My co-author Eunice and I write porn. We call it ‘porn’ without flinching; where some people like to claim there’s a categorical distinction between porn and erotica, we both are of the opinion that po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to, it’s all a tempest in a linguistic teapot.
I bring this up because, having co-authored five books of the most twisted pornography ever conceived with Eunice, filled with kinks so esoteric they don’t even have names (we looked), I thought I understood the purpose of porn pretty well.
Porn is when you use explicit, super-kinky sex to explore themes like personhood theory, agency, autonomy, philosophical ethics, atonement and redemption, social values, and community.
Obviously.
So imagine my surprise when Joreth, my wife, suggested in a Quora post:
My spouse doesn’t watch porn. He doesn’t get it. To be fair, almost all porn is bad bad BAD filmmaking, and as a filmmaker myself, I don’t disagree at all. But I understand that the point of mainstream porn is just to put naked bodies rutting on screen for those who are visually aroused, and nothing else.
My spouse, however, writes porn, but not, like, mainstream porn. He writes literary tomes, super-accurate far-future science-fiction, and detailed world-building urban fantasy. That happens to have sex scenes in them. He does. not. understand. the point of porn. To him, “porn” is for arousing the intellect, which will then follow with physical arousal.
I’m just back from Dragon*Con, where I spent most of my time alternating between the writers track and the skeptics track, so during a panel on written porn, I put the question to the panelists.
All of whom sided with my wife on this.
As did, for that matter, most of the Internet.
Now, a lot of folks do draw a distinction between porn and erotica; something I heard often is that erotica can explore complex themes but porn can’t. There’s a fair amount of this gatekeeping in the erotica writer’s scene: “erotica is what I write; porn is that dirty nasty filth that other people write.” I personally don’t draw that line; to me, it smacks of classism, of “porn is bad but erotica is okay.” If your goal is to arouse, to quicken the senses, then it’s porn, no matter what else you may be doing.
But that also seems a minority opinion.
The porn Eunice and I write is incredibly explicit and very kinky indeed. It’s also, quite often, highly uncomfortable. (Eunice likes to say she’ll keep scaling the kink factor up and up until I cringe; that’s the sweet spot we’re aiming for.) The explicitness and the discomfort are part of the point—we explore ideas that are intrinsically uncomfortable, like “is it ethical to give consent to sex in such a way that you cannot revoke it?” (Spoiler: we both think the answer is yes. It’s strange that doing this is so wildely accepted in anything but sex—joining the militart, for instance—but when it comes to sex, people—even people in the kink scene—struggle with it.)
The word “porn” is emotionally charged. Using “erotica” in place of “porn” feels to me like a way to try to soften it, to hide from sexuality rather than engaging with it directly. Our novels confront uncomfortable ideas directly, without evasion; why not call them porn?
I’ve now been in Florida for over a month and a half, helping joreth get her new (to her) RV set up and situated…a project that involved gutting the entire inside, adding 600 watts of solar to the roof, and replacing the house batteries with a very large lithium battery bank.
As we’ve run bto and fro between Winter Haven and Orlando, mainly along I-4, a wretched hive of scum and poor civil engineering, I noticed a very peculiar thing:
Florida has given up on the idea of advancing your station through hard work.
Drive across Florida on Interstate 4. Drive around in downtown Winter Haven, Orlando, or Lakeland. Notice anything peculiar?
I’m talking, of course, about billboards. But not just any billboards. Florida is, to an extent I’ve not seen in any other state, littered with billboards…for accident lawyers. Billboards as far as the eye can see, all advertising how much money you can make if you are in an accident.
Billboard after billboard after billboard, all for accident attorneys. On the stretch of I-4 we’ve been driving regularly, most of the billboards—54%, by my count—are advertising accident attorneys.
They’re everywhere. It’s absolutely uncanny.
I took these photos from inside a moving car, so I know the quality isn’t the greatest, but they just go on and on. We would drive down stretches of road where every single billboard for miles advertised accident attorneys, one after another after another.
Florida has long been legendary for the staggering numbers of terrible drivers on the roads, the result of snowbirds coming down from all over the country without being accustomed to the rain, a olice force focused on making money over protecting public safety, and lax licensing laws.
But I think there’s another part of it as well:
In Florida, there’s a cultural attitude that says getting in a car accident that you can blame on someone else is like winning the lottery.
They even have lawyers who specialize in going after semi owner/operators and trucking companies.
And, of course, language is no barrier to your payday.
But the absolute freakiest thing?
Remember when I said that getting in a car wreck is like winning the lottery? I meant that literally, not figuratively.
Accident lawyers put up shiny happy billboards with shiny happy accident victims wearing shiny happy smiles under headlines trumpeting how much money they made.
(There’s something so very very Florida about this little scene: an “I won $500,000 in an injury lawsuit, isn’t that awesome?” billboard over a strip mall with a pawn and gun shop, an acupuncturist, a martial arts center, an MMA arena, and a weird Evangelical church, all sharing a roof.)
