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.
Today, I had to run a rather annoying errand—namely, I had to hike down to the Post Office (a 20-minute trek each way), which thankfully is open half the day on Saturday, to mail some of my personal porn stash to Congress.
Yes, I’m serious.
To understand this story, you must first understand cataloguing-in-publication. Most books published in or for sale in the United States have a CIP data block on the copyright page. It’s a set of bizarre numbers and dashes, and it indicates exactly how the book should be catalogued using the Library of Congress cataloging system.
This system is way more complex than the Dewey Decimal System, and has category identifiers for every category of fiction and nonfiction you can imagine, up to and including subjects as specific as “hacking,” “betrayal,” and “voluntary human sacrifice.”
This CIP data block looks like this:
These numbers all instruct libraries exactly how to file the book. The CIP block is put together by library science researchers who are intimately familiar with the filing system, and study the book to see how to categorize it.
You can get this information free from the Library of Congress, or pay researchers at specialized companies to put this block together. Without it, libraries will refuse to stock the book.
If you have the Library of Congress do it, you can get a Library of Congress Control Number, an ID that links the book to its CIP data block online. This LCCN also appears on the copyright page. So far, so boring.
Now, when you register a copyright on a book, you must send two copies of the book to the Library of Congress. However, if you get an LCCN, you must also send a third copy to a different office at the Library of Congress.
When Eunice and I published our pornographic collection of short stories, Ecstatic Communion, we got an LCCN. I didn’t realize until today that the Library of Congress needed that third copy. I didn’t have any extra copies, so I just had to send them my own personal copy.
Which means I can now check off “send porn from my personal stash to Congress.”
…and all through the house, the hiphuggers were scurrying, searching for a victim to parasitize, a host they could control, forcing the host to violate all around, spreading their eggs in a gush of slime…
My wife decided that, given the alien from the Aliens movie has been the shape of my nightmares for years, I should make an alien xenomorph hiphugger strapon sex toy. And given that she loves cosplay, she’s also decided to do a Borg Queen costume, to go with it.
Because what’s worse than being parasitized by an alien hiphugger? The Borg Queen parasitized by an alien hiphugger, of course!
I’m helping her design those bits of the costume that require a 3D printer, so she’s made a life-sized dressmaker’s dummy casting of herself to better help me make sure the various bits and bobs I print are the right size.
I have the dummy sitting on my couch right now, and, well…
It’s a bit disconcerting when I wake up in the middle of the night to pee.
Orchids are cool, in a “nature is horrifying” way. There are species of orchid that have evolved structures that look like insects, which they use to lure in insects searching for mates.
Some orchids use these insect visitors to pollinate themselves. The insect does its thing and then flies off, horny and frustrated and covered with sticky pollen, but otherwise none the worse for wear.
But some orchids are carnivorous. They lure insects to their doom, slowly digesting their prey alive as the ill-fated insect struggles helplessly.
And some orchids mimic insect pheromones, sweeting the honeytrap with the same signals that female insects use.
I’ve been thinking quite a lot about sexual parasitism of humans lately, in no small measure because I’ve finished the first version of the Xenomorph Hiphugger Strapon, a Giger-esque nightmare sex toy first conceived by my wife Joreth. Imagine an alien facehugger that wraps around the subject’s hips, then incites the subject to seek out victims, violating them in a parasitic frenzy. As creepy as this image is, it’s table stakes in the game of real-world sexual parasitism, which is horrifying.
Anyway, that’s got me thinking: what if an alien species created mimics of human females to lure in the male of the species? (An idea for a horror novel with this theme is bubbling in my brain; stay tuned!)
What I’ve come up with so far is…well, pretty horrifying.
I’ve started work on a small, AI-illustrated graphic novella (is a graphic novella a thing?), though with all the projects in the pipe right now—including a version of the hiphugger strapon optimized for oral violation—it may be a while before it’s finished.
I tried to do a different thing, but I couldn’t do the thing I wanted to do that was different from the thing I did, so I did the thing instead. Then I did the other thing, too, so…things got done.
It started yesterday morning, when I woke intending to post a new episode of the Skeptical Pervert podcast, this one looking at sex work in different cultures. But what to my wondering eye should show up, but a database server error at my webhosting provider. As I waited for them to fix the problem, I…amused. Yes, that’s the word we’ll use. I amused myself by writing a quick and crude web page that generates random horror poetry and pairs it with a random tentacle image generated by a Stable Diffusion AI generator.
It’s still quite primitive, but it looks like this:
You can, if this strikes your fancy, check it out here:
I’ve done it! They said I was mad, but I’ve done it! After almost three years of work and countless redesigns, I present to you:
The Xenomorph Hiphugger Strapon!
Ripped straight from a nightmare
This Giger-inspired monstrosity comes from the deepest depths of my nightmares. It all started when my wife Joreth said, hey, you know what would be cool? A strapon that looks like the facehugger from Alien, but it goes around the wearer’s hips, and the tail is a dildo.
And now, here it is!
