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Some Thoughts on Consent and the Right to Say Meh

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My Talespinner and I are just putting the finishing touches on a book we co-authored together with her other boyfriend, an anthology of supernatural erotica called Spectres.

This isn’t actually an essay about that, it’s an essay about consent, agency, and the right to say meh. Hang on, I’m getting there.

One of the stories (actually more of a novella; Spectres is a chonky book) centers on an archaeologist working at a dig site in Türkiye who unearths a Hittite artifact that, spoiler, contains the soul of a priestess of Šauška, the Hittite goddess of sex and healing. Shenanigans happen, she seduces a grad student named Sarah, they start a weird D/s relationship, and near the end of the story it’s implied that she may offer Sarah’s sexual favors to another of her lovers…something Sarah consents to.

I will have ARCs soon. Hit me up if you want a copy!

So. A few days ago I saw a post on social media to the extent of “Remember, if the consent is not enthusiastic, it’s rape.” And, of course, that post had the usual performative affirmations: upvotes, replies like “Yes! This!” and “Right!”

It kinda rubbed me the wrong way. Not just the performative virtue-signaling aspect of the responses, but the post itself.

Don’t get me wrong, I get where it’s coming from. If you wheedle, beg, pressure, coerce, whine, cajole, browbeat, bulldoze, blandish, exhort, compel, or otherwise arm-twist someone into shagging you, that’s not really consent. Consent, to be valid, must be free, informed, and uncoerced.

But here’s the thing:

Consent can be unenthusiastic without being coerced.

We like to draw hard lines. We like to put everything and everyone in neat, tidy boxes. But real life is messy and chaotic and it sometimes requires thought and judgment rather than platitudes and rules.

I’ve consented to sex unenthusiastically. I’ve agreed to do things I don’t particularly enjoy, because my lovers really really wanted to do them. That isn’t rape.

Yes, I know, I know, the person who posted on social media was (probably) trying, in a clumsy way, to say that sex without uncoerced consent is rape. And that’s true, but it’s not what she said.

Look, I get it. Enthusiastic sex between participants who are really into it is good. But you know what? There are times when one person is more into it than another, and that’s okay.

I have the right to say yes even to things I’m not overjoyed about.

I’m not a masochist. I don’t enjoy pain. I do enjoy making my lovers happy, and so I have freely, without coercion, consented to be spanked, cropped, caned, have needles stuck in me, and bottom for knife play. My body, my choice…and that means I have the right to choose things I’m not really into for the sake of a lover who is.

I am not, and I know there will probably be people who push back on this, but I am not a victim of a sexual assault when I say yes to something that I know in advance is not particularly going to crank my motor. I have the right to say yes to sex I am meh about.

In fact, thad this’ll really bake your noodle, not only do I have the right to say yes to sex I’m meh about, I think that under many circumstances it’s a good thing to do so.

We human beings are terrible at predicting in advance how we will respond to unfamiliar things. I have said yes to sex I was sure I’d enjoy and discovered after the fact that I didn’t like it at all and will never do it again. My consent was not violated.

I’ve said yes to things that I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like in order to please a partner, and then discovered that, wow, it really turned me on. My consent was not violated.

Part of having agency means, I believe, having the right to agree to do things I’m not enthusiastic about doing. I may express that thus-and-such isn’t really likely to float my banana, but I can still choose to do it anway.

So. Back to Spectres.

Why would our character agree to have sex with someone she doesn’t want to have sex with and wouldn’t choose as a lover? Because it’s not about him. It’s about her relationship with the protagonist; it’s her way of showing that she is willing to give herself to her lover in that way, by consenting to allow her lover to choose another person for her to have sex with.

I’ve done that in real life, by the way; consented to have sex with someone I wouldnn’t otherwise choose to have sex with because another lover told me to. If you play with D/s, that’s a very powerful form of submission. (And isn’t that what D/s is, for a lot of us? Being willing to do things that another person tells us to do, things we wouldn’t otherwise do, because we’ve chosen to surrender power?)

Look, a lot of folks don’t play this way, and that’s fine. Part of what makes me willing to play this way is the fact that I’m not sexually attracted to people I don’t already have an emotional connection with, so it pushes my buttons in a big way, and that’s where the power, the kick, comes from.

