Tag Archives: erotica

When Fantasy Sex is Not Just Sex

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Eunice and I have written four novels and one collection of short stories in a far-future, post-scarcity world that emerged from a fantasy she had, a woman atop a ziggurat, strapped to an altar, given forced orgasms from sunup to sundown.

From that one image, an entire world, with fusion power and drones and near-Culture-level AIs and an entire society and religious system arose, the backdrop of five books (and counting!).

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about today. I want to talk about that big consumer magic show in Las Vegas.

So I ran across a question on the social media site Quora, What’s your go-to fantasy? And the thing is, I don’t have one of those. In fact, I kind of envy people who do…it must be nice to have something that always works for you, something that gets you off reliably.

My fantasy world is a weird place, where the thing that does it for me changes all the time. I answered the question with the fantasy that’s currently doing it for me right now:

The one that’s doing it for me right now involves me and one of my current real-life lovers going to that huge consumer magic expo in Las Vegas every year, you know the one I mean.

It’s always a rather dreary affair, giant corporations with a trillion-dollar market cap trying to convince you that this year’s new grimoires are, like, this radical new development in magic that’ll change the world when really they’re about the same spells as last year but with less mana requirements and maybe a bit less material components, or the new model scrying stones are some radical new earth-shaking invention when really they’re about the same as last year’s model but maybe with a bigger viewing crystal or something.

But hey, we’re there for work, and the hotel restaurant has real unicorn steaks (the kind where they dust the meat with powdered unicorn horn before they grill it so you get that tingle) and top-shelf fae cider, the kind that gets you high af and turns your eyes golden for a few hours…and it’s all expense accountable.

So anyway, we’re exploring the vendor hall when we find a little booth in the back advertising Eros magic, staffed by a cute but surly goth girl watching Shoot ’Em Up on Netflix on her iPad. (Yes, I know Netflix doesn’t have Shoot ’Em Up, it’s a fantasy, okay?)

The booth has all the normal tat you’d find at a place like that, love potions, lust amulets set in cheap brass jewelry, desire charms that have so little magic in them that you can resist the compulsion in your sleep. But we find some little black vials with a holographic moon on the label that look kind of interesting, and the sign on the display stand offers exquisite ecstasy beyond imagining, so we’re like, why not?

We get two of them and take them up to our room. The vials have those peel-to-open labels with all the instructions and contraindications and such printed in four-point type on the inside: do not take more than four doses in 24 hours, do not take if you’re allergic to pixie dust or succubus essence, yadda yadda yadda, not legal for sale or use in AR, MI, or AL, check state and local ordinances, blah blah blah…

So we both down the contents, halfway expecting a cheap gas-station aphrodisiac, something that makes you all frantic but leaves you with a hangover and itchy skin the next day, but this is not that.

It comes on slow, subtle at first, but absolutely irresistible, until I get an intoxicating buzz just looking at her. Every touch, however slight or fleeting, sends this long slow wave of indescribable ecstasy rippling through me. And kissing? Dear god, just the lightest touch of her lips is like the heavens open up and, for just that moment, I see the whole of the cosmos.

I won’t bore you with the rest, but yeah, that’s the fantasy that’s working for me right now.

Here, have a ghastly AI generated image that probably accelerated global warming by three months, because that’s the time we live in.

So anyway, there’s a guy I know from The Online who asked me, “Why does you need all these non-sexual details in your wank material? A lot of this context isn’t even very relevant to the foreplay.”

Which is a good question, one I started answering over on Quora before I realized it really needed a full fledged essay to answer.

Eunice and I share one thing in common: grunt-n-thrust doesn’t work for us. (In fact, this is something I share with my Talespinner as well; we’re currently a third of the way through co-authoring a hyperurban retrofuturist gangster noir novel that started as a sexual fantasy and became an entire world.)

There needs to be something beyond two (or more) people fucking. Who are they? Why are they fucking? Where are they fucking? What’s the context of the fucking they’re doing?

The context is actually, for me, part of what makes it hot. Every element of that fantasy changes the nature of the sex. So let’s look at it, and I’ll explain why.

Me and one of my current real-life lovers…

So this is about a rela person, someone who’s already an intimate partner.

…going to that huge consumer magic expo in Las Vegas every year, you know the one I mean.

Right away, this isn’t the real world. It’s a world where magic is real, and is as humdrum as electronics (which, seriously, are magic!) are here in this world.

