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.
Last weekend, while I was working with Joreth and Eunice on an upcoming episode of the Skeptical Pervert podcast, the conversation veered off in a direction I’ve been chewing on ever since: male expectations around sex.
Men and women have, by and large, grossly unequal experiences of sex: socially (men who have lots of lovers are “studs,” women with many lovers are “sluts”), physically (women bear a disproportionate amount of physical risk from sex: pregnancy, sexual violence, and so on), and even in their expectation of outcome (men are more likely to report a random encounter as physically satisfying, and often have an easier time reaching orgasm).
A lot of this imbalance is rooted in sexism, and we often talk about how sexism disproportionately harms women, but I think sexist ideas about getting it on hurt men, too. One of the ways that can happen is social pressure around sex: men are supposed to want it, supposed to take advantage of any opportunities to have it, and, I think, supposed to enjoy it even if it’s bad sex. Men are supposed to be opportunistic about sex.
In fact, I’ve often heard men say “there’s no such thing as bad sex.” I have literally never heard a single woman say this, but men? Oh yeah. All the damn time.
There is bad sex. Even for men. (As an old friend of mine was fond of saying, “if you think there’s no such thing as bad sex, you probably are bad sex.”)
The thing that got me to thinking along these lines was an event that happened in my sex life many years ago, back when I still lived in Florida, and had only recently started dating my ex-wife.
I came home from work one night to find all the lights low. Curious, I wandered into the bedroom, to find her in bed in a negligee, snuggled in with a female friend of hers. I was barely through the door before my wife dragged me down into the bed and started pulling off my clothes. Yadda yadda yadda, we had an unexpected threesome, me, my wife, and her friend.
Sounds like a Penthouse Letters, right? (Is Penthouse Letters even still a thing? I legit have no idea.)
But here’s the thing:
Her friend wasn’t someone I would have chosen as a lover. I tend, by and large, to decline offers of casual sex because casual sex doesn’t really work for me. And it was quite clear from the beginning that’s all this was: casual sex, no kissing, nothing beyond the grunt-n-thrust of two more or less emotionally uninvolved bodies.
It wasn’t good sex. I mean, yeah, I had an orgasm, she had an orgasm…but the thing that’s lingered, the overall psychic impression it left in me, was that it just…wasn’t fun.
I didn’t feel, back then, like I had any call to say no. And it wasn’t just because this woman I was dating had clearly gone through a lot of effort to set this up. No, it was more than that:
What kind of man turns down sex with a willing partner? What kind of man says no to a threesome?
Answer: Me, now. I’m way more likely to say no than I was when I was 22, and way more likely to decide that sex with someone I don’t feel connected to just isn’t worth it. But back then? It happened fast, I was in for the ride the instant I walked through the door, nobody at any point asked me if I was on board with this or not, and I genuinely didn’t feel I should—or could—say no.
And here’s another thing:
When I tell this story to other men, invariably, in-fucking-variably, the response I get is “What do you mean it wasn’t good sex? Are you mental? Your girlfriend arranged for you to have a threesome with another woman and you’re complaining about it? What’s wrong with you??!” (That is, when they don’t simply accuse me of making it up out of whole cloth—I get that a lot too, even about things I consider fairly mundane.)
Which leads me to think that for a lot of men, “good sex” is somehow…I don’t know if “performative” is the right word exactly, but good sex is in the context, not in how enjoyable it was or how you felt about it after.
Was she hot? Then it was good sex. Was it kinky? Then it was good sex. Did you get off? Then it was good sex. A threesome? Dude, that’s the brass ring, the sine qua non of awesome sex. You had a threesome with your girlfriend and another woman, arranged by her? You can’t get any better sex than that!
Whether it was satisfying, whether it met the needs of the people involved, whether it gave you what you want…irrelevant. Your girlfriend set you up with another woman! How jaded do you have to be not to think that’s good sex? Do you know how many men would kill for that experience?
The social construction of male sex is that men want sex, men should be grateful to have sex, and certain forms of sex—including the Holy Grail, sex with two women at once—is the pinnacle of the male sexual expression. The experience of that sex isn’t particularly important, or indeed even particularly relevant.
And I think that’s unfortunate. It means there are likely a lot of men out there having sex that…really isn’t that great, but that they’ve been told to believe is great, because what makes sex great is the display, the spectacle of it, not the experience of it.
