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Kink-shaming and policing the boundaries of acceptability

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Image: Nina Hill

Okay, hold onto your hat, because ima get a bit ranty.

There’s a thing I’m seeing in the kink scene these days that’s making me a bit mental. Specifically, I’m seeing a shift away from “your kink is not my kink, but your kink is okay” to “I am the guardian of what practices are acceptable, even between consenting adults, and those who engage in play I personally don’t enjoy are not only bad and wrong, but actively sick”…as often as not accompanied by heaping servings of projection and mind-reading, with an extra-large order of gaslighting on the side.

Anyone who’s read me over the past few years/decades knows that I am a champion of personal autonomy and agency. I’ve talked extensively about this before. I enjoy engaging in kink where I consent to things in such a way that I can’t withdraw consent, and yes, I understand that’s not a lotta people’s cuppa, which is fine. Different folks have different tastes, yeah?

Thing is, I’ve seen a backlash brewing in the kink scene against folks who enjoy playing with shelf-stable or irrevocable consent, in a weird sort of “people who do this are eeeevil” way.

This has especially been the case with the fetish called “somnophilia,” or sleep sex. This is, as it turns out, a kink I quite like, though more and more I’m seeing claims that it’s always bad, always toxic, whatever.

One of these anti-somnophilia screeds, which I read with some small measure of frustration and, I have to say, a bit of amusement as well, is here: Somnophilia: More a Crime Than a Kink. Gaslighting, mind-reading, projection, this one has it all.

I invite you to read the entire essay. I’ll be picking apart specific arguments that jumped out at me, starting with this one:

There are three things are taken from the victim when they’re tranquilized: their speech, their sight and their movement. Historical patriarchy required the silence of women and allowed them to speak only when they were furthering its cause. Domestication symbolized the lack of movement. Sight, the precious awareness that life could be any different.

Now, there are women and girls with movement, voices and vision. As the patriarchy fights its loss of power, its most ancient beneficiaries feel it the most.

To silence, to blind, to imprison women in their bodies, is to enact patriarchal principles within one’s cosy domain, safe from scrutiny. It is the inability to perceive woman as a whole being. Roofieing is an act of opportunistic cowardice, an offshoot of a dying patriarchy. It’s how men fight back.

Did you feel it? A disturbance in the Force?

I could point out the obvious, surface flaw in this argument: that it equates somnophilia with “roofieing,” a little linguistic Three Card Monte that you aren’t supposed to notice or react to, but I’ll say the bit you’re not supposed to say: sleep sex doesn’t have to involve drugging someone, and most often doesn’t.

But this is a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation argument. You’re supposed to get so hung up on the surface flaw in the argument that you start debating whether it’s “really” somnophilia if no drugs are involved that you don’t notice the deep flaw in the argument:

Rather bold to assume that somnophilia always involves a heterosexual couple in which a man has sex with a sleeping woman, eh? 🤣

I’m a man who likes somnophilia. It fascinates me that the people who argue about how evil this kink is assume that must go only one direction, that it must mean I only like it if I’m having sex with a sleeping (female) partner. In fact, I have female lovers who like having sex with me in my sleep; two of my lovers have standing, shelf-stable consent to do as they please to me whilst I sleep.

Remember, folks: when someone tells you you what you’re thinking and feeling, when someone claims to speak to what motivates you without listening to you…that’s the very essence of gaslighting.

This reminds me of the second-wave, sex-negative feminist argument that bondage and domination are always degrading to women, because they’re inevitably a male in the dominant role tying or dominating a woman in the submissive role. (When this was pointed out, one famous sex-negative feminist said something along the lines of “if men play a submissive role, it’s because they get something out of it, so the man is still in control.” Weird that she could imagine a man getting something out of being bound or bossed about, but couldn’t imagine a woman getting something out of it.)

This is a type of projection we see all the time. “I am a woman; I cannot imagine enjoying this; therefore, no woman would ever enjoy this. Women who say they enjoy it are, therefore, either lying or brainwashed by the Patriarchy.” The same form of argument has long been used to assert that gay men and lesbians must be mentally ill: “I cannot imagine wanting to shag someone of the same sex; therefore, nobody would want to shag someone of the same sex; therefore, someone who says they want to shag someone of the same sex is mentally defective in some way.”

The lyrics change but the tune remains the same.

And the thing is, the person who wrote this essay is so close to getting it.

The essay also says:

I’m an advocate for sleep as a panacea for most ills. It’s about the most vulnerable state one’s body can be in, a semi-death state, one’s sensory perception reduced to the bare minimum, one’s cells in desperate need of rejuvenation, the shutting down of a tired brain. It’s also a state that requires complete trust in one’s environment, the letting down of one’s guard.

