Musings

Bottoming is a Skill! (+ some tips on how to build it)

Kate Sloan
Photos by mb, of me finding out that Nick Jonas was performing in the Miscast video we were watching, lol

I am a good reactor. That is to say, I am good at reacting to things. I used to think this wasn’t even a skill – but through sex, kink, and comedy, I’ve learned that it absolutely is.

Over the course of a typical week, I’ll attend at least one improv show, and have kinky phone sex with a partner at least once. While these two activities occur in different places, contexts, and headspaces, in many ways I bring the same skills to the table for both: I dial up my natural reactions slightly, making more noise than I would if I was alone, because my responses serve a social function. They communicate what I’m enjoying, which helps the partner or performer hone their approach over time; they encourage any others present to react more openly too – and perhaps most crucially of all, they provide positive feedback which can make someone feel good, motivated, and appreciated.

Audience members at comedy shows might think they matter less than the performers they came to see, but without attentive audiences, performers simply couldn’t do what they do, or at least wouldn’t enjoy it nearly as much. And by the same principle, when you’re bottoming (i.e. receiving sensation) in a kink scene, you might feel like you’re “not really doing anything” and like your top is “doing all the work” – when, in fact, it’s your receptiveness and reactivity that’s making their “work” feel like play! They might even feel lucky to get to top someone like you.

Suffice it to say: Bottoms aren’t just punching bags and cock sleeves – we’re a living, breathing, positive feedback loop, with skills worth boasting about. How do you build those skills, though? I could talk about this for hours, but here are 3 quick tips from my years of bottoming:

Amplify your reactions

A lot of people learn to be ultra-quiet when receiving pleasure (or pain, for that matter) while growing up, so for some of us, it may not come naturally to make noise at first. However, you can practice this skill, like anything else.

Moaning (or gasping, whimpering, etc.) is not automatically inauthentic just because you consciously choose to do it. You’re merely turning up the volume on your natural reactions to make them more legible to your top, which they will find both hot and useful. It gets easier the more that you do it, I swear. (And if you hate making noise in a silent room, put some music/white noise/rain sounds on, for fuck’s sake!)

Unlearn your people-pleaser tendencies

If you, like me, struggle with a compulsion to always say ‘yes’ and do what people expect of you, you might just be a people-pleaser. It’s an understandable maladaptation, but when it comes to bottoming, it can corrode the connection between you and your top. In order to play safely, they need to trust that you will safeword or say ‘no’ if you want/need to – which means you have to be able to say ‘no,’ even to someone you really like, and even when you’re incoherent from subspace.

I needed a few years of trauma therapy to address this issue, but even just saying ‘no’ to your partner about innocuous things (e.g. “Do you want Mexican food tonight?” “No, I had Mexican food last night…”) can be good practice. Work that muscle until it’s strong!

Ask yourself why

When something feels good during sex/kink, either physically or psychologically, ask yourself why that is. In other words, ask yourself what you liked about it, and file your answers away. Do the same for anything you decidedly don’t like – what made it unpleasant for you? You can share this info with tops as needed.

One of the things tops have consistently complimented me on is that I know what I like/want/need – but it took a lot of work for me to get to that point! Self-knowledge is often hard-won, and expressing that self-knowledge to someone else can feel super vulnerable – but that’s part of what makes kink such a beautiful practice: it invites us to know ourselves and our partners better, to see different sides of ourselves, to uncover the deep ‘whys’ of our own pleasures and joys.

Fellow bottoms, what other skills do you think are important for us to hone?

 

This post contains a sponsored link. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

An Underrated Way to Expand Your Kink Palate…

Kate Sloan

Ever feel stuck in your kinks, like you’re just looping the same fantasies in your head every time you jerk off/have sex, unable to break free from your own patterns?

Trust me, I’ve been there. While I’d never advise you to shame yourself for your desires, sometimes it’s not shame so much as boredom and monotony that make us want to expand our kink palates and palettes. Humans thrive on novelty, after all, and even your all-time favorite treat might leave you wanting more at times. (A lady cannot live on chocolate cake alone, as much as she might want to…!)

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that you can liven up your kink life by playing with people whose kinks differ from yours – ideally people with whom you have some overlap, but plenty of differences, too. As a fetishist friend of mine once put it (while consensually threatening to do a knife-play scene with me!), “I mean, we aren’t looking to be life partners here. Maybe just learn some stuff.”