But I rarely hear people talk about that, and that’s a damn shame.
I’m way more selective about sex now, and decline opportunities more often than I accept them (something else that often causes people to roll their eyes and say “yeah, sure, whatever, you’re clearly lying,” or in the case of one bloke I encountered on Quora who declared with absolute conviction, “no man anywhere would ever turn down sex”).
I wonder, sometimes, what the world might look like if we lived in a society that recognized men aren’t all cast from the same mold, and encouraged everyone to learn what works for them, and then have, you know, that kind of sex.
I like language. I hate what the alt-right does to language.
I’ve always liked language. Majored in linguistics for a brief time in my misspent university years, and today I make my living as a writer, so I suppose it’s not too surprising, really.
But man, watching the violence perpetrated on language by the American right is painful. It’s a travesty, what those people do.
Take the word “cuck,” for instance. It’s a favorite insult amongst the knuckle-draggers of the alt-right, most of whom likely have no idea what it actually means, just like they have no idea what “socialism” means.
It’s been fascinating to me to watch how the word “cuckold” has become politicized by the sex-negative contingent on the alt right; in only a few short years, the meaning of the word has been distorted, in a weird sex-hating Orwellian newspeak kind of way, almost beyond recognition.
The latest idiocy? Calling men who watch porn “cucks,” because—get this—you’re watching another man have sex with the woman you fancy.
In the strictest definition, a “cuckold” is a married man whose wife has a child by another man, without his knowledge, which he believes to be his.
The word comes from the behavior of the cuckoo bird, which lays its eggs in nests belonging to other birds. The other birds don’t know the egg was left by an intruder; when it hatches, they feed and care for the chick, believing it to be their own.
In the fetish sense a cuckold is a man whose partner has sex with other men, specifically for the purpose of dominance and submission or erotic humiliation play, with his knowledge and often in front of him. (A woman whose partner has sex with other women specifically for the purpose of erotic humiliation is a cuckquean.)
Cuckolding as a fetish is not just any form of non-monogamy. Swinging is not cuckolding. Polyamory is not (necessarily) cuckolding. Cuckolding is a specific form of non-monogamy, in a D/s context, for the purpose of humiliation play.
What’s weird is how the alt right has co-opted the word in some frankly rather bizarre ways.
Parts of the alt right, especially the weird sex-negative “fapping is bad, homosexuality is bad, but we fuck each other and it like totally isn’t gay” Proud Boys, have done some deeply weird reinterpretation of “cuckolding” to make it mean:
If your girlfriend wasn’t a virgin when you started dating, you’re a cuckold, because she slept with other men before you met.
If your girlfriend has sex with other people after you break up, you’re a cuckold, because…well, I’m not exactly sure why. Because you own her vagina and another man is using your property, I, um, guess? Or something.
If you wank to porn, you’re a cuckold, because you’re playing Willy Wonka’s Whacky Adventure while another man is putting the salami in the woman who gets you hot.
If you allow your woman to have male friends, you’re a cuckold, because reasons.
If you allow your woman to gain the upper hand in a relationship, or do what your female partner tells you to do, you’re a cuck, because even more vague reasons.
So we go from a very specific sexual fetish to any situation where any woman has sex with any man except you to a situation where a woman has any social power whatsoever even if it has nothing to do with sex…
…which, I mean, not to get too Freudian, but if that doesn’t lay bare the insecurities and fears of the men saying this, I don’t know what does.
tl;dr: You cannot by definition be cuckolded by a woman who is not your partner.
The connection between the alt-right, and the way sex negativity plays into alt-right ideology, is fascinating. The NoFap movement, for example, has become a doorway to alt-right and neo-Fascist ideology…but that’s a blog post (or maybe a podcast) for another time.
I am, as regular readers know, a big fan of various types of “consent play” in sex. A lot of people who hear “consent play” think “rape role-play” or “consensual non-consent” or “resistance play,” and don’t get me wrong, all of those things are fun, and a regular part of my sex life.
But what I really enjoy, the siren song that really calls to me, is a little different: it’s the consent play that comes from navigating that space where I give my lover consent to do something to me, then deliberately and intentionally remove my own ability to withdraw consent. Once the activity begins, I’m in it for the ride—there’s no taking it back.
