Musings

My Top 10 Favorite Songs About Marriage

Kate Sloan
The closest thing I have to a photo of me in a wedding dress.

I’m a romantic sap and I don’t care who knows it. I cry at Hallmark cards, I sob whenever I watch the episode of The Office where Jim and Pam get married, and I certainly weep profusely at real-life weddings. What can I say?

I once briefly dated someone who edited wedding videos for a living, and he frequently lamented how boring certain songs get after a while. (You would not believe how many millennials want Bright Eyes’ “First Day of My Life” to feature prominently in their nuptials. Or maybe you would.) That said, wedding-related songs still get me all choked up pretty much whenever I listen to them, whether they’re about beautiful brides for marriage, or offbeat vows, or an oddly-romantic desire not to get married. Here are 10 of my faves…

The Magnetic Fields – It’s Only Time

Why would I stop loving you a hundred years from now?/ It’s only time/ What could stop this beating heart once it’s made a vow?/ It’s only time

This is my #1, play-this-at-my-wedding, first-dance-contender, most romantic song ever. I once sang it and played it on the ukulele in Malta while my cousin walked down the aisle; she hadn’t heard the song before I presented it as an option, but she quickly fell in love with it, as did basically the entire wedding party. Stephin Merritt is a brilliant songwriter, blessed with the ability to write lyrics that are quirky and quixotic sometimes, and utterly classic and simple at other times. This song is of the latter type – it feels, somehow, like it has always existed, since the birth of love.

Rosie Thomas – Wedding Day

I’m gonna stop at every bar/ And flirt with the cowboys in front of their girlfriends/ It’s gonna be so great/ It’s gonna be just like my wedding day

This isn’t actually about a wedding – it’s kind of about a rejection of romance and an embracing of self-love instead, with Rosie sweetly breathing lines like “I’ve had enough of love; it feels good to give up, so good to be good to myself.” But your relationship with yourself is so deeply rooted, so permanent and important, that it may as well be a marriage, am I right?

Tegan and Sara – BWU

All the girls I loved before/ Told me they signed up for more/ Save your first and last chance for me/ ‘Cause I don’t want a white wedding

I have a long-standing theory that Tegan Quin is anxiously attached (to use the parlance of the psychological concept known as attachment theory) while her sister, Sara, is avoidantly attached. You can see the difference easily if you know which T&S songs are written and sung by each sister: Tegan’s songs tend to be desperate “I want you to love me/Why don’t you love me?!” bops, while some of Sara’s greatest hits include lines like “I’m not unfaithful but I’ll stray,” “I swear I tried to leave you at least a hundred times a day,” and – yes – “I don’t want a white wedding.” I admire her level of self-knowledge; I just suuuper don’t want to date someone who approaches relationships the way she does (or the way she seems to in her songs)!

Alvvays – Archie, Marry Me

You’ve expressed explicitly/ Your contempt for matrimony/ You’ve student loans to pay/ And will not risk the alimony

This is a song about a girl trying to convince a boy to marry her. Even though she sounds feminine and sweet, there is something remarkably brash about it. “Hey, hey,” she sings in the chorus, “marry me, Archie.” I admire that level of straightforwardness, and of clarity of desire!

Punch Brothers – Don’t Get Married Without Me

Let’s not fool ourselves/ Taking a break is dragging out a break-up too long/ Help yourself to whatever you like with whomever you like/ But don’t get married without me

The feeling expressed in this song is one I’m sure a lot of us have felt, even if we’re not proud of it: the sense that, even when you’ve broken up with someone, you still have (or want to have) some sense of ownership over them. It’s a shitty monogamy-culture knee-jerk reaction, but what can ya do. I like that this song has a sense of humor about itself; clearly Chris Thile knows how ridiculous it would be to put conditions on the romantic life of someone you’re dumping, but it’s an impulse that comes up nonetheless.

