Tag Archives: relationships

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.

Stories from the Past: Xtina

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As I move into my sixth decade of life, I’m posting a series of stories from my past. This is part of that series.

We met at a point of transition in my life.

For nearly two decades, I’d been with my first wife, a woman I met in the late 1980s, in a time before the word “polyamory” was in circulation. My wife (now ex-wife) and I had no benefit of community or a roadmap for non-monogamy; we were making it up as we went along.

We started out, my ex-wife and I, in what would now be called a “polyamorous quad” with my best friend (who was also my wife’s lover) and his girlfriend (who I had a crush on, and who was a snogging friend of mine). Like many people back then, my ex-wife and I had a veto relationship, an agreement that if either of us became uncomfortable with the other’s lover, we could demand a breakup.

I never used my veto. My ex-wife did.

Then I met a woman named Shelly Deforte, a woman who blew me away with her intelligence and insight.

Shelly asked me out. I said yes. Very quickly, Shelly chafed under the idea of veto, the Sword of Damocles hanging over our relationship, a weapon terrible and cruel, always there, always looming like a dark shadow over anything we built together, ready to pierce our hearts without warning. She saw my ex-wife veto another of my lovers, saw what it did to us, and she was rightfully appalled. Veto, she said in many conversations that extended long into the night, was intrinsically destructive, a weapon barbaric and vicious, one that eroded trust, destroyed all hope of a building anything stable and meaningful.

Her ideas, which went straight at the root of my relationship with my ex-wife, forced me to see things in a completely new way, to reconsider the impact of the arrangement I’d made with my ex-wife without any input from anyone else. As you might imagine, this drove the relationship with my ex-wife to the brink of ruin. Even though my ex-wife had more “outside” lovers than I did, and for longer, from earlier in our relationship, she still felt threatened whenever I took a new lover.

It was against this backdrop that I went to a friend’s birthday party.

The place was absolutely jammed, perhaps fifty people packed shoulder to shoulder in an apartment, drinking from plastic cups, chatting while they scarfed down handfuls of potato chips.

I didn’t know anyone there except the host.

That’s when it happened.

Hollywood movies call it “love at first sight,” though of course that’s nonsense. You can’t love someone you don’t know. Biologists talk about major histocompatibility complexes and reproductive compatibility, but that doesn’t give you any sense of the urgency of it, the immediacy, the overwhelming knock-your-socks-off emotional power of it that stops your heart in your chest and makes the rest of the world pale and insubstantial.

She was reading a book on applied cryptography. We saw each other. The universe (or major histocompatibility immune molecules, it’s hard to tell from the inside) sang a song of “Yes!” The host took a photo.

I’d never before experienced anything even remotely like it. For the first time, I understood why people believe in “soulmates” and “twin flames” and “love at first sight,” even though those things aren’t real. Those emotions? Heady stuff.

So we started dating.

None of this is new to anyone who’s read my blog for a long time. You’ll find fragments of this story all through my blog if you look—the good, the bad, the deeply stupid and bitterly regrettable. Funny thng about life: your collection of regrets always increases, never decreases.

She introduced herself as Xtina. We started dating. She and Shelly started dating. She and Shelly stopped dating, for reasons I should have paid more attention to.

“Isn’t it funny that Xtina still thinks she gets to be with you?” Shelly said. “Stop seeing her.”

The woman who argued passionately that veto is and always will be wrong, is and always will be morally inexcusable, is and always will be nothing but evil, demanded a veto. The man who’d come to believe her, to believe that veto is in fact a form of intimate partner abuse, complied.

I saw her only once after that, years later, in Portland, I don’t know why. I messaged her out of the blue. She agreed, more charitably than I deserved, to meet at a bar.

I choked.

We said little. In the car on the way back home, I broke down.

For years after Shelly vetoed Xtina, I did everything in my power to convince myself it was all for the best, that Xtina and I were not compatible, that it never would’ve lasted anyway. It even fueled a deep and lingering distrust of instant connection. It’s often the case that we will employ these sorts of psychological self-deceptions to avoid acknowledging the shitty things we do to people who don’t deserve the shitty things we do.