The way these billboards are designed, they’re exactly like state lottery billboards.
“Dude! You got hit by a car and smashed into rubble? Awesome! Cha-CHING!!!”
Every time you pull into traffic in Florida, you’re sharing the road with people who sincerely hope you hit them because that’s the way you get ahead in this world.
It’s really deeply creepy…and perversely, it incentivizes the exact opposite of driving defensively. Coming up to a light and it looks like someone might be about to run the red? Gun it! Get in that intersection and hope he slams into you. Then maybe you’ll be one of the shiny happy people with a big payday, baby!
I haven’t done it since I returned to the US from Canada waaaaay back in the distant Before Time of 2018, so a few weeks ago, something finally snapped. I woke up at 3AM, decided it’s been far too long since I spun, and ordered a set of LED poi from Amazon. You know, as one does.
When the poi arrived, Joreth’s first reaction was “hey, the local dungeon has a photo night coming up, we could do a Borg Queen xenomorph parasite poi-spinning photo shoot!” Of course, I immediately said yes, and so, that Friday, we did.
It’s a little-known fact that when a Borg Queen is parasitized by a xenomorph, a peculiar quirk of Borg physiology makes the Borg Queen spin LED poi. Later, as the xenomorph parasite takes hold, the Borg Queen is driven to do…unspeakable acts by the hiphugger on her hips.
My Talespinner’s boyfriend came into town days before the shoot to help us work on Joreth’s RV, because that’s how my polycule rolls. (Seriously, I have awesome metamours!) So naturally I pressed him into the shoot as well.
We had an absolute blast.
Behind the scenes, Joreth’s boyfriend (who, as it turns out, also spins!) helped with lighting and such.
The alien xenomorph hiphugger is definitely a head-turner wherever we go, or maybe that’s just Joreth.
Last night, at 12:42 AM Eastern time, my Talespinnter and I finished the first draft of our novel Spin, by far the most difficult, ambitious writing project I’ve ever been part of.
This novel has a story. I mean, it also is a story, but on top of that it has a story. Lemme take you back.
I met her on Quora. She talked about beta-testing sex toys, I had some toys in need of beta testing, so I slid into her DMs with “hey, pardon the intrusion, but would you like…?” She said yes, I gave her some prototypes, she gave me an excellent beta report, she invited me to a tabletop role-playing game she GMed, and the rest is (still unfolding) history.
Anyway, I already have a wife, and a girlfriend, and a crush, so we needed something to call her. She’s a writer and a marvelously inventive creator of worlds, so we cast around for a bit, she called me her Toymaker, and I called her my Talespinner. A spinner of tales. A weaver of dreams.
One of her friends was like “The Toymaker and the Talespinner? That sounds like a YA novel!”
Naturally, we immediately started thinking of a way to write a novel about a Toymaker and a Talespinner. We invented a world, we sat down,a nd we started to write.
30,353 words into what we expected to be an 80,000-90,000-word book, we realized that the idea of casting it as a YA novel just didn’t work. The story that kept trying to emerge was not the story we planned out, but something much bigger, much more subtle, and much, much, much darker.
So we scrapped those 30,353 words and started over from a clean sheet.
We realized quickly that the complexity of the story meant we couldn’t wing it, so we drafted an extensive, detailed 11,000-word outline that also served as an extensive set of background notes on the world and its politics, much of which informs the story even though it’s not explicitly discussed in the story.
It’s now been over two years since we started work on this new, reimagined version of the story, with the working title Spin.
It’s a far-future, post-Collapse magical realism literary novel set in a world where the central United States is now a quasi-Calvinish theocracy called the Dominionate. Human population has crashed to under a billion people. Human fertility has crashed to about a quarter what it is now. As in The Handmaid’s Tale, fertile women are effectively slaves, but unlike The Handmaid’s Tale, the Dominionate has managed to build a stable society that actually works for most of its people. (That’s the true horror, I think, of slave societies; it’s possible to construct stable, prosperous slave societies in which most people—at least the ones who aren’t slaves—are reasonably happy. It’s a little distressing how quickly people can become inured to horror if their own lives are fairly pleasant.)
We’ve been grinding on this novel for more than two years. Narratively, structurally, and in scope and scale, it’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever written. We know the first draft is, well, a first draft, and still needs a lot of work, but I am immensely proud of this book.
At one point, we found ourselves having difficulty nailing down the timing of part of the novel, so I flew out to Missouri so that my Talespinner and I could trace the steps of one of our protagonists. That let us put together a detailed timeline, and get a sense of the kind of terrain our protagonist would journey through.
A few thousand years from now, this will be the site of Half-Circle Cothold, the tiny village home to Aiyah Spinner.
I just…I cannot tell you how I feel that this first draft is done. So instead I’ll leave you with this excerpt. I know this is first-draft material in need of polish, but I’m so delighted to have it done I want to share. Enjoy!