If you don’t understand that, hey, that’s fine. You absolutely don’t need to play that way. The point I’m making here is not that you should run out and do things you don’t want to do because a lover tells you to; the point I’m making here is that it’s absolutely possible to give free, uncoerced consent that is not enthusiastic, to sex you know you’re not likely to enjoy particularly…and that isn’t automatically rape.

The problem with morals that fit conveniently in one Tweet or on a bumper sticker is that people are more complex than bumper-sticker morality. Trying to reduce human ethics to bumper-sticker slogans causes harm.

You personally don’t need to embrace the meh to acknowledge that others can, if they choose.

Dispatches from the Front of Mad Science

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I’ve returned from Wales and London, a trip that turned out to be the absolute embodiment of chaos, from canceled flights and impossible connections to ticket snafus and a wedding in which one of the brides rolled her car into a ditch on her way to the venue (she was fine; the car, less so).

All that plus many pics later. First, whilst visiting my Talespinner I had the opportunity to do a live field test of the Giger-inspired biomechanical nipplesuckers I designed for the alien xenomorph tentacle violation pod, and the trial went quite swimmingly, all things considered.

The nipplesuckers are powerful to the point of being right on the edge of pain, just the thing to add authenticity to an alien violation experience. And of course the mechanical suction never gets tired. Like some kind of unstoppable Nipple Terminator, it can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with, it doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are a spent puddle.

The glowing electroluminescent wire turned out to be quite lovely, so we did an entire EL wire bondage photo shoot in Wales, sadly not at a castle (the weather didn’t cooperate) but in the charming little AirBnB we stayed at.

Got a couple outtakes from the nipplesucker test that turned out unexpectedly cool, though!

Thoughts on Understanding Porn

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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.

Image: Jan Kopřiva

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.)

Image: 1MilliKarat

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’d love to hear your thoughts. What say you?

The Borg Queen awakens

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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:

  1. That’s a photo of Joreth;
  2. 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.”

Oh, how wrong I was.

My knee hurts. I blame Sigorney Weaver.

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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).

Hyperurbanized noir retrofuturism: Inventing literary genres during sex

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This morning, I answered a question over on Quora, the social media site where I spend most of my time these days.

The question asked, What do partners say to each other in sex, like when you are thrusting and such?

As it turns out, I had an example from some rather spectacular sex last night, the kind of sex that makes you see the face of God, that may have led to my lover and I creating a new literary genre…one that we’re tentatively calling “hyperurbanized noir retrofuturism.” It’s kind of a spinoff of the cyberpunk retrofuturism of entertainment like Bladerunner or Akira or Cyberpunk 2077.

Okay, so.

I call my Talespinner my Talespinner because she has a gift for weaving worlds from words, something she does pretty much all the time, including during sex.

When we have sex, we build shared worlds—we talk about fictional characters and settings in which characters are having sex. We explore fantasies together by inventing these characters and setting them loose in a shared universe very different from ours.

Like the dystopian, oligarchical world we’ve created where the State is controlled by a kleptocratic class and the apparatus of the State, modeled loosely on Stalinist Russia, arrests political dissidents who are conditioned and brainwashed to serve as pleasure objects, leased to the oligarchs for staggering sums of money to fulfill the oligarchs’ most perverse desires. (We’ve opened this shared world to my crush and her other boyfriend, and written over 170,000 words of fiction with a cast of dozens of characters.)

So before I go further, a bit of backstory is necessary.

Some time ago, I shared this H. R. Giger image with my crush:

I said it looks like a machine for forced sexual stimulation, she pointed out that all sexual stimulation can be forced sexual stimulation if it goes on for long enough, and at that point it was off to the races.

Before long we’d invented a world in which an all-female Yakuza-style street gang had arisen with a unique punishment for members who erred: rather than cutting off a finger to atone, they were strapped into this device, then raised into a soundproofed plexiglas cube in the middle of a posh restaurant owned by the gang, where the machine forced orgasm after agonizing, unendurable orgasm from their helpless bodies for eight or nine hours while they screamed and sobbed in uncanny silence for the amusement of the restaurant’s patrons.

I shared this scenario with my Talespinner. One of the things I love about my polycule is that it’s fertile ground for creativity: my Talespinner’s other boyfriend is contributing to an erotic anthology my Talespinner and I will be publishing next year, my wife has created the entire history of fashion for my Black Iron universe; my wife designed the Victorian house that serves as the setting for a novel my crush and I were writing, that my Talespinner may help finish…you get the idea.

It’s magnificent.