It’s always a rather dreary affair, giant corporations with a trillion-dollar market cap trying to convince you…

So it’s this world’s equivalent of the Consumer Electronics Show. Right away that tells you even more about the world, but also that my lover and I are away from home. There’s something just a little extra about sex in a motel room, isn’t there?

But hey, we’re there for work,…

Which also adds an element of spice to the sex. Is this an illicit workplace tryst? Are we there from different companies? Dunno, but either way it changes the sex.

…and the hotel restaurant has real unicorn steaks (the kind where they dust the meat with powdered unicorn horn before they grill it so you get that tingle) and top-shelf fae cider, the kind that gets you high af and turns your eyes golden for a few hours…and it’s all expense accountable.

It’s a nice hotel, with an expensive restaurant that serves a high-end (and presumably very pricey) menu, but someone else is paying for it! Again, changes the nature of the tryst.

…we find a little booth in the back advertising Eros magic, staffed by a cute but surly goth girl watching Shoot ’Em Up on Netflix on her iPad.

Magic and consumer electronics are real. Oh, and the consumer electronics expo was, for a while, actually famous for having tons of little booths advertising sex toys, until the organizers actually changed the rules to ban them. (Why were they there? Because you get a whole bunch of people there on business because their companies made them go, far from home with hot co-workers or partners, it was A Thing™. Why did they get banned? They started overshadowing the big consumer electronics giants.)

…all the normal tat you’d find at a place like that, love potions, lust amulets set in cheap brass jewelry, desire charms that have so little magic in them that you can resist the compulsion in your sleep.

So basically the equivalent of those ridiculous penis pills or whatever, or cheap vibrators that break after the second use. And also, this is a world where recrational magic is a bit like recreational pharmaceuticals are in the real world.

But we find some little black vials with a holographic moon on the label that look kind of interesting, and the sign on the display stand offers exquisite ecstasy beyond imagining, so we’re like, why not?

We didn’t plan to investigate the tat at the little sex booth; this was a spontaneous decision. We didn’t come to the expo expecting to try some dodgy sex magic and shag. But we weren’t closed to it, clearly.

The vials have those peel-to-open labels with all the instructions and contraindications and such printed in four-point type on the inside: do not take more than four doses in 24 hours, do not take if you’re allergic to pixie dust or succubus essence, yadda yadda yadda, not legal for sale or use in AR, MI, or AL…

So these vials, whatever they are, occupy that legal limbo that cannabis products did for a while. Hmm, interesting. Means they probably legit have some effect, then.

It comes on slow, subtle at first, but absolutely irresistible, until I get an intoxicating buzz just looking at her. Every touch, however slight or fleeting, sends this long slow wave of indescribable ecstasy rippling through me. And kissing? Dear god, just the lightest touch of her lips is like the heavens open up and, for just that moment, I see the whole of the cosmos.

Fuuuck me, this is way more of an intense experience than either of us expected, and way, way better, too. We’re off in an expensive, swanky hotel room in an expensive, swanky hotel that neither of us is paying for, with an expensive, swanky restaurant serving from a menu that normally we’d never even consider buying from, and now we’re set to have this amazing sexual experience.

Every part of the fantasy informs the nature of what’s about to happen.

For me, when I say that I need the context and the setting to make a sexual fantasy work, that’s what I’m talking about. Whi is it with? Why are we shagging? How are we shagging? What informs the shagging? What sets the stage? What’s the context? Sex at home is different from sex in a hotel is different from sex while traveling to another country. Sex in the normal everyday world is different from sex in a dystopia where every sexual encounter is a subversive act is different from sex in a world where magic is real and is routinely used as part of the sex.

Everything changes the quality and timbre of sex. All these little background details influence the nature of the sex in the fantasy.

Sex as Fuel for Creativity

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Back in 2019, Eunice and I spent some time in New Orleans, a place I’d never visited before. We did all the normal New Orleans touristy things: explored an abandoned and partly-flooded power plant, did some urban spelunking in the ruins of an old mansion…you know, the usual.

While we were there, we also officially broke ground on immechanica, our near-future, hard-SF post-cyberpunk novel. We officially started working on the background of the world in a laundromat whilst waiting for our clothes to dry.

A couple weeks ago, a random troll on social media informed me, with the cast-iron certainty of those who make their home on the rugged and inhospitable slopes of Mount Dunning-Kruger, that I would never accomplish anything because clearly my entire life revolved around sex. (I’d include a screenshot, but honestly I’ve only had one cup of tea so far today and I absolutely cannot be arsed to go find it.) The dude is, and I’m sure this will come as a surprise to nobody, a conservative Evangelical Christian, and he also exhibits this weird quirk where he (randomly) puts words in (parentheses) whenever he (writes).