“Ever notice how God tells the powerless to respect the powerful, but never the other way around?”
Nathaniel tensed, so subtly Diego doubted she’d noticed. He raised a finger, a quick subtle signal to Nathaniel to stand down. “Perhaps that’s because those with the most power also bear the most responsibility.”
“Ha! Easy for you to say. Look at you. The Grand Inquisitor, sitting atop a mountain of skulls, with the full might of the Church behind you. People die at your command. You answer to nobody but the Emissary himself. Funny how those in high places seem to spend more time talking about their responsibilities than their power.”
Nathaniel tensed again. Diego folded his hands in his lap, observing her for a time. Finally, he said, “Do you love people?”
“What?”
“Do you love your fellow man? Do you wish for humanity to continue?”
She turned her attention out the window, away from Diego. “I like some people well enough, I suppose. Can’t say I much care for people as a group.”
“Ah, that’s where you and I differ,” Diego said. “You see, I am a fan of all mankind.”
“You have a funny way of showing it. You kill people. You enforce conformity with violence.”
“I protect humanity.”
“You protect the Church’s power. And your own.”
“Power, young lady, is a means to an end, not an end in itself. How much do you know of history?”
“Enough to know it has always been written by people like you.”
“You must know there once was a time when we built machines that flew through the air, that traveled the roads as we are doing now without the need of horses, that generated unimaginable power from the very elements of creation itself.”
“So?”
Diego held up his hand. “Indulge an old man with some measure of influence over your destiny, if you please. Do you know what brought that time to an end?”
“I suppose you’re going to say we turned away from God. We abandoned the Divine Plan.”
“No, I’m going to say I don’t know. Nobody does. The Church theologians have ideas, as theologians often do, but I would encourage skepticism of any theological answer that seems to suit the interests of the person offering it.” Larali’s eyes widened in incredulity as he continued, “What’s of greater interest to me is the cause of the cycle of growth and collapse that came after. Perhaps mankind wasn’t meant to live in large, complex societies. The ancients certainly didn’t think so. They believed our true nature to be tribal, suited to societies no bigger than a hundred and fifty or so.”
“What?” Larali leaned forward, engaged despite herself. “How is that possible? There were billions of them!”
“Indeed. Their scholars believed that in order for a large civilization to thrive, it was first necessary to replace loyalty to the tribe with loyalty to something else, something bigger than the individual, bigger than the family, bigger than the tribe.”
“Let me guess. Something like the Church?”
“Something like the Church.”
“So you’re the enablers of civilization.”
“Yes. What you say with scorn, I say in earnest. We are the enablers of civilization. The ancients built their societies by welding together feuding, warlike tribes through conquest, not just of armies, but of ideas. Disunity into unity through a single vision.”
“How convenient,” Larali snorted. “You cement your own power in the knowledge that it’s better for all mankind. The ends justify the means.” She stared into the darkness outside the carriage, where Lieutenant Blacklock’s horse kept pace. “You surround yourself with armed men to enforce your will, then sleep at night by telling yourself that you’re bringing the benevolent light of civilization to the wretched masses. How many of the ancients told themselves the same thing, do you think?”
“Spoken with passion, for one who doesn’t much care for people,” Diego said.
“Maybe I just don’t think you can slaughter your way to a perfect world.”
Every second of every hour Let your actions speak your will
Raise your head up high Raise your head up high So the heavens hear you cry Light the brightest fire From the highest mountain So the whole world knows That your spirit can’t be broken
—VNV Nation, Resolution
I love dancing. I’ve loved dancing for a very long time, though partner dancing is still relatively new to me. One of the few things I regret about living in Portland is being able to go out clubbing at the Castle, the world’s best goth nightclub…and I say that after being in goth clubs all over the world.
I’m back in Florida at the moment, helping prepare my wife’s RV for a cross-country trip (during which we plan to shoot photos of abandoned amusement parks all through the US, with an eye toward publishing a coffee table photo book in 2026 or 2027).
So it came to pass that my wife is out of town for the weekend working, but her boyfriend was of a mood to go out dancing, and so he said, “hey Franklin, interested in going to the Castle?”
I first went there in…um, I want to say 1997 or so? Somewhere thereabouts. It’s been a fixture of the Ybor City district for a donkey’s age. And oh my God, it remains just as marvelous as I remember.
There’s something utterly transcendant about dancing.
There is something so pure, so absolute about losing yourself to the music that now, two days later, I struggle to express it, or even recall it, except as a maddeningly vague series of impressions.
I remember the joy, of course. If you could bottle and sell the joy I felt spending the entire night dancing, there might never be war again. It’s a joy so flawless and unadulterated that everything else in existence falls away into nothing, replaced by exultation that fills every corner of my being. I had forgotten, I think, in the years since I’ve last been goth dancing, just whas a jubilant experience it is.
