Tag Archives: sex

Review: Kinklabs Neon Wand

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Back when I was married and living in Tampa, one of my favorite sex toys in the sex toy drawer box closet was a violet wand. It’s a gadget that you plug glass electrodes into and then plug into the wall. When you turn it on, it makes a buzzing noise and the glass electrodes turn purple, and then when you touch someone with the electrodes you get a sensation that’s like…

Well, it’s kinda hard to describe what it’s like. A lot of folks (like me!) who don’t like electrical play still like violet wands, because they don’t really feel like electric shocks. It’s more like little teensy hot needles caressing your skin. There are lots of different shapes of electrodes, that all make different sensations, but that’s the basic theme.

They’re amazing toys. They’re also very spendy. The violet wand I used to have cost me about $700, so when I lost it, I couldn’t afford to replace it, and I’ve been missing it ever since.

Recently, JT’s Stockroom sent me a neon wand as part of a promotion. And, to be honest, I’ve been waiting for someone to realize the market for cheap, reliable violet wands for rather a long time.

This is the Kinklab Neon Wand. If you really want to get technical, it’s not a violet wand, though the reasons that’s true are largely academic.

But, since this journal has never been afraid to venture forth into the academic, I’ll explain why; click here if if you’re interested.

Some thoughts on sex positivity

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A lot of folks use the terms “sex-positive” (usually in reference to themselves) or “sex-negative” (usually in reference to people they don’t much like, or society as a whole), but rarely seem to define exactly what those terms mean. There’s a lot of heat surrounding them, but very little light, and I’ve seen a lot of conversations in the BDSM and poly communities turn into “I’m more sex-positive than you” slagoffs. Go out on the Web and it doesn’t get much better; a lot of the definitions I’ve seen offered up for sex positivity don’t really seem to be well-formed (the rather dreadful Wikipedia article makes it seem like little more than no-rules hedonism, whose adherents get down with one another “with few limits;” sex-positive activist Carol Queen sees sex-positivity as recognition that there are “millions” of sexual orientations, and then goes on to talk about it primarily in terms of gender politics). These kinds of conversations seem to dance around the most important ideas behind sex-positivity without actually addressing them head-on, and I think they paint sex positivity in an erroneous light.

First off, sex positivity isn’t (necessarily) about sexual behavior. It’s not about how many people you shag, nor in which position you shag them, nor what you do with them after you’re done shagging. It is possible to be asexual and still be sex-positive. And on the flip side of the same coin, it’s possible to have a dozen lovers with whom you shag in the Monkey And Crane With Hand Grenades On A Trapeze position in three-day thirteen-way marathon orgies while still being sex-negative. The number of partners you have doesn’t define sex-positivity.

It’s also not about having an anything-goes attitude toward sex. I once had a person online claim that being sex-positive essentially means little more than embracing total hedonism as the only sexual ethic; his argument was that the term “sex positive” means seeing all sexual activity as a positive thing, and that since nobody actually does that for real (few people, for example, are willing to make the argument that nonconsensual sex is OK), sex positivity doesn’t actually exist.

And sex positivity is not about dismantling cultural norms. Just as it is possible to be asexual and still be sex-positive, or to have wild kinky sex with twelve partners at the same time and still be sex negative, it is possible to be married in a monogamous relationship with one spouse and live in a suburban house with a white picket fence while still being sex positive. You can not tell whether someone is sex positive or sex negative simply by looking at their sexual arrangements.

Sex positivity at its core is simply the recognition that there is more than one “right” way to have sexual relationships. It is an acknowledgement that human sexuality is incredibly diverse, that different people have different tastes and relate to sexuality in different ways, and that as long as everyone is having sex with consenting adult partners, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with sex, regardless of the way people relate to it. In short, it’s a deliberate refusal to place one’s own sexuality on a pedestal and proclaim it the “right” way to have sex.

Sex positivity is not about how many people you have sex with. I’ve talked, for example, to a person who is polyamorous and who has several sexual partners, who believes that having sex with anyone you don’t love”degrades” and “cheapens” sex, and is therefore wrong. Sex positivity embraces sex for a wide variety of reasons. Some people like to have sex simply for pleasure, without attaching expectations of emotional commitment to it. That is OK, provided that the sex is freely consented to by the people involved.

Sex positivity is not about having sexual relationships in any specific form. Some sex-positive activists see traditional pair-bonded monogamy as inherently disempowering and therefore bad, and say that being sex-positive means seeking to overturn heterosexual monogamy. Monogamous relationships are absolutely right for some people; there is nothing wrong with choosing to have sex with only one other person, just as there is nothing wrong with choosing to have sex with two, or five, or more.

Sex positivity is not (necessarily) about sex for pleasure. Nearly every person I’ve talked to and every Web site I’ve read about sex positive relationships focuses on sex as a natural and healthy thing to do for pleasure, which it is. But people choose to have sex for a number of reasons. Sex for procreation is a valid reason for sex. So is sex for profit. While it may make many folks squeamish, exchanging sex for money is a perfectly valid reason to have sex. Believing that a person who engages in prostitution is inherently less worthy than a person who has sex only for pleasure is not sex positive. Believing that all people who exchange sex for money are always disempowered and are always victims is likewise not a sex-positive attitude. Fundamentally, people have the right to control their bodies, and this extends to the right to choose when, how, and for what reason to have sex. Absent any coercion, sex for money, in any form from traditional prostitution to cam sex to production of porn films, is just as valid as any other consensual form of sexual expression.