I’ve long suspected that folks who do that sort of weird inappropriate (emphasis)—sometimes it’s random Capitalized words, sometimes it’s random ALL caps—have a defineable, quantifiable mental illness, because it’s so overwhelmingly common amongst a certain type of Internet troll—but I digress.

Anyway, the thing is, he’s not exactly wrong, but he’s so wrong he has accidentally looped all the way around to right, in a manner of speaking, kind of like what happens in that video game Asteroids where you go off one side of the screen and reappear on t’other.

But I digress.

Whilst we were there, we went out one evening to a very nice seafood teppanyaki dinner. Before we left for the restaurant, I took some PT-141 (bremelanotide), a potent aphrodisiac that works gangbusters on me.

It started to hit in the restaurant. We walked back to the AirBnB through the French quarter hand in hand, with Eunice whispering the most delicious filth at me the whole time. We got back, got naked, spread out a huge collection of sex toys all over the bed, and…

…started talking about the book.

Then I got out my laptop.

The next thing you know, it’s past 2AM and we’re both sitting on the bed naked, writing, the toys forgotten around us.

See, here’s the thing: I like sex. A lot. I mean, yeah, a lot of folks like sex, but I might like sex more than the average bear.

But when I say I like sex, I don’t necessarily mean I like having sex, or having orgasms, or doing the bumping of squishy bits. Don’t get me wrong, I like all those things, but what I really like, what really drives me, is that the impulse toward sex is, in a literal sense, the most fundamental expression of the creative impulse. I do not see how it’s possible to separate sex from creativity.

Which is kind of a big deal, because co-creation is my love language.

I like sex, yet two of my lovers are on the asexuality spectrum, and that’s fine. They’re both creative, and all creativity is sex.

When I look back over the things I’ve created and am creating, sex is intimately tied up in all of them, even if the connection isn’t necessarily visible from the outside.

I mean, yes, often it is. Sometimes it’s pretty heckin’ obvious.

But sometimes it’s not. There’s basically no sex in our novel immechanica, but the writing of it was a highly sexual act, even though it literally, not figuratively, prevented us from having sex.

Last time I visited my Talespinner, a lover with a sex drive so breathtakingly vast and deep she makes me look like a celibate monk in a monastery, I got an idea for a novel I’m working on that I’ve been stuck on for a while.

In the middle of a very kinky threesome with her other boyfriend.

So I did what anyone might do in that situation: I excused myself for about an hour or so and banged out about 1200 words on the novel whilst they carried on doing their thing. When I was done, I rejoined them and the kinky sexy festivities continued.

Which is kind of my point. Yes, my life is, from a certain point of view, very much about sex (and caffeine), because sex (and caffeine) drives my creativity. My normal background emotional state is basically happy and basically horny pretty much all the time. I turn sex and caffeine into words…even when those words aren’t about sex or caffeine.

To be fair, they sometimes are; I write about sex rather a lot. But in the Passionate Pantheon universe, a series of novels that contain a lot of sex, we use sex to explore philosophy, radical agency, consent, justice, and morality. We’ve received feedback that sometimes people are left a bit confused by the novels because they skip over the sex, but important plot points, character development, and ideas happen during the sex—you can’t take the sex out of the stories and still follow what’s going on.

Right now, my Talespinner and I are writing a novel with the working title A Long Kiss Goodbye. It’s a hyperurban retrofuturist court-intrigue gangster noir. I’ve written before about how we created the book’s setting and plot during sex.

We’ve formally started working on it, and man, it’s been a ride. Indah Tan, our protagonist, is headstrong and stubborn and not at all afraid to tell us “no, I’m not doing that” when we try to write her scenes. I told my Talespinner it kinda feels like this book has three co-authors—her, me, and Indah—and of the three of us, Indah is the most well-armed. Still, it must be working, we’re already a quarter of the way through the first draft.

So yes, sex is an important part of my life. No, it’s not preventing me from accomplishing anything…it’s fueling the things I accomplish.

The United States is, by the standards of Western developed nations, Puritan and prudish to such a degree it’s almost self-parodying. There’s a deep, reflexive hatred and fear of sexuality wired into our collective consciousness, which of course makes us simultaneously fascinated by and repelled by sex. Our advertising is drenched in sex, but serious talk about sex and sexuality shocks us to our core.

In this kind of society, using the sexual impulse to fuel creativity is by itself almost an act of defiance.

