Since returning from Reykjavik, my body’s been stuck in this thing where I wake up at 4:30 AM, can’t get back to sleep, haul myself out of bed, and then by 9 PM I’m crashing.
But hey, I did get some amazing photos, even if the trip wrecked my sleep schedule.
While I hate this with every fiber of my being—I am firmly of the opinion that if I’m up at 4:30 in the morning it should be because I’m still up, not because I’m getting up—I do have to admit it’s done wonders for my productivity.
This morning, before noon, I worked on a novel, updated my Patreon, finalized a new page on my BDSM site, wrote a blog post for More Than Two, put up a new essay on Xeromag, reset all the FTP passwords on my web server (thanks to a security issue at my webhosting provider…man, this has been a rough week in the infosec world), finished unpacking from Reykjavik, cleaned the tub, and did a load of laundry.
So, from the top:
A short while ago I got a rather snarky email from my BDSM for Nice Guys page.
Which, I mean, wow. “Barely any submissive males”? Oh, my sweet summer child.
Still, this person made a good point that there aren’t a ton of BDSM guides aimed at women out there. I didn’t write one because I’m not a woman; I’m not qualified to write such a thing.
Fortunately, I know people who are, and Dr. Jenny Hale graciously volunteered to step up and fill that space.
And so, the first new page on my BDSM site in quite a long while is now live:
I also added a new page to my Essays section on Xeromag. Most people think of themselves as basically good. Most people are wrong. People tend to get their ethics from the ambient morality around them, and abide by them so long as doing so doesn’t cost them anything, so in their local frame of reference they generally are pleased to consider themselves “good people.” However, step outside the local ethical frame and you see that ethics are more Einsteinian than Newtonian.
Over on the More Than Two blog (and its companion Substack), I published an essay about the skills and traits that make for vibrant, strong relationships:
And finally, I apparently now have a YouTube channel, upon which I just put a new video on the subject of how writers find the drive to finish writing books. (Spoiler: We don’t. The book gives us no peace until we finish it.)
I’ve had a Patreon for years, but have for most of that time done very little with it. I’m now making a point of updating it quite frequently, with behind-the-scenes peek at creative projects, original photography, and excerpts from books I’m working on. You can join for free, and see all my content for just a dollar a month!
While I was in Reykjavik, Iceland last week with the extended polycule, I am pleased to report that we were able to do a beta test of the Project Ladybug prototype…which succeeded beyond our most optimistic hopes.
Monster sex is a huge fetish, with dozens of companies producing endless variations on monster and mythological creature dildos, but my Talespinnrer and I have noticed a shocking, dare I say even dismaying, lack of monster-sex toys of the opposite sort: monsters they prey not on people with innies, but those with outies. Where are the toys that parasitize women, living within them, driving them into frenzies of need, forcing them to copulate endlessly with men, giving those men pleasure beyond imagining in order to steal their precious bodily fluids whilst denying the host any hope of satiation? This will not stand!
This is exactly the void Project Ladybug was designed to fill.
So it came to pass that after making an alginate cast of the inside of my Talespinner’s vagina, 3D scanning the cast, and bringing it into a 3D modeling program, as extensively documented in the links above (not safe for work, natch), I finally made the mold for the alien parasite, a super-soft silicone sleeve designed to fit precisely the exact shape of my Talespinner’s ladybits.
Fun fact: the project became known as Project Ladybug when my smartphone autocorrect keps changing “ladybits” to “ladybug.”
The Ladybug is a pouch of soft silicone, about a millimeter thick, that conforms to her insides and is ridged for his pleasure. It features two internal tentacles that caress the head of the man making use of the host, and as it completely covers her inner bits, it makes sure the host can feel nothing but a vague sense of pressure, but no pleasure.
Why? To keep the host in a state of extended need without relief, so as to make the host copulate fiercely with whatever male subjects happen to be nearby, of course, so that the parasite can feed.
I 3D printed the mold, which took over a day on my old and rather slow 3D printer.
The supports for the inner part of the mold ended up looking rather organic, like alien hands sprouting from the print bed to hold it warmly in a tender embrace.
Partly assembled (half the mold is not shown here), you can get a sense of how large it is and how thick it is.
Pouring the silicone turned out to be a huge hassle, because the inner clearances are so fine and there are so many undercuts that allow for bubbles to form that it actually took more than an hour to cast. I ended up doing the casting in two steps because the silicone started curing in the pot.
