Regular readers are no doubt aware that I quite like tentacles. I don’t mean I like tentacles the way a marine biologist likes tentacles, but rather I like tentacles the way a schoolgirl in a dodgy Japanese animated movie of the sort you don’t share with your parents likes tentacles.
I have recently been working on a project to make a tentacle strapon, but not the sort of strapon that’s just shaped like a tentacle, oh no. I’m looking for a more…authentic tentacle experience.
To that end, I’ve 3D printed an articulated three-wire tentacle core in soft TPU. It took some faffing, but I eventually ended up with a tentacle core that can be attached to a strapon harness. Here’s a first test of the v2.0 articulated tentacle core:
I plan to wrap this core with a silicone sheath. I’ve already made test castings of a couple of silicone sheaths, and plan to shoot video of them next week when I visit my Talespinner.
This is a test casting of the sheath; I’ve since tweaked the mold and made a second test casting, which I will be using in the tests next week.
I plan to change the design to make it more…err, usable based on what I learn next week.
My goal going forward is to mount an Arduino and stepper motors on the back of the harness, so that the tentacle writhes and wriggles on its own. Once that version is done, the next step is to equip the harness with motion and proximity sensors, so that the tentacle moves toward anything that comes near the wearer.
A short time ago, I started thinking about the fact that I will often do things that are Type 2 fun when I’m having sex.
Quick recap for those who aren’t familiar with the types of fun: Type 1 fun is stuff that’s just fun. Things you enjoy. Things you like doing in the moment. Type 2 fun is fun that isn’t enjoyable in the moment, but that you enjoy the memory of, or telling stories about later. (For many marathon runners, for example, actually running in the marathon itself isn’t fun; it’s painful, uncomfortable, exhausting, and miserable. But there’s joy in having run the marathon—joy in being able to reminisce about it later and in the knowledge that you did it.) Type 3 fun is stuff that just isn’t fun at all—not in the moment, not in the remembering of it, and you are not likely to do it again.
My girlfriend Maxine says there’s also a Type 4 fun: something that isn’t fun in the doing or the remembering, but that a third party has fun telling others about. “Hey, you remember that one time when Bob had that firecracker, and there was that big pail of fish heads…?”
Anyway, I saw an online article that suggested you should never do anything sexually that makes you uncomfortable, which frankly I thought was terrible advice. That got me to thinking about my personal sex onion: the layers of things I will and won’t do in sex.
It looks something like this. Everything inside the largest circle is stuff I’ll do; everything outside it, stuff I won’t.
There’s a lot of stuff inside the circle I don’t enjoy. I’m not a masochist; I don’t get aroused from pain, and it never feels good no matter how sexy the context is. But I will allow lovers to do things like needle play or impact play on me if they’re into it.
I spent years developing the Xenomorph Hiphugger Strapon because my wife, who knows my parents took me to see the movie Alien at far too tender an age and it terrified me for decades, suggested the alien facehugger could be made into a strapon sex toy:
My wife wearing a prototype (photo by author)
I am what Eunice calls a “reaction junkie.” It gets me hot seeing my lovers get hot. If there’s something that really really does it for you, something that lights you up and revs your motor, something that turns you on to the point of incandescence, I can probably make it work for me even if it’s not my thing. There’s something amazing and unbelievably sexy about seeing someone you love light up.
Even if it’s uncomfortable in the moment.
In fact, hidden beneath the layers of“ooh, sexy!” is a profound truth of the human condition, one that people who explore kink and people who run marathons share in common: Sometimes, in those moments of discomfort, you learn something about who you really are. Intense experiences bring out hidden parts of us.
As far as intimacy goes, it’s the most intimate thing I can imagine: allowing your lover to push your buttons, or being with a lover who allows you to push theirs, to see you in those moments of genuine authenticity.
I’ve allowed lovers to spank and crop me, to put needles into me, to give me forced orgasms one after the other until I pass out. All those things are inside my personal sex onion. I won’t say I enjoyed them in the moment of doing them, but I feel like all of those experiences have value—they’ve given me insight I might not have any other way.
Life’s cost of entry
The cost of entry of that insight is being willing to do things that challenge you. Which isn’t common, thanks in no small part to the number of people who will tell you, with apparent sincerity and the right intentions, never to do anything that makes you uncomfortable.