Death Cab For Cutie – Cath…

You said your vows/ And you closed the door/ On so many men/ Who would have loved you more

Ben Gibbard, for some reason, is really good at writing songs about women with romantic regrets. (See also: “Lady Adelaide,” the solo-project track of his that makes me weep for a fictional character.) I find this song relatable even though I’ve never been married; being romantically entangled with “a well-intentioned man” while your “heart is dying fast” is a tough spot to be in, and yet I think a lot of us have experienced some version of that. You want to get out, but you’re worried about what’ll happen if you do.

The Japanese House – Worms

Sharing your house/ Sharing your life/ Sharing your home/ There’s so much pressure not to be alone

I feel this song in the marrow of my bones. It feels like a post-breakup anxiety spiral: “She’s my lullaby and I can’t sleep right,” Amber Bain warbles mournfully, before deep-diving into feelings of large-scale rejection and loneliness. She’s right that our culture is overinvested in pairing people up, and in making single people feel like shit.

Company – Getting Married Today

Listen, everybody/ Look, I don’t know what you’re waiting for/ A wedding? What’s a wedding?/ It’s a prehistoric ritual/ Where everybody promises fidelity forever/ Which is maybe the most horrifying word I’ve ever heard

Just about everything Stephen Sondheim writes is gold, but this is a fave of mine. It’s a nervous breakdown in song form: Amy, a neurotic bride-to-be, has a panic attack the morning of her wedding and enumerates all the reasons she can’t possibly go through with it. I like to think that if I ever get married, I’ll listen to this on the day of, just to bring those last-minute jitters to the surface and exorcize them so I can proceed.

West Side Story – One Hand, One Heart

Make of our hands one hand/ Make of our hearts one heart/ Make of our vows one last vow/ Only death will part us now

On the opposite end of the spectrum, here is a musical theatre song about a wedding gone right. Tony and Maria – based on Romeo and Juliet – sing this beautiful love duet to bind them together. It’s so over-the-top that I think it would actually be too cheesy to be a first-dance song… and yet, I love it.

John Mayer – Home Life

I can tell you this much/ I will marry just once/ And if it doesn’t work out/ Give her half of my stuff/ It’s fine with me/ We said eternity

The J-man has a bit of a reputation as a player, so it’s rare for him to grapple with questions of domesticity and long-term love in his songs, but he does in this one. Mayer has never gotten married as of yet, but has been romantically tied to the likes of Jennifer Love Hewitt, Jennifer Aniston, and Katy Perry. Guess he didn’t click with any of them enough to have “said eternity” with ’em.

What are your favorite songs about weddings/marriage?

 

This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

Winsome in White: Wedding Dress Fetish

Kate Sloan
A strapless white Betsey Johnson dress that makes me shriek

When I attended a cakesitting party, I theorized that perhaps the spark of lust some people feel from destroying a cake materializes because we put so much time and effort and emotional energy into cakes. Not just the making of them, but also the planning for them, presenting them, eating them. They’re the centerpiece of a traditional birthday party, and to destroy something so precious and so highly celebrated is an almost unfathomable taboo. It’s why, you’ll note, many big showy “Oh no!!” moments in movies culminate in a cake being tragically (and comically) destroyed.

Around the same time, I started wondering whether this taboo of destroying highly celebrated objects could extend to other types of celebrations. So, naturally, I typed “wedding dress fetish” into Google, thinking: what could be a more celebrated object than that?

Currently, that phrase brings up 41 results. In those results, you’ve got your brides merely expressing extreme enthusiasm about their dresses, sure, but you’ve also got an Experience Project page of men professing their lust for wedding dresses, porn clips of women giving blowjobs in floofy white frocks, and a review of a mystery novel about a serial killer who dresses all his victims in wedding gowns. It’s often said that humans can and will fetishize anything and everything you can think of, and this is no exception. One fetishist writes that a wedding dress is “the ultimate in femininity and the most ultimate dress anyone can own.” I can’t argue with that, except to add that the femininity being referred to here is, of course, a capitalist and conventional form of that gender expression, tied up in many different axes of historical oppression.