I have done shitty things in my life, of course. We are all made of frailty and error, which is why it’s important that we learn to forgive one another’s transgressions with grace, at least insofar as we can without compromising our own ethics.

I have made shitty choices. There are two shitty choices I’ve made that I would, were it possible, give almost anything to be able to make again. One was to agree to the veto of Xtina, the other to start dating someone I never shoud’ve dated in the first place.

I still think about Xtina way more than you might expect, considering I ended the relationship decades ago.

The Pathologizing of Sexual Disinterest

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Image: BGStock72

In 2019, the FDA approved the drug bremelanotide for use in female hypoactive sexual desire disorder.

Bremelanotide was discovered a bit by accident. The tiny pharmaceutical company that developed it, Palatin Technologies, was looking for a drug that would let you tan without exposure to light (tanning is the result of certain biochemical changes that are usually triggered by exposure to ultraviolet light, but they thought, what if that change could be tipped off by a drug?)

It didn’t work well, but it did, to the researchers’s surprise, do something else: it made some people in clinical trials super-duper extra special horny. In search of a sunless tanning agent, they discovered the world’s first true aphrodisiac.

Fast forward, skipping over a nasal spray trial that was halted in 2004 ostensibly over fears of blood pressure spikes but, behind the scenes, possibly also because the Bush administration’s FDA didn’t like the idea of a real aphrodisiac (women’s sexuality has always, always been political), some licensing agreements, changes of hands, and so forth, in 2014 bremelanotide was approved as an injectable under the trade name Vyleesi. It has not exactly set the world on fire, likely in part because injectible drugs are not generally popular.

It’s also approved only in women, not men, because once again, women’s sexual desire has always been political. (Men can be dagnosed with male hypoactive sexual desire disorder, but the standard treatment modalities are talk therapy and testosterone supplements, because of course the normal state of men is to be horny all the time, so if you’re not horny you either have psychological problems or you don’t have enough testosterone…but I digress.)

I’ve tried it. It’s available from custom peptide synthesis houses, and man, in me (and about half the people who try it) it hits like a truck. There’s nothing subtle about it, no “hmm, is it working, I can’t tell?”, it’s like being flattened by a train. About half an hour after I take it, I’m ready to kick a hole in a vrick wall, and I don’t mean with my foot.

Now, I honestly think this is a good thing. This is in fact a point that Eunice and I make in the Passionate Pantheon novels, our book series set in a post-scarcity society. People in the City have access to “blessings,” sort of like drugs that allow their users to tailor their subjective experiences in almost any way they can imagine.

The reason being, everything that extends human agency, anything that enables people to be who they want to be and make the choices they want to make, is a force for good. Human agency is a desireable goal.

And honestly, I do have that feeling about aphrodisiacs. I personally know people who aren’t generally horny who would like to be. Something that gives you control over your own libido, allowing you to tailor it to what you want it to be? That’s a boon.

And yet…

I find it highly strange that Vyleesi is only available by prescription to women. The cultural narrative is that women should feel retiscent about sex, so a litle pharmacological boost to their libidos is reasonable and normal, but if men don’t want sex we need to find out what’s really wrong with them.

I bet the fact that Vyleesi is available to women but not men sends a message that a lot of women hear loud and clear: if you’re not horny enough for your man, you need medication. In a world where people all had about the same range of autonomy, bremelanotide would be unremarkable; in the world as it is, I worry that there will be those who want it not out of desire to be more horny, but out of fear that they need to please their partners.

Mind you, I am still cautiously optimistic that available of a real aphrodisiac is a good thing, generally speaking. But i see potential for the pathologization of people (by which, of ourse, I mean mostly women) who aren’t interested in sex, or who are fine with having a low libido, and making it available only to women kind of shows where society puts the blame for sexless relationships.