Before we get going, let me say up front a lot of folks consider some of the play my lovers and I explore “edge play,” and there are a lot of people, including veteran BDSM enthusiasts, who flat-out won’t even consider some of the things I do. And that’s okay. I freely admit these tastes are unusual even in the kink scene, and with good reason. They require an iron-clad, unparalleled trust, a deep foundation in trusting both your partner to know and understand how far to take things and, just as importantly, trust in your own resilience in the event you have an unpleasant experience. (People talk quite a lot in the kink scene about the first kind of trust, but not so much about the second. I might write more about that in the future.)
And I get that high resiliency is a privilege. I also get that I haven’t grown up in an environment that tells me I’m supposed to have sex I don’t want, that I’m expected to have sex I don’t want, is a form of privilege, too. I’ve had sex I didn’t want to have, but always by my choice; it was never forced on me. So, yes, I completely understand the emotions I’m describing aren’t necessarily available to everyone.
That inability to withdraw consent, the knowledge that when I start, I’m saying ‘yes’ to my lover knowing that she’s going to do whatever it is and once it starts I will be unable to say no, is absolutely delicious to me.
What does that look like?
Image: https://unsplash.com/@klugzy
Part of it is somnophilia—the taste for sex with a sleeping partner. I don’t wake easily, so when I give a lover permission to use my body whilst I’m asleep, I do it knowing there’s a good chance that I won’t wake up quiiite enough to be able to communicate a ‘no’ even if I decide I object to what’s going on. That’s part of what makes it hot.
That inability to say ‘no,’ that idea that the yes, once I’ve uttered it, can’t be recalled, is intoxicating to me.
The Passionate Pantheon novels Eunice and I write, our far-future, post-scarcity philosophical erotica, explore this theme of consenting to things you can’t take back a lot—it’s a theme we keep returning to.
I wrote a scene into the fourth Passionate Pantheon novel Eunice and I co-authored, Unyielding Devotion (due out later this year), that plays on that idea:
“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 scene has been in heavy rotation in my internal fantasy library for years. If I were to live in the City, I might very well volunteer to be in the cage with Lanissae, at least once.
Why?
We included a scene that explains why I find it so attractive:
“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 with 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.”
I totally, 100% get that most people would take one look at that scenario and say “oh hell no.” And I get why, and that’s okay.
We don’t actually have the technology to do that, of course, but I’ve experimented with things that get as close to that feeling as I can.
For example, I learned when I burned my foot that cannabis edibles work really well for pain management on me—better, in fact, than the oxycodone the burn clinic prescribed.
I also learned that I get extremely suggestible when I’m high. and I’ve incorporated that in my sex life with some of my partners. I know that once I take that edible, my ability to withdraw consent will become impaired. That’s the point. That’s part of what makes it hot—that inevitability, that sense that once I’ve taken it, I will not be able to do anything about it. The drug takes about half an hour to start working, and that’s half an hour to really savor the knowledge that I have already passed a point of no return: that my ability to withdraw consent will soon fade and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
In principle, yes, consent to sex exists only in the moment and cannot be withdrawn.
In practice, the idea I like to explore is, can I give consent that is irrevocable? Can I deliberately create a situation where once i have given my lover consent to do something to me, I have also given away my right (or my ability!) to change my mind?
Is it ethical to do this? I think it is. We do it all the time in areas that aren’t connected to sex. Contracts, for example, don’t usually have an “oops, I changed my mind” clause—once signed, that’s it, no taksies-backsies.
Can we do the same with sex?
I think the answer is yes. I also think that’s super-hot. Other people might not agree. The thing about autonomy, though, is that people who value consent and agency must also respect that I have the right to say “yes, you can do this to me, and I explicitly give you permission to continue doing it to me even if I change my mind.”
Is this everybody’s cup of tea? No.
Should it be permissible in the context of sexual ethics? I think the answer is yes. I do believe that basic autonomy, the notion of “my body, my rules,” extends to me choosing, if I want, to give someone else consent with the explicit understanding it can’t be revoked.
In fact, I’ll even go one step further. Ready?
What we find sexy often varies with our mood. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably already learned that there are things that sound sexy when you’re aroused, but as soon as you’re sexually spent, suddenly seem a whole lot less interesting.
I’ve had a lover where one of our dynamics is we would negotiate new things to try whilst in the middle of having sex, when we were both ramped up and horny…things I would give this sort of irrevocable consent to. Then she would get me off, or I’d get myself off, over and over again until I was completely d-o-n-e done and not interested in sex anymore…
…at which point, then she’d do the thing.