Anyway. I shared this scenario with my Talespinner, and together we fleshed out the world a retrofuturist, quasi-cyberpunk world that abandons the signature chrome-steel, neon, weirdly Orientalist fetishistic background of traditional cyberpunk:

for a more grounded environment that’s less chrome and neon and more Cubist hyperurbanization:

Imagine an endless, densely packed urban environment, but not the Sprawl from Neuromancer; rather, this is an immense vista of great towering Cubist architecture, spanned by a complex web of covered pedestrian bridges far above street level—a huge multilevel Cubist metropolis in which you can walk for a dozen blocks or more without ever descending to street level.

Subways accessed through stations beneath the buildings allow travel to the far corners of the immense city without ever setting foot on the street (which is dominated almost exclusively by robotic taxis and self-driving supply vehicles).

Our main character is a member of this all-female gang, young but ambitious and on an upward trajectory through the ranks.

You will notice that the Giger painting features space for two people. What, then, happens when only one person transgresses against the gang’s rules?

In such a case, another gang member may volunteer to serve alongside her or, if no volunteers are forthcoming, one is chosen at random. Serving in this capacity awards a certain measure of honor and respect, more if it’s voluntary than if it’s assigned randomly.

The tale my Talespinner and I wove over many hot kinky sex sessions during the past week or so, involves our unnamed gang-member heroine and an unnamed gentleman who happened to be dining in this restaurant (owned and operated by an ostensibly retired former gang member, of course) on a day when our heroine is randomly chosen to endure hours of unimaginable sexual torment alongside another member caught transgressing the gang’s rules.

He becomes so enamored of this mysterious tattooed woman locked in this cube, suffering so magnificently, that he waits until the restaurant closes and follows her, still shaking and weeping, home.

A dangerous game to be sure, but he is a civilian and has no idea what he’s up against.

He spies on her for weeks, but somehow whenever he tries to follow her to figure out what she does for a living, poof! She vanishes like a ghost.

Eventually, he works up the courage to ask her out for coffee, and is quite surprised when she accepts. They have a few dates, and soon become lovers…

…but…

…but…

…she knows, of course. She knows how she first came to his attention. She knows he has stalked her. And she resolves to teach him a lesson.

Which brings me, in roundabout fashion, to my answer to the question, what do lovers say to each other during sex, like when thrusting and such?

You need to understand that at this point, my Talespinner and I had had sex…um, four times, I think? Not including the threesomes with her other boyfriend the night before.

The last time we had sex, I’d already had…oh, man, I don’t know how many orgasms. Enough I was convinced I couldn’t have another.

That’s when it started.

My Talespinner murmured in my ear an entire scenario in which our heroine took this fellow out on a leisurely day-long date, one where she gave him every possible opportunity to come clean. She even took him to the indoor garden cafe in the building across the street from her apartment, and had lunch with him at the one table overlooking her apartment from which he spied on her.

She was disappointed, of course, that he failed to be forthcoming about his behavior prior to asking her out. Disappointed, but prepared.

So when she invited him back to her apartment, she’d already set up the chair with the straps and the projecting rod and all the implements she needed to impress upon him the value of open, honest communication in a relationship.

Including a rather lovely item of jewelry something like this, but with the blades blades on the fingertips wickedly sharp:

She has, while she binds him, a calm, reasoned conversation with him, about honesty and openness, and how she’d really hoped he’d be more forthcoming, but regardless, the time for that conversation had come, and now there was nothing for it but to talk.

It was around the point where she described the narrow, almost thread-thin, but very strong cords she wrapped around his body to encourage him to remain very still without struggling lest the cords cut painfully into his skin, and the way she ran those thin sharp blades down his skin, that I had the last, strongest, and definitely most painful orgasm of the evening, and indeed of the past several months.

We will likely end up writing a novel set in this world, but there are so many projects in the pipe ahead of it I don’t see us starting on it until 2027 at the earliest.

Now, of course, I’m not suggesting this is what you, dear reader, should necessarily talk about during sex. It may be that hyperurbanized noir retrofuturism isn’t your particular taste.

Perhaps you’d rather talk about the interpersonal social dynamics of My Little Pony, or the alternative economics of non-monetary tips for the pizza delivery dude.

The point is, talk about your interests. Listen to your partner talk about their interests. Find the overlap. Explore the area between.