Advance review books available!

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After not releasing any new books in 2025, I have two advance review books available for 2026. Both these books come out midyear this year, and I’d love to find folks interested in reviewing them.

The first one, The Temperance Engine, is…um. I’m…um. I’m not sure what it is, and I co-wrote it.

It’s kind of an erotica novel (there’s a lot of sex in it). It’s kind of a historical satire. It’s kind of science fiction, sort of. It has elements of steampunk, maybe? It’s sort of a coming-of-age story, I guess, maybe.

The story is set in modern-day Buffalo, New York, and 1870s London. Odd-numbered chapters follow a group of college friends when one of them inherits a house from a relative he didn’t know he had. They find a diary and a hidden mad science lab in a boarded-up section of the basement. The even-numbered chapters, told through the diary they find, follows a London doctor in 1869 obsessed with finding a cure for the mental illness of furor uterinus, also known as “nymphomania,” and details his efforts to build an apparatus that would cure this dread condition.

The college students decide to replicate some of his experiments, for reasons of their own, and in the process discover some things about their own desires they didn’t previously know.

One rather clever person on social media describes it as “steamypunk,” which I suppose is as good a term for it as any.

The second book, Spectres, is much more straightforward; it’s an anthology of supernatural erotica, but with a new spin (no stereotypical vampire porn or ghost porn here!). It contains thirteen stories ranging from short fiction to full novellas, including stories about heartless gods, an archaeologist possessed by the spirit of a long-gone Hittite priestess, alien invasion, a very special hotel that’s visited once a year by a pair of Assyrian lovers, and more.

I have ePubs and a limited number of paperback ARCs available. If either of these books sounds like your jam, let me know!

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?

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.

Ronin Steppin’ Razor

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Some time ago, I found 45 meters of electroluminescent wire on Amazon. A few months after that, I found thin sheets of edible 24-carat gold foil on Amazon. When one finds EL wire and gold foil, one’s mind, of course, wanders to thoughts of old-school cyberpunk dystopias and the nude female form.

I’m writing this from Springfield, where I’m visiting my Talespinner, who is remarkable in many respects, not the least of which is the way she encourages my incorrigible nature. So naturally, when I expressed the inchoate thoughts brewing in my head re: EL wire and gold and lots of silicone lube, she not only agreed to become a work of art, but even helped make those inchoate thoughts choate.

So it came to pass that we three (me, my Talespinner, and her other boyfriend) gathered around her coffee table cutting thin (as in about 400 atoms thick) gold foil into geometric shapes and putting an entire case of AA batteries into EL wire battery packs, upon which we retired to her bedroom to cover her with silicone lube for that wet-n-shiny look.

Gold foil is, as it turns out, difficult to apply to skin without tearing, a process that requires patience and careful attention. That done, after a brief delay so that the model could have a spontaneous orgasm, we started wrapping her in wire.

At last, more than an hour after we started, all was ready. Ans the results were…well, I find them extraordinary.

That last one kinda makes me think cyberpunk yoga. “You do Downward Facing Dog. I do Ronin Steppin’ Razor. We are not the same.”

Cutting the thin gold foil turned out to be so problematic, I plan to try laser-cutting it to see if that works. (My 10-watt diode laser cutter isn’t generally up to metal, but hey, literally only 400 atoms thick, so who knows?) I’m picturing something like the Matrix waterfall cascading down her chest, but in gold.

We’re still finding teeny flecks of gold in unlikely places.

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.

It’s Almost Here!

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London Under Veil, the new book by Eunice and me, is publishing next week at WorldCon Glasgow!

Sadly, I won’t be there, but Eunice will, and she’ll have paperbacks and eBooks with her. (Plus you’ll be able to pick up copies of our other books too).

This is a…strange book. It’s like…um, well, imagine Harry Potter meets The Matrix by way of Tom Clancy. It’s got a wizarding school, and an alternate reality, and political intrigue, and Brexit, and computer security, and cats.

This book almost didn’t exist. It came into being because of a question I saw on Quora:

I laughed, I showed it to Eunice, I laughed, she laughed, I said “we could totally write a book about a coven of spellcasting sex workers,” we laughed, then she was like “…no, really, we could.”

Inspiration is everywhere.

Fast forward a couple years and somehow we’ve written a novel about a young British-born Chinese infosec worker at a webhosting company in Shoreditch who evades a kidnapping attempt and finds herself drawn into a long-running underground war between an ancient guild of spellcasting sex workers and a group of rage mages who have infiltrated the Tories. Along the way, she befriends Iris, the Guild’s asexual spell engineer, and they have adventures.