Yes! Yes, exactly! This! 👆This, right here! That’s what makes somnophilia hot! You’re allowing someone in to that most vulnerable, most unguarded space. That’s the point, at least for me. It’s hot because it’s so incredibly, unbelievably vulnerable. To allow someone else access to you in that way, to know that you can do that and still be safe…it’s exquisite.

Image: IgorVetushko

I get that some people don’t like being made that vulnerable. I really, really do. That’s why I don’t practice this kink lightly. That’s why I do this only with intimate partners I feel safe with, and who I trust implicitly, and who have also expressed an interest in the same sort of play.

I also understand that we draw personal lines in different places. Many years ago, when I still lived in Florida, I met a Black woman at a play party whose thing was plantation owner/plantation slave rape play. On a purely intellectual level, I can sorta see why someone might find that super-hot. I also told her there’s no way I could go there. I just…I get the difference between consensual and non-consensual play, I understand CNC, but I just absolutely can”t do that. (She told me she has trouble finding lovers who will explore that kink with her and you know what? I believed her.)

But here’s the thing:

I don’t tell people this kind of kink is intrinsically wrong. I don’t say that those who do it are immoral or criminal. I don’t tell people with this kink that they’re feeding into white supremacy. And I sure as hell don’t presume to know what goes on in their minds, or project my own feelings, onto people who do it. It’s not my kink—in fact, I have a visceral reaction against doing it—and that’s okay.[1]

That’s the thing that gets me. It’s the idea that if you do something that I find uncomfortable, my discomfort, and my inner monologue about what makes it hot for you, entitles me to tell you that you’re wrong for doing it.

I am, as I said, a huge advocate for personal agency. If I choose to allow my partner to have sex with me whilst I’m asleep, as a grown-ass adult with moral agency and bodily autonomy, I believe I have the right to make that choice. It might not be the right choice for you, but it is for me.

Are the people involved adults? Are they doing this freely, uncoerced, because they enjoy it? Are they taking measures to assure that nobody is harmed and that the people involved get what they want from the experience? Then fill yer boots.

I’ve heard about BDSM communities where engaging in this practice, even outside the context of group events like play parties, will render you excommunicado, branded a bad person nobody should play with, and I cannot express how deeply fucked up that is.

There’s a certain aura of smug purity culture that’s taken hold in a lot of sexual subcommunities that I believe is harmful to everyone. It’s hard to look at these arguments and not see old-fashioned sex-negative moral Puritanism with the serial numbers filed off.

Maybe you’re not into somnophilia. That’s cool. But consider this: If this kink is in fact relegated to the dark dungeon of the unacceptable in your community, what kink do you think people will go after next? Purity culture is never satisfied. There is never a time when people say “okay, we’re pure enough now, thank you all for coming, go about your business.”

If this isn’t your kink, what will you do when they come for a kink that is?

[1] Side note: A lot of folks in the kink scene talk a great deal about consent and boundaries from a submissive person’s point of view. People who play dominant roles also have limits and boundaries, something I feel doesn’t always get the attention it deserves.

Calling erotica fans!

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I have stories in a new erotica anthology coming out in August. If you’re a fan of weird, complex supernatural erotica way beyond the conventional ghosts/vampires.

This book contains thirteen stories ranging in size from short stories to full-on novellas, all of them very spicy, all of them touching in some way on the supernatural.

In these pages you’ll find fables that tell a new creation myth, stories of small and heartless gods, sentient storms, living shadows, an archaeologist possessed by a Hittite priestess, and so much more! I think this is one of the best, most varied, most diverse collections of erotica you’ll ever find.

Here’s a taste:

She dried with one of the fluffy towels. More shadows moved overhead, chasing each other down the wall. She froze, a slightly puzzled frown on her face. With the blinds all shut, the only light in the room came from the tiny indirect lights in the ceiling, so how could the shadows move? “Henry?” she called. “Did you light a fire or something?”

“What? No.” His voice filtered through the rice paper screen, oddly distant. “What are you talking about?”

“I saw…” Light glowed on eggshell white walls and unremarkable beige blinds, steady and unwavering. She shook her head. “Nothing.” She dressed again in the same clothes she’d worn before, except her bra: button-up satiny blouse in white, dark lace panties, dark tailored skirt. Dressed once more, she found Henry sprawled on his back in the middle of the bed, still fully clothed save for his shoes. She paused, self-conscious at his expression. “What?”

“Nothing. I’m…I guess I’m hoping this whatever-it-is works.” He cocked his head. “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“I don’t know, like voices or something.”

“We’re in a hotel.” Exasperation tinged her voice.

“Yes, I know we’re in a hotel,” he said. His cadence and rhythm fell smoothly into the groove, just starting the long downhill slide into an argument. “I’m just saying—” He stopped. “There it is again.”