Which is advice we apply to no other area of human activity. (Can you imagine someone saying that about running a marathon, signing on for the Marines, learning to sail, learning ballet, or going mountain climbing?) We accept discomfort as the price for many valuable experiences…except sex.
Of course, none of this means you should allow yourself to be pressured into doing things you genuinely don’t want to do. I will almost certainly never run a marathon. Doing something onlyi because it’s uncomfortable…well, that’s the road to madness.
But rejecting something only because it might be uncomfortable? That’s not a way, I think, to live an interesting life. (You may not agree, and that’s okay. Your life, your body, your rules.)
Outcome vs Consent
See that circle down in the bottom right, the one labeled “things I’ve tried at are now a hard no”?
A long long time ago, in a whole different digital age, when LiveJournal was new and social media seemed alight with possibilities beyond political tampering by hostile state-level actors, I saw a conversation online where a guy said he’d never do anything sexual he wasn’t 100% comfortable with, because what if he tried it, he didn’t like it, and then his girlfriend asked him to do it again?
I told him, “then you say no. It’s okay to try something and decide you don’t like it.”
Boom! Mind. Blown.
But it’s true. It’s okay to say no to something you previously said yes to. Again, we understand this intuitively with everything except sex.
I’ve talked about this before, but many people also do a terrible job of separating consent from outcome. If you say yes to something, and decide that oyu hated it, even felt violated by it, your consent was not violated. If you say no to something, and someone does it anyway, then you decide you actually kinda liked it, your consent was still violated.
You cannot label something you agreed to do and then decided you didn’t like a consent violation. You can label something you never said yes to a consent violation, even if after the fact you enjoyed it.
If you freely consent to something, decide you don’t like it, and claim your consent was violated, you’re a shitty person. If you do something to someone who didn’t consent to it, then claim that it was okay because they liked it, you’re a shitty person. I feel like this ought to be obvious, but no matter how many times I say it, it’s not.
If no means no, then yes has to mean yes.
There are things I’ve tried I won’t do again. There are things that I didn’t agree to that weren’t terrible, that I even kinda liked, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was not okay to do something that violated my consent.
It’s okay to agree to things that you later find you didn’t like. Just don’t do them again. Your body, your rules, remember?
Taking apart the onion
The point here is that sex is a lot of things. You can have fun (Type 1 or Type 2!) during sex, yes, but you can also learn about yourself, and your lover, from sex. We know that we do all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons…maybe we simply need to remember sex is no different. We know marathons are uncomfortable, but also that people choose to do them anyway, and running a marathon last year doesn’t obligate you to run another next year.
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.
I have a number of…um, fairly ambitious projects I’m working on right now that I’ve hit roadblocks on. Since the Internet is a marvel of modern technological accomplishment that allows instantaneous access to not only the entirety of human knowledge but also domain experts in every conceivable field of human endeavor, I’m throwing out a request for ideas and suggestions here.
Project 1: The Alien Pod
I have, through a strange set of circumstances, come into possession of an old “bod pod,” a medical scanner designed, I’m told, to measure BMI. It doesn’t work—it’s just the pod without the computer software and such to drive it—and my goal is to turn it into a gigantic alien egg, like the kind in the Alien movies, but large enough to hold a person.
So the plan is to cover this thing with silicone, to make it look like one of the eggs from the Alien movie (which were basically garbage bags and chicken wire covered with silicone). The effect I’m looking for is something like this:
My thought is to cover the pod with silicone (probably condensation-cure rather than the medical-grade platinum-cure silicone I ise for sex toys, whcih is more than $200 a gallon).
Why silicone and not paper-mâché? The pod weighs more than 400 pounds, so it’s very difficult to transport, and the egg needs to be strong enough to survive handling and moving in a truck. My goal is to use it for a photo shoot, with a model halfway out of it, being dragged back in by tentacles.
The problem is that silicone won’t stick to the surface, like, at all. Not even a little bit.
The pod is a stainless steel shell overlaid with fiberglass and with some sort of textured polymer layer on top. Up close it looks like this:
My first thought is to epoxy a whole bunch of short pins to the pod, to give the silicone something to grip. Many years ago, I remember seeing a product that would be perfect for this: small steel pins, about a centimeter or less long, with a ball on one end and a flat base on the other, kind of like so:
They’re quite small, and a whole bunch of them sticking out of the pod like spines on a porcupine would give the silicone something to hang on to mechanically. Trouble is, I don’t know what they’re called or what they’re used for (I vaguely recall that they’re used in aviation, maybe?), so I don’t know how to search for them.
