A couple of years back, my co-author Eunice and I started work on a new erotic novel, told in two parallel narrative streams: odd-numbered chapters taking place in Buffalo, New York in the present day, and even-numbered chapters taking place in London in 1871. The even-numbered chapters follow a Victorian doctor struggling to find a cure for furor uterinus, the formal name for “nymphomania;” the even-numbered chapters, a group of college friends who find his diaries and decide to replicate his experiments for…more entertaining purposes.
This is an essay about being experimented upon in a bar, not about writing. I’m getting to that, I promise.
Anyway, the novel, which we abandoned for a while and have recently returned to (with the assistance of my wife and my Talespinner), includes this passage:
“Is this another sitting room?” Jason said.
“I think it’s a parlor,” Leigh said.
“What’s the difference between a sitting room and a parlor?” Jason said.
Olivia glanced around the posh, elaborately decorated room, its windows just as large as the ones in the master bedroom. Several couches, a large comfortable chair, and a tête-à-tête all lurked beneath white shrouds. “One’s more formal?” she guessed. “What’s that thing?” She opened what looked like a large cabinet built into the wall, to find a shaft with cables running down into darkness.
“Dumbwaiter!” Leigh said. “For bringing things up. Brandy, cognac, cigars…” She tugged on a chain dangling from a lever in the wall next to the dumbwaiter. A distant bell tinkled. Leigh giggled. “I say, old chap, do be a sport and bring up the cognac.”
“What’s cognac?” David said.
“Little fish eggs in a tin?” Natalie hazarded.
“That’s caviar,” Leigh said. “Cognac is whisky for snooty people.”
Now, those of you familiar with cognac will know that it is not, in fact, whiskey for snooty people, it’s brandy for snooty people.
I am not familiar with cognac, but that’s okay because the characters are also not familiar with cognac, so it’s cool that they get it wrong.
That’s the setup. The story I mean to relay here is utterly different.
So I’m currently in Orlando, helping my wife get her RV ready for a cross-country trip. She lives across the street from a small neighborhood bar which the three of us—me, my wife, and her boyfriend—visited a few days back.
Three things struck me immediately when we walked in:
We were literally the only people in the place besides the bartender;
The bartender looked exactly, and I mean exactly, the way I imagine the character Natalie from the novel, to the point I turned to Joreth and said “holy shit, it’s Natalie!”; and
The house special that day was a cognac drink.
So naturally, I ordered the cognac drink (as did Joreth’s boyfriend); and naturally, that led to an entire conversation about cognac, which, as I pointed out already, is not whiskey for snooty people, it’s brandy for snooty people.
The special drink, which the bartender (whose name, as it turns out, was not actually Natalie, which is good because had it been, I’d’ve been quite convinced I’d fallen through a dimensional rift into a fictional world) had never made before, was a rather complex thing whose making involves, among other things, a blowtorch.
“It’s an experiment!” not-Natalie chirped as she got out the blowtorch.
I do not, Gentle Reader, understand the purpose of the blowtorch. I mean, I do, it exists to apply fire to things, but I’m not sure what role they play in making a drink. She stripped the peel off an orange, cut it into strips, sprinkled it with cinnamon and…um, sugar, I think?, slipped it into the glass, sprinkled more cinnamon on it, and…
I will confess that I am not generally an alcohol connisseur. I can’t tell a Scotch single-malt from a dry gin. But believe me when I say, Gentle Reader, that drink was delicious.
10/10, would recommend being experimented upon by a character from a novel again.
If you could move inside my head, you’d…well, honestly, you’d probably find the experience a little disconcerting, because who does that? Moving into someone else would likely be unsettling no matter who you did it to, unless they were, like, an identical twin or something.
But if you could move inside my head, you’d probably find it especially unsettling, because I don’t live in my body. People assume that a body is something you live in, but actually, from an entirely subjective viewpoint, my sense of self is more a big ball of wibbly-wobbly…stuff. I am, most of the time, a ball that floats behind my eyes and operates my body like one of those mecha things in a certain genre of Japanese science fiction. A meat mecha. A meat mecha made of flesh and bone and bizarre squishy biology.
But this isn’t an essay about that. It’s an essay about dancing.
