feeling each of the few times I’ve truly encountered it (which have been, it’s worth noting, mostly in platonic relationships and not romantic ones), and the oddest thing to me about how it touches my own life is that 3 of my 4 “great loves” were born and raised in the U.S., a country I didn’t set foot in until I was nine years old. Knowing what I know about social psychology, it seems strange that I would feel so deeply connected to people who don’t share many of my cultural touchstones, social identities, or formative experiences. But I suppose that just reinforces the apparently soul-deep link I had (and still have) with these people – we could come from starkly different backgrounds and still click into place like magnets as soon as we crossed paths.

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.

Two things happened in late 2017 that contributed to a boost in my book consumption: I bought a Kindle Oasis (while drunk at 1 a.m., might I add), and I moved into an apartment where, for the first time in my life, I didn’t have a TV. I stopped whiling away fruitless hours in front of old Simpsons reruns and bad ‘90s rom-coms (well, mostly), and started devouring books again the way I did when I was a nerdy, overachieving third-grader. Ah, bliss.

Being a sex writer, I tend to apply a sexuality lens to almost anything I read: “Okay, that’s interesting, but what does it say about how humans fuck?!” For that reason, I found these 5 excellent books sexually illuminating in one way or another, even if that wasn’t strictly their aim…

High Heel by Summer Brennan

This is ostensibly a book about shoes, but really it’s a book about gender, history, beauty, morality, and fairy tales. Each page made me want to either never wear heels again or wear them every day from here to eternity. More to the point, this book made me think more critically about my own self-presentation, the places where it cleaves to what’s expected of me and the places where it noticeably, deliberately doesn’t. I think this short tome would be a revelation for anyone with a gender and a pair of feet. And probably even people without those things, too.

I’m scared beyond reason of getting a tattoo I later regret. Every piece of art I’ve had inked on me – four so far – came after weeks or months of pondering the design, the meaning, the long-term ramifications. I diligently googled my chosen phrases and symbols to make sure they didn’t have some secret, sinister connotation. If I was going to welcome a piece of work onto my skin, I wanted it to be something I could be proud of, and uplifted by, forever.

This is also why I’ve never allowed a romantic partner to attend any of my tattoo appointments. Oh, they have asked. Two of my most serious ex-boyfriends – a tall, goofy-grinned man with shaggy ginger hair, and a short goth with a great laugh – had more tattoos than I could ever dream of wanting, and offered to accompany me to my inking sessions so they could share in that experience we both knew so well. I politely declined, not entirely explaining that I couldn’t sew a beau into my memory of a particular tattoo, because the ink would be forever, and the relationships would not.

I knew the evil way mementos associated with sad memories can suck the sparkle from your smile every time you look at them. I’d once kept a dime on my bedroom floor for over a year because someone I loved had dropped it there, and while the sight of it initially brightened my days, by the end of that period I had come to loathe it. It reminded me too much of not being loved back, of being abandoned – but it nonetheless took a lot of time and emotional energy for me to eventually decide to pick it up and put it away. With tattoos, you can’t even do that – you have to look at them forever, or spend gobs of cash having them removed or covered up. To me, it didn’t seem worth the risk to ink something on my skin that could be eternally associated with someone who’d broken my heart, or who I’d ultimately come to loathe. (I had not yet truly conceived of a relationship ending in any way other than these – or of a relationship never ending at all.)

But the truth is, every one of my tattoos reminds me of the people I was dating and/or fucking at the time that I got them, despite the care I took to make sure this wouldn’t happen. The red heart on my belly summons the memory of the boy who gingerly peeled my underwear off the day after, marveling softly at the needle-wounded flesh. The pink “good girl” bows on my thighs make me think of the dominant boy who encouraged me to get them, pinning me to his mattress on the floor and whispering, “You’re a good girl, and soon everyone will know it.” My “this too shall pass” wrist tattoos take me back to the morning I got them, and the then-boyfriend who ignored my excited “Check out my new tats!” texts for hours. The flowers on my right arm, and their accompanying slogan “Do no harm but take no shit,” remind me of Matt, with whom I’d just fallen hopelessly in love when I went to my appointment. The details of that day are carved into my memory the way so many days are when you’re awash with romantic hormones: I remember I took a picture of a blue wall because the shade reminded me of Matt, lovesick as I was, and that the owner of the tattoo shop asked me if my “pun slut” pin stood for “punishment slut” and I blushed because I wanted to be, and was, Matt’s punishment slut.