This resonated with me deeply because, for me, so much of kink is about learning: it’s a lens through which to continually discover and rediscover what interests you, what excites you, and what you’re capable of. And in kink as in the rest of life, we often learn the most from people who are very different from us – because they inspire us to try things we otherwise wouldn’t have considered, and therefore to reveal new facets of our sexualities and selves.

For instance, if I hadn’t met my now-wife, whose biggest kink is erotic hypnosis, I doubt I would have fully realized how much pleasure I get from flow-state-esque headspaces like trance and subspace. Trance allowed me to explore alternate forms of bondage, too – ones that constrained me using the power of my own mind, instead of ropes or chains, which was cool and hot in totally unexpected ways.

It was also through my wife’s love of hypnosis that we discovered my fondness for dollification, bimbofication, and other forms of “intelligence play” – which have been surprisingly healing endeavors for me, as someone whose smarts have long been the load-bearing center of her identity and who sometimes needs a break from carrying that mantle.

So, this week my advice to you is: Find a way to expand your kink horizons by connecting with someone whose tastes are way outside your wheelhouse. Could some new friends at a munch introduce you to your Next Big Thing? Could a random, exhibitionistic Omegle video call free your mind by letting you play a role in somebody else’s fantasy? Could filling out a Yes/No/Maybe list with a current partner lead the two of you down entirely new paths together, that you wouldn’t have stumbled onto without discussing not only your similarities but also your beautiful differences? Only time will tell… and you won’t know until you try! 😉

 

This post contains a sponsored link. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

What Counts as “Real Sex,” & Why?

Kate Sloan
Photo by mb

“What is sex?”

I’ve been a sex nerd for decades, have done deep dives into sexual subcultures for books and podcasts, have philosophized with friends about sexuality for countless hours – and this is a question I still come back to, time and time again. Like a koan, it seems less answerable the more that I ponder it.

I think the definition probably seemed more clear-cut to me before my current relationship. Seven years of long-distance taught me that activities like phone sex and sexting can absolutely feel like sex, and can be just as intimate, connective, exciting, arousing, and orgasmic. Occasionally I’ve had phone sex with my partner on the same day as having in-person sex with someone else (what can I say, I’m booked ‘n’ busy) and there were times when the phone sex felt more like “real sex” to me than the IRL sex – because I got more turned on, or stayed in the moment more easily, or felt closer to my partner, or all of the above. These qualities aren’t inherent to everyone‘s definition of sex, but they certainly make sex feel more engaging to me, and thus more “real.”

To that end, a lot of different things can be sex, if you choose to see them that way. A study of over 10,000 cam-show viewers, for instance, found that 19% of them see those cam encounters as “real sex.” I wondered, upon reading this, how many webcam performers think of their shows as being “real sex.” Certainly, the babes of BongaCams.com and other such sites are doing sex work, but I imagine performers’ opinions differ widely on this, and my own dalliances into cam work mostly felt like work, and not like sex.

The asexual community, too, has taught me a lot about the definition of sex – mainly, that it might not matter as much as I used to think it did. We put so much emphasis on sex as a society that it’s easy to forget how fun (and even hot) it can be to connect with people, including lovers/partners, through non-sexual (or not-directly-sexual) activities. That can be anything from taking a bath together, to going on a hike together, to reading poetry to each other, to feeding each other grapes, to mud-wrestling, to hypnosis, to silently meditating in the same room together… all of which might be defined as sex by somebody, and that’s okay too!

So, what is sex? I think ultimately, the answer depends on who you’re talking to, and your definition may need to evolve throughout your life (or throughout your day!) to accommodate for the different spaces you find yourself in. When I tell my doctor I had sex with someone, I mean that bodily fluids were potentially exchanged. When I tell my straight friends I had sex with someone, I probably mean some clothes came off and somebody’s genitals were stimulated; when I tell my queer friends I had sex with someone, I might also mean we did something like dry-humping or spanking. When my wife says to me, “I liked fucking you last night,” or “You fucked me so well last night,” or “We haven’t fucked in a while and I miss it,” I know that she’s including phone sex and IRL sex in her definition – and that an intense and connective kink scene might well scratch that itch, too.

So when you find yourself wondering whether a particular experience “counted as” sex, first ask yourself why it matters – and then ask yourself how it made you feel. Sex can be so much more than “insert tab A into slot B,” and I find that my sex life – and my life in general – feel more vibrant when I broaden my definitions of sex, pleasure, connection, and joy.