Here a scammer, there a scammer: the psychology of romance scams

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My mom died just over two years ago. She and my dad were together for most of their lives; they married young, right out of uni, and stayed together until she died.

Since then, my dad’s tried to get back in the dating game. He fell prey to a romance scammer, so I’ve spent quite a bit of time and effort over the last year trying to teach him how to spot romance scam accounts.

About the same time, Quora, a site I am on frequently, became buried in an absolute tsunami of romance scammers. A combination of lax moderation, poor site design, and weak defenses against spam makes Quora pretty much Ground Zero on the Internet for romance scammers; you’ll find more of them on Quora than you will even on dating sites.

This is fairly typical of a romance scammer account on Quora. There are tens of thousands of these accounts; this particular one is using a stolen photo of porn performer Violet Starr. Romance scammers often use stolen photos of celebrities, porn stars, OnlyFans models, and Instagram models in their fake profiles.

I spend about half an hour to an hour a day reporting romance scam accounts on Quora, typically between 150 and 200 a day. On a light day, I’ll only report 100 or so; on heavy days, I’ve reported 300 scam accounts in a single day.

I know it’s a bit like holding back the tide with a broom, but Quora’s been good to me; I’ve met many friends and even a lover and co-author on Quora, so I try to do what I can to make it a better place than I found it.

I am planning to write an essay about how to spot romance scammers.

This is not that essay.

Instead, I want to share an observation I’ve made. I think romance scam accounts are painfully obvious, and easy to spot; they all basically have the same shape, the same feel. You can even oftentimes spot what country the romance scammer is in by the way they mangle English, because nearly all romance scammers do not speak English as a first language.

For example, “Hello dear” and “Kindly let’s” are tipoffs to scammers in India. In fact, Indian scammers loooove the word “kindly” and use it everywhere. Forgetting to use first person pronouns is something you usually only see in Nigerian scammers who speak Yoruba as a native language. “I need urgently” often means Myanmar. Leaving out indefinite articles is typical of scammers who speak Russian natively.

Specific phrases also give scammers away. “Do the needful:” unique to India. “Angry against” instead of “angry at:” Myanmar. “Please quickly:” India again. Using “at” in place of “have:” Nigeria.

Nigerian scammers confuse A and E in English words, so will say “massage me” instead of “message me.” “Looking for serious relation” instead of “””looking for a serious relationship” pops up over and over in scammer profiles.

Some folks claim the poor English is deliberate, to put off people who are smart enough to catch the scam and therefore represent a waste of effort. I think that’s true in phishing emails but I don’t think it’s true of romance scammers; I think romance scammers are genuinely doing the best they can with limited English.

Yet despite how obvious they are, people still fall for them.

Not only that, there are men I call “concentrators,” men who seem uniquely susceptible to romance scammers. You’ll see a guy who follows 800 other profiles on social media, and 780 of them are clearly romance scammers. Everyone they interact with, every post they comment on, is clearly a romance scammer.

I call these people “concentrators,” because their social media connection map concentrates romance scammers extremely efficiently.

I’ve spent a lot, I mean a lot, of time over the past year thinking about that. Why are romance scammers so effective when they’re so obvious? What causes a concentrator to follow hundreds of romance scam accounts? Clearly, despite how obvious they are, their pitch is precisely tuned to a specific type of psychology. What is it?

I’ve now looked at thousands of romance scam accounts, and I recently had an insight:

Romance scammers don’t behave like women. They behave like thirsty, desperate, sexually frustrated men.

This is, I believe, absolutely key to their success. It’s the realization that makes everything else obvious.

Consider:

A genuine woman does not post photos of herself scantily clad with her private contact information and complaints about how much she needs a man. Even OnlyFans performers don’t do this.

This is the behavior of a sexually frustrated man with few social skills, someone who lacks the empathy or experience to understand why woman don’t do this. Women don’t behave this way because, of course, it’s an invitation to get flooded with rape threats, dick pics, commentary on their bodies, slut-shaming, and religious diatribes.