“What? I don’t hear—”

A soft, feminine chuckle came to her, right behind her. She spun, half-expecting to see some member of the hotel staff had somehow crept in while she wasn’t looking.

Nothing.

“Huh, that’s weird,” she said as she turned in slow motion back toward Henry. “I thought I heard…” Her body resisted her, like the air itself had turned to molasses around her. Shadows danced across the walls. “I could have sworn—”

She heard it again, the feminine laugh, low and throaty, right beside her. The spell shattered, She jumped and spun. Nothing but empty air behind her. “What’s going on?”

The light dimmed. A tremulous wavering glow wreathed the walls. She raced for the door, barely aware as she did of the look of astonishment on Henry’s face. A fat spark jumped when her finger brushed the knob. She flung open the door into yawning, gaping blackness. No hallway outside the door, no floor beneath, just an unfathomable expanse of nothingness between her and thousands of distant stars glittering in the velvety black of interstellar space.

She slammed the door shut. “There’s…that isn’t possible!” she panted. “Did—you did see that, right?”

Henry stayed frozen like an insect in amber, jaw slack with surprise. “The champagne!” Lisa cried. “It must be—they must have put something in the champagne!”

“Something like what?” Henry’s voice, thin and reedy, coming to her across some endless distance.

“I don’t know! A drug! Like a hallucinogen, or ecstasy, something, how would I know?”

A woman’s giggle, behind her, very near. She could almost feel warm breath on her neck. A long slow wave of goosebumps ran shivering down her body. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up. Hello! the voice said again, not from behind her now but somewhere inside her, a second stream of consciousness competing with her own. Don’t fight me. Faint trace of an accent she couldn’t place.

“I don’t—what’s—” A sudden dizzying sense of vertigo swept over her, like she was falling without falling. She flung her arms in front of her. They moved in glacial slow motion, coasting to a stop halfway on their journey.

I won’t hurt you. The giggle came again. Though he might.

Her body froze, like one of those dreams where she lay trapped within herself in the middle of the night, mind swirling with nameless dread. She tried to scream, tried to flee. Her fingers twitched. Then with a sudden wrench, her body was torn away from her, leaving her tumbling into some still place within, a rider behind her own eyes.

Her body came to life, moving on its own toward the bed, her hips swaying, her gate strangely fluid, graceful but unfamiliar. “Hello, my love.” The words came from her but did not belong to her, colored by that faint, undefinable accent.

Henry sat up on the bed with a smile on his face, a smile she’d never seen there before. He raised his hands in front of his eyes, turning them this way and that, flexing his fingers. “Oh, I like this one.”

Lisa watched in powerless dread as she, or her body, knelt on the bed, piloted by someone else. The soft comforter yielded beneath her knees. A long, slow flush burned from her face down her body, setting her skin tingling in its wake. Her nipples hardened. She felt suddenly, intrusively aware of a trembling need that fluttered between her legs. “This one is surrendering already,” she heard herself say. “Come and see!”

He crawled across the bed toward her, her husband of all these years, wearing an expression she was certain had never before visited his face. She tried to flinch, tried to pull away, but her body no longer obeyed her commands. I must be dreaming! she thought.

You’re not dreaming, that other voice, that other thought, answered.

Henry seized her blouse. Fabric ripped as he tore it open, exposing her to his gaze, looking at her, really looking at her, in a way he hadn’t in years, his eyes intent and hungry. She arched her back. Her hands crept up her body on their own, cupping her breasts as though presenting them to him. “Come, my love,” she purred. “Make me yours once more.”

He leaned forward in aching slow motion, studying her with glittering eyes, wearing a grin nothing like Henry’s. Her breath caught. When was the last time Henry had looked at her so covetously, drinking in her form with such careful attention?

You can pre-order the book here!

When Fantasy Sex is Not Just Sex

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Me and one of my current real-life lovers…

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

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

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

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

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

But hey, we’re there for work,…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sex as Fuel for Creativity

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

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

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

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

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

But I digress.

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

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

…started talking about the book.

Then I got out my laptop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Dispatches from the Front of Mad Science

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on Understanding Porn

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My co-author Eunice and I write porn. We call it ‘porn’ without flinching; where some people like to claim there’s a categorical distinction between porn and erotica, we both are of the opinion that po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to, it’s all a tempest in a linguistic teapot.

I bring this up because, having co-authored five books of the most twisted pornography ever conceived with Eunice, filled with kinks so esoteric they don’t even have names (we looked), I thought I understood the purpose of porn pretty well.

Image: Jan Kopřiva

Porn is when you use explicit, super-kinky sex to explore themes like personhood theory, agency, autonomy, philosophical ethics, atonement and redemption, social values, and community.

Obviously.