This might mean that you talk about what you’re doing, or what you’d like to. It might mean you invent characters in fictitious worlds and talk about them. It might mean you talk about Vulcan philosophy, or pon farr rituals, or how the latter doesn’t really mesh with the former but is really more about Gene Roddenberry’s own particular and peculiar sexual tastes.

Whatever.

You don’t need someone else to tell you what’s okay to talk about. Explore! It’s your life and your relationship.

Some Thoughts on Irrevocable Consent

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There is a fetish I quite like. It’s not terribly common, but it’s also not uncommon as these things go, and it’s called somnophilia. It’s the fetish for either having sex with a sleeping partner, or having someone have sex with you in your sleep.

Now, if you don’t get the appeal, that’s totally okay. Fetishes kinda work that way: if they get you hot, they get you hot, and if they don’t, they’re complete mysteries. Take foot fetishes, for example. I don’t get them. They don’t make any sense to me. I struggle to imagine how someone might be aroused by feet. Like, of all things to get you hot, feet? Why feet?

And that’s okay. I don’t need to understand it to know there are people who are turned on by feet, even if I don’t understand why.

Somnophilia has been dipping in and out of the news lately, because of a rather horrifying case in France concerning a man, Dominique Pelicot, who is on trial for drugging his wife multiple times over a period of years and then recruiting strangers (about fifty or so have been identified and are being prosecuted, if I recall correctly) to rape her.

Court drawing of Dominique Pelicot (Europa Press)

This isn’t actually about the way whenever someone introduces fetishistic elements of a rape into his crimes, people who enjoy that fetish consensually sigh, roll their eyes, and brace for the onslaught from folks who don’t actually understand that the thing separating rape from sex is consent, though I could write that essay, and maybe eventually I will.

I get the taste for somnophilia. I love the idea of being half asleep, one of those really deep sucking sleeps you just can’t drag yourself from, partly aware that my body is being used for someone else’s pleasure but unable to do anything about it, and waking the next morning with the barest of hazy, fragmented memories of it. Whew! *fans self* I personally find that super-hot.

I also enjoy doing this with a lover who finds it as hot as I do.

Yum.

What I want to talk about today, though, isn’t somnophilia itself, nor even the way pop media conflates the fetish with the rapes that Dominique Pelicot staged, but I want to take a step back and ask: Is it even okay at all? Can we consent to sex in such a way that we cannot revoke that consent?

Sex and Commerce and War, Oh My

Sexual consent, according to a lot of folks in the kink community, is informed, freely given, and exists in the moment. Informed means you know what you’re getting into. Freely given means you’re not being coerced, blackmailed, wheedled, pressured, or forced into it. Exists in the moment means you can always tap out, even if you agreed up front.

A lot of folks are deeply uncomfortable about sex you consent to without a way to back out. That’s why they’ll tell you to have a safeword if you’re playing, say, with rape fantasy, where “no” and “stop” might not mean “no” and “stop.” That’s why they’ll tell you to have a nonverbal signal like a bell if your partner is gagged.

And I get that. It’s okay to be deeply uncomfortable about sex you can’t tap out of.

But, as I believe I’ve blogged about in the past, I personally like agreeing to things that I can’t tap out of. That gets me hot.

And here’s an interesting thing: If you take sex out of the picture, we as a society are quite comfortable indeed with agreeing to things you can’t back out of. Like contracts. Or mortgages. Or military service. Try getting three years into your four-year enlistment and saying “you know what? I changed my mind. I don’t want to do this any more.” Ha ha ha ha ha.

It’s really only with sex when we say “consent isn’t consent if it can’t be revoked.”

But…is that really true?

Unyielding Devotion

Last October, Eunice and I published a book. It’s the fourth novel in our Passionate Pantheon series of far-future, post-scarcity philosophical science fiction theological pornography, and pretty much the entire book is a deep dive into Eunice and I exploring the idea of whether you can give irrevocable consent to sex. (Spoiler: We think the answer is yes.)

It’s an even-numbered book, which means it’s erotic horror (the odd-numbered books in the series are Utopian, the even-numbered books are erotic horror). Here’s an example of what you’ll find:

Two doors in the far wall slid open to admit a tall, muscular man and an equally tall, strong-looking woman. He had bronze skin and brown hair that fell around his shoulders, and looked out at the world through piercing aquamarine eyes with cross-shaped pupils. She had shoulder-length hair of brilliant purple that matched her purple eyes, pale skin, and a warm face that smiled easily. They met in front of the cage. She offered her hand. “Hi! I’m Lanissae. I don’t think we’ve met.”