The pain seeps through my body like a basement flood, creeping along carpets and baseboards until the whole mess is cold and ruined. I’ve had this chronic pain disorder – as-yet undiagnosed, though many of my doctors have ideas – for about four years now, and it just grows steadily worse. I am tired, and scared, and getting older.

The pain is like the deepest part of the sensation of stubbing your toe or crashing your shin against something hard: that bone-adjacent, sickening throb that feels like it’s radiating from inside your body. It shows up in my hands, wrists, ankles, calves, knees, hips… wherever it pleases. Sometimes it seems to spread to my brain, which gets foggy and slow on high pain days, like my CPU is being throttled by just handling all that input. Even now, writing this newsletter is a glacial process of stop-and-start, tapping out a word or two, pausing, having a thought, forgetting it, and trying to keep going.

But this is supposed to be a newsletter about sex and kink and relationships, not boring stuff like body aches, which brings me to BDSM’s role in my pain management.

If you’re familiar with my work, you might expect me to say something here about how good pain helps offset bad pain; how the endorphins released during a solid spanking can calm down my nervous system and push out all those ugly sensations. This is, to some extent, true, but it presupposes I’m well enough to get hit in the first place. Holding myself up on my hands and knees, or even flipping over onto my front, can be a frustrating and agonizing process when my body hurts this badly. No, I’m not anticipating a beating today; I don’t even want one.

Content note: This essay mentions rape and mass murder.

I have filled my head with useless information about “incels” – involuntary celibates, a movement of (mostly) young men who, in the dank depths of the internet, work and rework their sexual rejections into cause for venomous misogyny. I have read voraciously about their ideology, which they call “the red pill”; it frames women as the privileged oppressor in the sexual economy, leaving men of subpar attractiveness with the short end of the stick. I have combed through their message boards until 4 a.m., greedily gulping down their poisoned logic – because, in some ways, it makes me feel safer to do so.

Incels are not always, but notably are sometimes, mass murderers. Two such attacks have taken place in my own city: a van ramming into pedestrians, killing 8 of them, as part of an “incel rebellion,” and a terrifying shooting on a high-traffic street that led to the death of two girls, both not even old enough to be considered women. So my efforts to understand incels’ twisted thought processes are, in part, an attempt at self-defense. Some part of me believes that if I know my way around their philosophical hedge maze, I can scythe my way out, should I ever need to. I don’t know quite what that would look like or what it would accomplish, but it’s comforting to imagine.

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.

My new apartment is cheerful, bright, and beautiful. It’s not at all spacious, but it fits my must-haves. Moving was a hassle, as it always is, but now it’s done and I’m settled. I’m further downtown than before, and the city greets me each morning through my massive window. Hello, Toronto, my love.

I fortunately had the foresight, when I moved, to tuck away some items I’d need for my first few days, if I couldn’t or didn’t unpack everything right away: some changes of clothes, some toiletries, my electronics and chargers. And yes, sex toys were among those essentials – but only a couple. For a sex toy reviewer who’s used to having a wide palette of colors to play with, it was jarring to have just a few shades to use for a while.

(If you’re wondering why I didn’t just unpack immediately, well, me and my depression and chronic pain will have a bit of a chuckle about that.)

The two trusty friends that stayed on my nightstand during those first few days of rebuilding were my Eroscillator and Star Delight, and they were certainly up to the task. It was fun listening to my partner spinning various different phone-sex stories about cocks and mouths and fingers to accompany my usage of these toys; I am lucky to be dating someone so resourceful. What I noticed mostly, though, was how much these two sex toys made my new space feel immediately like home – moreso than my furniture, my bedding, my posters. They made this unfamiliar new locale into a site of familiar pleasure and decompression. They brought sunshine into my mind the same way my big, wide window brought it into my room.

I am typing this on my phone from the laundry room of my new building, because I have a confession: this is the first time I’ve ever done laundry anywhere that isn’t my parents’ house, even though I moved out of their home nearly two years ago.