I like dancing. I enjoy dancing. Some years ago, I started getting into partner dancing. My wife and my crush are both avid, skilled, talented dancers, so they were, as oyu might imagine, thrilled at the idea I might extend my repertoir beyond goth/industrial dancing at a certain flavor of loud, frenetic nightclub.
There is, however, as you might imagine, a difficulty that comes from not living in one’s body. Learning to dance is a bit like learning to make a marionette dance; when you’re operating a meat mecha made of biology and fluids, getting it to do exactly what you want it to do is a bit of a challenge.
I learned through a rather strange set of circumstances some time ago that psilocybin mushrooms can, for brief moments, make me inhabit my body. The first time that happened, it was…um, startling. When you’re accustomed to living life as an invisible ball floating somewhere behind your eyes, operating a meat mecha by remote control, the sensation that you reach alllll the way to the ground is jarring.
Then, when I burned my foot and learned that opiate painkillers do nothing but make me puke profusely and exuberantly, but cannabis edibles actually work for pain management, I discovered that edibles also put me into my body, which was wonderful because, you know, inhabiting one’s body without hallucinating is a marvelous thing.
So it came to pass that Joreth offered to take me swing dancing a few nights back, and I thought, hey, I wonder if it will be easier to learn a new dance if I’m inhabiting my body?
Morgan Freeman voice: “It was, in fact, easier to learn a new dance when he was inhabiting his body.
The entire experience was, for lack of a better word, extraordinary. It’s far easier, as it turns out, to learn how to move one’s feet when one’s sense of self extends all the way to the floor. I don’t think I’ve ever caught on to something new in…well, in ever.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, it helps that Joreth is the best teacher I’ve ever had. But still, never underestimate the power of living entirely within your body, rather than operating your body the way you might a particularly fiddly meat-robot.
Interestingly, when the edible started to wear off and I shrunk back into that ball behind my eyes, she could tell immediately. (Her, mid-dance: “You’re becoming a ball again, aren’t you?”)
Anyway, the whole experiment turned out to be a resounding success, one I definitely hope to continue exploring again in the future.
Okay, so sit back, and ima tell you a story. It’s a story of kink, and depravity, and surprise serendipity.
So. I’m in Florida, helping my wife Joreth get the RV ready for a cross-country trip, during which we plan to do a photo tour of the abandoned amusement parks that litter the American Midwest like so many broken dreams of a bygone era. (We’ll likely do a coffee table photo book sometime in the next couple of years.)
Anyway, the day after I arrived, the local dungeon hosted a party, so your humble scribe and his beautiful wife showed up, of course, for an evening of kink and Killer Klowns from Outer Space.
The dungeon had electronic consent forms to be filled out on an iPad. On the consent form there was a profile, and on the profile there was a place to pick one’s favorite kink from a dropdown list.
Me: “I guarantee my fvorite kink is not on this list.”
Cheerful Woman Behind the Desk: “It cannot possibly be any weirder than this kink I just learned about!”
Whereupon CWBTD pulled out her phone and showed us…
…The Picture.
You know the one. The Picture that broke the Internet. The Picture that, every now and then, undergoes a new wave of virality. The Picture that, I’m told, ended up briefly on the official Sigorney Weaver fan site until a moderator took it down.
There are two things to know about The Picture:
That’s a photo of Joreth;
Wearing a xenomorph hiphugger strapon designed and made by your humble scribe.
In other words, CWBTD was right. My kink isn’t weirder than the thing she’d just discovered, it’s exactly as weird as the thing she’d just discovered.
Anyway, she was thrilled, and asked us to come back in yesterday for a bit of show and tell.
Which we did. The Borg Queen xenomorph parasite has been in storage since Barcelona, but it required surprisingly little repair, and we were soon on our way.
It was marvelous. They let us use the dungeon for a photo shoot!
The bad: I didn’t have my real camera, and we couldn’t lay hands on the Borg mask, so we did the best we could.
The good: There’s a photo night coming up next week, for which we will be better prepared.
The better: We met a lovely couple who were all like “ooh, Borg Queen parasitized by an alien xenomorph? That’s exactly my kink![1] Victimize us, please?”
Innocent victim: Mittyrin (image by author, reproduced by permission)
Fantastic fun, if that’s the sort of thing you consider fun. (Tautalogical cat is tautalogical.)