 

This post contains a sponsored link. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

Why is Cock-Milking So Hot?

Kate Sloan
Pictured: the Seekheart Raiden telescopic rotation masturbation cup

Content note: I’m gonna talk about some forms of consensual non-consent in this post, primarily cock-milking/”forced orgasm” play. We’ll also touch on animal sexuality in the context of farming/husbandry.

Sometimes it takes me a long time to accept that I’m into a particular kink simply because I don’t like the name of that kink – or at least, the generally-agreed-upon name that it goes by in kink communities, fetish porn, etc.

I’m sure I would have embraced my fondness for “throatpies” much sooner, for instance, if they weren’t called, well, “throatpies.” (That’s the term for someone ejaculating while being deepthroated, FYI. It has nothing to do with pies!)

Likewise, there’s something about “cock-milking” that just doesn’t do it for me. I tend to shy away from anything livestock-adjacent in my sexual language – I’m fuckable, not breedable, thank you very much! – and the idea of someone being “milked” for their semen just makes me think about husbandry tanks and factory farming… although of course, there are many people for whom the dehumanizing livestock angle is the turn-on, and I love that for them. We should all be so lucky as to find sexual language that makes us feel “as happy as a pig in shit,” to invoke another farm-based metaphor 😂

It’s a pity that I don’t particularly connect with “cock-milking” as a phrase, because I sure do enjoy it as a kink. I love dicks, cum, and witnessing/giving intense pleasure, and I love the power exchange involved in “forced orgasm” play, so it makes sense that I’d also be into the type of cock-milking you can do with a mechanical wonder like the Seekheart Raiden. I haven’t gotten to try this particular one, alas, but its gun-like aesthetic is fascinating, and reminds me of the power tools used by farmers to extract semen from actual livestock. (Best of luck to anyone who I’ve just sent down that particular Wikipedia rabbit hole… or artificial bovine vagina, as the case may be…)

Indeed, I think something like “semen extraction” is my own preferred terminology for this kink. I adore medical play, but mostly the kind where the patients are treated like humans, not animals – although frankly, given how dehumanizing and even abusive the real-life medical system can be, sometimes this feels like a distinction without a difference!

As is probably common, my cum-harvesting fantasies usually conveniently omit the reason that the cum is being harvested at all… Maybe your genetics are being researched by an evil scientist, or you’re being baby-trapped by an alien trying to propagate a new planet; who the fuck knows. The point is, someone wants your cum and they want it bad – and they therefore want your orgasm bad, and will move heaven and earth to make it happen.

Writing that out and reading it back, I have to wonder if my interest in these fantasies stems at least partially from my own experiences of bad sex, of sex where my orgasm didn’t matter to the other person. Wouldn’t it be the ultimate antidote to that type of sex if someone not only wanted you to come, but literally needed you to? And if you don’t, then their career, Nobel Prize, or entire species could be on the line?

But that can’t fully explain my proclivity for this kink, because usually I identify moreso with the scientist or bratty evil genius doing the cum extraction. That, too, probably serves a psychological function: in stark contrast to all the times I’ve felt unattractive and unable to capture a crush’s sexual attention, in these fantasies my “victim” is so turned on by me and my ministrations that they literally cannot escape their own arousal, pleasure, and orgasm. Validation ahoy!

Is it fun to psychoanalyze yourself through your fantasies like this? Yes! Is it illuminating? Sometimes! I think one other benefit I glean from it, though, is that it helps me feel more connected to other perverts throughout time and space. Whether or not we agree on which terminology is hottest, and whether or not we practice our kinks in the same ways, we all have our own motivations for doing what we do – and these motivations are usually more similar than they are different. We all want to be loved, accepted, and valued, for instance – and it’s fascinating to observe all the zillions of different ways that manifests in fantasy, whether yours involves vanilla missionary lovemaking in a Paris hotel room, or having your cum guzzled by a ruthless alien on the Starship Enterprise. 🚀🖖

 

This post contains a sponsored link. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

In Defense of Sex Dolls (Stigma Be Damned!)

Kate Sloan
Image via this post’s sponsor, Coeros, makers of cool custom sex dolls!

I’ve written quite a few articles about sex dolls and sex robots over the years, so I’ve encountered plenty of anti-sex-doll stigma while researching these products. One common argument, often made by people who are basically well-meaning, goes as follows:

“It’s fine if someone wants to own and use a sex doll, so long as it doesn’t interfere with their ability to form human relationships.”