“Royat.” He shook her hand. “This is only my second party. I came here for the first time last month. I agreed to serve as entertainment at this party, so here I am.”

“Royat.” She inclined her head. “It’s lovely to meet you! This is my fifth time as a cage entertainer. Do you know what to do?”

“I think so. Jakalva explained it to me.”

“Good.” A door in the round cage folded upward. Lanissae stripped, then stepped nude into the cage. Royat undressed somewhat more awkwardly and followed her. A drone flitted down to whisk away their clothes. The cage door folded back down. The woman who had given Jakalva and Kaytin their vials approached the cage, moaning with each step. Her tray now held only four vials, two bright red and two deep turquoise.

“What’s happening?” Kaytin asked Chasoi, who stared at Lanissae and Royat with bright, hungry eyes.

“They’ll each take two Blessings,” Chasoi said. “The first one ensures their bodies will remain physically aroused no matter what happens to them. And the second, well, that’s the magic.”

“The magic? What does that mean?”

“One of them,” Jakalva said, “will become desperately horny beyond all reason. Are you familiar with the Blessing of Fire?”

“Yes,” Kaytin said.

“It’s like that, but more violent. It removes inhibition and obliterates self-control. The other does just the opposite, causing intense aversion, repulsion even, to the idea of sex. The cage makes sure neither of them can escape.”

“Oh.” Kaytin blinked. “So whoever gets the first vial will…”

“Yes. But that’s only half of it.”

“Half of it how?”

“That’s the beauty,” Chasoi breathed. “The moment either of them has an orgasm, they switch. Whoever was needy becomes averse. Whoever was averse becomes wild beyond control. They stay in the cage until they collapse from exhaustion.” Her eyes glittered.

I…would volunteer to be cage entertainment. I bet the number of people who would willingly do this is very small indeed, but I would absolutely do it.

Why?

The character Lanissae, who who has signed up to be cage entertainment many times, explains:

“Okay, let me try to explain,” Lanissae said. “It’s…” She paused, regarding Kaytin through hooded eyes. “I like…I like the tiny spaces. I like that little moment of clarity that happens when you switch, you see? There’s that one second when you know what’s going to happen. You see it in their eyes. You know that when that second is over, they will want you so badly that nothing you can do will stop them.” She shivered, eyes half-closed, and slipped one hand inside the plunging neckline of her shimmering, lacy dress. “Mmm. To be seen with such desire, to know that when the moment passes you will not want it and would do anything to make it stop, to know that it will happen anyway…there’s a delicious inevitability to it.” She cupped her breast. Her eyelids fluttered. “It’s such an exquisite surrender. You exist only to be ravished.” She exhaled in a soft moan. “You can’t get away. You lose yourself in how much you don’t want it, but it doesn’t matter. You stand on the brink and for one instant, you see it all so clearly, and you know what’s about to happen, and you also know that you chose to be here. You walked into the cage yourself, of your own free will…oh!” She leaned back on the couch and caressed her nipple beneath her thin dress.

Kaytin stared at her, desire and revulsion roiling within her. “And then,” Lanissae went on, “the violation is over, and the change happens, and you have that moment of clarity again. You feel the heat in your body. For that one delicious second, you know. When the heat reaches your head, the need will take you, and nothing in the world will matter except the person you are about to ravish. Everything stops. You balance on that edge. You recognize each other. You see the humanity there. In that instant, you share a connection that’s absolutely magical. For that one brief second, you see each other, really see each other—not as predator and prey, but as two people sharing an experience. You know that when the moment passes, you will not be able to stop yourself any more than you could stop what was coming when you were the object. You can feel your mind going…mmm.” She caressed her neck with her fingertips. “You embrace that moment of humanity, before it all slips away. It’s…uh! It’s so magnificent to stand on that cliff and feel yourself about to fall.” Lanissae arched languidly, running both hands down her arms. “When I’m in the cage, I live for those moments of connection between the moments of madness.”

Now, I don’t believe that you should explore irrevocable consent in your relationships, of course. If you find that idea repulsive, I 100% get that.

What I argue is that, in the spirit of agency and bodily autonomy, you have the right to explore irrevocable consent in your sexual relationships if you want to. And I have the right to do so as well.

I believe that, if I choose, I can tell a partner “I consent to you doing X to me, and I also consent to being placed in a situation where I can’t change my mind.” I don’t think I have to, or should, but I think I can if I choose to.