Naturally, I meant to start doing laundry in the basement of my old building. But the thought of going someplace new, learning a new set of protocols and rules, brought my anxiety to a zenith, as it often does. The same forces were exacted which also prevent me far too often from visiting cafés I’ve never been to before or attending shows that are new to me: how will I navigate them, and what will people think if I navigate them badly? And so weeks passed, and then months, and then more than a year, with me curtly avoiding the laundry room and instead trundling my clothes and sheets back and forth across the city every week or two to wash them in my parents’ machine.

This week I was lucky enough to move in with an anxiety-savvy roommate who asked me, without being clued in to any of this, if I’d like her to show me the laundry room. She took me there, pointed out the card-loading machine and the tricky washers and the best dryers, and my heart felt soothed. This was all I’d needed all along and I hadn’t known how to ask for it. Doing my first load of laundry here today has filled me with a familiar sense of power: the feeling of overcoming a fear, of stepping an old neurosis and saying, “No more.”

I am well used to this feeling, because in the year and a half I’ve been dating my partner, he has ushered me through many such growth experiences, using the magic of kink. I have attended new improv shows by myself at his behest; I have worn things that felt to me overly loud and attention-grabbing; I have spoken and sang on stages even as my knees knocked together from fright. I was brave before I ever met him, but he’s made me braver, because when he instructs me to make a leap, I know two things: I want to do it, and I’m capable of doing it. I will do it for him.

• I’ve never had such a passionate love affair with someone’s voice before. His voice is the main way I experience him – phone dates, phone giggles, phone sex – and it’s one of my favorite things about him. I fell in love with him via his voice, first and foremost. It’s the tether that connects us, more than touch or sight, and it’s often enough.

• I get butterflies each and every time I see him, which I gather is a feat, a year and a half in. Our chemistry has never faded into stasis; it doesn’t get a chance to. I am still nervous whenever I wait for him at the airport; my heart still pounds when I drag my suitcase toward a hotel where I know he will be. All my life I have been afraid of what happens to love once the sparkle scrapes off, but we are still sparkly, still strong.

• I love New York and he loves Toronto. It’s clear how poly we both are: we can love more than one city at once. My own apartment is home, but so is anywhere he’s holding me. Home is movable, mutable. Portable.

• I was once accused, by a probably-asexual ex, of being too sex-focused. (I mean, he was the one who knowingly chose to date a sex blogger, but okay.) This proclamation hit me where it hurt, and made me worry forevermore that I was too much of a horndog to sustain any meaningful connections. But here I am, deeply loved by someone whose genitals I haven’t been within 500 miles of in weeks. Sex is important to me, but it isn’t everything. I’ve always known that, and now I know it even more.

It’s Pride month, and fittingly, I got a text the other day from the person I half-jokingly credit with making me queer. We’re in touch semi-regularly, so this was no earthshattering communiqué, but it made me smile nonetheless. They wanted to let me know they’d brought me up recently in a conversation about “first serious crushes.” My phone screen cast a glow on my face as I read the text, but I was also glowing inside – who doesn’t feel flattered by being someone’s first serious crush?

Admittedly, I was also glowing because this person was my first serious crush, too – my first, at least, on someone attainable, someone I could conceivably kiss (and did). It’s been 12 years and they still sit gilded in my heart like a bust on a mantel: immortalized in lust, limerence, and the lyrics of the many, many songs I wrote about them, before, during, and after our flash-in-the-pan fling.

This person had been on my mind even before they texted me, because it’s Pride month and I’ve been thinking about my queer crushes. The girls whose strong fingers and tanned forearms I’ve stared at across lecture halls; the enbies whose boots and swagger I’ve eyed in bars and cafés. The girl who fingerfucked me in the alley behind a pizzeria, the girl who blushed when I told her I’d like to flog her, the enby who took me over their lap after a tense game of Scrabble. The queer sex in closets, in sex clubs, in my imagination. These thoughts cloud my mind with societally-unsanctioned ardor.