More broadly, some people have a “bride fetish” or a “bridal fetish,” which might focus on the dress but also might focus on the other trappings of a woman being wed: the white lingerie under the dress, the flawless makeup, the veil, the unattainability, the supposed virginity, or any number of other things. I’m most interested in the dress as a fetish object, though, especially after having read Laurie Essig’s book Love, Inc. where she dissects the vast psychological baggage we’ve placed on the wedding dress as a symbol. It’s right up there with crosses and the human heart in terms of the importance we heap onto it.

I spent some time in a bridal shop a couple years ago when I joined my friend’s wedding party. While I was trying on bridesmaid dresses – which are pretty much designed to make the wearer look unremarkable and plain, but in a pretty way – my friend kept swanning in and out of the dressing room in one gorgeous gown after another, commanding the room. I teared up almost every time she emerged in a new dress, because the effect of seeing someone you love – or even someone you hardly know! – in a dress that culturally weighted is powerful.

I didn’t experience that feeling as sexual, but I can easily see how someone could. Swathing yourself or a loved one in white tulle and satin could be a way of accessing what’s supposed to be the best day of your life, a day when you look and feel gorgeous, a day that we all winkingly acknowledge will probably end in romantic sex. It’s a day when everyone stares at you, when you’re the center of attention but no one gets mad at you for it, when you make promises that are supposed to be binding. There’s a lot in there that overlaps psychologically with concepts like exhibitionism and voyeurism, dominance and submission, and (especially when you factor in the corsets and high heels) sadism and masochism. It’s no wonder some people fixate on weddings and their trappings in a distinctly sexual way.

Apparently sometimes bridesmaids try on wedding gowns when the bride-to-be does, because “When in Rome” and all that – but I didn’t, when I was in that bridal boutique with my pal. It would’ve felt inappropriate to steal her thunder, but also there was something powerfully sacred about these dresses in my mind. I didn’t want to try one on until I had “earned” the right by getting engaged and actually being a bride-to-be, rather than just playacting as one. I knew seeing myself in a white gown would unleash a torrent of feelings I wasn’t ready to feel. So I zipped myself into my meek blue cocktail dress and tucked that desire away for another day.

I hope someday I have sex in a wedding gown, whether or not I actually got married that day, because I imagine there’s just nothing else quite like it. What else could be as decadent – besides sitting on a beautiful chocolate cake?

 

This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

10 Ways Sex & Hookup Websites Can Be Safer For Women

Kate Sloan

For as much as I talk about dating sites and the hours of amusement they’ve brought me, I don’t actually think they’re that great. They’re too often full of creeps and trolls, seeking to offend and harass more than they’re seeking actual dates or hookups. The situation is dire. Even at times when I’ve been highly motivated to find dates and/or sex on these sites, sometimes I felt cockblocked by my insidious fears about getting catfished or doxxed – or worse, assaulted on a date. It doesn’t have to be this way!

Since so many dating sites and apps are subpar in this area, I’ve put together these 10 suggestions for how these companies can make their services safer and more appealing for women. (A lot of this applies to people other than women as well – anyone vulnerable and/or marginalized, potentially – but I’m a woman so that’s the perspective I’m coming from.) I wish more sites would take these ideas into account!

Comprehensive blocking. I’ve yelled about this before, but… please, please, Hookup Websites, give us a decent blocking feature. You should be able to block someone before you match with them, not just once you’ve already matched (*cough* fuck you Tinder), and once you’ve blocked someone, they should be unable to see any aspect of your profile ever again. This isn’t even that difficult to implement and would make lots of people feel much safer.

A reporting feature that works. If someone is sending unsolicited dick pics, or misogynist screeds, or using pick-up artist tactics, or (god forbid) attacking people on dates, there should be an option to report them on the app or website and have them investigated by a human person (not a robot!) from the platform. If need be, their profile should be pulled. Letting creeps run wild on your site is a surefire way to make women nervous about using it.