I mean, even women who don’t behave this way get slammed with this sort of garbage. My wife has shared with me some of the comments and DMs she gets from horny men, and brother, let me just say, there’s a reason a lot of men struggle for female companionship.1

Romance scammers behave the way incel men wish that women would behave.

That’s the secret.

There is, I think, a certain kind of man who struggles to get outside his own head, who has difficulty understanding the perspectives or experiences of others, who re-creates the entire world in his own image.2

That’s the target of romance scammers, who have learned through trial and error that the way to target such men is to hold up a mirror in front of them, dressed in the drag of an OnlyFans performer.

We do not see the world as it is, we see the world as we are. Lonely men respond to reflections of their own loneliness.

[1] You’re in her DMs. I’m getting screenshots of her DMs with messages like “check out this loser, have you ever seen anyone with such terrible social skills?” We are not the same.

[2] There are woman who do this as well, of course, but I think that female romance scam victims aren’t among them, there’s something else going on.

Some Thoughts on Consent and the Right to Say Meh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But here’s the thing:

Consent can be unenthusiastic without being coerced.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So. Back to Spectres.

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Unexpected Journey

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I’m sitting in my Talespinner’s living room, tending to her dogs, who believe with surety and absolute conviction there is something Outside that requires their immediate attention every fifteen minutes or so. The fact that they’ve been wrong about this three times in a row now does not in the slightest deter theri certainty that this time will be different. She (my Talespinnter) is at work, where she will be until ten o’clock tonight.

I flew in from Portland, after an entire day of travel. When I left, it was suny and 40 degrees; I connected in Huoston, where it was dark and in the 70s, and arrived late last night.

A week from today, she and I fly together to London before traveling on with much of the extended polycule to Wales.

This wasn’t the trip we had planned.

We’d planned for me to fly to Springfield in late November, when she’d be able to take some time off work, rent a cozy little cabin she found in a remote corner of Missouri, and isolate ourselves from the outside world to work on the third draft of our novel spin, a sprawling far-future, post-Collapse magical realism literary novel that is, in structure and narrative, the most ambitious, challenging, difficult writing project I’ve ever been part of.

Life got in the way.

We’re flying to London and then on to Wales because a person in our extended polycule, my girlfriend’s girlfriend, has received devastating medical news. Almost the entire polycule dropped what it was doing to go out there to support her.

I would not have been able to make the trip on such short notice without help from the rest of the extended network, and the unexpected generosity of complete strangers on the Internet, for which I am incredibly grateful.

The situation is unimaginably shitty, yet I am deeply, profoundly thankful to be part of such an amazing, supportive, generous, resilient, healthy, vibrant polycule.

If there is one lesson I could go back in time to give my younger self, it would be…well, it would be buy Bitcoin when it was still 25 cents. But if there were another, it would be this:

Franklin, there’s a word for what you are. That word doesn’t exist yet, but it’s “polyamorous,” and it means “loving many.” You aren’t alone in this, and you don’t need to settle. There are others like Find them. And if ever it should come to pass that a person you love tells you that you must break up with another person you love, or that they refuse to be around your other partners, never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever say yes. It is, in fact, possible to be part of an extended network of people who genuinely support each other, and don’t play those kinds of games.

My knee hurts. I blame Sigorney Weaver.

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It’s not necessarily her fault, mind you. And yet, and yet, the sex party blew out my knee, a fact for which Ms. Weaver bears some responsibility.

Lemme back up a bit.

I saw Star Wars (the original, before it was “Episode 4: A New Hope”) at the tender age of 11, when it first came out, and oh. My. God. It blew me away. I’d say I was obsessed with it, but that would be, if anything, understating the single-mindedness with which I obsessed over that movie. I collected all the trading cards (which I no longer have, the awareness of which gives me the same feeling in the pit of my stomach that I get when I think about the fact that I could have bought Bitcoin at $2 a coin but thought, “what’s the point?”), I built a flying model X-Wing (and ended up in the ER when the XActo knife I was using slipped…I still have the scar)…that movie moved into my mind and took up residence like a meth addict in an abandoned single-wide.