Alternately, any small, cheap, epoxy-able pin or whatever I can glue to the pod might work. I’m also open to other suggestions. Keep in mind it has to stand up to rough handling—this bloody thing is almost unimaginably heavy and hard to maneuver!
Project 2: Machining Molds
I’ve started making alien xenomorph hiphugger strapons and alien xenomorph facehugger gags for sale.
Right now, I’m 3D printing the molds, a 6-part mold for the hiphugger and a 7-part (yes, seriously) mold for the facehugger.
I’d hoped to get maybe ten castings from each mold. In fact, I’m getting 2-3 before the mold is ruined and I have to print a new one. The facehugger mold takes two weeks(!) to print on my 3D printer. Obviously this isn’t sustainable.
I’ve been planning for a while to move to machined wood or aluminum molds, and I have a 4-axis desktop CNC machine:
I’ve been teaching myself CNC milling, but the learning curve is a cliff; I’m getting reasonably good at 2D and 2.5D machining, but man, the molds are complex.
Here’s a 3D model of one part of the hiphugger mold. This is what I’m looking to machine, either in aluminum or even in wood:
As you can see, it’s a complex shape with aggressive undercuts.
I have not been able to make a CNC program to carve this. (One person online looked at this mold and was like “um, yeah, you’ll need four years of trade school plus at least four years of apprenticeship to even think about machining something like that.”)
So, hey, I have the machine but not the skill, why not hire someone to design the CNC program, right? I’ve talked to a few folks online who are like “yeah, pay me and I’ll do the program for you,” then when they see that part they’re like “oh hell no. Hell. No.”
If anyone reading this knows a skilled CNC machinist who can create a program to mill this part, and parts like it, on my machine (a Makera Carvera with a 4th-axis module), send them my way! This is a paying gig.
In the meantime, I’m also exploring ways to treat the 3D printed molds with resin or epoxy or something to make them more durable. Right now I’m only making one facehugger and one hiphugger per month, and even at that slow rate of production, the process I’m using is unsustainable.
So yeah. I have an eclectic set of friends out there with some highly unusual skills, so I’m hoping that some of you might have insights or ideas to offer.
Somehow, between a lot of other projects we’re working on and this last-minute trip to Europe, the fact that Eunice and I have released another book sort of fell through the cracks.
So hey, we released another book!
Presenting, the fourth novel in the Passionate Pantheon series, Unyielding Devotion. Sexy far-future post-scarcity science fiction theocratic body horror philosophical erotica, for your reading pleasure!
I’m particularly proud of this book. It’s probably the most philosophical of the Passionate Pantheon novels, but still has a ton of sex so kinky the kinks don’t even have names.
It follows a group of people who meet at a party hosted by Jakalva, a power broker in the City who worships none of the AI gods but nevertheless is still one of the City’s most influential citizens, and explores how their experiences at the party change the course of their lives.
You can read it as really really kinky porn, and it works, but it’s also sort of a sustained meditation on unconventional choices, growth, and relationships.
Sex! Zero-gravity gladiator matches! Skydiving from the tops of buildings! More sex!
Here’s an excerpt:
Jakalva leaned back. “My, my. A person comes to our City seeking to atone for her wrongdoing, and instead is selected to punish others for theirs. You have an interesting story indeed.”
Kaytin looked down. “I don’t feel interesting.”
The music stopped. A melodic chime filled the air. Jakalva touched Kaytin’s arm. “A moment, please.” She rose. “Friends, the entertainment is about to start. I invite those of you who wish to watch to be seated.” With the music gone, the drone above Kaytin flitted away.
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.
This is not a novel for the faint of heart. You’ll find some pretty radical kinks between its covers.
Check it out! It’s available on Amazon US, UK, and Canada.
It all started when I accidentally clicked on Facebook Marketplace.
I was trying to click on my notifications. On the iOS app, the Marketplace button is next to the Notifications button, and, well…
As God is my witness, I do not know why Facebook Marketplace thought I would be interested in a gigantic human-sized pod. I mean, it was absolutely 100% right, but how did it know?
And so it came to pass that I, after much back and forth with the seller (who owns a clinic that was moving, and didn’t have space for it any more) and some absolutely heroic efforts from my friend Stan to move the damn thing, came into possession of a Bod Pod, a medical scanner originally, I gather, designed to calculate body mass.