Sex positivity is not (necessarily) about gender identity or orientation. I’ve heard the claim that all people are bisexual, and that anyone who is sex positive must embrace the notion that sexuality should ignore gender identity. The fact is that you can no more say “all people are bisexual” than you can say “all people have two legs.” Some people are attracted only to folks who have the same gender identity they do, some people are attracted only to folks who have a different gender identity than they do, some people are attracted (to varying extents at varying times and in varying circumstances) to members of many gender identities; while there is not necessarily a 1:1 correlation between gender identity and biological sex, there often is; and all this is a normal part of ordinary human variability. It is not necessary to identify as bisexual or pansexual in order to be sex positive. It is not necessary to have sex with partners of different sexes in order to be sex positive. Heterosexual cisgendered people can be sex positive.

Sex positivity is not about enshrining sex as a sacred act. I’ve spoken to folks in the tantric sex community who claim that in order to be sex positive, one must embrace the “spirituality” and “sacredness” of sex. For some people, sex does create feelings of spirituality, and that’s fine. But it doesn’t have to. Sometimes, it’s just about the orgasm. Sometimes, it’s just about friendship. Sometimes, it’s just about finishing the movie. The fact that it can be spiritual doesn’t mean it has to be.

Sex positivity isn’t (necessarily) about hedonism. Some people seem to have little or no drive toward sex; other people seem to take no particular pleasure from sex. A person may choose not to have sex, and that choice is just as valid as the choice to have sex. A person may choose to have sex for reasons other than physical pleasure–for reproduction, say, or for the gratification of a partner, or to scratch a biological itch–and that, too, is just as valid. A person is free to limit his or her own sexual expression, and provided that person does not then impose that limitation on other people, that person can still be sex positive.

At the end of the day, people have sex for a lot of different reasons, none of them intrinsically more “right” than any other. If you look at two (or three or fifteen) consenting adults having sex and say “Hey, what they’re doing might not be what I would do, or might not be happening for the reasons I’d do it, but that’s still a valid form of sexual expression nonetheless,” that’s probably a sex-positive attitude. The instant you start attaching thoughts of “They are more debased than I am because their reasons for having sex aren’t as good as mine,” you’ve stepped away from sex positivity, seems to me.

We’re all human beings, which means we all come factory-equipped with a tendency to see our own motivations as purer and more evolved than those of others–especially when we don’t understand why anyone else wouldn’t do something the way we do it. To be sex positive, it is necessary to take a conscious step away from that natural human impulse.

Linky-Links: Sex, Polyamory, Tech, and Humor edition

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It’s time for another massive collection of links, so I can close some of my browser windows and reclaim a whole bunch of RAM on this computer. Today’s list is heavy on sex, tech, and humor, making it different from any other linky-links post in exactly zero ways, I suppose.

Sex

From New Scientist magazine, we have the article Sex on the brain: Orgasms unlock altered consciousness. It discusses fMRI scans of a volunteer who masturbated to orgasm inside an fMRI scanner while the experimenters recorded her brain activity. If I had the budget, this is the sort of science I’d be doing.

The Sexacademic blog gives us a story titled Explaining Porn Watching With Science!, which talks about the neurochemical pathways active during porn watching, and along the way debunks some lurid, sensationalistic pop culture ideas about “sex addiction”.

On Sexonomics is an article Porn by the Numbers 5: On feminist porn. The myth that porn, or “mainstream” porn (whatever that is), never shows women in a positive light and is never aimed at a female audience is as enduring as the legend of Bigfoot. I was recently at a Science Pub, in fact, in which an otherwise sex-positive sociologist decried the portrayal of women in “mainstream” porn. The argument became neatly circular later when she said that “mainstream” porn is that which portrays women negatively. The fact that someone with a doctorate in sociology can think about something in such an intellectually sloppy way testifies, I think, to how emotional the subject of porn (and especially feminist porn) is.

Society and rape

Speaking of feminist issues, some time ago a prominent female blogger was approached by a stranger in an elevator at a convention. Said stranger asked her to go back to his room with him. She blogged about the incident and why it was inappropriate, and provoked a firestorm that many of you Gentle Readers are probably aware of. Her thesis is pretty simple: Lots of women are sexually assaulted; if you want a positive response from women, don’t approach them in ways that would make sexual assault easy.

A lot of men–including some men that I know personally and otherwise find to be basically reasonable people–flipped out about that, and started wailing nonsense like “Feminists think all men are raaaaaaapists!” Which is total bunk; what’s being said is that SOME men are rapists, but rapists don’t wear special T-shirts or have a secret handshake that identifies them, so if you’re being approached by some strange guy you have no way to know if he’s likely to assault you or not. That means being aware that a strange dude you meet might be willing to assault you. (The defensive, “you’re saying all men are rapists” response from a lot of guys is similar to the sort of response you see in US society when you try to talk about institutional racism; people who think “Well, I’m not a rapist” or “Well, I’m not a racist” become so reactionary when they hear what might sound like an accusation that they refuse to discuss rape or race in any sort of rational way.)

All that is a longwinded introduction to the next two links, The first, Women in Elevators: A Man To Man Talk For The Menz, talks about the reasons that women can be suspicious of being approached by strangers. Not every dog is aggressive, but nearly everyone feels some trepidation when approached by a strange dog, because there’s no easy way to tell dogs that bite from dogs that don’t. I’m sure somebody somewhere will be upset and insulted by a metaphor about dogs (“You’re saying all men are dogs!”), but if that’s the case, that dude probably can’t be educated.

And second, for the dudes who say “Well, women should just say so if they don’t want to be approached!” we have Another post about rape. This one talks about how women (and men, to be fair, though to a lesser extent) are strongly socialized not to say “no,” not to assert boundaries, and not to upset people. It is, I think, a toxic set of social values, but that’s a whole ‘nother blog post. The point is, simply asserting a boundary carries a social cost. (This is why I think the idea of affirmative consent, adding “only yes means yes” to the idea of “no means no,” is so important, as I’ve talked about before.)