So it was with no small measure of nervousness, Gentle Reader, that I cracked the mold open, expecting to find a mess. Instead, the casting turned out flawless.
You can see the ridges inside the parasite, designed to offer greater stimulation for the male subject. When you look at it head on down the opening, you can also see the inner tentacles.
So enough of that, how does it work?
That’s the question we set out to answer in Reykjavik. It turns out the answer is: Rather brilliantly!
Inserting and properly seating the Ladybug proved more difficult than we’d anticipated. It needs to be pressed completely into the host, and we ultimately ended up using a pair of chopsticks for that; fingers alone didn’t really do it.
For the final version, I’ll likely design a tool for the…um, insertion.
Once in place (a process that was, by all accounts, quite pleasant for the host), it stayed put nicely.
To create the best possible simulation of the parasite experience, one that most closely replicated the aphrodisiacs the parasite pumps into the host, we both took bremelanotide (PT-141), a potent aphrodisiac that works like gangbusters on both of us, before we began the experiment.
Sex with the host was…magnificent. The final version will need larger internal tentacles, but the ridges? *chef’s kiss* The parasite absolutely, without question, amplifies the pleasure experienced by male subjects. The ridges are quite soft, and absolutely delightful on the head of the subject’s penis. What’s more, I could remain still within her and each twitch and clench, however slight, felt like a massage on the most sensitive parts of my shaft. Truly delightful.
The host, on the other hand, reported an unbearably frustrating experience, often while on the verge of tears. The host feels nothing of the subject’s pleasure. Indeed, the host feels nothing but a slight sense of pressure, even while the subject is experiencing crashing waves of overwhelming ecstasy.
There are a few minor changes I plan to make for the version 1.0 parasite. The interior tentacles need to be larger, to better stimulate the subject to heights of ecstasy. The outside portion of the parasite will be bigger, to cover the host’s clit and prevent even accidental stimulation. I may make it slightly thicker, and I plan some changes to the mold to make casting easier.
But overall, the effect is exactly what my Talespinner and I had hoped for, and I hope it opens new avenues of mad science to explore.
Alas, this is unlikely to be a sex toy I can produce in any quantity. It turns out there’s enormous variability in the human vagina (there is, of course, a PubMed article on the subject), so making these literally requires 3D scanning a casting of every individual user’s bits. I’d hoped I could maybe make 3-4 standard sizes, but no.
I am not, as a general principle, that much into recreational drugs. I drink on occasion, and discovered when I burned my foot that low-dose cannabis edibles are absolutely magnificent for pain management, but beyond that, and some good experiences with bremelanotide, I don’t use or seek out recreational drugs.
I have, however, always been curious about ecstasy.
I’ve never used it, in part because it’s quite difficult to find in the US and in part because it has a rather alarming risk profile, so it was with considerable interest I learned about 5-MAPB, a designer empathogen quite similar to MDMA but with a milder risk profile.
So it came to pass that my Talespinner and I tried 5-MAPB for the first time on Friday evening. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, being a complete novice to empathogens/entactogens in general, but what I got definitely wasn’t what I expected nor signed up for. 5-MAPB is a wild ride, and definitely deceptive. We both experienced waves of effects, with a general diminishment between waves that made it feel as though the drug was wearing off when it absolutely was not.
5-MAPB is, as of the time of writing this, legal in the US and in the EU except Germany, where it’s prohibited. It’s also prohibited in Canada, China, and Finland.
A normal dose of 5-MAPB is generally between 60 and 80 milligrams, with 75 mg the most typical. We both took 50 milligrams, two-thirds of a typical dose, since approaching these things with caution is generally well advised, and honestly I think that for both of us, 75 mg would likely be much too high a dose.
With her help, I sat down this morning to reconstruct something approximating our experience, which I’m documenting here both for my own future reference and in the event anyone else might be interested and looking for other people’s experiences.
The drug has a nominal rise time of about an hour, which is what we both experienced. Our experiences, however, were radically different from each other, which I gather is quite common for entactogens in general, so if you’re reading this, keep in mind that our experiences will likely be different from yours.
Let me start by saying the drug gave us both a rough ride, me moreso than her. I am not at all sorry I tried it, not even a little bit, but parts of the trip were quite brutal and not what I thought I was getting into. My Talespinner and I reconstructed this timeline, which will show you how different my experience was from hers:
I call it a “deceptive molecule” because it tends to come on in waves, with peaks separated by hours, so you can genuinely believe it’s letting go of you when it is most definitely not.