Round about my third hour on the dance floor, when I was starting to feel tired enough that I kinda wanted to sit down for a minute but the DJ just kept absolutely killing it. There comes a point where you push past the fatigue into something else, something numnous, on the other side.
Parts of the evening only exist in my memory in fragments. I remember dancing to the Aphex Twin remix of the Nine Inch Nails song Reptile sandwiched between a goth lesbian couple to my left and a da-glo bubble-gum lesbian couple to my right.
Mostly I remember an overwhelming sense of sonder, the realization that every single person you see is living a life as rich and complex as your own, with their own histories and dreams, goals and ambitions, heartbreaks and sorrows, as though I were surrounded by two hundred brilliant, dynamic, complex universes, fifteen thousand years of joy and desire and loss and tragedy all intersecting in this one brief moment.
The dance floor exists in its own space, a small pocket universe set apart from the world. It’s a bit like being transported for a single night to some Land of the Fae—not a fairyland like one might find in a Disney movie, but a wildland, a place of the old fae, the dangerous and unpredictable fae…but not to worry, they’re not hunting, they’re relaxing and having fun.
At one point, a person who was obviously of the Fair Folk and not even trying to hide it grabbed my hand to lead me deeper onto the dance floor. The music poured through me, vibrating like molten silver down my back, and such delirious ecstasy took me that now, sitting here in front of my computer, I can recall only the shape of it, the outline without its substance.
There is a vicious, ugly streak of Puritanism woven deep in the fabric of American social life, a cynical suspicion and distrust of pleasure, a sneering contempt for doing things simply for the joy of doing them. We are all poorer, I think, for it, for forgetting that joy exists.
I’ve heard people say, often with a derisive sneer, that nightclubbing is fr twentysomethings with no direction in life, as though Serious and Grown Adults™ should eschew mere pleasure. I find that idea both toxic and farcical. If we are, as some people say, spiritual beings having a physical existence, then what virtue is there in denying that physicality, the very reason we are in this world in the first place? What point is there to existing, if we don’t lean into that existence? What has it gained us to turn our back on joy, besides strife, division, and suffering?
I think we are poorer for this turning away from the joy of existence. We are here today, and gone tomorrow. We take nothing with us from this brief moment in the sun. Let us enjoy what time we have.
A couple of years back, my co-author Eunice and I started work on a new erotic novel, told in two parallel narrative streams: odd-numbered chapters taking place in Buffalo, New York in the present day, and even-numbered chapters taking place in London in 1871. The even-numbered chapters follow a Victorian doctor struggling to find a cure for furor uterinus, the formal name for “nymphomania;” the even-numbered chapters, a group of college friends who find his diaries and decide to replicate his experiments for…more entertaining purposes.
This is an essay about being experimented upon in a bar, not about writing. I’m getting to that, I promise.
Anyway, the novel, which we abandoned for a while and have recently returned to (with the assistance of my wife and my Talespinner), includes this passage:
“Is this another sitting room?” Jason said.
“I think it’s a parlor,” Leigh said.
“What’s the difference between a sitting room and a parlor?” Jason said.
Olivia glanced around the posh, elaborately decorated room, its windows just as large as the ones in the master bedroom. Several couches, a large comfortable chair, and a tête-à-tête all lurked beneath white shrouds. “One’s more formal?” she guessed. “What’s that thing?” She opened what looked like a large cabinet built into the wall, to find a shaft with cables running down into darkness.
“Dumbwaiter!” Leigh said. “For bringing things up. Brandy, cognac, cigars…” She tugged on a chain dangling from a lever in the wall next to the dumbwaiter. A distant bell tinkled. Leigh giggled. “I say, old chap, do be a sport and bring up the cognac.”
“What’s cognac?” David said.
“Little fish eggs in a tin?” Natalie hazarded.
“That’s caviar,” Leigh said. “Cognac is whisky for snooty people.”
Now, those of you familiar with cognac will know that it is not, in fact, whiskey for snooty people, it’s brandy for snooty people.
I am not familiar with cognac, but that’s okay because the characters are also not familiar with cognac, so it’s cool that they get it wrong.
That’s the setup. The story I mean to relay here is utterly different.
So I’m currently in Orlando, helping my wife get her RV ready for a cross-country trip. She lives across the street from a small neighborhood bar which the three of us—me, my wife, and her boyfriend—visited a few days back.
Three things struck me immediately when we walked in:
We were literally the only people in the place besides the bartender;
The bartender looked exactly, and I mean exactly, the way I imagine the character Natalie from the novel, to the point I turned to Joreth and said “holy shit, it’s Natalie!”; and
The house special that day was a cognac drink.
So naturally, I ordered the cognac drink (as did Joreth’s boyfriend); and naturally, that led to an entire conversation about cognac, which, as I pointed out already, is not whiskey for snooty people, it’s brandy for snooty people.