Of course, when I saw that listing on Facebook on that fateful day, my mind immediately, as it is wont to do, went to images of the alien eggs from the Alien movies.
What if, thought I, I could cover this Bod Pod in silicone, making an alien egg large enough for a person? And what if, I continued as my brain inevitably rode this train to the last station, I could make a whole bunch of gigantic silicone tentacles—say, just for the sake of argument, nine and a hald feet long or so—that might explode from the pod, dripping with slime, trying to drag a Helpless Victim™ into the egg-thing? And what if, I continued on, having at this point reached the last station, crashed through the wall, and sailed on into the Beyond Space where anything is possible, I did a photo shoot, in which this poor Helpless Victim™ was molested by tentacles from this giant alien pod?
Now, of course, getting from pod to giant alien egg with tentacles is a Project, one I have only just barely embarked upon.
The first step to a pod with tentacles is, of course, the pod. The second step is the tentacles, and so it was, Gentle Reader, that I set about designing a Giant Tentacle in a 3D modeling program.
From this Giant Tentacle, I created a mold that could be printed in 15-inch segments, which is the maximum print size on my 3D printer, with an overall length of over 9 feet.
Of course, I didn’t really quite imagine how long a 9-foot mold is, so it turned out that once the mold was complete—something that took days of printing—I didn’t have enough space for it without rearranging furniture.
Seriously, nine-feet-plus of mold is more mold than you think it is.
It’s also a lot harder to cast silicone in an open-face mold this size than I expected it to be. Like, a lot harder. In this much space, silicone doesn’t behave the way you’d expect it to. It’s kind of like lava—it doesn’t flow to fill the entire mold. (It doesn’t help that my vacuum chamber also isn’t big enough to degas this much silicone all at once, either.)
So I had to make the pour in a bunch of steps, which created all sorts of weird problems. I’d planned to have the suckers lighter than the rest, with bands of color through the tentacles. That…didn’t work. The coloring pigment actually migrated up through the silicone, something it doesn’t do in a smaller mold.
The mold is just a liiiiitle teensy bit more than half the diameter of the tentacle, so it just barely starts to pinch inward at the top. This is so that I could cast half the tentacle, remove it from the mold, fill it with silicone again, then put the half I’d already cast on top, and that slight bit of pinch would grab the bit I’d already cast.
The result worked out pretty well, though it uses a lot of silicone—I made two tentacles, and together they’re about $100 worth of body-safe platinum-cure silicone alone, not including the cost of printing the mold.
When I flew to Springfield to see my Talespinner, I brought the tentacles (of course), which caused some degree of consternation at TSA (of course). We trialled the tentacles as a means of violation of Helpless Victims™, at which they excelled, but we (by which I mean she and her other lover, as I looked on) also gave them a try as an impact toy, at which they also excelled.
In fact, this may be the thuddiest impact toy ever conceived by man, more thuddy even than the Dread Koosh Flogger, a flogger made (as the name suggests) from Koosh balls.
I’m considering making an impact tentacle toy that’s basically a short length of this tentacle with a handle on the end.
When I returned from Springfield, armed with more information to allow the Great Tentacle Pod Project to move forward, I unpacked my suitcase and tossed the tentacles over the pod, lacking a better place to put them (and nine-foot tentacles are both heavier and take up more storage space than you may realize).
It struck me yesterday that visitors to my home, upon walking into my living room and seeing this, might be subject to some discomfiture.
Imagine the scene: It’s late at night. A Beautiful Young Woman has just had a fight with her Wretched Boyfriend at a nightclub, and is walking home through the bad part of town, an industrial park fallen on hard times, now the home of shuttered businesses and derelict warehouses.
A meteor streaks across the sky, growing larger and larger, until it crashes through the roof of an abandoned warehouse, now crumbling into ruin. Curious, the Beautiful Young Woman investigates, but soon finds herself in trouble when the alien drones spring from the dark recesses of the abandoned warehouse and drag her before the Alien Queen, which has hauled itself from the still-smoking spacecraft. The Alien Queen sprouts a mass of wet, slimy tentacles that violate the helpless Beautiful Young Woman in ways far too shocking to describe in this blog entry, lest you, Gentle Reader, pass out from the vapors, giving her ecstasy beyond anything she has ever known before until at last, delirious, she is overcome and loses her senses.