We both experienced a first peak starting about an hour after taking it, with a second peak about an hour after that, though subjectively those peaks were quite different. That first peak was marked by intense skin hunger and sensitivity, though my Talespinner also felt an absolutely overwhelming desire to be hurt. She is generally much more masochistic than I am (she loves impact play, whereas I am not a masochist at all, until this evening, more on that in a bit), and asked me to use her crop on her. Her experience when I cropped her was not, interestingly, one of pain, more like intense sensation that was pain-adjacent without being painful at all (more on that in a bit as well). We both came down from that peak at about the same time, which left us both with a generalized euphoria that felt as if the drug were wearing off.
David Attenborough voice: “It was not, in fact, wearing off.”
The second peak came out of nowhere, very quickly, characterized by an overwhelming, intense subjective sense of empathy, though we both felt it so radically differently that our subective experiences were close to polar opposites.
I fell into her, as if every touch on her body was a touch on mine. She felt herself expand outward, until her awareness consumed the rest of the polycule sharing the rental flat with us and then from there outward until it touched everyone in Reykjavik.
One side effect of generalized 5-HT receptor agonists including 5-MAPB is anorgasmia (inability to orgasm) and, in men, inability to get an erection. That took sex off the table, though not orgasm, and in fact this was one of the wildest parts of the trip. My Talespinner got herself off repeatedly, and every time she did, I had an orgasm as well. And I don’t mean like an emotional or intellectual orgasm, I mean the full deal, a full-on ejaculatory orgasm. She started murmuring in my ear that she wanted me to come—and yes, each time she did, I did. (And yes, this was just as sticky and messy as you imagine.)
That was a new experience for me, one I’ve never even imagined, being so intimately connected with another person that even my physical responses mirrored theirs. It really is just as intoxicating as you, Gentle Reader, might imagine.
Then things came off the rails quite spectacularly.
We came down from that peak and once more, because your humble narrator is sometimes a slow learner, I truly thought the drug was wearing off.
Ha ha ha ha ha oh my God.
We cuddled up together and drifted off. I had just reached that twilight between wakefulness and sleep when it started: intense, visceral pain everywhere she wasn’t touching me.
It.
Sucked.
Dear God it sucked. It sucked it sucked it sucked.
My Talespinner rose to this problem with amazing compassion and almost supernatural grace. Her deft, incredibly adroit reassurance guided me out of a miserable experience and even, by some subtle magic, transformed it into something quite exquisite. She held me through the worst of it while somehow, through some kind of nimble emotional alchemy I don’t pretend to understand, taking it from me and transforming it from pain into…something else. I won’t say pleasure, exactly, but something adjacent to pleasure somehow.
Near the worst of the drop, in the part of the timeline shaded in red, I started to hallucinate. Nothing dramatic, nothing bad, just things moving in the corners of my vision, and curious shapes crawling from the edges of the walls and ceilings. Subjectively, the experience was as if the drug itself were a living thing within me, something selfish trying to claim me and my attention for itself, that when it realized hurting me wouldn’t accomplish its goal, decided to trick me with false visions. At no point did I think the hallucinations were anything other than hallucinations, and at no point did I find them at all frightening, though I distinctly remember having the impression that the drug wanted me to be frightened of them, that it intended to frighten me.
A deceptive molecule indeed.
Anyway, thanks to that subtle magic, my Talespinner somehow turned the pain into something else, a bit of deep magic for which I was and remain deeply, profoundly grateful. Her guidance and presence changed an awful experience into something, and I do not say this lightly, transcendent.
Having transformed into something that was no longer pain, that experience became a deep longing to be hurt, to experience intensity in all its forms. By the time I’d reached the height of that last peak, I recall begging her to hurt me, which is, in all my experience in this body, never something I have done before.
And, like her, I discovered the most astonishing thing: I was not capable of experiencing pain. Everything she did to me, with crop and teeth and even a scalpel, I experienced as delirious, intense joy. She cut her mark onto me and it was absolute rapture.
Curiously, she didn’t feel that third peak at all. After it ended, we were, finally, able to sleep (the blue-shaded part of the timeline).