My body, my rules. If I want to give a lover permission to use me in my sleep, I have the right to do that.

You may or may not agree (and if you don’t, I’d love to hear your arguments in the comments). I do, though, find it interesting that society enshrines this right to irrevocable consent in basically every aspect of commercial and social life, except sex.

Isn’t that interesting? Sex, something whose connection to consent we’ve long been shockingly indifferent about, now gets an exception carved for irrevocable consent.

I think, honestly, this is at least in part a sign of the intrinsic distrust and fear our society has about sex.

The Pod

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It all started when I accidentally clicked on Facebook Marketplace.

I was trying to click on my notifications. On the iOS app, the Marketplace button is next to the Notifications button, and, well…

As God is my witness, I do not know why Facebook Marketplace thought I would be interested in a gigantic human-sized pod. I mean, it was absolutely 100% right, but how did it know?

And so it came to pass that I, after much back and forth with the seller (who owns a clinic that was moving, and didn’t have space for it any more) and some absolutely heroic efforts from my friend Stan to move the damn thing, came into possession of a Bod Pod, a medical scanner originally, I gather, designed to calculate body mass.

Of course, when I saw that listing on Facebook on that fateful day, my mind immediately, as it is wont to do, went to images of the alien eggs from the Alien movies.

What if, thought I, I could cover this Bod Pod in silicone, making an alien egg large enough for a person? And what if, I continued as my brain inevitably rode this train to the last station, I could make a whole bunch of gigantic silicone tentacles—say, just for the sake of argument, nine and a hald feet long or so—that might explode from the pod, dripping with slime, trying to drag a Helpless Victim™ into the egg-thing? And what if, I continued on, having at this point reached the last station, crashed through the wall, and sailed on into the Beyond Space where anything is possible, I did a photo shoot, in which this poor Helpless Victim™ was molested by tentacles from this giant alien pod?

Now, of course, getting from pod to giant alien egg with tentacles is a Project, one I have only just barely embarked upon.

The first step to a pod with tentacles is, of course, the pod. The second step is the tentacles, and so it was, Gentle Reader, that I set about designing a Giant Tentacle in a 3D modeling program.

From this Giant Tentacle, I created a mold that could be printed in 15-inch segments, which is the maximum print size on my 3D printer, with an overall length of over 9 feet.

Of course, I didn’t really quite imagine how long a 9-foot mold is, so it turned out that once the mold was complete—something that took days of printing—I didn’t have enough space for it without rearranging furniture.

Seriously, nine-feet-plus of mold is more mold than you think it is.

It’s also a lot harder to cast silicone in an open-face mold this size than I expected it to be. Like, a lot harder. In this much space, silicone doesn’t behave the way you’d expect it to. It’s kind of like lava—it doesn’t flow to fill the entire mold. (It doesn’t help that my vacuum chamber also isn’t big enough to degas this much silicone all at once, either.)

So I had to make the pour in a bunch of steps, which created all sorts of weird problems. I’d planned to have the suckers lighter than the rest, with bands of color through the tentacles. That…didn’t work. The coloring pigment actually migrated up through the silicone, something it doesn’t do in a smaller mold.

The mold is just a liiiiitle teensy bit more than half the diameter of the tentacle, so it just barely starts to pinch inward at the top. This is so that I could cast half the tentacle, remove it from the mold, fill it with silicone again, then put the half I’d already cast on top, and that slight bit of pinch would grab the bit I’d already cast.

The result worked out pretty well, though it uses a lot of silicone—I made two tentacles, and together they’re about $100 worth of body-safe platinum-cure silicone alone, not including the cost of printing the mold.

When I flew to Springfield to see my Talespinner, I brought the tentacles (of course), which caused some degree of consternation at TSA (of course). We trialled the tentacles as a means of violation of Helpless Victims™, at which they excelled, but we (by which I mean she and her other lover, as I looked on) also gave them a try as an impact toy, at which they also excelled.

In fact, this may be the thuddiest impact toy ever conceived by man, more thuddy even than the Dread Koosh Flogger, a flogger made (as the name suggests) from Koosh balls.

I’m considering making an impact tentacle toy that’s basically a short length of this tentacle with a handle on the end.

When I returned from Springfield, armed with more information to allow the Great Tentacle Pod Project to move forward, I unpacked my suitcase and tossed the tentacles over the pod, lacking a better place to put them (and nine-foot tentacles are both heavier and take up more storage space than you may realize).