This isn’t a post about Star Wars. It’s actually about a sex party. Hang on, I’m getting to that.

So. My parents, who wanted to feed and nourish my interests, heard about this movie called Alien. They, being generally reasonable people who didn’t know the genre of sci-fi horror existed, largely because Alien kinda invented the genre of sci-fi horror, decided, he likes space movies with spaceships and stuff, this is a space movie with spaceships and stuff, he’ll like this movie.”

And so, I trotted into the theater, expecting something like Star Wars and getting…something else.

That movie traumatized me. Like, I had nightmares about the alien in Alien. Literal, actual, wake-up-in-a-cold-sweat nightmares.

For the next thirty-five years.

That alien became the shape of all my fears for decades. And so it came to pass that my wife, who loves pushing my buttons, during the course of a casual, ordinary conversaion on a casual, ordinary day, wouldn’t it be intersting if, given that I was teaching myself to make sex toys, I made an alien facehugger strapon? A…hiphugger, to coin a phrase?

Now, the thing about me is that once I get hold of a project, I don’t let it go until I’ve figured it out. The alien hiphugger moved into the space in my brain hollowed out by the Star Wars prequels (which not only killed my love of the franchise stone dead, but squatted over the corpse and farted in its face), I fired up Blender, and, two years and seven design revisions later, I created…

…the Alien Hiphugger Strapon.

It took seven design revisions and years of work to get here, but this is my wife during the first test fit of the first completed, assembled, and usable hiphugger.

Which she had never, until two nights ago, actually used.

Okay, so.

I am currently in Orlando, helping her get the RV ready to move cross-country to the West Coast. (Well, more likely we’re replacing the RV with a new one, but anyway.)

There is, here in Orlando, a swinger’s club which my wife and her boyfriend frequently attend. Not for sex—well, not just for sex—but also because they have the cheapest pool and hot tub in Orlando, where she’s been doing physical therapy for an injury for quite some time. Yes, people can go to swing clubs for therapy, and read Playboy for the articles, shut up.

Anyway.

Since I got to Orlando, we’ve been going to the swing club regularly. My wife does her PT, while I sit and write porn (specifically, a porn novel that takes place in two parallel narrative threads, one in London in 1871 and one in Buffalo in 2025), while people have sex around me, because that is, apparently, the life I lead now.

Two days ago, we decided that we should maybe go to the swing club for sex, because, you know, sex, and so a Plan was hatched.

My wife couldn’t find the syringe that I included with her xenomorph hiphugger strapon, so I procured a replacement on Amazon, for free, as I belong to their “free stuff if you write a review” program…but only for certain products. The lineup changes daily. The good news: they had a syringe available. The bad news: It was ludicrously, comically large.

Problem solved, the next step was acquisition, at remarkable effort, of tiny tapioca pearls, as you cannot have an alien violation experience without alien eggs (obviously, duh).

So.

We packed the hiphugger, the Ludicrously Large Syringe, and the eggs, with a carrier fluid of milk because at this point why the hell not, in a Box™ with some other toys and set off, the three of us, to the swingers club. Along the way, I took a quarter of a cannabis edible, on account of the fact they make me suuuuuper suggetible.

Now, there’s a thing you have to understand about swingers.

Swingers are, generally speaking, extremely conservative. They’re basically, by and large and painting with a very broad brush, PTA members and homeowners’ association managers who happen to enjoy shagging other people.

The swingers club inspects incoming packages. My wife cheerfully presented The Box™ for inspection, with its horrifying dildo-tailed alien facehugger and its Ludicrously Large Syringe and mass of Far Too Many Alien Eggs, owing to making just a bit too much tapioca…

The people doing the inspection behaved the way one might if one were to be served a lightly grilled roadkill opossum on a plate with a side order of Klingon gagh.

The injury toward which I am slowly working my way happened in one of the swing club’s themed playrooms, each of which has a door and a large window, through which other people can watch the goings-on within.