Functional filtering. Beyond just making it easier to find compatible dates, this feature can also prevent a lot of scary or annoying situations. I simply don’t want non-feminists to be able to view my profile, let alone interact with me. I’m not saying everyone who rejects the feminist label is dangerous, but certainly in many cases their ideologies are (who the fuck doesn’t want gender equality in this day and age?!), so I just want them gone from my digital life. Nip that “friendly debate” about my personhood in the bud. Byeee.

Identity verification. Okay, this is a controversial one, because some people are understandably skittish about having to upload their ID to a dating site. Some folks even get angry when asked to do so. But I think, provided the data was kept private and managed responsibly (i.e. maybe deleted altogether after verification was complete), it would be worthwhile to make sure people actually are who they’re claiming to be. The internet makes it all too easy to catfish folks, and that’s not cool. Plus I think people would behave better on a platform if they knew it had all their info on file.

Vouching. If you’ve had a good date with someone, maybe you could leave them feedback in the form of a review, like on Yelp, or a rating, like on Uber. Of course, this feature is somewhat objectifying and would likely be abused – I can imagine shitty men leaving bad feedback for women who didn’t “put out” after their date bought them dinner, for example – but it could be useful for shunning creeps.

Taking privacy seriously. I had no idea, for example, when I linked my Instagram account with my Tinder account, that matches and even non-matches would be able to click through to my IG profile and thus immediately learn everything about me; I thought this feature would just show my pictures on my profile. Some dating apps use geolocation, some force you to disclose your school or your workplace, some make you use your real name… All of these “features” are problematic because they put you at risk if someone decides to track you down. Let users decide how much they want to disclose!

Gender self-identification tools. I hear lots of different things from my trans, non-binary, and genderqueer friends about how they wish gender worked on dating sites. However, the common thread seems to be that they wish there were more options rather than less, even if they wouldn’t actually use the options provided. Not every trans woman will feel comfortable disclosing on her profile that she’s trans, for example (especially since doing so often brings on harassment and even violence), but some trans folks prefer to air that stuff upfront so they don’t have to deal with it later. Dating sites should allow for this. In doing so, they’ll also normalize gender disclosure for everyone, not just trans people.

Tools for setting expectations. Many dating sites already have this – but many don’t, and it’s weird! You should always be able to indicate whether you’re looking for something casual, something more serious, either, or something in between. This can help prevent some of the tension that arises when you go on a date with someone whose dating goals end up being different from yours.

Clear community guidelines. I’d rather they be too harsh than too lenient. No unsolicited sexual media, no pick-up tactics, no racism, no sexism, no homophobia, no transphobia, that kind of thing. Setting these boundaries clearly and publicly, and standing by them, would make a company seem more trustworthy to me, and thus more worthy of my patronage.

Investment in sexual health and anti-sexual violence causes. Okay, this one’s more abstract and indirect. But I would definitely trust a hookup platform more if it had made tangible monetary contributions to these causes. Being publicly sex-positive and feminist isn’t just a marketing tactic; it helps establish a culture on the site, and shows abusers and misogynists that they’re not welcome.

What safety features do you wish more dating sites had?

 

This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

Sex With an Ex: Good Idea, or Worst Idea?

Kate Sloan

I’ve never had sex with an ex. This experience seems to be common, and being as sentimental and stubborn as I am, it seems like something I would do – but I never really have. Apart from one ill-advised encounter with an ex-FWB in a sweaty closet at a Pride party, I’ve never gone back to once again fuck someone I had previously decided I wasn’t going to fuck anymore.

Oh, I’ve certainly thought about it. Whenever someone dumps me, I walk around in a haze of regret for at least a few weeks, daydreaming about running into my ex in public while looking absolutely scintillating, and earning an invitation back to their place for comfortingly familiar sex that will inevitably lead us back into a comfortingly familiar relationship. But this never happens, and in the long run, I never really want it to.

Having sex with your ex is playing with fire. If you broke up, there was always a reason – and if you feel the desire to find ’em and fuck ’em again, it’s worth pondering: what was the reason you broke up, and is that reason still relevant?