Polyamory

For quite a while now, people have been bugging me to find a new home for my polyamory pages that until now have livedo n my site at www.xeromag.com. I’ve finally built a new site for them, More Than Two. I’ve blogged the new link before, but f you haven’t taken a look recently, you should. There’s now an RSS feed of new articles, and some new content has been posted.

On the Polytical blog is this excellent essay, I’m Better ‘Cos I’m Poly. Anyone who is openly out about being poly has probably at some point or another been labeled as “smug” or “arrogant” about it, most often by someone who identifies as monogamous. This essay is an excellent deconstruction of the “smug poly” stereotype.

Geek Humor

First up, we have these very funny Sci-Fi Ikea Manuals. What would happen if light sabers were real? Or the Tardis was something you could get at Ikea? What would the assembly instructions look like? Apparently, in order to put together an Ikea light saber, you must first have your hand chopped off by Darth Vader.

Our travel down the surrealist path continues with Ride the Gummi Worm, Muad’Dib, a diorama of a scene from Dune done with Gummi Bears and a gigantic Gummi Worm.

Do-It-Yourself Science!

I have blogged in the past about using and Arduino mocrocontroller board to make sex toys. For folks who think that sounds like a good idea but aren’t sure how to use or program an Arduino, there is a comic book introduction to Arduino, which you can download as a PDF. If you don’t have a background in electronics or microcontrollers but you want to build your own Arduino projects, this is a great way to get started.

Speaking of Ikea, which I was a bit earlier, for those of oyu who are photography buffs comes this guide to building a cheap time lapse panning unit using only things you can get at Ikea.

And from the Department of Mad Science So Preposterous it Just Might Work comes the story of a high school student who rigged a camera and GPS transponder to a bunch of garbage bags, filled them with helium, and let them go. This is a really cool science project done on a tiny budget and with really fun results.

Science

Over at New Scientist is this awesome article, Sky survey maps distant universe in 3D. The universe isn’t shaped like you think it is, and now a group of researchers are working on building what is by far the highest-resolution map of the physical universe yet undertaken…in 3D!

The Department of Unclear on the Concept

It’s likely that most folks reading this are aware of the Occupy Wall Street movement. It’s kind of the flip side of the American Tea Party movement;. The Tea Party is a bunch of mostly middle-class people who love and cherish the superrich and believe that the superrich, being such wonderful people and all, should be exempt from paying the same tax that the working class pays and should otherwise be given all sorts of concessions so that they can make more money. The Occupy Wall Street folks, on the other hand, embrace the heretical notion that taxes on the superrich should be increased so that the very wealthiest people are paying sixty percent of the taxes that the middle class pays, instead of fifty percent of the taxes that the middle class pays…even if it means that some of the world’s richest people might have to postpone purchasing that five-million-dollar yacht for a few weeks because of it.

I’m generally sympathetic to the Occupy Wall Street protesters, though there’s at least one of them who simply doesn’t appear to Get It…nor to have a functioning sense of irony. He argues that the mainstream media lies or distorts truth to protect the interests of the wealthy and powerful, which it arguably does…so his response is to, err, do the same thing. And when he gets called on it over on TimParkinson.net, hilarity ensues. Read the comments to get the full effect; there’s even a followup here.

More on the Mathematics of Sex Toys

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I’ve been posting a bit about the Tormentor, a sex toy I’m designing for the sole and nefarious purpose of not letting the user get off. Quick recap in case you haven’t seen the project so far: it’s a vibrator connected to a programmable microcontroller that’s programmed to run the vibrator in random patterns for random lengths of time with random pauses in between, to keep the wearer sexually aroused but without being q-u-i-t-e enough to allow the wearer to come.

Because, yeah, I’m kind of a bastard.

My sweetie lapis_lazuli beta tested the first standalone prototype, the Tormentor version 0.2, and the biggest problem that arose was that the deice was just too damn bulky.

Part of this was the fault of using a 9V battery to run the microcontroller, but part of t was the fact that the Arduino Uno board I’m using is just plain big.

I mentioned this problem to roadknight last time I was in San Francisco, seeing how he’s also a micorocontroller hacker and general mad scientist. He suggested that I use a Teensy USB board in place of the Arduino, and even gave me a spare that he happened to have handy.

The name doesn’t lie.


Size comparison, top to bottom: 9-week-old Tonkinese kitten, Arduino Uno, Teensy USB

The Teensy is certainly that; it was the second-smallest programmable microcontroller in his collection. (The first was an obscure Chinese something something on a flexible board, about the height of a grain of rice and three times that long.)

I’ve started looking into building the Tormentor version 0.3 around a Teensy. It’ll take a bit of work; the Teensy lacks an on-board voltage regulator, for instance. I’m thinking of using a 6.3v lithium battery to drive both the Teensy and the sex toy; I’ll have to cobble together a recharge/regulator circuit of some sort, but it should let me get the finished gadget very, very small indeed.

The Teensy people don’t understand something that Apple does: User experience matters. The Teensy board is unlikely ever to knock over the Arduino as the reigning champ of DIY microcontrollers, even though the Teensy is smaller and has better technical specifications, because the user experience when it comes to programming a Teensy is, to put it bluntly, abysmal.

You don’t get no Arduino-style all-in-one IDE and device programmer, where you can type code into a window and press a button and bam! The device is working! Oh, no. The Teensy requires you to install a gcc compiler, then type your code in a text editor, run it through gcc with make, and then load the resulting hex file onto the board with a loader program. It’s archaic and barbaric, and it brings back memories of my Programming 101 class in college, in which I wrote 8080 assembly on a CDC Cyber 760 mainframe, compiled it to a hax hex file, copied it onto a floppy disk, then ran it on a CP/M machine using a hex loader.