The special drink, which the bartender (whose name, as it turns out, was not actually Natalie, which is good because had it been, I’d’ve been quite convinced I’d fallen through a dimensional rift into a fictional world) had never made before, was a rather complex thing whose making involves, among other things, a blowtorch.
“It’s an experiment!” not-Natalie chirped as she got out the blowtorch.
I do not, Gentle Reader, understand the purpose of the blowtorch. I mean, I do, it exists to apply fire to things, but I’m not sure what role they play in making a drink. She stripped the peel off an orange, cut it into strips, sprinkled it with cinnamon and…um, sugar, I think?, slipped it into the glass, sprinkled more cinnamon on it, and…
I will confess that I am not generally an alcohol connisseur. I can’t tell a Scotch single-malt from a dry gin. But believe me when I say, Gentle Reader, that drink was delicious.
10/10, would recommend being experimented upon by a character from a novel again.
If you could move inside my head, you’d…well, honestly, you’d probably find the experience a little disconcerting, because who does that? Moving into someone else would likely be unsettling no matter who you did it to, unless they were, like, an identical twin or something.
But if you could move inside my head, you’d probably find it especially unsettling, because I don’t live in my body. People assume that a body is something you live in, but actually, from an entirely subjective viewpoint, my sense of self is more a big ball of wibbly-wobbly…stuff. I am, most of the time, a ball that floats behind my eyes and operates my body like one of those mecha things in a certain genre of Japanese science fiction. A meat mecha. A meat mecha made of flesh and bone and bizarre squishy biology.
But this isn’t an essay about that. It’s an essay about dancing.
I like dancing. I enjoy dancing. Some years ago, I started getting into partner dancing. My wife and my crush are both avid, skilled, talented dancers, so they were, as oyu might imagine, thrilled at the idea I might extend my repertoir beyond goth/industrial dancing at a certain flavor of loud, frenetic nightclub.
There is, however, as you might imagine, a difficulty that comes from not living in one’s body. Learning to dance is a bit like learning to make a marionette dance; when you’re operating a meat mecha made of biology and fluids, getting it to do exactly what you want it to do is a bit of a challenge.
I learned through a rather strange set of circumstances some time ago that psilocybin mushrooms can, for brief moments, make me inhabit my body. The first time that happened, it was…um, startling. When you’re accustomed to living life as an invisible ball floating somewhere behind your eyes, operating a meat mecha by remote control, the sensation that you reach alllll the way to the ground is jarring.
Then, when I burned my foot and learned that opiate painkillers do nothing but make me puke profusely and exuberantly, but cannabis edibles actually work for pain management, I discovered that edibles also put me into my body, which was wonderful because, you know, inhabiting one’s body without hallucinating is a marvelous thing.
So it came to pass that Joreth offered to take me swing dancing a few nights back, and I thought, hey, I wonder if it will be easier to learn a new dance if I’m inhabiting my body?
Morgan Freeman voice: “It was, in fact, easier to learn a new dance when he was inhabiting his body.
The entire experience was, for lack of a better word, extraordinary. It’s far easier, as it turns out, to learn how to move one’s feet when one’s sense of self extends all the way to the floor. I don’t think I’ve ever caught on to something new in…well, in ever.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, it helps that Joreth is the best teacher I’ve ever had. But still, never underestimate the power of living entirely within your body, rather than operating your body the way you might a particularly fiddly meat-robot.
Interestingly, when the edible started to wear off and I shrunk back into that ball behind my eyes, she could tell immediately. (Her, mid-dance: “You’re becoming a ball again, aren’t you?”)
Anyway, the whole experiment turned out to be a resounding success, one I definitely hope to continue exploring again in the future.
Okay, so sit back, and ima tell you a story. It’s a story of kink, and depravity, and surprise serendipity.
So. I’m in Florida, helping my wife Joreth get the RV ready for a cross-country trip, during which we plan to do a photo tour of the abandoned amusement parks that litter the American Midwest like so many broken dreams of a bygone era. (We’ll likely do a coffee table photo book sometime in the next couple of years.)
Anyway, the day after I arrived, the local dungeon hosted a party, so your humble scribe and his beautiful wife showed up, of course, for an evening of kink and Killer Klowns from Outer Space.
The dungeon had electronic consent forms to be filled out on an iPad. On the consent form there was a profile, and on the profile there was a place to pick one’s favorite kink from a dropdown list.
Me: “I guarantee my fvorite kink is not on this list.”
Cheerful Woman Behind the Desk: “It cannot possibly be any weirder than this kink I just learned about!”
Whereupon CWBTD pulled out her phone and showed us…
…The Picture.
You know the one. The Picture that broke the Internet. The Picture that, every now and then, undergoes a new wave of virality. The Picture that, I’m told, ended up briefly on the official Sigorney Weaver fan site until a moderator took it down.
There are two things to know about The Picture:
That’s a photo of Joreth;
Wearing a xenomorph hiphugger strapon designed and made by your humble scribe.