It struck me yesterday that visitors to my home, upon walking into my living room and seeing this, might be subject to some discomfiture.

Engineered Sensation and the Realm of the Senses

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Earlier this morning, I wrote an answer on Quora that reminded me I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the sex toys I design and make, but I’ve never really talked about the work that goes into those designs. So if the method to engineered sensation interests you, read on!

There are a lot, and I mean a lot, of boutique sex toy stores out there right now, the most famous being Bad Dragon, purveyor of monster cocks of all varieties. And honestly, some fo their designs are quite beautiful. But they, and most of their competitors, seem to have basically a single schtick: dildos of fantasy penises.

Which, don’t get me wrong, is perfectly fine. Hey, if that’s your jam, it’s your jam. But I absolutely think tiny bespoke sex toy makers can do more. To me, and I don’t know if I’m unusual in this regard, what interests me is exploring totally new sensations, so I think of what I do more in terms of designing sensations than designing mythological penises.

Most of my designs go through multiple iterations, refining not the look so much as the way it feels.

For example, the Tentacle Butt Plug went through almost a dozen design iterations:

I am firmly of the belief that if you are looking for a tentacle violation experience, then the tentacles should feel as violating as possible.

This is a prototype about midway through the design process. I added the suckers to the stem and I made the end, where it curves to the right, more prominent (the first design was shaped closer to where the red line is), to make the plug feel more intrusive to the wearer. You can’t ignore it.

I had five or six people test the various design iterations, and unanimously agreed that “violating” is a good word to describe the feel of this plug.

So what got me to writing this?

A question floated through my Quora feed asking how it feels to be pegged by one’s wife. I have, in fact, long been an enthusiastic fan of pegging (I hold a patent on a new type of strapon for pegging), so this was something I thought I could speak to, and the answer is:

There’s no such thing as what it feels like to be pegged. It’s different in different positions, obviously—being pegged in missionary position is much different from being pegged doggy style—but it also depends a lot on what you’re doing it with.

For example, here are two things I’ve created for the purpose of pegging that feel vastly different, both of them being worn by my wife:

This tentacle strapon dildo is…invasive. I designed it to simulate, as closely as reasonably possible, the sensations one might experience in one of those pornographic Japanese anime with the tentacle monsters.

It’s made of a fairly hard silicone (Smooth-On Dragon Skin 20, with a Shore hardness rating of 20). The suckers are deliberately designed to be fairly large and bumpy, and the tentacle twists a bit at the tip to make it feel even more invasive.

The tentacle in the photo is two colors because this was a prototype, a test cast in a brand-new mold, so I poured it with whatever silicone I had left over from making other toys. It works…really really well.

What does it feel like? Intense. When that thing is moving in and out, believe me, you feel those suckers. Most dildos, you can’t actually feel the tip of it because the top is centered and smooth; the tip on the tentacle is slightly twisted so that the very end, with that last sucker on the point, presses against you and you know EXACTLY how deep it is.

The xenomorph hiphugger, on the other hand, is…deceptive. Yes, the “tail” has ridges, but the tip is blunt, smooth, and shaped so it goes into the…err, orifice relatively easily and smoothly. The thing about this design is you don’t really realize just how deep it is until it comes time to pull out and it just keeps sliding out and out and out and out…

It’s also hollow, with a silicone tube running down the center, so that you can pump fluid through it from the reservoir. That feels…odd. Not really sure what to say besides odd. It’s a warm rush that just kinda keeps going.

That, for me, is the thing. Not what the toy looks like, but the experience it evokes, the sensation it creates. I love making art out of sensation. The question is not “how can we make the toy?” but rather “what new experiences can we call forth with this toy?”

Fifty Shades of Red Pen

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For a recent episode of the Skeptical Pervert podcast, Joreth read 50 Shades of Grey at Eunice and me.

I tried to read it when it came out and couldn’t get past the second or third chapter at all. Eunice was blisfully ignorant of the horrors that lurked within. So we made an entire episode of the two of us reacting in horror, specifically to the scene where Christian and Ana negotiate the terms of their relationship (and Christian violates Ana’s consent multiple times during the consent negotiation, which was…special).

Anyway, in the process of re-acquainting herself with the contents of that book, Joreth took a literal red pen to its pages, which you can see here.

And also, check out the podcast. We think it’s rather fun!