There’s intrigue, and chases, and a school of sex magic, and mathematics, and computer security, and sex, of course cats, because every fule know you can’t have spellcasting sex workers without cats.

Here’s a G-rated excerpt, so you know what you’re getting into:

After class, May rode the lift down to the old car park. “Iris!” she sang as she walked into the workshop. “Are you ready to watch me wank—oh. Who are you?”

“This is Lillian!” Iris said. “Lillian, this is May. She officially came on board yesterday. Lillian’s been a member of our little family for about ten months, haven’t you?”

May offered her hand. Lillian regarded her for a moment through intelligent grey eyes in an elfin face, then accepted it with dainty courtesy. “Lilly volunteered to accelerate your education,” Iris said. “Shall we get to it, then?”

“Get to what, exactly?”

“Ah.” Iris fished around the clutter on her workbench, dragged out a compact whiteboard, and balanced it precariously against one of the monitors. “So you know how Madame Sophia has been teaching you how to hold patterns in your head?”

“Yeah.”

“Right. Think of it like learning maths. The universe runs on maths, yes? Except it doesn’t, not really. The universe does what it does. Maths is the language we use to describe it.” She pulled the cap off a whiteboard marker with a grin. “If I write 1+1=2 on this board like so,” she went on as she scribbled on the whiteboard, “you know what that means. But these symbols, they’re arbitrary, right? They’re just characters that represent things.”

May folded her arms. “Okay, and?”

“Magic is the application of intent to the world. The visualisation exercises you’ve been doing, they’re part maths and part training you how to think.” She wiped the board clean. “Okay, so. Casting spells is just a matter of learning to think in a certain way, and learning to channel emotional energy into the world. Stronger the emotion, the better it works. Any kind of emotion can do in a pinch, but some work better than others. Fear, that’s strong but hard to control, and hard to bring up when you need it. Love and hate are less strong than people think. Rage, rage works really well. But lust, ah. Lust, desire, arousal, those are versatile. The thing about emotional energy is, it’s unpatterned, right? Chaotic. The trick is…well, the skill is letting that emotion flow through you without losing your focus.” She turned to the board. “So you have your home symbol, whatever it is. Don’t tell me what it is. Don’t tell anyone else, either. That symbol represents yourself, your will, your ‘I that is I,’ see? It’s like the number 0 in a mathematical system. Did you know you can build an entire system of maths with no numbers except a symbol for zero and a symbol for incrementation?”

“No.”

“Old hat for me,” Lillian said. “My undergrad degree is in mathematics.”

“Undergrad, huh? What’s your graduate degree in?”

Lillian perched on the edge of the bed. “Master’s in philosophy. Long story.”

“So how’d you end up involved in…all this?”

“Ah.” Lillian grinned. “I like maths. I like philosophy. I like fucking. Where am I going to find another job that lets me put my interests together?” She leaned back on her elbows with a lopsided smirk. “What brought you here? Maths, philosophy, or fucking?” She stretched out a foot in May’s direction. “I hope it’s fucking.”

Iris snapped her fingers. “If you’re finished hitting on the new girl, can I direct your attention to the whiteboard, please?” She drew a letter H in the centre. “Okay, so this is your home symbol, right?” She drew five more symbols around it. “And this is one of the basic visualisations Sophia taught you, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Right. This diagram forms your basic channelling array. This is what you hold in your mind when you want to focus your will on something, got it? This is your simple, boring, one plus one equals two stuff. Now let’s show you what calculus looks like.”

The book is up for preorder on Amazon, and if you’re going to WorldCon Glasgow, be sure to say hi to Eunice!

Beware Bowdlerization of Google Docs

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Image: David Pennington

I write novels almost exclusively in Google Docs.

It’s an aggressively mediocre word processor with two killer features: you have access to it wherever and from whatever device you have Internet access, and it is hands-down the absolute best thing out there for collaborative writing. Nearly all my books are co-written with other people. Google Docs makes this effortless; in fact, many’s the time I’ve been working with Eunice or my Talespinner as both of us type in the same Docs file at the same time.

Even when we aren’t writing at the same time, Google Docs makes it easy for us to leave notes to each other within the same document. It’s no exaggeration to say Docs is probably the best thing to happen to collaborative writing since the invention of the fountain pen.

So you can imagine when I opened my Messenger app a couple days ago and found a message from my co-author Eunice linking to a story by a writer who’d lost access to Google Docs and her manuscript because they contained sexually explicit content.