In other words, CWBTD was right. My kink isn’t weirder than the thing she’d just discovered, it’s exactly as weird as the thing she’d just discovered.
Anyway, she was thrilled, and asked us to come back in yesterday for a bit of show and tell.
Which we did. The Borg Queen xenomorph parasite has been in storage since Barcelona, but it required surprisingly little repair, and we were soon on our way.
It was marvelous. They let us use the dungeon for a photo shoot!
The bad: I didn’t have my real camera, and we couldn’t lay hands on the Borg mask, so we did the best we could.
The good: There’s a photo night coming up next week, for which we will be better prepared.
The better: We met a lovely couple who were all like “ooh, Borg Queen parasitized by an alien xenomorph? That’s exactly my kink![1] Victimize us, please?”
Innocent victim: Mittyrin (image by author, reproduced by permission)
Fantastic fun, if that’s the sort of thing you consider fun. (Tautalogical cat is tautalogical.)
We drove home beneath the symbol of God’s divine blessing, or, you know, non-traditional relationships, which is almost the same thing, so truly I feel like Divine Providence smailed upon a fantastic evening.
[1] When I first started working on the xenomorph hiphugger, I remember saying “I don’t know what the point is, there are only three people in the world with this taste and I’m dating two of them.”
It’s not necessarily her fault, mind you. And yet, and yet, the sex party blew out my knee, a fact for which Ms. Weaver bears some responsibility.
Lemme back up a bit.
I saw Star Wars (the original, before it was “Episode 4: A New Hope”) at the tender age of 11, when it first came out, and oh. My. God. It blew me away. I’d say I was obsessed with it, but that would be, if anything, understating the single-mindedness with which I obsessed over that movie. I collected all the trading cards (which I no longer have, the awareness of which gives me the same feeling in the pit of my stomach that I get when I think about the fact that I could have bought Bitcoin at $2 a coin but thought, “what’s the point?”), I built a flying model X-Wing (and ended up in the ER when the XActo knife I was using slipped…I still have the scar)…that movie moved into my mind and took up residence like a meth addict in an abandoned single-wide.
This isn’t a post about Star Wars. It’s actually about a sex party. Hang on, I’m getting to that.
So. My parents, who wanted to feed and nourish my interests, heard about this movie called Alien. They, being generally reasonable people who didn’t know the genre of sci-fi horror existed, largely because Alien kinda invented the genre of sci-fi horror, decided, he likes space movies with spaceships and stuff, this is a space movie with spaceships and stuff, he’ll like this movie.”
And so, I trotted into the theater, expecting something like Star Wars and getting…something else.
That movie traumatized me. Like, I had nightmares about the alien in Alien. Literal, actual, wake-up-in-a-cold-sweat nightmares.
For the next thirty-five years.
That alien became the shape of all my fears for decades. And so it came to pass that my wife, who loves pushing my buttons, during the course of a casual, ordinary conversaion on a casual, ordinary day, wouldn’t it be intersting if, given that I was teaching myself to make sex toys, I made an alien facehugger strapon? A…hiphugger, to coin a phrase?
Now, the thing about me is that once I get hold of a project, I don’t let it go until I’ve figured it out. The alien hiphugger moved into the space in my brain hollowed out by the Star Wars prequels (which not only killed my love of the franchise stone dead, but squatted over the corpse and farted in its face), I fired up Blender, and, two years and seven design revisions later, I created…
…the Alien Hiphugger Strapon.
It took seven design revisions and years of work to get here, but this is my wife during the first test fit of the first completed, assembled, and usable hiphugger.
Which she had never, until two nights ago, actually used.
Okay, so.
I am currently in Orlando, helping her get the RV ready to move cross-country to the West Coast. (Well, more likely we’re replacing the RV with a new one, but anyway.)
There is, here in Orlando, a swinger’s club which my wife and her boyfriend frequently attend. Not for sex—well, not just for sex—but also because they have the cheapest pool and hot tub in Orlando, where she’s been doing physical therapy for an injury for quite some time. Yes, people can go to swing clubs for therapy, and read Playboy for the articles, shut up.
Anyway.
Since I got to Orlando, we’ve been going to the swing club regularly. My wife does her PT, while I sit and write porn (specifically, a porn novel that takes place in two parallel narrative threads, one in London in 1871 and one in Buffalo in 2025), while people have sex around me, because that is, apparently, the life I lead now.
Two days ago, we decided that we should maybe go to the swing club for sex, because, you know, sex, and so a Plan was hatched.
My wife couldn’t find the syringe that I included with her xenomorph hiphugger strapon, so I procured a replacement on Amazon, for free, as I belong to their “free stuff if you write a review” program…but only for certain products. The lineup changes daily. The good news: they had a syringe available. The bad news: It was ludicrously, comically large.
Problem solved, the next step was acquisition, at remarkable effort, of tiny tapioca pearls, as you cannot have an alien violation experience without alien eggs (obviously, duh).