We drove home beneath the symbol of God’s divine blessing, or, you know, non-traditional relationships, which is almost the same thing, so truly I feel like Divine Providence smailed upon a fantastic evening.
[1] When I first started working on the xenomorph hiphugger, I remember saying “I don’t know what the point is, there are only three people in the world with this taste and I’m dating two of them.”
For years, my wife Joreth has teased me about getting me a RealDoll—you know, one of those horrifyingly realistic sex dolls that almost but not quite looks like a wax figure that almost but not quite looks like a real person.
It’s not out of any particular fetish, you understand. Oh, no, it’s far more sinister than that. You see, those sex dools creep me out. I mean really creep me out. The thought of putting my willie in one of them makes my skin crawl. And, since she loves pushing my buttons (this is, in fact, the reason the xenomorph hiphugger sex toy exists), well…
It is only the fact that those dolls cost more than the first three cars I owned combined that has saved me from the squick of mounting a thing that looks just enough like a person to be skin-crawling but not enough to be, you know, pleasurable.
But that’s not what I came here to discuss.
So it came to pass that my Talespinner’s other boyfriend found a full body suit on Ali Express for somethig like $2 including shipping, because globalization and low wages and all the economic hegemony that *flails arms* is part of, you know, all that.
And it came to pass that I thought, hmm, it might be interesting to cast a silicone tentacle on something like that, so the person wearing the bodysuit would seem to have tentacles crawling up their body.
I brought one with me to visit my Talespinner, where my hopes were quickly dashed: the degree of stretch and the fineness of the material precluded any reasonable means to cast silicone tentacles on the fabric and have them stay pot when it stretches.
We ended up doing an impromptu, last-minute photo shoot with the body suit and a prototype tentacle feeldoe strapless strap-on. The results were…
…horrifying.
Gentle Reader, the skin-crawling horror I felt taking photos of this would, if I could sufficiently communicate them to you, send you screaming from your computer in terror this very moment.
Since I am often the agent of my own undoing, I immediately had to run off to show them to Eunice and Joreth and say “hey, hey, check this out, these photos make my skin crawl!”
We are all drawn like moths to a flame to our own destruction.
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.
A new billboard appeared recently next to the grocery store where I do most of my shopping.
Image by author
I don’t mean the “now leasing” sign, but the one next to it. The one with the country singer on it.
Back when I was in middle school in Venango, Nebraska, I didn’t know a thing about Dolly Parton except that she apparently had large breasts. I might have vaguely known that she was in a band or something, maybe, but I couldn’t put a face to the name. I knew she had big boobs because all the other kids told me she had big boobs, and if all the other kids are saying something, like they put spider eggs in bubble gum or whatever, you know it’s probably true.
We would get together at recess and tell Dolly Parton jokes, all of them dirty (at least by the standards of a fifth-grader; ah, how little I knew!) and all of them about her breasts.
As I moved into adulthood, I learned that yes, she was a singer, she sung country and western songs, and she had that one hit because of that one movie everyone liked but I didn’t see. I don’t listen to country and western music, so that was about the sum total of my knowledge of all things Dolly Parton.
Nowadays, as I learn more about her, she strikes me as a genuinely marvelous person: kind, generous, giving, and genuinely invested in leaving the world a better place than she found it.
I still don’t listen to country music, but by all accounts she seems quite extraordinary. She is that rarest of things in creation: a genuinely compassionate person.
That’s something the world needs in greater quantities.
As I get older, I become more and more aware of the value of kindness. The truth is, callousness is easy. Indifference is easy. Cruelty is easy. The world is filled with people who see kindness as weakness, but in truth, kindness costs more than insensitivity. To be kind is to see the world from someone else’s point of view, and the ego rebels against that. It reminds us we are not the sun-center of all creation.
Empathy: Humanity’s Secret Weapon
Image by author
Pop quiz time. How did human beings—soft, weak, squishy bipeds with no claws, no massive canines, and thin skin—become the dominant mammals on the planet? Survival of the fittest says we should’ve been wiped out by fiercer, stronger, creatures, right?
No.
Our special sauce, beyond our big brains and abstract reasoning, is our cooperation. We work together. We help each other. We tend to our sick and injured. Where one of us goes, the rest follow.
We have each other’s backs.