This thing is massive—almost eight pounds of silicone—and features a tube and a reservoir so that the tail can be made to spurt fluids. Because it isn’t really an alien if it’s not dripping slime, right?
The tube was actually a late addition—I’d finalized the design when joreth said “hey, can you make it spurt?” The version you see here is a bit of an accident: I’d intended to buy silicone tubing that was 3 mm inside diameter/5mm outside diameter, but accidentally ordered 5mm/7mm tubing instead. So it should, I think, have a rather more…voluminous fluid flow than I’d originally planned.
As many folks who read me probably know by now (and goodness, I’m doing my job wrong if you don’t!), I’m polyamorous. I’ve been polyamorous my entire life, I’ve been writing a Web site about polyamory since the 1990s, and I recently co-wrote a book on the subject.
A lot of folks ask me if I get negative responses from being so open about poly. And the answer is, no, I usually don’t. In fact, it’s extremely rare that I hear anything negative about polyamory, all things considered. I generally encourage folks who are poly (or in other non-traditional relationships) to be as open as they feel safe in being, both because stigma is reduced when many people are open about non-traditional relationships and because, almost always, the pushback is nowhere near as great as people are likely to think it will be.
But that’s not to say I never hear anything negative. Like this, for example, left as an anonymous comment to a post I made about dating and relationships on a social media site recently:
“This is what a woman had to say about you “Let me put this franklin, frank is a user/manipulator. I am sure he tells the women he is with that by being in a relationship with him and 4 other women that he is “empowering” them. You have to realize that there is a new “modern” type of feminism, these women misconstrue the term femism. The original feminist wanted to feel equal to men, they wanted more opportunities that we (women) are now given due to thier efforts. Nowadays women are empowered in a completely different way, women are mislead (in my opinion by manipulative men such as franklin) to believe that being overtly sexual is empowering, so that is why you see these women bending over backwards for men. I dont know exactly who is misleading women of our generation to believe polyamory is empowering or being overly sexual is but its someone, perhaps the feminists in the media but the question who is behind the media in the first place? I just feel bad for young feminists because they have no true understanding of what it means to be empowered and they are very confused. Franklin is smart and manipulating each girlfriend he has and he most likely a sociopath.””
Formatting, quote marks, and spelling as in the original.
So now you know, the media feminists are pushing women into the arms of sociopaths like me. Curses, my secret is out.
Every time I write a blog post like this, as sure as night follows day, the same thing happens. Invariably, I will get at least one, and sometimes several, private emails in my inbox. The content of these emails is always the same, and they’re rarely stated in the blog comments. Every time, they’re some variant on the same theme:
That must be working pretty good for you, huh? Pretending to be a feminist must really get you laid.
This has happened for years, and this last blog post was no exception.
I’m not quite sure what to make of the assumption that a man who espouses feminist values must be using it as a ploy to get sex. The first time I encountered this, it was quite a head-scratcher, I must confess. Really? I thought. That’s your take-away? I am pretending to support values and ideals about women’s agency because I’m trying to score sex from feminists? Seriously?
Now, in all fairness, if you look at all my partners, it’s very unlikely I would be involved with them if I weren’t a “feminist man,” or, as I like to call it, “a man who thinks women are people.” I have simple tastes; I prefer strong, smart, confident women, and those tend–surprise!–to be women who like being treated as people.
But here’s the thing.
The fact that these women would only be likely to get involved with a man who respects the ideals of feminism doesn’t mean that they’d get involved with every guy who respects those ideals. Treating women as people is necessary but not sufficient; if you treat women as people, that doesn’t guarantee you’ll be involved with them, but if you don’t, you won’t. Yes, in order to have sex with my partners, you have to be a dude who’s a feminist. You also have to be a dude who they think is worth having sex with, and you can’t fake your way into that.
So as a strategy for getting laid, adopting feminist ideals is, by itself, kinda rubbish.
And pretending to adopt feminist ideals is even more rubbish.
I don’t quite get what’s going on in the head of some guy who thinks pretending to be feminist is a ploy to get laid, but I have to assume that a guy who thinks that, probably doesn’t think women are very smart. If someone pretends to think women are people, but doesn’t actually think women are people, I suspect the ploy would be revealed rather quickly. Probably some time between appetizers and the main course, and certainly well before any clothes come off. I really don’t think it’s possible to pretend to be feminist, at least not for any length of time longer than a dinner conversation.
I don’t say that rape culture is a thing because I’m hoping to get laid by women who say that rape culture is a thing. I don’t think women deserve agency and personal autonomy as a tactic to try to get them to use their agency and personal autonomy to fuck me. I mean, seriously, what the fuck? How is it that someone might seriously think that being nice to feminists is a strategy for getting laid? Is it because he thinks feminists are so well-known for…um, having sex with any guy who’s nice to them?
If I were to advocate some kind of duplicitous scheme to get more sex, I would definitely recommend “learn to swing dance” over “pretend to be a feminist.” It certainly seems far more likely to succeed. Pretending to be a feminist when you really don’t think of women as real people, just to try to get in the pants of women who want to be treated like real people, is just…it…I just…what is this I don’t even.