Today I’m going to go on the record about a hot take of mine: I think it’s fine to use sex dolls even if they do disincentivize you from seeking a relationship – so long as you’re okay with that. Let me explain…

 

Not everyone wants romance or sex!

Yep: asexual and aromantic people might well enjoy a sex doll even if they don’t enjoy dating/fucking actual people. My allo (non-ace/aro) readers may be wondering, “Why would someone want a sex toy, presumably to be used during masturbation, if they’re asexual?!” and the answer is that sexual attraction is different and separate from sexual behavior and sexual desires. For instance, a straight woman might jerk off to lesbian porn sometimes because it focuses primarily on clit stimulation, but that doesn’t negate her heterosexuality – or a gay man might impulsively hook up with a female friend just to ‘try it out,’ and might even have a good time, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s gay.

Asexuality is a sexual orientation characterized by a lack of sexual attraction – but many ace people still masturbate and/or have sex. And since there’s a high degree of overlap between the asexual and aromantic communities, it’s entirely plausible that some ace and/or aro people might enjoy using sex dolls and other types of sex toys. These products supply sexual pleasure without the requirement of seeking human connection that may or may not be wanted.

There are also people who don’t identify as ace or aro but are celibate for various reasons – perhaps due to trauma or mental health struggles, or perhaps just as a matter of choice – and those folks could get a lot of value out of sex dolls too. If you’ve been in nonconsensual situations before that made you feel very out of control, for instance, I can see how it could be deeply empowering to get yourself a custom sex doll – you have full control over the doll and how you engage with it, which could be less scary and triggering than sex with a human being.

 

You don’t owe the world a cookie-cutter love story!

As queer, trans, kinky, and polyamorous people already know well, the world is full of harmful myths about what constitutes a ‘healthy’ or ‘acceptable’ relationship. There are infinite different ways to structure and label our relationships – so, although you may be drowning in cultural messages to the contrary, you have no obligation to get into a monogamous, long-term romantic relationship, or any other kind of relationship, for that matter. Your life is yours to design!

As disability and anti-fatness advocates often point out, our society mandates health as a moral good, which is why so many people feel justified in shaming fat folks and disabled folks for not ‘working hard enough’ to meet a particular definition of health. This practice is harmful and wrong-headed, not only because health depends on some factors we have no choice over (like disabilities and genetics), but also because no one is morally obligated to be healthy. Health versus illness is a practical consideration, not an ethical one.

Likewise, there’s nothing intrinsically good or bad about being in a relationship, or not being in a relationship – whether temporarily, or for decades at a time! Don’t get me wrong: humans are social creatures, and if someone lacks any meaningful social connection in their life (including friendships), that’s likely not healthy for them, and I would counsel them to join local hobby/interest-based groups to meet people. But romantic and sexual connection are not requirements for a life well-lived, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

 

Ultimately, it’s just a toy

I think what people tend to forget, when they clutch their pearls about sex toys ‘replacing’ human connection, is that these products simply… don’t replace human connection. A sex doll can’t make you laugh, fascinate you in conversation, or make you feel truly loved. Even as A.I. technologies get better, I don’t foresee humanoid robots ever fully overtaking humans as our preferred sexual partners. Real people are fallible, imaginative, imperfect, and human, and that’s why it’s dynamic and exciting to connect with them. I love knowing that a partner chose to touch me in a specific way because of a combination of their own preferences and their knowledge of my preferences – and I find it tough to believe a robot could ever replicate that, in large part because robots cannot experience desire. (Fight me, philosophy majors. No, seriously, feel free to fight me about this in the comments; I’m curious to hear your take!)

If someone truly feels that all of their romantic and sexual needs (to the extent that they have them) are sated by a sex doll, I’m happy for them! We all should be so lucky as to have our needs abundantly met. And if they find, instead, that something is missing and that they want to continue seeking human connection, I’m happy for them too. The more pleasures you pursue and experience, the closer you get to building your ideal life – by which I mean, the life that is ideal for you, specifically. You’re the only one who gets to decide that.

So no, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with owning a sex doll, even if it does lead to a change in your romantic and sexual priorities. That’s your choice to make, because it’s your life to live – and if you want to live it hand-in-hand (or dick-in-vag) with a sex doll, more power to you. Just make sure, for fuck’s sake, that you clean it properly after every use.

 

This post contains a sponsored link. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.