That makes us unstoppable. There are many creatures larger, stronger, faster, and fiercer than we are, creatures that can take us one on one in a fight, but the thing about humans is it’s never one on one.
You kill one of us, the rest of us will come for you. We are an unstoppable force of nature.
Losers and idiots think that kindness is a weakness because they see the world in terms of the Rugged Individual™, the lone warrior standing strong against a world red in tooth and claw. They don’t see the army that stands behind that Rugged Individual, making his tools and his clothing and his weapons, nor the entire history behind him that brought him to this place. The Rugged Individual stands on the shoulders of others and says “look how I rose to this lofty height all by myself!”
Today, we live in a world increasingly dominated by loudmouth bullies, people for whom the world is always zero sum, people who believe that every interaction has a winner and a loser.
This attitude appeals to the sort of person who thinks of himself as an Alpha Male™, taking charge through force and strength to leave his mark upon the world, but it’s comedically inept.
And the math is behind it. Entire branches of game theory show that cooperation always wins out in the long run, always…not that the sort of person who sees the world as force against force in a battle royale to the death actually understands the math.
In the end, it comes down to a simple but surprisingly subtle idea: Other people are real. In a world where we act with reciprocal kindness, everyone benefits. We are a social species; we do more acting together than acting alone.
I will admit this has not always been obvious even to me. The Internet makes it easy to forget that other people are real—that the letters we see on the screen come from a real person. I had an experience about ten or so years ago when I met in realspace some people I’d been needlessly abrasive to online, and it occurred to me, holy shit, these folks are actual human beings! Since then, I’ve tried—not always with perfect success—to be more mindful in my online communication.
Bullying is easy. Especially when it’s anonymous, and most especially when it curries favor in our social in-groups. We live in a world where kindness and compassion are increasingly seen as weakness. Let us not forget that it is cooperation that carried us here.
I grew up in a tiny town called Venango, Nebraska, a rural farming village of 242 people. A lot of my formative memories took hold there, even though we only lived there for my middle-school years.
I went to school in this building right here, Venango Elementary, which housed the entire kindergarten through twelfth-grade population of Venango.
One of my teachers, a guy named Mr. Shepherd (I don’t think I ever knew his first name—in fact, I don’t think it ever occurred to me he had a first name) had a reputation in my class for assigning “punishment writing” to any kid who acted out in class, by which I mean committed some transgression like speaking out of turn. He’d demand that the offender would write the same sentence 250 times or 500 times or whatever, as befitted the severity of the transgression, then took malicious glee in throwing the pages away right in front of the student who’d transgressed.
Because there’s nothing like making young children associate learning with mind-crushing tedium and then watching their work destroyed in front of them to instill a deep, lifelong passion for learning and a keen intellectual curiosity, amirite?
One day, a day I still remember quite clearly, Mr. Shepherd accused me of talking in class. The actual transgressor was the kid behind me, a kid named Mike, the school bully who loved seeing other people get in trouble.
I have never, ever liked being accused of something I didn’t do. I did something wrong? Cool, man, lemme know and I’ll cop to it. Accuse me of something I didn’t do? Fuck you, I’ll burn my own life down before I take responsibility that isn’t mine to take.
So it was that Mr. Shepherd, with the absolute conviction available only to autocrats, abusers, and teachers of middle school, decided I was the one responsible for the voices he heard, and demanded that I write “I will never talk in class” 250 times that night, to be handed in the next day.
I was livid when I got home. The wrath in Heaven at the rebellion of the angels was but a candle beside my incandescent rage at the injustice of a teacher believing I’d done something I hadn’t done.
Enter my mom, who taught me a valuable lesson.
My mom in 2016, wearing the same expression she did on that day in 1980.
We didn’t have that lovely, evocative expression “malicious compliance” back then, but that’s exactly what my mom suggested I do.
She explained that yes, teachers could be wrong and no, not all injustices could be rectified, but as long as I was going to be writing something 250 times, why not use it as a covert opportunity to express how I felt?
So I sat down and started writing.
I will never talk in class. I will never talk in class. I will always talk in class. I will never talk in class. I will never talk in class. I will celery stalk in class. I will beaver balk in class.
She encouraged me to adjust my letter and word spacing so that, on casual glance, the lines of text would all look about the same.