She wakes some time later, driven by a gnawing hunger more powerful than anything she’s ever known before, an insatiable sexual need that drives her from the warehouse in search of prey. For you see, she is now host to an Alien Parasite, a creature that fills her with need, driving her to mate with all who cross her path, spreading the alien seed as she does. The parasite lives deep within her ladybits, granting unspeakable ecstasy to all with whom she copulates but denying her pleasure herself, as she roves the town in a frenzy of frantic, unnatural lust.
From this fantasy, spun by my Talespinner and me in a late-night sexting session, came our newest foray into weird sex toys from a realm beyond imagination: Project Ladybug.
“What if,” thought I, “I could actually make an alien that lived within her ladybits?” Picture something like a soft silicone fleshlight masturbator, designed to be worn vaginally, with a sinister alien opening and tentacles that wrap around her legs, holding it in place. It would grant great pleasure to those who have sex with the Beautiful Young Woman™ so afflicted, whilst denying her of any pleasure herself, so as to keep the fires of her lust unslaked.
This is Project Ladybug, and it comes after the first successful test of the nine-foot tentacle project.
So it was that when I was in Springfield two weeks ago visiting my Talespinner that we set about turning Project Ladybug into reality.
The idea was a sex toy exactly custom-fit to her internal anatomy, that would keep her nicely filled when the Alien Parasite was within her, so the first step was making a cast of her inside bits.
I thought this would be fairly easy. Slip in a female condom, fill her with dental alginate to the point she was properly full, wait for it to set, then remove it, make a 3D scan of it, and use that as the basis for the stroker. 3D print a model of the stroker, cast it in super-soft silicone…what could be simpler, right?
Ah, if only.
I ordered some alginate and, because alginate soon crumbles and is not very durable, some casting material to make a mold of the alginate, so that if it didn’t survive the trip home, I could cast her internal bits in silicone and 3D scan that.
Armed with casting materials and a female condom, we set about the first bit, which quickly proved more difficult than we anticipated.
You’d think it would be easy. Lie your model on her back, slip in the female condom, fill with alginate, wait a couple minutes, and Bob’s your uncle.
In practice, the first two efforts met with failure, because the alginate (a) sets way too fast (even if you get medium-set material) and (b) comes gushing back out, and (c) the entrance to the typical hoo-ha is soft and pliable enough that the casting won’t stay centered.
However, my Talespinner came up with the idea of using a canning funnel to…um, provide structural stability at the vaginal entrance, and I used cold water to mix the third batch of alginate to slow setting…
…which meant she had time to play on her phone whilst it set…
…et voilà!
At this point, we had a (quite fragile) alginate representation of her internal anatomy. It was difficult and expensive enough to make, and the flight home fraught enough (I’d broken my suitcase on a previous trip to a convention, and so had flown out to see her with only a duffel bag), that I was paranoid, so I used a 3D scan program on my phone to make a quick, dirty 3D scan of the cast in case it was damaged on the trip home.
I shan’t bore you with the details of exactly what a PITA that turned out to be, except to say that it needed a place with (a) bright light that (b) I could move around in three dimensions (c) with a background that wouldn’t confuse the phone, so I ended up hanging her ladycast by a string from the ceiling fan in the middle of the living room with a sheet wrapped around, which is just as ridiculous and surreal as it sounds.
Anyway, emergency backup 3D scan made, it was time to make a cast, in the event the alginate didn’t survive the trip home.
I cast it right up to the midline, let the material set, sprayed it with mold release agent, then did a second pour to cast it full.
That created an entirely new problem.
Enter the TSA
I flew back to Portland with the cast, and a nine-foot-long silicone tentacle, and a four-foot-long silicone tentacle, in my carry-on luggage.
These things created no small measure of consternation at security.
The finished cast looked like this:
The X-ray looked…bizarre. (I really, really wish TSA would let me take pictures of the X-ray screens when I travel, I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.)
They pulled my bag, as you would expect. They asked me many questions about the solid lump of heavy cement in my bag, as you’d expect. They swabbed it for explosives, as you’d expect.
Then they shut down the security checkpoint and called every single TSA agent over to examine the block of cement, which I did not expect.
They swabbed it for explosives again, using a different technique, one I didn’t even know they had.
They called a supervisor.
The supervisor comes over, glances at the X-ray, says “oh, I know what that is,” and waves me through.