We woke severely dehydrated and fuzzy-headed. I ended up with a hangover considerably worse than hers, and one that lasted longer; for her, it was no worse than an evening with a couple of drinks, for me it was wretched. It’s kind of ironic, since one of the selling points of 5-MAPB is it doesn’t have MDMA’s legendarily awful, 3-5 day hangover (MDMA users call it “Tuesday blues” because, I’m told, if you take it before you go out on Saturday night, the worst of the headache hits the following Tuesday). As it turns out, it’s “better than MDMA” in the sense that beaing beaten with a tire iron for six hours is better than being beaten with a telephone pole for three days.
Will I ever use it again? I don’t know. Right now I’m leaning toward no, but I’m still a bit fuzzy, so it’s possible I may one day change my mind.
Will I ever use it alone? Not just no but hell no. This is not something to take into yourself without the presence of someone you trust very deeply indeed. I had briefly considered using it before this trip, just for the purpose of getting a handle on dosage and longevity…but if I could describe in words how glad I am I didn’t do that, there might never be a negative thought in all the world again.
There are, in the event I ever decide to allow this wild and unpredictable chaos magic in the form of a chemical substance into my body again, perhaps four people in all the world I would even consider doing it with. I am so absolutely fortunate far beyond anything I can take credit for that I shared this with her.
Okay, hold onto your hat, because ima get a bit ranty.
There’s a thing I’m seeing in the kink scene these days that’s making me a bit mental. Specifically, I’m seeing a shift away from “your kink is not my kink, but your kink is okay” to “I am the guardian of what practices are acceptable, even between consenting adults, and those who engage in play I personally don’t enjoy are not only bad and wrong, but actively sick”…as often as not accompanied by heaping servings of projection and mind-reading, with an extra-large order of gaslighting on the side.
Anyone who’s read me over the past few years/decades knows that I am a champion of personal autonomy and agency. I’ve talked extensively about this before. I enjoy engaging in kink where I consent to things in such a way that I can’t withdraw consent, and yes, I understand that’s not a lotta people’s cuppa, which is fine. Different folks have different tastes, yeah?
Thing is, I’ve seen a backlash brewing in the kink scene against folks who enjoy playing with shelf-stable or irrevocable consent, in a weird sort of “people who do this are eeeevil” way.
This has especially been the case with the fetish called “somnophilia,” or sleep sex. This is, as it turns out, a kink I quite like, though more and more I’m seeing claims that it’s always bad, always toxic, whatever.
One of these anti-somnophilia screeds, which I read with some small measure of frustration and, I have to say, a bit of amusement as well, is here: Somnophilia: More a Crime Than a Kink. Gaslighting, mind-reading, projection, this one has it all.
I invite you to read the entire essay. I’ll be picking apart specific arguments that jumped out at me, starting with this one:
There are three things are taken from the victim when they’re tranquilized: their speech, their sight and their movement. Historical patriarchy required the silence of women and allowed them to speak only when they were furthering its cause. Domestication symbolized the lack of movement. Sight, the precious awareness that life could be any different.
Now, there are women and girls with movement, voices and vision. As the patriarchy fights its loss of power, its most ancient beneficiaries feel it the most.
To silence, to blind, to imprison women in their bodies, is to enact patriarchal principles within one’s cosy domain, safe from scrutiny. It is the inability to perceive woman as a whole being. Roofieing is an act of opportunistic cowardice, an offshoot of a dying patriarchy. It’s how men fight back.
Did you feel it? A disturbance in the Force?
I could point out the obvious, surface flaw in this argument: that it equates somnophilia with “roofieing,” a little linguistic Three Card Monte that you aren’t supposed to notice or react to, but I’ll say the bit you’re not supposed to say: sleep sex doesn’t have to involve drugging someone, and most often doesn’t.
But this is a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation argument. You’re supposed to get so hung up on the surface flaw in the argument that you start debating whether it’s “really” somnophilia if no drugs are involved that you don’t notice the deep flaw in the argument:
Rather bold to assume that somnophilia always involves a heterosexual couple in which a man has sex with a sleeping woman, eh? 🤣
I’m a man who likes somnophilia. It fascinates me that the people who argue about how evil this kink is assume that must go only one direction, that it must mean I only like it if I’m having sex with a sleeping (female) partner. In fact, I have female lovers who like having sex with me in my sleep; two of my lovers have standing, shelf-stable consent to do as they please to me whilst I sleep.
Remember, folks: when someone tells you you what you’re thinking and feeling, when someone claims to speak to what motivates you without listening to you…that’s the very essence of gaslighting.