Now, I am not a voyeur. I’ve watched people have sex countless times, which is occasionally interesting in a “huh, I didn’t know people could bend that way” sort of way. It’s a shame I can’t hand those experiences to someone who would appreciate them better, because I know if watching people shag is your thing then it is very much Your Thing, but for me, it’s like, eh.

So my wife started with her boyfriend, and they started Doing Stuff, and I guess I blanked out a bit thinking about a scene in the porn story I mentioned earlier and how it needed some rework, so she’s like “you okay?” and I’m like “I was thinking about the novel” and she’s like “of course you were.”

Because of course I was. Writers: we’re not like other people.

My writing setup in the RV. That’s my wife’s tea mug. Twice the size means half as many trips to make more tea!

Anyway, a short time later I was on my hands and knees for the Great Xenomorph Parasite Violation.

If it seems like I’m Using Caps a lot, it was that kind of night.

Now, my wife is a dancer. And the play rooms had music piped in. And my wife started swaying to the beat of the music, and at the risk of using more capital letters, Oh My God.

Remember that cannabis edible? Cannabis does two things to me: it makes me hyper-suggestible, which my partners love with the love of a benevolent Divinity to all creation; but it also puts me in touch with my body, in a way that I’m generally not.

So fast forward two hours, during which I’m either on my knees or flat on my back. I won’t disturb you with the details, because they would…err, disturb you, but let me just say, So Many Alien Eggs. The tapioca had congealed into a slippery mass and it was So Gooey that, could I adequately express it in text, your computer screen would start dripping.

There was this kind of back and forth between “ooh, that’s nice” and absolute horror: in one particular position, the alien ovipositor would encounter the mass of eggs and…again, I won’t disturb you with the disturbing details.

Anyway, after hours of this, we went home sated and happy and just a touch horrified. After a brief Denny’s stop, because low-quality food after kinky threesomes seems part of my life now, I wrote in the car on the way home, then tumbled into a deep sleep.

I took this self-portrait on the way out of the sex club.

The next morning, I woke with a knee that refused to bend without agonizing pain. As I write this, I’m wearing a brace.

I blame Sigorney Weaver.

Not that it’s her fauly, exactly, but she is the sexy part of a casual chain that led directly from the theater to nightmares to the hiphugger strapon (I think it’s safe to say my wife may have, with her simple suggestion, invented the entire genre of xenomorph play).

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.

Yes, men are losing rights* in the age of feminism

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[Note: This essay originally started out as an answer on Quora.]

If, God help you, you ever read incel or “men going their own way” forums, which I have done, you frequently find a complaint—

Well, hang on, wait. You frequently find many complaints, because that’s pretty much all the incels and MGTOW folks do: whine and complain. One of those complaints you’ll often see is that “men are losing their rights” thanks, of course, to those evil feminist women, hell-bent on stripping men of their natural God-given rights.

The standard answer to this particular whine is, of course, “egalitarianism doesn’t mean you lose your rights, it means women gain rights.” Which is true as far as it goes, but the fact is, yes, men have lost rights because of feminism. In fact, you can look at the changing legal landscape in the United States over the past century and point to specific legal rights men once had that they don’t any more, directly because of feminism.

Photo by author

I was born in the 1960s, so I’ve lived through the rise of modern feminism.

Men have lost rights, both legal and civil, due to the rise of women’s rights.