So imagine my surprise when Joreth, my wife, suggested in a Quora post:

My spouse doesn’t watch porn. He doesn’t get it. To be fair, almost all porn is bad bad BAD filmmaking, and as a filmmaker myself, I don’t disagree at all. But I understand that the point of mainstream porn is just to put naked bodies rutting on screen for those who are visually aroused, and nothing else.

My spouse, however, writes porn, but not, like, mainstream porn. He writes literary tomes, super-accurate far-future science-fiction, and detailed world-building urban fantasy. That happens to have sex scenes in them. He does. not. understand. the point of porn. To him, “porn” is for arousing the intellect, which will then follow with physical arousal.

I’m just back from Dragon*Con, where I spent most of my time alternating between the writers track and the skeptics track, so during a panel on written porn, I put the question to the panelists.

All of whom sided with my wife on this.

As did, for that matter, most of the Internet.

Now, a lot of folks do draw a distinction between porn and erotica; something I heard often is that erotica can explore complex themes but porn can’t. There’s a fair amount of this gatekeeping in the erotica writer’s scene: “erotica is what I write; porn is that dirty nasty filth that other people write.” I personally don’t draw that line; to me, it smacks of classism, of “porn is bad but erotica is okay.” If your goal is to arouse, to quicken the senses, then it’s porn, no matter what else you may be doing.

But that also seems a minority opinion.

The porn Eunice and I write is incredibly explicit and very kinky indeed. It’s also, quite often, highly uncomfortable. (Eunice likes to say she’ll keep scaling the kink factor up and up until I cringe; that’s the sweet spot we’re aiming for.) The explicitness and the discomfort are part of the point—we explore ideas that are intrinsically uncomfortable, like “is it ethical to give consent to sex in such a way that you cannot revoke it?” (Spoiler: we both think the answer is yes. It’s strange that doing this is so wildely accepted in anything but sex—joining the militart, for instance—but when it comes to sex, people—even people in the kink scene—struggle with it.)

Image: 1MilliKarat

The word “porn” is emotionally charged. Using “erotica” in place of “porn” feels to me like a way to try to soften it, to hide from sexuality rather than engaging with it directly. Our novels confront uncomfortable ideas directly, without evasion; why not call them porn?

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

The Borg Queen awakens

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Okay, so sit back, and ima tell you a story. It’s a story of kink, and depravity, and surprise serendipity.

So. I’m in Florida, helping my wife Joreth get the RV ready for a cross-country trip, during which we plan to do a photo tour of the abandoned amusement parks that litter the American Midwest like so many broken dreams of a bygone era. (We’ll likely do a coffee table photo book sometime in the next couple of years.)

Anyway, the day after I arrived, the local dungeon hosted a party, so your humble scribe and his beautiful wife showed up, of course, for an evening of kink and Killer Klowns from Outer Space.

The dungeon had electronic consent forms to be filled out on an iPad. On the consent form there was a profile, and on the profile there was a place to pick one’s favorite kink from a dropdown list.

Me: “I guarantee my fvorite kink is not on this list.”

Cheerful Woman Behind the Desk: “It cannot possibly be any weirder than this kink I just learned about!”

Whereupon CWBTD pulled out her phone and showed us…

…The Picture.

You know the one. The Picture that broke the Internet. The Picture that, every now and then, undergoes a new wave of virality. The Picture that, I’m told, ended up briefly on the official Sigorney Weaver fan site until a moderator took it down.

There are two things to know about The Picture:

  1. That’s a photo of Joreth;
  2. Wearing a xenomorph hiphugger strapon designed and made by your humble scribe.

In other words, CWBTD was right. My kink isn’t weirder than the thing she’d just discovered, it’s exactly as weird as the thing she’d just discovered.

Anyway, she was thrilled, and asked us to come back in yesterday for a bit of show and tell.

Which we did. The Borg Queen xenomorph parasite has been in storage since Barcelona, but it required surprisingly little repair, and we were soon on our way.

It was marvelous. They let us use the dungeon for a photo shoot!

The bad: I didn’t have my real camera, and we couldn’t lay hands on the Borg mask, so we did the best we could.

The good: There’s a photo night coming up next week, for which we will be better prepared.

The better: We met a lovely couple who were all like “ooh, Borg Queen parasitized by an alien xenomorph? That’s exactly my kink![1] Victimize us, please?”

Innocent victim: Mittyrin (image by author, reproduced by permission)

Fantastic fun, if that’s the sort of thing you consider fun. (Tautalogical cat is tautalogical.)

We drove home beneath the symbol of God’s divine blessing, or, you know, non-traditional relationships, which is almost the same thing, so truly I feel like Divine Providence smailed upon a fantastic evening.

[1] When I first started working on the xenomorph hiphugger, I remember saying “I don’t know what the point is, there are only three people in the world with this taste and I’m dating two of them.”

Oh, how wrong I was.