And that is quite a potent head trip, let me say.
Now: Do I believe that it’s ethical to do this? Yes. Do I believe it’s ethical to give irrevokable consent and then change your mental state, for example with drugs or change in mood or arousal? With fully informed consenting adults who understand exactly what they’re getting into, yes.
Do I believe it’s ethical to do this for an indeterminate amount of time, as in “now and forever you can do whatever you like to me even if I say no”? That’s…a different thing. I think healthy relationships are always voluntary, and you cannot reasonably make promises of access to you or your body that continue past a relationship’s end. Not gonna tell you you’re a bad person if that’s your jam, but I am aware of ways that could easily become problematic.
And yes, I can see where even limited irrevocable consent might become problematic. Like I said, edge play.
But here’s the thing:
Playing in this way is beautifully, powerfully, intoxicatingly intimate.
Image: https://unsplash.com/@klugzy
Intimacy is about letting someone in, about letting them touch you, about allowing access to your deepest and truest self.
Part of the bewitching beauty of irrevocable consent for me is, as the character Lanissae says in our book, the connection. I am granting someone access to me in a literal, visceral way, allowing them to touch me, and giving up my ability to throw them out, to shut the door.
It’s an exquisite kind of intimacy, an intimacy that says “here, in this space, with you, right now, I promise not to take this back.” It’s an embrace of intensely deep trust.
The difficulty lies in the fact that I can tolerate only a narrow range of temperature. Anything above or below that range is pain.
I inherited this trait from my mom, along with her resistance to local anesthetics. It has a name, in fact: “congenital thermal allodynia.” It’s caused by a genetic anomaly of genes that direct production of a class of receptor protiens called “transient receptor proteins,” or TRPs, particularly receptor called TRPA1 (which activates in response to cold) and TRPV1 (which activates in response to heat).
TRPV1, the sensor that makes painfully hot things painfully hot
Simplified, handwaving over details, many TRPs respond to changes in temperature, allowing ions to flow through into the nerve cells the receptor proteins are attached to if temperature goes above or below a threshold. When these receptors are found on pain nerves, triggering them results in pain. The temperature-sensing receptors produced my body aren’t formed correctly, so the heat-sensitive receptors trigger at too low a temperature and the cold-sensitive receptors at too high a temperature; a shower that’s perfectly fine for someone else is painfully hot for me, and cold showers are unbearable agony.
That’s the background part I.
So.
Some time ago, I severely burned my foot by dropping a kettle of boiling water on it, which is how I discovered that boiling water burns are just about the only things that suck worse than kidney stones.
The hospital gave me a shot of morphine, which did nothing except make me throw up, and prescribed oxycodone, which also did nothing but make me throw up. Finally, in desperation, I tried cannabis edibles, which I found worked far better than opiates on pain—cannabis was the only thing that made followup viits to the burn clinic tolerable.
That’s the background part II.
Incidentally to this, I also learned that cannabis edibles quench the thermal allodynia. It was, I must say, quite an amazing thing to be able to take a nice warm shower and have it, astonishingly, be a pleasant experience.
For the first time, I really understood what people mean when they talk about enjoying a hot shower.
Fast forward a few years, and I discovered, also quite by accident, that cannabis edibles put me in my body. Normally, my experience of the world is that I live in a ball behind my eyes, connected to and driven around by a meat machine that I can feel, sure, but that isn’t really me. The first time I ever had the experience of completely inhabiting my body was after an experiment with psilocybin mushrooms some years back; and boy, lemme tell you, the experience that I, the me that I am, reached all the way to the floor was fascinating.
I learned earlier this year that small doses of cannabis edibles, about 1.25mg of THC and 1mg of CBD, will induce the same thing.
I also learned, entirely by accident, that a low-dose cannabis edible plus a Mike’s hard lemonade will put me entirely in my body but also make the experience extremely unpleasant.
That’s the background part III.
Now that you know the background, allow me to get to the point of this essay, in which your humble scribe and his Talespinner decide to do “Science!”, and instead accidentally do real, honest-to-god Science!
So first, the “Science!”
Those of you who’ve followed the adventures chronicled herein may be aware that for the last three years I’ve been hard at work on various xenonorph-themed sex toys, most notably the Xenomorph Hiphugger Strapon.