I’ve been thinking lately, too, about how even my relationships with men have sometimes felt queer to me – because I’m queer, and my attractions are. Almost every man I’ve ever dated has felt disconnected from his masculinity and attached, instead, to something softer and less defined. Some have confessed they’d like to be born again as women, born into a better fit; others have enjoyed toying with feminine names, pronouns, and clothes sometimes, just to try, just to see. I went out with an old beau recently, and when I mentioned I’m most often drawn to masculine people, he scoffed – all broad shoulders, bulky beard, and beer in tow – and said, “I’m not exactly masculine.” I hadn’t seen that before, but I saw it now: a softness, a low-grade flamboyance, a genderlessness under the outward trappings. I felt such tender fondness for him, as I always do when someone slips into my heart who strays from the beaten path. I take pleasure in seeing everyone’s nuances instead of flattening them into a monolith, dim and small.

I mentioned to my partner recently that I’d been having some “1950s housewife feelings,” i.e. that I wanted to bring him a drink and suck his cock at the end of a long work day, after his return to an abode I’d made sparkle. He wanted more details, so I wrote this…

A lot of the pushback against the heteronormative ‘50s nuclear family lifestyle, rightfully so, is about the servitude the woman offers the man, focusing so much of her effort and energy on making him happy. It’s seen as disempowering for her to essentially devote her days to making someone else comfortable.

Granted, I don’t want my life to revolve so singularly around a partner – but I am drawn to the idea of my partner’s comfort and happiness being a goal of mine, in a domestic setting and in a ritualized way. Rituals and routines have always comforted me because they give me something to cling to when everything else is in chaos. So much of life is full of unclear goals – your manager may not tell you what they want from you, your customers may not know what they need, your parents may not articulate the ways in which you disappoint them – so it’s nice to imagine living in an environment where the expectations are very clear, and the rewards of meeting those expectations are known to me. This type of structure can both calm me down and turn me on.

Heads up: this essay references suicidal ideation as part of depression.

I find myself at a crossroads. Should I pursue happiness, or should I pursue sex?

The past year has been one of the worst of my life for my mental health, for mysterious neurochemical reasons. My depression has been crushing, my anxiety has gone haywire, and I’ve spent many days too dysfunctional to even get out of bed. I started on Wellbutrin last November, and while it initially lifted my mood (and my libido), I’m no longer convinced it’s doing much of anything. The tears and fears remain. I often want to die, or at least don’t feel strongly that I should continue to live.

When my current roommate was contemplating moving in over a year ago, we had a discussion about our various living-quarters quirks, anything that might make us annoying to live with, so we could decide together whether we’d be a good fit.

“I work from home, so I’m here most of the time,” I admitted, knowing this had been a sticking point for some potential roommates in the past. “I also have a long-distance partner; he comes and stays here about one weekend a month, and I have giggly phone calls with him at night a lot. I think that’s about it.”

My future roommate nodded and told me, “I’m a loud sex-haver.” She didn’t seem ashamed, nor did I think she should have to. Working in sex media, I am well used to the sex shame most people harbor, and I don’t think it serves us.

I shrugged. “As long as you’re respectful in the times you choose to have sex, that should be fine for me.”

How many times did I say “Step on me, queen” out loud to a gif of Stephanie Beatriz or Olivia Wilde before realizing I might actually want someone to step on me? I don’t know. A lot.

My boyfriend, as ever, went into Intrepid Researcher mode when I made this proclamation. He searched on Google, KinkAcademy, and the various kink wikis, but there just wasn’t that much practical info on trampling safety or technique. Here are a few basic things we learned:

1. A carpeted surface – and/or pillows on the floor – makes the experience more comfortable for the “tramplee.” I’ll leave it to you to decide whether that’s a good thing.

2. The trampler should wear either shoes (ouch) or bare feet (less ouch) – not just socks or stockings, which are too slippery for this task.

3. As with any kink activity, care should be taken to avoid putting pressure on the kidneys, spine, and other bones. Large fleshy areas are best for stepping on: the upper thighs, the butt, and the non-bony parts of the back, for example.

4. Orient yourselves in an area where the trampler has lots of things to lean on, on all sides – banisters, cabinets, whatever – so they can keep their balance and moderate the amount of weight they’re distributing.

Why did I want to be stepped on? The typical narrative about this activity is one of humiliation and domination, being squished into the ground because you’re a lowly worm who only deserves to be under your tormentor’s feet. But I didn’t want a punitive or degrading experience; I wanted the slow, measured, meditative calm of someone gradually moving their weight from one part of my body to another. I wanted the peace of momentarily being not a very messy person but instead a very useful floor.