As God is my witness, I really, really want to know what he thought it was. Because I can think of only two possibilities:
He had no idea what it was, but he thought he did, in which case I will confess I am super curious about what he believed it was; or
He knew exactly what it was, in which case he seems the sort of person I should get to know.
Upon arriving home, I faced yet another problem:
The mold release agent I put between the layers of the cast didn’t work.
Now I have a solid lump of cement with Kitty’s kitty trapped within, and freeing it is proving a nightmare. Half an hour of hard work with a hacksaw succeeded only in getting this far:
It may yet come to pass that I reconstruct Kitty’s kitty in a 3D program from the phone-generated scan and the photos I took. (I took a ton of photos, with a measuring tape for scale.)
In any event, Project Ladybug is proceeding apace, and at some point in the not to distant future I plan to have a monstrous alien parasite custom-fit to my Talespinner’s ladybits (for you see, the name Ladybug came from an autocorrect fail of “ladybits”) that will attach itself to her, driving her to a frenzy of unspeakable, insatiable alien lust.
Because if you’re going to make freaky sex toys, I think it’s time to move beyond “fantasy penises of supernatural creatures.”
Earlier this morning, I wrote an answer on Quora that reminded me I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the sex toys I design and make, but I’ve never really talked about the work that goes into those designs. So if the method to engineered sensation interests you, read on!
There are a lot, and I mean a lot, of boutique sex toy stores out there right now, the most famous being Bad Dragon, purveyor of monster cocks of all varieties. And honestly, some fo their designs are quite beautiful. But they, and most of their competitors, seem to have basically a single schtick: dildos of fantasy penises.
Which, don’t get me wrong, is perfectly fine. Hey, if that’s your jam, it’s your jam. But I absolutely think tiny bespoke sex toy makers can do more. To me, and I don’t know if I’m unusual in this regard, what interests me is exploring totally new sensations, so I think of what I do more in terms of designing sensations than designing mythological penises.
Most of my designs go through multiple iterations, refining not the look so much as the way it feels.
For example, the Tentacle Butt Plug went through almost a dozen design iterations:
I am firmly of the belief that if you are looking for a tentacle violation experience, then the tentacles should feel as violating as possible.
This is a prototype about midway through the design process. I added the suckers to the stem and I made the end, where it curves to the right, more prominent (the first design was shaped closer to where the red line is), to make the plug feel more intrusive to the wearer. You can’t ignore it.
I had five or six people test the various design iterations, and unanimously agreed that “violating” is a good word to describe the feel of this plug.
So what got me to writing this?
A question floated through my Quora feed asking how it feels to be pegged by one’s wife. I have, in fact, long been an enthusiastic fan of pegging (I hold a patent on a new type of strapon for pegging), so this was something I thought I could speak to, and the answer is:
There’s no such thing as what it feels like to be pegged. It’s different in different positions, obviously—being pegged in missionary position is much different from being pegged doggy style—but it also depends a lot on what you’re doing it with.
For example, here are two things I’ve created for the purpose of pegging that feel vastly different, both of them being worn by my wife:
This tentacle strapon dildo is…invasive. I designed it to simulate, as closely as reasonably possible, the sensations one might experience in one of those pornographic Japanese anime with the tentacle monsters.
It’s made of a fairly hard silicone (Smooth-On Dragon Skin 20, with a Shore hardness rating of 20). The suckers are deliberately designed to be fairly large and bumpy, and the tentacle twists a bit at the tip to make it feel even more invasive.
The tentacle in the photo is two colors because this was a prototype, a test cast in a brand-new mold, so I poured it with whatever silicone I had left over from making other toys. It works…really really well.
What does it feel like? Intense. When that thing is moving in and out, believe me, you feel those suckers. Most dildos, you can’t actually feel the tip of it because the top is centered and smooth; the tip on the tentacle is slightly twisted so that the very end, with that last sucker on the point, presses against you and you know EXACTLY how deep it is.
The xenomorph hiphugger, on the other hand, is…deceptive. Yes, the “tail” has ridges, but the tip is blunt, smooth, and shaped so it goes into the…err, orifice relatively easily and smoothly. The thing about this design is you don’t really realize just how deep it is until it comes time to pull out and it just keeps sliding out and out and out and out…
It’s also hollow, with a silicone tube running down the center, so that you can pump fluid through it from the reservoir. That feels…odd. Not really sure what to say besides odd. It’s a warm rush that just kinda keeps going.