I made a xenomorph hiphugger for my Talespinner as well, and also I’ve been working on a xenomorph facehugger gag, which I brought with me to Springfield.
Two nights ago, my Talespinner and I attended a play party a a local dungeon, at which she played the role of a captive experimental subject caged and parasitized by xenomorphs.
A great time was had by all—you know it’s a party when the facehuggers come out—and so, the next day, we decided to bring out the facehuggers again.
Being that it was close to New Year’s Eve, we got a bottle of aggressively mediocre spiced rum, nowhere near as good as the rum we had in Barcelona, but adequate to the task of toasting the end of an objectively shite year.
And in the name of “Science!”, my Talespinner suggested we replicate my accidental findings with cannabis and alcohol, because, as all reasonable people know, replicability is the foundation of both “Sicence!” and Science!
And so it came to pass, Gentle Readers, that your humble scribe took a low-dose edible and a shot of mediocre rum, his Talespinner strapped a facehugger alien to her hips, and we were off to “Science!”
I won’t disturb you with the details of what happened next, as they would..err, disturb you. However, I will tell you that what we learned was the experience of being in my body was overall quite pleasant.
Until I crawled, exhausted and spent, beneath the blankets.
And the cold blankets were…I won’t say agonizing exactly, but certainly agonizing-adjacent.
Here is where we move from “Science!” to actual bona-fide Science!
It seems that alcohol doesn’t actually make my perception of fully inhabiting my body unpleasant. Rather, what one recreational chemical giveth, the other taketh away. Where cannabis removes the thermal allodynia, alcohol brings it back. And the combination of extreme—some might even say unreasonable—temperature sensitivity and being more consciously aware of my body than I otherwise am is an experienced not to be missed, unless you can miss it, in which case I suggest you do.
I spent some time this morning scratching my head about this, as I would not expect, at first consideration, alcohol to affect transient receptor proteins.
I finally dod a Google Scholar search while we were on our way to the store to purchase tools for minor alien penis surgery, when what to my wondering eyes should appear, but an NIH article directly on point about this:
And so it came to pass, Gentle Reader, that our attempts to get jiggy with alien hiphugger parasites and recreational intoxicants actually resulted in a finding supported by genuine empirical Science!, namely that cannabinoid molecules can suppress congenital thermal allodynia, a result reversible by concomitant administration of ethanol.
“The thing that makes you a good lover,” she said, “is that you listen to me when I tell you what I want, and you believe what I say.”
The second-sexiest organ of the human body. (Photo: Taisiia Shestopal)
We’d just finished a quite lengthy and vigorous round of fun, involving a crop, a gold-toned Sharpie marker, and several hours of vigorous and sweaty activity, during which I did at least two things I’d never tried before. (As a side note, I love the incredible, almost incomprehensible vastness of the human sexual experience. Even after decades of highly exploratory, experimental sex, there are still vistas unvisited, experiences untapped. I remember, ages ago, seeing a social media post by some naive dudebro who complained that sex was boring to him because “I’m eighteen years old and I’ve done it all.” No, my dude, you haven’t. If you lived to be eight hundred years old, and you did something different in bed every night for that entire time, never repeating the same thing twice, you’d still not have time to do it all. But I digress.)
I was surprised, at first, when she said it. “Listening to what I want and believing what I say” doesn’t seem like it should be that high a bar to reach. I mean, this is basic, preliminary stuff, right? It’s a bit like saying “the thing that makes you a wonderful cook is you turn on the stove,” right?
But the more I unpacked it, the more sense it made. It turns out this one weird trick is both more effective and more difficult than really it ought to be.
The result.
Okay, so if just listening to someone talk about what they want and believing them is key to being a good lover, why don’t more people do it?
For starters, most of us are indoctrinated from an early age to surround sex with walls of shame and fear. Especially women. Women who know and advocate for their sexual desires are “tramps,” “hos” (or among the less literate, “hoes”), “sluts,” whatever. I’ve seen people—sexually insecure guys, to a one—ask questions over on Quora like “my girlfriend said she wants to do [$Thing], does that make her a slut?” Not once or twice, but over and over. This is, apparently, something that a lot of guys have a great deal of anxiety about. Dude, chill, don’t you want a lover who, you know, likes sex?