Here’s a partial list of rights and privileges I as a man have lost just in my lifetime due to women’s rights:

  • The right to rape my wife without being prosecuted. Before 1974, marital rape was legal in every state. It was banned in Delaware and Maryland in 1974, but remained legal in other states until 1993.
  • The right to control my spouse’s money. Until the early 1960s, women could be barred from opening bank accounts at all without a male co-signer. Until 1974, married women could be barred from opening a bank account; the bank account was always in the man’s name, and the man had control. Until 1974, women could be barred from having a credit card in their own name.
  • The right to sexually harass at work. Until 1980, sexually harassing women in the workplace was legal.
  • The right to have certain jobs reserved only for men. Until 1970, it was legal for employers to reserve certain jobs as “men only” even if the sex of the person in the job had nothing to do with the job. Advertising designer, newspaper reporter, and many other jobs were frequently reserved as “men only.”
  • The right to hire only single women. Before 1960, many employers banned married women—you had to be single to get a job, and you were fired if you got married.
  • The right to control estates. Until 1971, women were banned from administering estates and could be passed over for inheritance at the whim of the estate administrator.
  • The right to prosecute women as “public scolds.” Until 1972, men could take legal action against women for “being quarrelsome or public scolds.” The last public scold law was struck down in 1972.
  • Control over women’s housing. Until 1974, landlords could refuse to rent to women.
  • Control over women’s healthcare. Until 1976, laws in many states said that a woman could not seek certain forms of healthcare without the signature of their husband or a male guardian.
  • Control over women’s money part II: Until 1981, married men in Louisiana has complete control over their wives’ money and property under a law called—get this—the Louisiana Head and Master Law. It was finally struck down in 1981.

How do I, as a man, deal with that?

Simple: I don’t want to rape my wife. I don’t want to control her money, control her doctor’s visits, or have her arrested as a scold.

In other words, why am I losing my rights? Because the rights I’ve lost are rights that men should never have had in the first place.

That’s the pesky asterisk in “men are losing rights*”. And it’s a different argument than “ha ha ha LOL shut up you haven’t lost any rights.” Men have lost rights. Unpacking why, and whether we shoud’ve ever had them to begin with, is a different conversation, and one I think we need to be willing to have if we are to deconstruct the weird entitlement of the manosphere.

The fifth horseman of the relationship apocalypse

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If you’re at all familiar with the world of the relationship self-help insustry, you’ve probably heard of the Gottman Institute, an “evidence-based research institute” that explores romantic relationships.

The Gottmans claim to be able to predict with a high (greater than 93%) degree of accuracy which married couples they see are headed for divorce. Leaving aside the issue of selection bias—healthy couples are less likely to seek relationship counseling—they claim to have identified four factors they call the Four Horsemen of the Relationship Apocalypse: Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness, and Stonewalling. Once those become part of a relationship dynamic, stick a fork in it, it’s over.

Now, I tend to be deeply skeptical of quantifying relationship dynamics. Which is not to say there aren’t certain dynamics that can be recognized, it’s just that there tend to be a lot more of them than a lot of relationship gurus think, with quite a bit more nuance and overlap than folks who like pigeonholing are perhaps comfortable with.

For example, I do think different people express love in different ways, and it’s important to recognize the ways you express and receive love. I don’t think there are five love languages, though. I think there are a lot more than five.

But I digress.

The relationship landscape once the apocalypse comes. (Image: Catalin Pop)

And so it is with the Four Horsement. I don’t disagree for a second that once these dynamics start to dominate a relationship, it’s done.

I just think this particular apocalypse is heralded by more of a posse. There are more than four dynamics that herald the end of things.

I got to thinking about this when I fell down a rabbit hole reading about zygote development a couple days back (as one does). Not because of evolutionary psychology or any of that silliness, but because vertebrate embryology follows a predictable pattern. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny and all that jazz.

That got me to thinking about hyenas, which got me to thinking about an ex from long ago, which got me to thinking about warning signs I should’ve seen but didn’t.

So a bit of history. Back in 2006, when I was still living in Tampa and dating a woman named Shelly, we went to Busch Gardens together and watched the hyenas, which inspired a blog post about the nature of beauty.

Brief recap: A lot of people who look at the hyena exhibit were like “man, those are sume ugly dogs.” But of course, hyenas aren’t dogs; they’re not even close to dogs. They’re more related to cats and mongooses than they are to dogs. If you judge the hyena by the beauty standards of a dog, of course they’ll seem ugly—they’re quite poor approximations of a dog. If you look at them for what they are, they’re quite lovely in their way.