That, for me, is the thing. Not what the toy looks like, but the experience it evokes, the sensation it creates. I love making art out of sensation. The question is not “how can we make the toy?” but rather “what new experiences can we call forth with this toy?”
Hard to believe it’s been a year. These past twelve months have been a wild ride. Bits of it have been extremely good, bits (like the death of my mother) extremely bad, but there’s been nothing average anywhere in this year.
Today marks the one-year anniversary of something very, very good.
It began, as these things often do, more than a year ago. A beginning is a very delicate time, I hear, and so it was much more than a year ago that I first talked to her about beta testing some new prototype sex toys.
I don’t exactly remember how we first noticed each other. I know where—it was on Quora—and I vaguely remember seeing her around, thinking she struck me as a good writer and a generally positive person. She said something in passing about trsting sex toys, I had some prototypes, I was looking for beta testers, so I slid into her DMs with something like “I hope you’ll forgive the intrusion, but would you be interested in trying something out?”
We started talking after. She invited me to a pen and paper role-playing game. I grew to appreciate her skill at wordsmithing, of the pragmatic and erotic sort. She called me her Toymaker. I called her my Talespinner.
A friend of hers observed that the Talespinner and the Toymaker sounds like a YA novel. We were both like “You know…”
I said “Do you wanna?” She said “Sure!”
Time went on. I invited her to accompany me to Barcelona with the rest of the poly network. She said yes.
And so, a year ago, I got on a plane to Springfield.
She showed me around her town: a giant alien xenomorph made of scrap iron.
Chrome steel bunnies and a frog.
And a lovely little rum bar, where I confessed I would very much like to kiss her. “Hold that thought!” she said.
She took me to a rushing fountain, where we shared our first kiss, one year ago today.
We went to Barcelona, where she met the rest of the polyfam. Later, she would tell me she was amazed by how warm and welcoming they were—no hesitation, no reservation.
I am so deeply grateful to have surrounded myself with people I love who love me, who have no weirdness, no animosity toward one another. It’s deeply relaxing and wonderful.
The book still marches on. We meet over videoconference to work on it when we aren’t together. We are, as I write this, just over 93,000 words in, which in any other book would mean we’re nearly done, but this thing is a monster—the most complex novel I’ve ever been part of. We’re targeting 160,000 words.
We’re calling it Spin, and it’s grown into something that is definitely not a YA novel, something dark and brooding, something complex and ambitious. Fitting, I think, because our relationship is turning out to be something more than I expected as well.
I am not, it must be said, the sort of person who gets to the airport early.
I am the sort of person who rolls up to the gate just as they start boarding, then says “hmm, I’m in Boarding Group 8, that means I have time to dash down the hallway to grab a bite to eat.” (I’m serious. I’ve done this. My wife hates it.)
And so it came to pass that I woke on the morning of my recent trip to Springfield, started packing, and then saw a message from the airline: they’d canceled my flight and put me on another, scheduled to depart an hour and a half earlier.
Folks, if you ever see the distant gray not-a-moon shape of the Death Star in a clear blue sky over your home town, panic will not do to you what it did to me when I saw that text.
I grabbed whatever was close to hand and shoved it frantically into the suitcase: a couple pairs of pants, some shirts, maybe some socks I think? (I’d already packed the important stuff, the sex toy prototypes, the night before; I’m not a complete barbarian.)
I will spare you the harrowing and wildly improbable roller-coaster tale of what happened next—arriving just in time to discover that flight had also been canceled, flying standby on yet another—and skip ahead to the part where I arrive, exhausted but grateful, a couple hours earlier than I would have had things gone to plan. Suffice to say I eventually arrived in Springfield, through the magic of flight turned into something tawdry and uncomfortable.
I flew Airbus, so the flight was uneventful—nothing fell off, split open, or went “Sproing!”
My Talespinner and another of her lovers I hadn’t met yet greeted me at the airport. He turned out to be a lovely chap, and we immediately got on like two people who have a lover in common and are both dedicated to making her life as fun and interesting as possible. We got back to her place, yadda yadda yadda, a few days later we were off to the future city of Kanzit to do some sanity checking for a novel.