The next day, when Mr. Shepherd took my neat stack of handwritten papers and dropped it in the trash in front of me, I couldn’t help grinning. I’d stuck my thumb in his eye, my small act of defiance against injustice, and he never even knew.
My mom died in December 2023. I still haven’t adjusted to the reality of living in a world where she no longer exists.
There has never been a moment in my life I did not have the absolute, rock-solid certainty that she would always, always be there for me. My mom always had my back. She taught me, not just facts and skills and things about the world, but how to think. She encouraged the boundless, limitless curiosity I still have today.
She taught me how to think. How to ask questions and find answers. How to see the world, not as I want it to be, but as it is.
I still keep in my phone a list of the things she would say, the things I heard again and again growing up, that I continued to hear even as an adult:
Education is not the solution if ignorance is not the problem.
Information by itself almost never changes attitudes.
The curse of being middle class is you can afford anything you want but not everything you want.
People vote their identity and their feelings, not their interests.
People in groups will agree to something that each one individually knows is stupid.
We are predisposed to believe what we wish were true or what we’re afraid is true. Understanding what is true is hard work.
You can’t reason someone out of a position they did not reason themselves into.
Never ask a question whose answer you don’t want to know.
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.
A couple weeks ago, I ended up on an unexpected last-minute trip to Dublin, Ireland (my client literally emailed me on Thursday evening to say “hey, can you be at the airport on Sunday?”). On the way back from Dublin, I spent a week or so in London visiting Eunice, my lovely co-author.
Our novel London Under Veil, about a young British infosec worker in Shoreditch who ends up drawn into a secret underground war between an ancient guild of spellcasting sex workers and a society of Tory rage mages, is (rather unexpectedly) turning out to be the most popular thing we’ve written so far.
Whilst I was in London, we spent a couple of days visiting some of the important places in the novel. All of the locations in the novel except the headquarters of the Guild are real; we wanted the novel to be as grounded as we possibly could.
We had a blast touring and taking photos of the key places in London where the story unfolds.
The first key location, where May takes refuge from the people trying to kidnap her, learns that magic is real, and finds herself drawn into the Guild of the Women of Saint Thais Under Royal Charter of Her Majesty Catherine Parr, Queen Consort of England and Ireland, founded in anno Domini nostri Jesu Christi 1544, is the Lalit, a tiny luxury hotel and restaurant:
We had high tea in the dining room, the very place where May meets Serene, the leader of the Guild and a powerful spellcaster.
The table on the right hand side of the photo, on the balcony, is where May has her first introduction to Serene.
“So, okay, just so we’re clear.” May folded her arms. “You’re telling me you can cast magic spells. Something like that.”
Serene smiled benevolently. “Something like that.”
“And the people who were after me? Can they…cast magic too?”
“They can, though they use a different system. A different way of seeing the world. A different programming language, if you like.”
“And you expect me to believe this, just by a sleight of hand trick with ID badges and some tea.” Even as she said it, May thought of the metal badge, hard and smooth beneath her fingers, a visceral memory that still lingered in her fingertips.
“What do you think?”
“I think you’re crazy. I think you’re trying to manipulate me. I think you’re trying to trick me for—for—for reasons of your own. I think you’ve arranged to drag me here so you can mess with my mind. You…you put something in the tea.”
“You haven’t had any of your tea.”
“Even so, this can’t be real!”
“All of those are sane, rational, and reasonable responses,” Serene said. “Offered a choice between accepting that which is by its very nature impossible, and accepting that someone is trying to fool you, the smart money is on someone trying to fool you every time. Normally I would suggest you go home and sleep on it, get adjusted to it a little, then come back with your questions, but this situation is not normal.”
“Because people are trying to grab me.”
“Because people are trying to grab you.” Serene sipped daintily at her tea.
“You seem quite blasé about all this.”
“Would you like to finish your tea before we go?”
“I’m fine.”
“I expect you’re not, but you are doing well considering. And you have a healthy degree of suspicion that will serve you in what is to come, I think. Still, time for us to be going.”
The Lalit is gorgeous, and we ended up staying there until well into the night.
Next up, the Barbican, that sprawling marvel of Brutalist architecture. Not many people know this, but the pools in the Barbican are part of a sophisticated magical warding system.