So.
We packed the hiphugger, the Ludicrously Large Syringe, and the eggs, with a carrier fluid of milk because at this point why the hell not, in a Box™ with some other toys and set off, the three of us, to the swingers club. Along the way, I took a quarter of a cannabis edible, on account of the fact they make me suuuuuper suggetible.
Now, there’s a thing you have to understand about swingers.
Swingers are, generally speaking, extremely conservative. They’re basically, by and large and painting with a very broad brush, PTA members and homeowners’ association managers who happen to enjoy shagging other people.
The swingers club inspects incoming packages. My wife cheerfully presented The Box™ for inspection, with its horrifying dildo-tailed alien facehugger and its Ludicrously Large Syringe and mass of Far Too Many Alien Eggs, owing to making just a bit too much tapioca…
The people doing the inspection behaved the way one might if one were to be served a lightly grilled roadkill opossum on a plate with a side order of Klingon gagh.
The injury toward which I am slowly working my way happened in one of the swing club’s themed playrooms, each of which has a door and a large window, through which other people can watch the goings-on within.
Now, I am not a voyeur. I’ve watched people have sex countless times, which is occasionally interesting in a “huh, I didn’t know people could bend that way” sort of way. It’s a shame I can’t hand those experiences to someone who would appreciate them better, because I know if watching people shag is your thing then it is very much Your Thing, but for me, it’s like, eh.
So my wife started with her boyfriend, and they started Doing Stuff, and I guess I blanked out a bit thinking about a scene in the porn story I mentioned earlier and how it needed some rework, so she’s like “you okay?” and I’m like “I was thinking about the novel” and she’s like “of course you were.”
Because of course I was. Writers: we’re not like other people.
My writing setup in the RV. That’s my wife’s tea mug. Twice the size means half as many trips to make more tea!
Anyway, a short time later I was on my hands and knees for the Great Xenomorph Parasite Violation.
If it seems like I’m Using Caps a lot, it was that kind of night.
Now, my wife is a dancer. And the play rooms had music piped in. And my wife started swaying to the beat of the music, and at the risk of using more capital letters, Oh My God.
Remember that cannabis edible? Cannabis does two things to me: it makes me hyper-suggestible, which my partners love with the love of a benevolent Divinity to all creation; but it also puts me in touch with my body, in a way that I’m generally not.
So fast forward two hours, during which I’m either on my knees or flat on my back. I won’t disturb you with the details, because they would…err, disturb you, but let me just say, So Many Alien Eggs. The tapioca had congealed into a slippery mass and it was So Gooey that, could I adequately express it in text, your computer screen would start dripping.
There was this kind of back and forth between “ooh, that’s nice” and absolute horror: in one particular position, the alien ovipositor would encounter the mass of eggs and…again, I won’t disturb you with the disturbing details.
Anyway, after hours of this, we went home sated and happy and just a touch horrified. After a brief Denny’s stop, because low-quality food after kinky threesomes seems part of my life now, I wrote in the car on the way home, then tumbled into a deep sleep.
I took this self-portrait on the way out of the sex club.
The next morning, I woke with a knee that refused to bend without agonizing pain. As I write this, I’m wearing a brace.
I blame Sigorney Weaver.
Not that it’s her fauly, exactly, but she is the sexy part of a casual chain that led directly from the theater to nightmares to the hiphugger strapon (I think it’s safe to say my wife may have, with her simple suggestion, invented the entire genre of xenomorph play).
In which Franklin makes everyone on all sides of the political divide angry
Okay, so. Some short while ago, a question floated through my Quora feed: Should men’s rights be more talked about, yes or no?
The thing about this question is it does not, and cannot, have a simple yes or no answer, because “rights” are not one thing. But even talking about talking about men’s rights tends to get people’s backs up. I will try to be as evenhanded as possible, in full understanding that I should be able to make everyone very angry indeed.
Let’s start here: The things people talk about when they talk about “rights,” especially in the context of systemic oppression, fall into two camps: rights everybody should have, and rights nobody should have. Conflating these things eradicates nuance and causes people to talk past each other.
Before I go any further, fair warning: Whataboutism, sealioning, and oppression Olympics in the comments will be terminated with extreme prejudice.
The most common objection I hear to any discussion about men’s rights is some variant of “men already control most of the world’s wealth, men are overrepresented in government and the upper tiers of corporations, men wield disproportionate power, the last thing on earth men need is more rights.”
That’s good sound bite activism, but it’s also a fetid, steaming pile of bullshit that’s irrelevant to any thoughtful discussion of men’s rights.
Yes, it is unquestionably true that men have all these advantages. We live in societies that overwhelmingly advantage men, absolutely. Yes, this is undeniable. Conservative men in the back who are getting pissed off because I said that, sit down. You hold tremendous advantages over women. American society gives you breaks that women don’t have. That’s just a fact.