We are, you see, my Talespinner and I, spinning a tale. It’s a far-future, post-Collapse, magical realism novel about a young spinner named Aiyah and a brilliant but eccentric master tinker named Lazlo who specializes in making windup toys, who live not far apart from each other in the future Dominionate, a neo-Calvinist theocratic empire erected upon a horrifying slave society that has built their entire social foundation atop a legal and moral edifice of systemic subjugation of women.
In the novel, Aiyah takes a journey from her small snug cottage in the tiny village Half-Circle Cothold to the big, bustling city of Kanzit, the capital of the Dominionate. Along the way, she has many adventures, she meets all kinds of people, she makes new friends, she flees cross-country from the Inquisition without food or supplies, and she is forced to confront some uncomfortable moral truths about the horror that sits at the base of her society. Whee!
There’s a particular part of her flight that has some complicated timing and a lot of moving pieces, and even with Google Maps we weren’t certain about how the timing would work, so when my Talespinner was just like “fukkit, I’m gonna trace Aiyah’s path and see” I was like “you son of a bitch, I’m in” and that, rather than kinky group sex, was actually the purpose of the trip.
We rose and bundled into the car, my Talespinner, her lover, and I, to follow a path that does not yet exist through towns that aren’t there in the path of a woman who isn’t real, fleeing from an inquisitor who is both a proxy for the society we’re holding up as a mirror to our own and also far more complex than he lets on at first, to the complaints of her cats, who seemed to know something was up.
I’d say we traveled over hill and through vale, but that would be a lie. Much of that part of Missouri is as flat as workers’ real earnings since Ronald Reagan and as interesting as soggy gerbil bedding, so I will jump ahead once more to our arrival in Half-Circle Cothold, from which our protagonist set forth.
It’s not much now, but in two thousand years, it will still be…not much.
Fortified by convenience-store pizza and candy bars after a drive that would’ve been rather boring if not for the conversation and the company, we set out on foot across what will, in two thousand years and the deaths of billions of people, become a sleepy village on the water’s edge. (Neither geologic upheaval nor global change in temperature are likely to erase the spot; it’s safe against even six meters of sea level rise, which is beyond the most pessimistic projections.)
Onward we went, traveling not through the realm of the real but the realm of what Terry Pratchett calls ‘L-space,’ that place where untold stories await the person who will write them, discussing as we did everything from glassblowing to the economics of guild systems, observing how even today towns in rural America tend to be spaced about the distance a person on horseback can ride in a day.
Accommodations that night were to be in an America’s Best [sic] Value Inn. That failed to work out as planned, because it seems that while America’s Best [sic] Value Inns are fairly solid on the concept of taking a reservation, they are a bit less clear on what it means to keep a reservation.
Considerably frustrated with no room at the end, we at last located another hotel thirty minutes away, which turned out to be, Gentle Reader, the third worst hotel I’ve ever stayed in, and given that rodents and bullet holes figure prominently in the story of the first and second, believe me when I say that’s saying something.
After dinner, we settled in for more kinky group sex. Yadda yadda yadda, the next day found us at the seat of the Dominionate, or what will be in thousands of years. Right now, it’s home to a genuine Caravaggio, which truly was extraordinary, though I didn’t realize St. John the Baptist was quite so…buff.
All good things must end, and so we tore ourselves from the contemplative glower of Buff John the Baptist to follow the path of a different character, our villain rather than our protagonist, back to Springfield.
More group sex, followed by testing of xenomorph facehugger sex toys…
…somewhat interrupted by certain cats who insisted on photobombing the shenanigans…
…and yadda yadda, yadda, the next thing you know, we’re at a FedEx Office printing out pics from the trip for our very first Murder Wall™. (At least my very first Murder Wall™, I don’t actually know that my Talespinner has never made one).
I thought there would be more cackling involved in making a Murder Wall. I didn’t realize it’s so…prosaic. Hollywood never shows the obsessive conspiracy nutter dropping pins, or cutting the yarn too short.
Eventually, as time must do, the moment to leave came. It came inconveniently, at 3:30AM, since this entire adventure had been predicated on the cheapest airline tickets possible and that meant flying out at 5AM, but we do what we must because we can.
When my Talespinner’s cat figured out I was leaving, he became inconsolable in that way kittens who have taken a shine to you sometimes do.
So I hardened my heart, said my goodbyes, and disappeared into the night, leaving, or so I am told, rather a lot of my clothes scattered about her bedroom, because who can really pack at that hour of the morning?
Now, days later, we are still girding our loins for The Rewritening.