Toward the end of the novel, the Guild seeks shelter at the Barbican:
May finally broke the silence as they neared their destination, the sprawling Brutalist retro-dystopian complex of the Barbican, with its pools and gardens giving rise to slablike concrete buildings like strange plants. “I keep thinking nothing else can surprise me, and I keep being wrong. I suppose you’re going to tell me the Guild owns a flat here?”
“Several,” Janet said.
“Of course you do. We do. Whatever.”
“Why wouldn’t we? On hindsight, perhaps we shouldn’t have abandoned it for our new headquarters. It seemed a sound decision at the time, but this is a far more defensible position, magically and practically speaking. The pools—”
“Forget I asked,” May said.
She helped Janet slide the stretcher from the back of the van. Spencer’s tail whipped back and forth, back and forth. Serene’s expression didn’t change as the wheels hit the pavement. “Where are we taking her?”
“The flat to the left,” Janet said.
May guided the stretcher through the door into a posh, beautifully-furnished flat with large windows overlooking the reflecting pool in the plaza. “Nice digs,” she said.
“It’s maintained by a small corporation owned by a holding company that’s a subsidiary of a concern operated by the Crown,” Janet said.
“Seriously? I kinda thought, with the Tories being all Them—”
“The Adversary’s takeover of the Tories is a recent development, historically speaking. Our special relationship with the Crown has endured for longer than any of us have been alive. I see no reason that won’t continue for as long as the Guild exists.” She looked down at Serene’s placid face. “Which I fear might not be much longer. We need to prepare a response.”
The Shard doesn’t occur in the story directly, but there is a version of the Shard in the weird surreal magical alternate London, and it tears a hole in the sky.
Which, honestly, it kinda looks like it’s trying to do anyway.
When her stomach quit spinning, May walked to the edge of the roof and looked around. London spread out below her…not her London, but a bizarre, fantasy London, a storybook London from one of those stories spun of equal parts wonder and dread.
The buildings sprawled in classic London chaos, dark and forbidding, an urban canyon of twisting passages, all alike. A bit south of her, along the Thames, the grand clock tower rose hundreds of metres from the Tower of Westminster, its glossy obsidian sides black and brooding, tipped by a yellow crystalline spire that blazed with incandescence. Beyond it, the Shard thrust upward from the ground, transparent as glass, its peak piercing the heavens, creating a jagged rip in the bowl of the sky through which the stars gleamed like hard pinholes in the black velvet of night. She turned her gaze across the bridge, to where the London Eye spun madly, a glowing blur of red atop a tall monolith of grey steel and white concrete. What she had taken as boats floating along the river were actually scribbles, charcoal impressions of boats hastily sketched by the hand of an impatient artist, each identical, each with a gleaming lantern in its prow. Static fuzz rippled just beneath the water, as if the river itself were a television signal badly degraded.
The story’s climactic showdown takes place in the Guildhall, which is a stronghold of magic if ever there was one. The door they enter through is on the right, behind the group of people standing there.
“Ah. Right. Just so I’m clear, it’s us, the people in this room right now, breaking into the Guildhall, which is also not coincidentally the stronghold of a fantastically powerful band of, and I say this with some reservation, evil spellcasting wizards, without any idea what we’re walking into.”
“That’s about the long and short of it, yeah,” Claire said. “I might feel better if I knew exactly how you plan to keep the Adversary’s prying eyes off us.”
“No way,” Claire said. “That’s a terrible idea, from an opsec perspective. Compartmentalization of information. If you’re caught, you can’t compromise the rest of us.”
“You don’t know, do you?”
“There is a certain…improvisational element to the plan, I will grant.” She turned to Zoe. “All-Girl Nude Beach 2014?”
“Got it in my pocket,” Zoe said.
“I’m sorry, what?” Lillian said. Zoe pulled a small thumb drive from her pocket and handed it to Lillian. The thing, badly scuffed and scratched, had a strip of masking tape stuck to it with “All-Girl Nude Beach 2014” scribbled on it in felt-tip pen.
“I don’t get it,” Lillian said.
“Loaded with all the best malware money can buy,” Zoe said. “When it falls out of my pocket in front of some mark, I guarantee he’ll race to his office just as fast as he can to plug it into his computer.”
“And then?”
Claire grinned. “And then we root his system. Hasn’t failed yet.”