This reminds me of the second-wave, sex-negative feminist argument that bondage and domination are always degrading to women, because they’re inevitably a male in the dominant role tying or dominating a woman in the submissive role. (When this was pointed out, one famous sex-negative feminist said something along the lines of “if men play a submissive role, it’s because they get something out of it, so the man is still in control.” Weird that she could imagine a man getting something out of being bound or bossed about, but couldn’t imagine a woman getting something out of it.)
This is a type of projection we see all the time. “I am a woman; I cannot imagine enjoying this; therefore, no woman would ever enjoy this. Women who say they enjoy it are, therefore, either lying or brainwashed by the Patriarchy.” The same form of argument has long been used to assert that gay men and lesbians must be mentally ill: “I cannot imagine wanting to shag someone of the same sex; therefore, nobody would want to shag someone of the same sex; therefore, someone who says they want to shag someone of the same sex is mentally defective in some way.”
The lyrics change but the tune remains the same.
And the thing is, the person who wrote this essay is so close to getting it.
The essay also says:
I’m an advocate for sleep as a panacea for most ills. It’s about the most vulnerable state one’s body can be in, a semi-death state, one’s sensory perception reduced to the bare minimum, one’s cells in desperate need of rejuvenation, the shutting down of a tired brain. It’s also a state that requires complete trust in one’s environment, the letting down of one’s guard.
Yes! Yes, exactly! This! 👆This, right here! That’s what makes somnophilia hot! You’re allowing someone in to that most vulnerable, most unguarded space. That’s the point, at least for me. It’s hot because it’s so incredibly, unbelievably vulnerable. To allow someone else access to you in that way, to know that you can do that and still be safe…it’s exquisite.
I get that some people don’t like being made that vulnerable. I really, really do. That’s why I don’t practice this kink lightly. That’s why I do this only with intimate partners I feel safe with, and who I trust implicitly, and who have also expressed an interest in the same sort of play.
I also understand that we draw personal lines in different places. Many years ago, when I still lived in Florida, I met a Black woman at a play party whose thing was plantation owner/plantation slave rape play. On a purely intellectual level, I can sorta see why someone might find that super-hot. I also told her there’s no way I could go there. I just…I get the difference between consensual and non-consensual play, I understand CNC, but I just absolutely can”t do that. (She told me she has trouble finding lovers who will explore that kink with her and you know what? I believed her.)
But here’s the thing:
I don’t tell people this kind of kink is intrinsically wrong. I don’t say that those who do it are immoral or criminal. I don’t tell people with this kink that they’re feeding into white supremacy. And I sure as hell don’t presume to know what goes on in their minds, or project my own feelings, onto people who do it. It’s not my kink—in fact, I have a visceral reaction against doing it—and that’s okay.[1]
That’s the thing that gets me. It’s the idea that if you do something that I find uncomfortable, my discomfort, and my inner monologue about what makes it hot for you, entitles me to tell you that you’re wrong for doing it.
I am, as I said, a huge advocate for personal agency. If I choose to allow my partner to have sex with me whilst I’m asleep, as a grown-ass adult with moral agency and bodily autonomy, I believe I have the right to make that choice. It might not be the right choice for you, but it is for me.
Are the people involved adults? Are they doing this freely, uncoerced, because they enjoy it? Are they taking measures to assure that nobody is harmed and that the people involved get what they want from the experience? Then fill yer boots.
I’ve heard about BDSM communities where engaging in this practice, even outside the context of group events like play parties, will render you excommunicado, branded a bad person nobody should play with, and I cannot express how deeply fucked up that is.
There’s a certain aura of smug purity culture that’s taken hold in a lot of sexual subcommunities that I believe is harmful to everyone. It’s hard to look at these arguments and not see old-fashioned sex-negative moral Puritanism with the serial numbers filed off.
Maybe you’re not into somnophilia. That’s cool. But consider this: If this kink is in fact relegated to the dark dungeon of the unacceptable in your community, what kink do you think people will go after next? Purity culture is never satisfied. There is never a time when people say “okay, we’re pure enough now, thank you all for coming, go about your business.”
If this isn’t your kink, what will you do when they come for a kink that is?
[1] Side note: A lot of folks in the kink scene talk a great deal about consent and boundaries from a submissive person’s point of view. People who play dominant roles also have limits and boundaries, something I feel doesn’t always get the attention it deserves.
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.
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!
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?
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).
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.