Someone, please kill me now.

There is, though, an Arduino IDE plugin for the Teensy, and though it’s a bit weird and doesn’t run all Arduino code, it looks like it should work for me.

The Mathematics of Sex Toys Made Tangible

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A while back, I posted a picture of a very early prototype sex toy designed to prevent its wearer from getting off.

This project is entirely separate from, and shouldn’t be confused with, the prototype sex toy that’s operated by the wearer’s brainwaves, which I’m still working on. The sex toy that is designed to keep the wearer from getting off, which I’ve started calling the “Tormentor,” is a vibrator connected to a programmable controller board that’s set up to run at random intervals with random pauses in between–perfect, in other words, for keeping whoever’s wearing it always aware of it, while not letting that person get enough stimulation to reach orgasm.

The very first proof-of-concept version was basically a bare controller board tethered to a laptop and connected to a vibrating egg. As it wasn’t exactly portable, it wasn’t able to do what I wanted, which is to be worn around while shopping or doing housework or otherwise going about one’s business.

So I started working on getting a more portable, self-contained version set up and running.

Click here for details, schematics, and pictures of the prototype being assembled

Fragments of Frolicon: Operation Wifebeater

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I first started hearing rumblings about Operation Wifebeater weeks before I headed down to Florida. Little hints, tiny suggestions of some dark and dire plan being cooked up by joreth and emanix, as vague and insubstantial as a rustling under the bed filled with implications of an unseen monster.

So on the first night of Frolicon, when emanix told me that joreth was already down in the dungeon and it was time for Operation Wifebeater to begin, I…

Hang on, let me back up a bit.

During my time in Florida pre-Frolicon, I did manage to accomplish a bit more than being abducted by emanix and modifying a MindFlex to act as a makeshift EEG. Hidden away in the suitcase I brought, tucked between the floggers and the rope and an abundance of clean socks, was a Clone-a-Willy kit. These things, in case you’ve never seen one, are do-it-yourself dildo kits designed to be used to take a casting from, and make an exact replica of, one’s penis.

joreth had given me this particular kit two (or was it three?) Frolicons past, and somehow we’d never found the time to use it. That’s not as surprising as it might sound; Frolicon can be a very busy time, and this year we were so busy we didn’t have time to schedule an orgy.

She wanted to make a point of cloning me this year, though, so the night before we were to leave for Atlanta, we set aside time to use it.

They’re actually pretty difficult to use. The mold material is fussy and extraordinarily temperature-sensitive, and I’ve experienced sexier things than sticking my you-know into a tube filled with gooey lukewarm mold material and holding it there for several minutes. Even with emanix‘s help, it was a complicated undertaking that was really only marginally successful. Nevertheless, it was successful enough, and the next morning, as we made our way north, we brought with us a replica–a bit misshapen, perhaps, but a replica nonetheless–of my willie.

Once we arrived in Atlanta, I had expected to start the debauchery with alacrity. Fate had other pans for us, however. As it turned out, the first six hours or so of our stay was spent running repeatedly to Wal-Mart and dollar stores in search of things we’d either neglected to bring with us or had deliberately not carried with us, thinking that they’d be easy to procure once we got there.

Two of those things were “a big sheet of foam core board” and “a whole bunch of pins with different-colored heads.” One of the plans I had for Frolicon was to put a poster of the Map of Human Sexuality on the motel room door with a bunch of pins, and let folks stick pins in it showing where they’d ventured.

The foam core was easy to find. The pins took three runs, two to Wal-Mart and one to a dollar store. The result ended up looking a bit like this:

We stuck it up next to the door with a handwritten color key (purple pins for things that folks had tried and liked, yellow pins for things that folks had tried and didn’t like, green pins for things that folks really wanted to try) and left it in the soft, gentle hands of Fate.

Between the late arrival and the bajillion runs to Wal-Mart to get yet another thing we’d managed not to have on hand, it ended up being quite late by the time we settled into the hotel. I stayed in emanix‘s suite as her captive, and joreth went off elsewhere to prepare.

emanix did some preparations of her own, before telling me “It’s time” and leading me down to the dungeon.

The name “Operation Wifebeater” was, as I discovered, more literal than figurative. joreth had dressed the part exactly like you might expect. I don’t know that emanix actually owns a wifebeater, but she came close, in a polka-dotted kind of way.

You can’t tell from this picture, but when I was dragged into the dungeon I soon was made aware that both of these lovely ladies were wearing strap-ons under their clothes. (How emanix managed to hide hers is a mystery still unsolved by your humble scribe.)

What followed was something out of either a B horror movie or a really interesting porn, depending on how you look at it, and gathered quite a large audience quite quickly.

Or so I’m told. I wasn’t watching. And it probably would have been impossible for me to have seen the audience anyway, given the fact that my face was buried… *ahem* Moving on…

The two of them had their way with me for a while, which was fun, and made just a bit surreal by the fact that joreth was wearing in her harness the clone of my willie we had produced the night before. I’ve heard the expression “go fuck yourself” on many occasions, of course, but I’d never seen its application in quite such a literal way before.

The rest of the con is still a bit of a blur to me.

A few bits stand out. The pet lesbians that zaiah and I had inadvertently acquired shortly after I moved to Portland, though a strange set of circumstances too complicated to go into here, were able to make it down to Atlanta of a visit, which was lovely. zaiah and I are both quite fond of them, and don’t get to see them nearly often enough.

Aren’t they cute?

emanix hosted the Frolicon Darkroom Party in the suite we were sharing the same night that the pets came down, and they helped run it for a while, which was totally awesome of them (and definitely counts as service above and beyond the call of duty).