A photo from that day, back when my digital camera was really rather shitty

They look a bit like dogs, especially in the shape of their faces (which are much more canine than feline), because of convergent morphology—a process by which creatures living in the same environment with the same general lifestyle will tend to converge on an optimized shape for that environment and lifestyle. Orcas and sharks diverged a very long time ago, but converged on the same basic shape. Ditto for creodonts and carnivores—there were bear-like and cat-like creodonts, even though they weren’t all that closely related to modern cats and bears. (And don’t even get me started on crabs—ultimately everything wants to be a crab).

Our relationship was still rather new at that point—we’d only been together five years—and I clearly remember saying that hyenas were a great example of convergent morphology, and Shelly saying something along the lines of “one of the things that I love about you is that you’ll use expressions like ‘convergent morphology’ in eveyday conversation, not because you’re trying to show off but just because that’s you.”

I remember it so clearly in part because something particularly jarring that happened a few years later, after she’d starting a monogamous fellow who was okay with her shagging other women but didn’t like her playing with other penis-bearers, so she told me that we would no longer be lovers “but,” she assured me, “we will always be partners and always be family.”

We’d gotten somehow on the subject of evolutionary biology—I don’t remember how—when I described something as an example of convergent morphology and she rolled her eyes and said (paraphrasing) “Why do you have to use expressions like that instead of just saying they evolved to look the same?”

It’s quite jolting when someone you love tells you that a thing they once really liked about you is a thing they find annoying. It tends to stick in the memory.

I think this is a fifth horseman. (How many horsemen are there? I don’t know; I’m not even sure it’s a useful exercise to try to list them all.) This isn’t the only time I’ve seen it, of course, but it’s the first time I ever experienced it.

In the start of a relationship, some people have a tendency to find everything about their new partner amazing and beautiful.

This isn’t universal, of course. Right now, Eunice and Joreth and I are reading Dorothy Tennov’s book Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being In Love with an eye toward doing an episode of our podcast, The Skeptical Pervert, about limerence. None of the three of us is particularly limerent, but the book definitely describes this phenomenon—obsessing over every detail of the object one feels limerence for, finding all of them uniquely enchanting. The book describes one person’s experience of limerence this way:

“Once I fall, really fall, everything about her becomes wonderful, even things that would otherwise mean nothing at all are suddenly capable of evoking curiously positive reactions. I love her clothes, her walk, her handwriting (its illegibility would seem charming, or if it were clear and readable, that would be equally admirable), her car, her cat, her mother. Anything that she liked, I liked; anything that belonged to her acquired a certain magic.”

That magic can, it seems, fade when the limerence fades.

Now me personally, I think limerence sounds absolutely awful, and I’m grateful I don’t experience it. (Which is not to say that I don’t have problems of my own, of course. I tend to accept red flags when I shouldn’t, thinking of them as quirks that help make this person who they are, something I’ve spent quite a lot of time working on with my therapist. But that’s a whole ’nother essay altogether.)

I don’t want to go into whether or not limerence is itself a long-range advanced scout for the Horse Posse of the Apocalypse (I think it might presage problems down the road, though I could be wrong), but I definitely think that when the day comes a thing you once found delightful about a lover now exasperates you, the end is, as Rorshach might say, well and truly nigh.

There’s a thing I’ve seen where creeping disenchantment begins to overcome a relationship, perhaps when someone is annoyed or frustrated, and all the things that were once sparkly and delightful become irritating. Many people project their present state into the past, losing touch with the way they once felt and assuming that their emotional state now is the way Things Always Were.

I can’t imagine what it must be like for such a person to square in their head that present emotion with past action. Regardless of where it comes from, though, that is definitely one of the Stampeding Herd of the Apocalypse, and it might, I think, be productive to be aware of it when it happens.

I don’t necessarily have a solution, mind. But if you see this happening in oyur relationship, take note: the wheels are coming off, and if you don’t do something to change your trajectory, you’re likely headed for a crash.