And of course the flip side of that, the people who are frightened that they’ll be judged if they ask for what they want, that what they want makes them “weird” and therefore unacceptable.
“I want to try 69 in bed, but I’m afraid my boyfriend will think I’m weird.” ”Is it weird that I want to tittyfuck my girlfriend?” “I have fantasies about having sex while I’m tied up, does that make me weird?” “Is it weird I like feet?” “Is it weird I like having my nipples sucked?” The Internet is filled to overflowing with questions like this, and it breaks my heart.
A good general rule of thumb: If you’re worried about being “weird,” you will never be good at sex. Just imagine if we applied this level of fear to anything else: “I want to try sushi, is that weird?” “If I want to take my girlfriend to a Thai restaurant, will she think I’m weird?”
Now, these aren’t new observations. But still, the level of fear and shame around sex is a tragedy. People agonize over whether or not their tastes are too far outside the pale for any lover to accept them, and at the same time agonize that their penis isn’t big enough for them to be good in bed. My dude, no, you aren’t a good lover because you have a colossal dong, you’re good in bed because you know every lover is different, every person has different tastes, and you communicate openly about sex.
Who knew, right?
So, I mean, it’s one thing to identify the problem, but it’s another to propose a solution. The problem is long-term indoctrination into a cult of secrecy and shame. You don’t overcome a lifetime of those lessons just by waking up and saying “okay, I’m going to be open about sex now.”
So allow me to propose a solution.
Woman with sex toy
My Talespinner and I met, as people often do, online. Early on in our acquaintance, we talked about our sexual fantasies, and spent endless hours exploring fantasy worlds together.
I don’t mean in the sense of “What are you wearing? Ooh, I’d love to bend oyu over right now.” I mean in the sense of constructing fictional characters and settings together, and exploring what happens to those characters, often in graphic detail. In other words, using the first sexiest organ of the human body.
The nice thing about telling interactive stories about fictional characters is it’s a safe, fun way to explore the places where your fantasy worlds overlap. (In fact, we had so much fun doing this, we ended up creating a shared-world fantasy about characters in a dystopian society that my co-author Eunice started participating in. Shared-world anthologies are fun!)
If you’re uncertain about your creative or wirting skills, reading erotica to each other, or even just putting snippets of erotica that really works for you, is another way to do the same thing. You create a space apart from the real world where it’s possible for you and your partner(s) to share your fantasies and explore the interesting bit of the Venn diagram, the place where they overlap.
And who knows? You might just find that while you were busy feeding your anxiety that your partner would think you’re “weird,” they were just as weird as you.
Which, of course, brings us back around to the “listen and believe what I say” thing.
It’s important to choose partners who don’t hear something out of whatever they imagine “ordinary” to be and say “eww, isn’t that weird?” But it’s just as important to be that person.
If you want to be a good lover, you will never get there by hearing something that surprises you and saying “eww, that’s weird.” You can’t expect your partner to share if oyu don’t make it safe to share. (Yes, I know, hashtag #ShouldBeObvious, but here we are.)
And finally, while we’re on the subject of #ShouldBeObvious, here’s a radical thought: Your lover knows more about their turnons and kinks than you do. If they say something gets them off, or they really want to try something, that might just mean—work with me here, a lot of folks seem to find this hard to believe, but it might just maybe perhaps mean that thing gets them off, and they really want to try it.
I know, right?
Everyone says communication is important to a good relationship. Part of that is, well, believing what your partner says. After all, that person is the world’s leading expert on being that person.
Whilst the extended polyamorous netowork and I were in Barcelona, we took time out from seeing the Sagrada Familia and doing…um, other stuff to take a ton of photos of the xenomorph sex toy prototypes.
That’s right, now you can order your very own hiphugger, for all your xenomorph ovipositor violation needs.
These things each take about three days of fussy, fiddly work to make, so for the foreseeable future I will only make one of them a month. First come, first served, and yes, they’re expensive.
If you order one, I’ll make it specifically for you, in whatever color you like.
We had a ton of fun doing the photo shoot, and got pics of some other xenomorphic goodness as well, including the xenomorph pacifiers and nipple pasties. (Yes, I made xenomorph pacifiers and nipple pasties. What can I say? My parents brought me to see Alien when I was, like, 12 or so, and it scared the holy hell out of me for the next thirty years.)