At some point–I think it was the next afternoon–I had the opportunity to use joreth and emanix as victims lab rats test subjects for another round of EEG sexual arousal testing. The EEG setup exactly fit into a round metal tin, thoughtfully decorated with an Aperture Science logo courtesy of datan0de.

We do what we must, because we can.

For anyone who wants to see what an orgasm looks like from the perspective of Science, the complete data set from joreth‘s session is posted here, just in case you missed it.

emanix looked particularly fetching all wired up and ready to do Science.

joreth managed to squeeze in just enough time at the con to sweep up the top award in the costume contest, in her role of her alter ego, Miss Poly Manners.

There’s a corset under that dress. Yes, she looks hot in it. Yes, I have pictures.

Now, in all honesty, I’ve been going to Frolicon for years and I literally did not know that they even had a costume contest, which might say something about my priorities.

By the end of the con, the poster of the human sex map had been rather heavily used, and was bristling like a porcupine on crystal meth. I wasn’t able to figure out a way to get it home in one piece, but damn did it have a lot of pins in it. I got a crummy low-resolution picture from my cell phone, and some pictures from my real camera that turned out even less well, which is a pity…I’d love to have an accurate record of all the pins, you know, for data-mining.

Which reminds me, at some point I should rprobably do a statistical analysis of all the custom maps people make at the Web site for the map. Might be interesting.

emanix suggested making another foam core mounted poster for next year’s Frolicon, and putting it up in one of the con’s public spaces with instructions to stick pins in all the things that folks did while actually at the con, which sounds like a lot of fun to me.

The trip back from the con was almost as much fun as the con itself, but I have forms to go fill out, so I will leave you with one more picture of joreth in her wifebeater. Enjoy!

Fragments of Frolicon: There and Back Again

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It is a fact of life universally acknowledged by sages and fools alike that the best candy in all the world is to be had from strangers.

And emanix is stranger than most.

As long-term readers of this blog will no doubt remember, I first met her at Frolicon in Atlanta in years gone by (well, three of them, at least). Frolicon, for those unfortunate enough never to have been there, is one of the high points of the year; a weekend-long festival of depraved, kinky debauchery the likes of which to make the Marquis de Sade blush and the Pope kick a hole in a plate-glass window. It is also one of the relatively few times of the year when I can count on seeing my sweetie joreth and the various members of my Tampa family.

Lon-term readers of this blog are also no doubt aware that I generally chronicle the various goings-on in my life weeks, or even months, after the fact. So it is with this post.

I didn’t expect to make it to this year’s Frolicon, truth be told. My finances have been a bit of a shambles lately, and it’s rather more expensive to get there from Orlando than from Tampa. However, a certain bunny named emanix, who as I may have mentioned before is rather strange and also has rather good candy, stepped in at the last moment like a leporid angel from on high and volunteered to fly me out there, in exchange for (ahem) certain services to be negotiated later (ahem). Best still, she had opted to arrive Stateside from the distant and exotic land of London-town early, and would be staying with my Florida peeps while enjoying all the hospitality that the United States has to offer (which, this being a declining late-stage civilization, means rather a lot, hospitality being one of the few things that declining late-stage civilizations in general have left to offer), and so offered to bring me out early as well.

Tales of my various exploits concerning mad science with modified EEG toys and sexual stimulation having preceded me, it was decided by joreth (with, I believe, some input from datan0de and emanix and perhaps others) that rigging up an EEG for Frolicon was in order.

So, once I arrived in Florida, I was tasked with soldering…

No, wait, I take that back. Once I arrived in Florida, I was kidnapped from the airport, blindfolded, bound, and tossed in the back of a car by emanix with driving assistance from datan0de, and brought in a severely sleep-deprived and jetlagged state to an undisclosed location, whereupon I was subjected to the most appalling of sexual torments which I shall not disturb you with, Gentle Readers, on account of the fact that they might…disturb you.

I was then transported, also with emanix, to joreth‘s place, whereupon I was tasked with soldering together another Arduino/MindFlex toy EEG setup for doing a bit of Mad Science.

Having had the experience of doing this once before, I opted to make some changes to the hardware, by rigging up a switch which could be given to the victim guinea pig experimental subject to depress on the occasion of orgasm, which would write “Orgasm Switch Depressed” into the datastream upon such event and “Orgasm Switch Released” upon its conclusion, the better to have exact markers which would tell us later exactly at what point said orgasm occurred.

I have, as a side note, now made exactly two Arduino projects myself, the first of which has an orgasm switch and the second of which has a sexual torment LED. That probably says something about me…but I digress.

When the Mad Science rig was tested and known to be working, it was time to be off to Frolicon.

There is a Christian group in the United States which has several times in the past predicted the end of the world and the second coming of Jesus. The destruction of all creation in the final battle at Armageddon have thus far failed to materialize, though that has not prevented that particular group from continuing to predict its exact date.

This time around, they were certain enough of their predictions–which, as near as I can tell, are based in equal parts Bronze Age mythology, numerology, marketing hucksterism, paranoid schizophrenia, and interpretation of Sarah Palin’s fame as one of the signs of the End Times (that last of which, I do have to admit, is hard to argue with)–to spend a huge bundle of money on a billboard campaign advertising the end of the world, though what one is supposed to do with the information is a mystery which escapes your humble scribe.

One of the billboards in question was located in Orlando, near to joreth‘s house, so I snapped a picture of it for the lulz.

I have no doubt that it will keep getting funnier and funnier as time goes on. zaiah and I actually hosted a party on May 21, which is in fact the second end-of-the-world party I’ve hosted (the first in 1988), and it just never gets old.