Liberals, wait your turn, I’ll piss you off in a minute.
Yes, men are advantaged. Obviously. And that has fuckall to do with men’s rights, because those advantages are not rights. No reasonable person is saying that men should have more of that, because those are advantages nobody should have merely because they were born with a certain configuration of genitals.
When I worked as a designer, there was a ha-ha-only-serious notajoke common in the industry: “This would be a wonderful job if it weren’t for the clients.”
There’s a similar problem with men’s rights: it would be a wonderful conversation if it weren’t for the men having it.
Men’s rights activists (at least in the US; I don’t see this nearly as much in Europe) include some of the most terrible people you will ever find outside a Khmer Rouge death squad. They use “men’s rights” as a platform to bang on about how much they hate women and whine about how women’s liberation ruined the world because now they can’t find a nice passive sperm receptacle who will fuck them and make them a sandwich. I mean, they’re so awful, malignant narcissists look at MRAs and say “my god, there goes a bunch of toxic self-obsessed losers and no mistake.”
But beneath the self-indulgent whining, they do, and I have to grit my teeth to type this, they do have some legitimate points.
Like, for example, and this is the bit where having alienated a bunch of conservative men, I’ll piss off a bunch of liberals: Abuse of men by women, physical and emotional, is way, way, way, way, way, way more common than most people believe.
Like, we live in a society that trivializes, dismisses, and denies abuse of men by women—so much so that many people actually support abusive women.
Like, we live in a society that mocks male abuse survivors. I’ve experienced this myself.
Like, there are in fact double standards about men who sexually abuse young girls and women who sexually abuse young boys; women who sexually abuse underage victims consistently receive lighter penalties, according to peer-reviewed studies.
Like, men are more likely to die by suicide than women. Like, men are disproportionately victims of violence, though to be honest that’s a bit of an own goal because we’re more likely to be perpetrators of violence as well.
Ideally, conversations about rights are independent of the identity of the person having them. All rights—men’s rights, women’s rights, gay rights, Black rights, trans rights, religious rights—are human rights.
In practice, we cannot always frame the conversation that way, because patterns of institutional oppression mean that the abrogation of human rights always, always affects some groups of people more than others. This is why “all lives matter” and “feminism should be humanism” fail. (Well, one of the reasons, anyway; another is they’re disengenuous claptrap, but even assuming they were put forward in good faith, they’d still fail.)
It’s reasonable to pay more attention to the house that’s burning than the one that is not. It’s reasonable to pay more attention to the groups that are more disenfranchised than the ones that have more structural power.
Having said that, the lens with which we look at rights should always start with, is this something everyone should have? That’s a good first-pass filter to separate rights from privileges.
Should everyone have the right to be free of violence and abuse in their intimate relationships? Yes. Obviously.
Does intimate partner abuse disproportionately affect women? Yes. Obviously,
Does that make it okay to declare intimate partner abuse of men a non-issue? No. Obviously not. (Well, you’d think obviously not, but…)
People abuse and people are abused. Men abuse women. Women abuse men. Women abuse women. Men abuse men. We need to acknowledge that and we need to take it all seriously. “More women suffer so it’s okay if men suffer” is fucking monstrous and anyone who plays oppression Olympics that way does not deserve a fucking seat amongst decent human beings, and that’s a fucking hill I will die on.
At the same time, men, listen up.
Yes, it’s true that men can be drafted and women can’t, and it’s totally reasonable to frame this as an issue of men’s rights…
…but here’s the thing. There are 535 people in Congress and 384 of them are men, so please, for the love of God, stop yapping that this is a problem women need to fix. Jesus Tap-Dancing Christ.
Men passed those laws. Not women. Men hold the balance of power in Congress. Not women. The president is a man, not a woman. Shut your yaps about “I wOn’T sUpPoRt WoMeN’s RiGhTs UnTiL tHe WoMeN tAkE a StAnD aGaInSt ThE dRaFt.” Men, not women, created that problem. Men, not women, have the power to change it.
Same goes for men being more likely to die by violence than women. Yeah, we are…
…at the hands, overwhelmingly, of other men. How do you expect women to fix this, exactly?
A lot of the problems MRAs yap about can be traced directly to toxic masculinity, which is overwhelmingly those beliefs and attitudes held by men that are harmful to men. Don’t shove a stick in your own bicycle wheel and whine about what women did to you, my brother.
Alllllll that being said:
Society is fucked up and unequal and advantages some people over others, and yeah on balance men have a lot of things better than women do, but privilege is intersectional and there are places men are disadvantaged and yeah, if we’re talking about groups that are disadvantaged by structural social institutions we need to talk about places that happens to men too, and if that hurts your liberal fee-fees maybe it’s time to go take some remedial courses in basic human empathy and come back when you’ve grokked the notion that systemic harm is always wrong, even when it hurts people who are otherwise advantaged.
And now that I’ve pissed everyone off, I will say good day.