We also spent quite a lot of time at the British Library, in the member’s room since Eunice is a member (because of course she is).
Some libraries have rare books rooms. The British Library has four immense walls of rare books, visible through the charming round porthole by these cozy chairs.
It all started when I accidentally clicked on Facebook Marketplace.
I was trying to click on my notifications. On the iOS app, the Marketplace button is next to the Notifications button, and, well…
As God is my witness, I do not know why Facebook Marketplace thought I would be interested in a gigantic human-sized pod. I mean, it was absolutely 100% right, but how did it know?
And so it came to pass that I, after much back and forth with the seller (who owns a clinic that was moving, and didn’t have space for it any more) and some absolutely heroic efforts from my friend Stan to move the damn thing, came into possession of a Bod Pod, a medical scanner originally, I gather, designed to calculate body mass.
Of course, when I saw that listing on Facebook on that fateful day, my mind immediately, as it is wont to do, went to images of the alien eggs from the Alien movies.
What if, thought I, I could cover this Bod Pod in silicone, making an alien egg large enough for a person? And what if, I continued as my brain inevitably rode this train to the last station, I could make a whole bunch of gigantic silicone tentacles—say, just for the sake of argument, nine and a hald feet long or so—that might explode from the pod, dripping with slime, trying to drag a Helpless Victim™ into the egg-thing? And what if, I continued on, having at this point reached the last station, crashed through the wall, and sailed on into the Beyond Space where anything is possible, I did a photo shoot, in which this poor Helpless Victim™ was molested by tentacles from this giant alien pod?
Now, of course, getting from pod to giant alien egg with tentacles is a Project, one I have only just barely embarked upon.
The first step to a pod with tentacles is, of course, the pod. The second step is the tentacles, and so it was, Gentle Reader, that I set about designing a Giant Tentacle in a 3D modeling program.
From this Giant Tentacle, I created a mold that could be printed in 15-inch segments, which is the maximum print size on my 3D printer, with an overall length of over 9 feet.
Of course, I didn’t really quite imagine how long a 9-foot mold is, so it turned out that once the mold was complete—something that took days of printing—I didn’t have enough space for it without rearranging furniture.
Seriously, nine-feet-plus of mold is more mold than you think it is.
It’s also a lot harder to cast silicone in an open-face mold this size than I expected it to be. Like, a lot harder. In this much space, silicone doesn’t behave the way you’d expect it to. It’s kind of like lava—it doesn’t flow to fill the entire mold. (It doesn’t help that my vacuum chamber also isn’t big enough to degas this much silicone all at once, either.)
So I had to make the pour in a bunch of steps, which created all sorts of weird problems. I’d planned to have the suckers lighter than the rest, with bands of color through the tentacles. That…didn’t work. The coloring pigment actually migrated up through the silicone, something it doesn’t do in a smaller mold.
The mold is just a liiiiitle teensy bit more than half the diameter of the tentacle, so it just barely starts to pinch inward at the top. This is so that I could cast half the tentacle, remove it from the mold, fill it with silicone again, then put the half I’d already cast on top, and that slight bit of pinch would grab the bit I’d already cast.
The result worked out pretty well, though it uses a lot of silicone—I made two tentacles, and together they’re about $100 worth of body-safe platinum-cure silicone alone, not including the cost of printing the mold.
When I flew to Springfield to see my Talespinner, I brought the tentacles (of course), which caused some degree of consternation at TSA (of course). We trialled the tentacles as a means of violation of Helpless Victims™, at which they excelled, but we (by which I mean she and her other lover, as I looked on) also gave them a try as an impact toy, at which they also excelled.
In fact, this may be the thuddiest impact toy ever conceived by man, more thuddy even than the Dread Koosh Flogger, a flogger made (as the name suggests) from Koosh balls.
I’m considering making an impact tentacle toy that’s basically a short length of this tentacle with a handle on the end.
When I returned from Springfield, armed with more information to allow the Great Tentacle Pod Project to move forward, I unpacked my suitcase and tossed the tentacles over the pod, lacking a better place to put them (and nine-foot tentacles are both heavier and take up more storage space than you may realize).
It struck me yesterday that visitors to my home, upon walking into my living room and seeing this, might be subject to some discomfiture.