Picture taken, we were well and truly on our way.

The drive up to Atlanta is pretty grueling under the best of circumstances.

The best of circumstances don’t generally involve a high-speed blowout on interstate 75 in the rural north of Florida. This particular trip, which emphatically was not the best of circumstances, did.

We replaced it with the little Go_kart thing that automotive manufacturers laughingly refer to as a “limited service spare” and were soon back on our way, searching for a service station that was still open and staffed with folks who wouldn’t kill and eat sexual deviants such as ourselves.

We found such a place without a great deal of fuss and with no casualties…

…whereupon we learned something new and unfortunate. Well, two new and unfortunate things…no, wait, three new and unfortunate things, now that I think about it.

The first was that another tire was quite frayed and ready to explode with little provocation, rather like any Middle Eastern country with Internet access these days.

The second of those three things was that the size of tire on joreth‘s car was exotic and not easily available in the backwoods of rural Florida.

The third of those three things was that such tires, which could be procured in a few hours’ time from a nearby town which had such newfangled amenities as electricity and running water, were hella fucking expensive.

The fourth of those three things was that small service stations in rural Florida are not generally the normal habitat of the European carnivorous candy-bunny.

But such ordinary garden-variety trials are not to stand between a gang of seasoned, veteran perverts and debaucheries the likes of which to make a Roman emperor weep, so we bucked up, walked to a local fast-food establishment, and waited.

The fast-food establishment in question, whose name is now long forgotten by your humble scribe, offered tea, which evidently is a beverage quite popular in London-town, so the bunny was soon in (moderately) better spirits.

It was also connected to a small store where one could buy a wide range of goods of dubious merit, such as police radar detectors, small plastic novelty items designed to be affixed to one’s dashboard, and inexpensive DVDs of movies that came and went in the theaters in less time than it takes a B meson to decay into J/ψ mesons in the Large Hadron Collider.

The store also sells Southern Pride stickers, which I was quite amused to note are made in China. Guangdong province, I reckon.

There is a rule of the Internet, called Rule 34, which says that if anyone anywhere is interested in something, there exists porn of that thing on the Internet. (There is another, lesser-known rule, Rule 36, which states that if anyone anywhere is interested in something, there exists a knitting pattern for it on the Internet.)

Rule 34 has let me down, though, for it would seem that there is in fact no Viking kazoo porn on the Internet.

However, datan0de and femetal own both a Viking hat and quite a startling number of kazoos, and I own a camera, so we resolved that we would make use of the London candy-distributing carnivorous rabbit and these things to fill this much-needed gap.

Alas, this photograph is the closest thing that exists to Viking kazoo porn, as we simply did not have time to do as we had planned to do. We arrived at the convention rather later than we had expected, and scarcely had time to settle ourselves before it was time for joreth and emanix to put Operation Wifebeater into effect…

…but more on that later. I would write more of Operation Wifebeater, a carefully-choreographed conspiracy of obscenity the like of which would make a Greek god shudder, but I have four-week-old kittens to play with.

Sex for Science! Chapter 3: It’s All About the Protocol

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Sex for Science! Chapter 0
Sex for Science! Chapter 1
Sex for Science! Interlude
Sex for Science! Chapter 2
Sex for Science! Chapter 3
Sex for Science! Chapter 4

Our accommodations and my partner in Science’s socks properly admired, it was time for business. Err, science. The business of science. And, um, stuff.

The motel did, amongst the amenities we didn’t need (like the bullet hole), provide the amenities that we did–namely, a bed, a door, and, once the office staff had got ’round to realizing the room was occupied, electricity.

The door was problematic. It had a fist-sized hole in it, which one does not normally expect to see in doors; but it did not have a doorknob or latch, which one normally does.

Fortunately, this wasn’t the front door, but rather the door between the suite’s living room and bedroom. The bedroom did come equipped with a bed–two of them, in fact. And, unlike a certain bed in a certain room atop a curtain turret in a certain castle in the south of France, the beds in this room seemed reasonably solid and unlikely to collapse at the slightest jouncing.

Which was good, as there is a possibility that the sudden and unexpected collapse of a bed might alter a subject’s brainwave activity, resulting in erroneous data that might be difficult to interpret.

My mad scientist partner and I checked the structural integrity of the bed, to help ensure first and foremost the validity of the data we planned to collect and also, as a helpful side benefit, the safety of our experimental subjects. When one is doing mad science, safety is job…well, safety is something one considers.

She had brought a photographer with her, so while the photographer started to set up we talked experimental protocol. If you’re doing anything for Science, including sex, you can’t just sit down and get right to it; you need to establish a methodology that helps to control for confounding factors and that has a reasonable shot at providing a clear answer to a specific question.

This is the bit that a lot of people get wrong when they try to understand the world around them. Take, for example, the popular old saw “you have to hit rock bottom before you can change.” What does ‘rock bottom’ mean, anyway? Having things go bad is often a catalyst for change, sure…but if one person loses a job and changes his behavior, another person loses a relationship and changes a behavior, and a third person loses his house and family and changes a behavior, which one has hit ‘rock bottom,’ whatever that is? Until you start losing limbs, you always have further down you can go. The concept of ‘rock bottom’ is poorly defined, just because the old saying sounds somehow better that way.

But I digress.

Our objective for this particular experiment was to see whether or not the Neurosky chip could detect any pattern of brainwave activity that was typical for sexual arousal but different from other states not related to arousal. To that end, she worked out a protocol that involved taking a set of baseline readings from each person while reading silently, meditating, and reciting a memory. That done, we would then record for fifteen minutes while each victim subject’s partner sexually stimulated that person. At the end of each session, there were exit questions involving asking the test subject for a subjective assessment of level of arousal and level of nervousness (to help control for whether or not nervousness was what the EEG was recording). During all this, a note-taker would be timing the events and recording anything that could present an anomaly on the EEG, as well as observations of each subject’s behavior.