I’ve spent the last couple of days poring over the Google Terms of Service, and what I found is…worrisome.

Many of the novels I write contain sex. Some of them contain a lot of sex; the Passionate Pantheon series Eunice and I write, a far-future post-scarcity science fiction series where residents of the City worship AI gods through highly ritualized group sex, is a vehicle for us to explore sexual ethics, philosophy, and society in a setting where attitudes toward sex and violence are pretty much exactly the opposite of what they are here in the real world. And these books have tons of sex, some of it so kinky the kinks don’t even have names—we looked.

Naturally, the notion that Google can terminate your Google account and delete your manuscripts in progress for (consensual adult) sexual content is a little alarming.

The issue seems to be Google’s March 2024 anti-spam update.

What does spam have to do with sex and Google? Glad you asked.

More and more often, I am seeing spam that directs to Google properties: Google Sites and Google Docs, mostly. The spammers link to a Google page, which has a link that goes on to the spam site.

Why? Because it keeps the spam emails from being filtered by anti-spam filters (Google links aren’t flagged as spam) and helps prevent the spammers from having their sites shut down.

Sex spammers especially seem to be flocking to Google:

If you click on the link, you’re taken to a Google Site (as in this example) or a Google Doc that then contains a link to the spam site. The Google page includes a little circle-I icon that, if you click on it, brings up the option to report the Google Site or Google Doc for abuse.

If you hit the Report Abuse link, one of the options is “Sexually Explicit.”

So. It seems Google doesn’t permit sexually explicit content. But is that actually part of the Google Terms of Service? Well, kinda.

Here’s the relevant part of the Google Terms of Service:

This…isn’t actually terribly clear. It forbids distributing sexually explicit material, though it doesn’t ban creating sexually explicit material, nor does it say what constitutes “distributing.”

So.

What follows is a completely unofficial speculation about what might be happening and what you might be able to do about it. I claim no insider knowledge of Google’s policies; this is simply informal noodling about the situation.

There are several ways to share a Google Doc. You can invite specific people to see it, and give them different levels of access (read only, comment, propose changes, edit, and so on). You can set it up so that anyone who has the URL can read the document, but can’t make any changes. The way you share it affects what people who view it will see.

If you invite specific people to be able to see and/or comment on the document, they will not see the little information bubble that gives them the option to report the site to Google’s abuse team.

If you set the document up so that anyone with the link can see it, which is what spammers do, then anyone who views the document will see the option to report the document for abuse.

I think—and let me emphasize again this is not based on insider knowledge of anything happening at Google—I think what’s happening is that authors who share Google docs with beta readers may be sharing it by setting the document up so that everyone who has the link can see the doc, and people are reporting the doc.

Why? Unknown. Maybe they’re undermining an author they personally don’t like. Maybe they’re just busybodies.

Point is, Google is a big company, with billions of files and docs on Google Sites and Google Docs and so forth, and they’re not generally proactive about deleting content that violates their terms. They’re reactive—they take action when someone calls attention specifically to a doc or file or page.

So it would seem that they consider sharing a read-only link to be “distribution,” and authors who “distribute” sexual content this way are prone to getting their stuff deleted.

If that’s true, what does it mean?

First of all, it suggests that sharing docs with sexual content to beta readers or reviewers is very dangerous. One person clicking that “report abuse” link may be all it takes to lose access to your Google Docs.

So if you’re sharing content with beta readers, especially beta readers you haven’t individually vetted, don’t do it by sharing a publicly-accessible link to any Google content. Create a Word file and share that, or host the copy you share on your own site…basically anything else.

But it also suggests that in the future, should they want to, Google can decide to be less reactive about enforcing their terms and simply search for sexual words or phrases. It would be trivial of them to do so. Their current terms forbid “distributing” sexual content, but of course they decide what distributing means, and they can change that whenever they feel.

The second thing it means is back up your Google content!

You can download from a Google doc to a Word file easily; it’s in the File menu in Docs.

Back up early. Back up often. (I’ve long had a policy of downloading Google Docs after every major change, because Google has been known to accidentally lose files, but this recent development has me doing so even more aggressively).

I plan to continue using Google Docs to write manuscripts. Thankfully, I don’t share the docs to dog+world, so I’m not likely at risk of having a malicious rando report me.

But I will continue to keep local copies of everything, and I’m in search of a replacement for Google if things should go pear-shaped.

Anyone out there who knows of any good collaborative writing tools, please shout out in the comments!