In which our hero has alien sex toys scanned for bombs, and urethral sounds confiscated…
Okay, so. I travel a bit, sometimes internationally, and so it was I found myself jetting off to Barcelona for a vacation with the extended polyamorous family a few months back.
I have, as those who follow this blog know, been working for several years on a Xenomorph Hiphugger Strapon, inspired by (a) my lifelong fear of the alien from Alien (a movie my parents took me to when I was, like, 11 or 12 or something, thinking it was like a new Star Wars…no exaggeration, I had nightmares aout that alien for more than 30 years after), and (b) a suggestion by my wife that I should make a sex toy inspired by the alien, because she loves to push my buttons.
In fact, a photo of one of the early prototypes ended up going mad viral on the Internet, and I’m told has even been uploaded to the official Sigorney Weaver fan page, which means Ms. Weaver has likely seen it. 0.o
Anyway.
I cast four prototype xenomorph hiphugger strapons and one xenomorph facehugger gag in the runup to Barcelona, with the idea that having multiple lovers in the same space would be a fine opportunity for a xenomorph gangbang, truly a test of the design.
So it was I packed all these xenomorph hiphuggers in my luggage and jetted off to Springfield, MO, to meet my Talespinner, who would be accompanying me to Spain.
You would not believe what this looked like on the X-ray. Sadly, they refused to allow me to take a pic.
The problem started quite early. Whilst carrying my luggage aboard the plane, the X-ray showed a suitcase absolutely packed with aggressive alien endoparasites, which, as you might imagine, elicited some…excitement at screening. (I didn’t put them in my checked bag because it was mainly filled with photographic gear and clothes.)
The bag got bounced, the TSA checker opened the lid, and gentle reader, if I could have photographed his expression and shown it to you, you would know that it is possible for surprise to take on human form.
Within minutes, there was a crowd around the table: the TSA inspector, the woman running the X-ray, and two other people, all of them staring in slack-jawed astonishment. The TSA checker called for his superior, who was like “What the…?” One of the other TSA screeners said “Holy shit, that looks like the alien from the Alien movies!”
TSA screener: “Should I—”
Supervisor: “Yes.”
And then they, hand to God, scanned the hiphuggers for explosives.
Eventually convinced the hiphuggers weren’t actually bombs, they allowed me to board, where I sat in a chair that through the miracle of Science flew through the air.
But that’s not the end of the story, oh my no.
When the time came for us to head from Springfield to Barcelona, I re-packed everything, in no small part because of the way TSA freaked out about the xenomorphs, but also prompted by the need to rearrange in order to fit two rather large studio lights for the xenomorph photo shoot we had planned. (That was an adventure in itself; the tripods for the studio lights were an inch and a half too long to fit the suitcase, but fifteen minutes with a hacksaw soon fixed that.)
We set off for the airport, confident that this TSA experience would be far smoother. Alas, it was not to be.
During the rearranging, I’d put the more conventional sex toy kit in my carryon whilst the hiphuggers ent in checked baggage with the studio lights, UV-reactive body paints, UV blacklight, and other miscellaneous orgy supplies.
I did not know, Gentle Reader, I did not suspect, that I had planted the seeds of my own undoing.
For you see, in my conventional sex toy kit I’d placed my collection of sounds. If oyu don’t know what those are, I won’t disturb you with the details, except to say that I had about ten or fifteen and they looked like this:
The TSA guy…
…confiscated and threw away the sounds.
When I asked him why, he looked me straight in the eye and told me, you could stab someone with them.”
You. Could. Stab. Someone. With. Them.
Words…words fail. Whatever danger these may pose as a weapon, Gentle Reader, let me assure you that the 100% sustainably made, biodegradable wood cutlery they gave us aboard the plane would be a far better stabby weapon in every single axis.At this point, it’s hard to escape the perhaps paranoid conclusion that my name exists on some TSA list somewhere. I had a slab of Barcelonan chocolate in my computer bag on the way home and it got scanned for explosives every single time I went through security.
I’ve now been back from Barcelona for a week, but I still don’t have my luggage (thanks, WestJet!). I’m way, waaaaay behind on processing and posting photos from the trip, including from the two days I spent at the Sagrada Familia (which was magnificent beyond what I ever imagined), so here’s a quick teaser from a Barcelona photo shoot of the alien xenomorph hiphugger Borg Queen parasite.