My partner in science brought one of her partners along–the mutual friend who’d introduced the two of us on Twitter and made the whole thing happen. He brought a netbook to record data and a really nifty necklace with a microphone and a bunch of LEDs that would glow and change according to the ambient sound. That bit became interesting a little later on, as it turns out.

Photo gear (for the subjects willing to be photographed), netbook, modified Mattel Mindflex, and Arduino in pace, we were ready to start.

I’ll skip over the next few hours, as it was for the most part nothing but people putting on the MindFlex, doing a bit of reading and meditating and stuff, and then lying still and being sexually stimulated in various ways. I would hate to bore you with the details. Such details are the stuff of scientific research, but when described in black and white, they tend toward the drab and tedious: “Subject number three spread her legs while her partner slowly kissed his way down her body, until at three minutes and sixteen seconds reaching her clitoris, at which point the subject began to moan and…” You get the idea. Pretty dry stuff, right?

There are a few minor points that do bear mentioning, though. The striped socks did come into play again at one point, when the photographer got this rather awesome shot:

The second was the interesting way in which the necklace I mentioned previously would react when my fellow mad scientist was screaming, which was, in my estimation, pretty damn nifty.

The third, as I mentioned in an earlier post, is that the English language has no word to describe the experience of watching a pierced, tattoed woman you’ve only just met have a huge, screaming orgasm, then pull off the electrodes for the EEG machine, roll over, and start talking about sex-based differences in brain activation during sexual arousal. Dear God.

Now, at this point I have a confession to make, which, Dear Readers, I am trusting not to impact too severely your opinion of your humble scribe. I may lose some of my street cred as a veteran, seasoned pervert, but in the interests of fulldisclosure (for Science!) there is a confession I feel I must make.

I had not, up until this point in my life, actually had an orgasm in front of people I didn’t know personally. Oh, sure, I’d been to sex parties and played in public dungeons; I mean, really, who hasn’t? But until that afternoon in that seedy motel in the industrial part of Seattle, I’d not gone that one last inch (so to speak).

That all changed, though, and opened the way to a repeat performance, of a sort, in the dungeon at Frolicon some months later…but more about that at a later time.

I was rigged up, the baseline measurements were made, the timer was started, zaiah started doing things to me, and I in fact did have some incredible screaming orgasms of my own.

Four of them, in fact. I was right on the edge of the fifth when the fifteen-minute mark rolled by, and was left shaking and frustrated right on the edge. Much, I might add, to the delight of the onlookers, who seemed perhaps less than fully engaged in sympathy for my plight.

Experiment finally over, we parted ways. The Seattle folks went back to wherever Seattle folks go when they aren’t in run-down motel suites doing impromptu brain research about sex, and the rest of us headed out to dinner.

The dinner turned into a bit of a scientific enterprise itself, during which we attempted to establish a set of parameters by which we could decide whether key lime pie was a superior dessert to New York cheesecake…since, y’know, we were in the mood for Science and all. And, as it turned out, key lime pie is indeed a superior dessert. This is the sort of surprising result that one sometimes discovers when exploring the often counterintuitive ways of the physical world.

We only shocked the server once, with a passing reference to Eiffel Towering (the sex act, not the act of visiting the French landmark). That done, it was back to the motel suite, where I fell into a deep slumber and, I’m told, missed some more sexual hijinks of some sort or another.

On the way home the next day, we made a couple of interesting discoveries, which I will detail in the next chapter.

Sex for Science! Chapter 2: Orgasms and Striped Socks

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Sex for Science! Chapter 0
Sex for Science! Chapter 1
Sex for Science! Interlude
Sex for Science! Chapter 2
Sex for Science! Chapter 3
Sex for Science! Chapter 4

Apparently, I have a thing for striped socks.

I’ve never realized this before. I don’t know if it’s a new thing, this thing for striped socks, or if it’s just been lurking there in some far corner of my brain, latent, awaiting the day when the whims of fashion would free it from its dark, lonely cerebral cage.

Once lapis-lazuli had departed back for San Francisco, with its cold and its fog and its hypothetical approach to traffic control, we started getting serious about doing some brain scans for Science. My fellow mad scientist who’d contacted me on Twitter and I began proposing dates and experimental protocols, and I started casting out feelers (as one is wont to do) for some victims experimental volunteers willing to be rigged up to an EEG and sexually stimulated for Science.

One of the places I inserted a feeler happened to be one of the local poly groups, because hey, we all know that polyamorous people are easy to talk into being experimental subjects, right? It kinda goes with the territory. Once you’ve cast monogamy to the wind, it’s a long and slippery downhill slide, and the next thing you know, you’re in some seedy motel in Seattle being hooked up to experimental equipment and–

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

We picked a date, and I made an announcement at one of the poly groups I attend about searching for volunteers for a bit of kinky mad science. A new couple, recent imports from Australia, had decided to attend that particular meeting, and they both signed up with enthusiasm.

I like folks who’re not only not put off by that sort of thing, but are willing to say “Sure! I’d love to head off to a different city with a bunch of folks I’ve only just met and engage in sex acts while being monitored by brain-scanning equipment!”

When the appointed day arrived, zaiah and I set out to pick up our Aussie volunteer lab rats and head off toward Seattle.

We had previously reserved a suite in a motel in downtown Seattle, carefully chosen for its location just blocks from where the EEG machine we were intending to use was stored. The EEG in question had recently been purchased by one of zaiah‘s sweeties and transported to a space in Seattle’s industrial district, and as it was large and cumbersome and heavy and quite delicate, we didn’t want to move it very far.

As it turned out, that wasn’t an issue, though again I’m getting ahead of myself.

What we didn’t realize, when we reserved the suite, was that it was in The Worst Motel In Seattle. And I say that with confidence, even having not personally visited every motel in Seattle, simply because it would be impossible for any motel to be worse without actually being under active NATO artillery bombardment.

The Web site, with its carefully retouched photos, promised us a stove and refrigerator in our suite. What it didn’t mention is that the stove would have had its burners and most of its guts stolen by previous tenants, nor that the refrigerator would not actually work. When we arrived, there was no power to the room; the office switched on the power about five minutes after we checked in.

The Web site also didn’t tell us about the mural.

Dear sweet Jesus on a pogo stick, the mural. It would have been considered tacky by 1977 standards, and that’s no lie.

The suite also featured such amenities, testifying to a careful attention to detail overlooked by more pedestrian sleazy motels, as a fist-sized hole in the door separating the front room from the bedroom, and a bullet hole in one of the windows:

The only thing the motel staff didn’t think to provide us with that might have completed the experience was a sniper on the rooftop across the alley.

Setting up for the experiment itself turned out to be a bit problematic. I brought volunteers and lab jackets, but unfortunately, the EEG itself had, upon inspection, turned out to have been damaged when it was transported to the place where it was being stored. My erstwhile mad scientist partner had spent the entire night attempting to repair it, only to discover that the programming manual for it had somehow gone AWOL as well.

All was not lost, however. It just so happened that with an Arduino and a toy MindFlex game, it’s possible to rig up a crude but still effective (at least for my purposes) EEG. The MindFlex toy uses a Neurosky chip, which seemed fitting, as the experiment had gone full circle and come home to roost, or something like that. The Arduino/MindFlex combination is pretty close to what I intended to use for a brainwave-controlled sex toy, so while it was less than perfectly ideal to my fellow mad scientist, it was ideal for my own nefarious purposes.

At least the nefarious purposes involving sex toys and EEGs. I have other nefarious purposes, at least one of which involves commandeering an alien armada of space battleships…but I digress.

Technical difficulty resolved, I finally met my partner in mad science in the flesh for the first time:

I paused long enough to admire her fabulous striped socks (about which more later) and she paused long enough to admire our fabulous motel suite, and we were ready to start with the Science.

I’m still not quite sure which was more fun, being the experimenter or being one of the lab rats volunteers. But that will have to wait for the next chapter, which is the good bit and has kinky sex in it.

Sex for Science! Interlude: Snogging and such

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Sex for Science! Chapter 0
Sex for Science! Chapter 1
Sex for Science! Interlude
Sex for Science! Chapter 2
Sex for Science! Chapter 3
Sex for Science! Chapter 4

With the trip to MacWorld far behind and the seedy motel suite in Seattle still some distance ahead, I turned my focus to the notion of a brainwave-controlled sex toy with a singleminded determination that I set aside only temporarily when lapis-lazuli suggested that she might be able to make a trip up to Portland to visit me.

Okay, that last sentence is a lie. I don’t approach anything with singleminded determination; I usually have at least three things going on my mental plate at any one time, and even those can often be derailed by–oh, look, potato chips!

Ahem. Sorry, where was I?

Oh, yes. Singleminded determination. I focused a part of my attention on the notion that it might be possible to make a sex toy work by brainwaves, in a sort of “Hmm, I should look into this more!” kind of way. I exchanged a few emails with the person who knew someone I knew on Twitter, and we both sorta thought “Hey, maybe this idea has potential,” and that’s where it sat when lapis-lazuli said “Hey, I really liked meeting you in San Francisco; how ’bout if I come up for a visit?”

To which I said “Gee, that would be swell!” and off she went.

lapis-lazuli writes fiction. Sometimes, she writes sexually explicit fiction. She also has a wonderful sexy reading voice, so it came to pass that on a particularly interesting evening when she was up visiting, she started reading one of her published stories to me. Then she started doing…err, other things while I continued reading the story myself.

And it was good. Oh, yes, it was good. The story, too.

There came, however, a moment in the story in which one passing character made an offhand remark to another passing character, and for some reason, I thought of the lady who says “But I don’t like spam!” in the Monty Python Spam skit. And read the line out loud that way. I definitely think that she should do the same thing if she is ever called upon to read that particular story for an event of some sort, because who doesn’t like a MOnty Python reference embedded in their pr0n?

One of the many things I love about Portland is Science Pub, hosted frequently by the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, and more specifically by a friend of mine upon whom I’ve been harboring a mad crush for quite some time.

Science Pub is an awesome idea. Invite speakers on a wide range of science-related topics, get an audience of a few hundred into a bar, drink beer (or not, if you’re me–never could stand the stuff), and geek out. It’s hard to describe in mere words how much win and awesome it is.

As it turned out, the Science Pub while lapis-lazuli was in town was on the subject of music and brain development. And as it also turned out, lapis-lazuli‘s college background is in music theory and neurobiology. Put those things together, and it turned into quite an epic win.

Well, except for the bit where we left the pub and discovered that the car battery was dead. But, y’know, you have to break a few eggs if you want to make an omelette. Or, err, something.

The next day, there were pictures.

All this served to do two things: first, to distract me for a while from the fate that was still barreling toward me like a truck, in the form of a meeting with destiny in a seedy motel in the heart of Seattle’s industrial squalor, and second, to illustrate once against he dangers of meeting up with strange people on the Internet. You can never quite tell when they might bust out with a Monty Python voice while reading the porn you’ve just published in an anthology of erotica about casual encounters.