It may not be. For example, I’ve broken up with people because I was in love with someone else and it was messing up my relationship, or because they were dating someone who decided they didn’t want to be polyamorous. Both of these are circumstantial roadblocks: they posed a problem at the time but may well have melted away in the intervening months or years. These are people with whom I might be tempted to rekindle things if I ever bumped into them on the subway or at a party, because – why not? If the attraction and compatibility are still there but the problems aren’t, what’s stopping us from giving it another go?

But that’s not why most breakups happen. Most breakups happen because you came up against some kind of fundamental incompatibility, or there was a big betrayal, or you just weren’t feelin’ it anymore. In those situations, it’d be tougher to justify a redo. Sure, your ex’s body and mind might still thrill you, or inspire a nostalgic frisson, but pursuing that half-extinguished spark is often more trouble than it’s worth.

Of my 30 lifetime sexual partners, 28 are people I’m no longer sleeping with. Of those 28, 10 are people I would happily fuck again if the opportunity presented itself – but that’s unlikely to happen. 5 are people I would consider fucking again, but we would have to have some heavy discussions and one or both of us would need to make some serious amends before I would feel comfortable jumping back into things with them. The remaining 13 are people I just don’t have any desire to be intimate with ever again – either because they hurt me too badly, or I’ve lost all attraction I once felt for them, or we just aren’t sexually compatible, or all of the above. I’d be curious to know what your ratio is, if you feel like sharing!

So, is sex with an ex a good idea? I think it’s a situation where you’d have to have a lot more pros than cons to justify even attempting it. Sex with someone who knows your body, who you feel comfortable around, and who you don’t have to explain yourself to is very tempting – but I think, in most cases, it’s not worth the complications and tricky feelings it could bring up. Whether I dumped them or they dumped me, I’d be verrrry hesitant to get back in bed with an ex. That’s not to say you should never do it, but be careful with your heart, okay?

 

This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

Why Sex Skills Are More Important Than “Sex Moves”

Kate Sloan

Sex guides that focus on particular “moves” have entertained me for years. I read them like they’re porn, and in a way, they are. “Swirl your tongue in circles around the clit.” “Stroke the G-spot firmly with two fingers until you feel it swelling.” “Lick the frenulum while cupping the balls.” They’re so vivid and visceral, they conjure up images with almost as much immediacy as porn. So I’d be lying if I said I’ve never jerked off to an article with a clickbait-y title like “10 Easy Tricks For Getting Her Off” or “Blow His Mind With These Foolproof Blowjob Moves.”

But, also like (mainstream) porn, these guides don’t teach you much about how to have actually good sex with actual humans. They try to pin sex down, like it’s a recipe or a location on a map, without acknowledging how variable and fluid it can be in reality.

One of the things that struck me most about Ian Kerner’s classic oral sex bible She Comes First is that it’s absolutely chock full of “moves.” He groups these manoeuvres together into what he calls “routines,” which are broken down into “stages”; he offers estimates on the proper amount of time to spend on each. One such section advises, for example, “Alternate vertical strokes of the tongue with horizontal strokes. On vertical strokes, try to just graze bottom of the clitoral head without fully hitting it. Focus on brushing the head on horizontal strokes. For every five vertical, do one horizontal.” Seeing a problem here?

These “routines” are a great starting point for someone who’s never eaten pussy before and has no idea how to begin, but to treat them as gospel is to miss the point of sex entirely. So much of good sex is about paying attention to your partner’s body and their responses and adjusting your approach accordingly. This give-and-take, back-and-forth interplay is the intimacy, the connection, the dynamism, the fun of good sex. Without it, you might as well be fucking a robot or a computer: input x and you’ll get y.

One of the most popular and well-known “sex moves” is the one where you lick the letters of the alphabet on someone’s clit, starting with A and working your way through to Z. However, used properly, this technique is really more about gathering information than it is about getting someone off. By licking the alphabet, you’ll be trying out a wide variety of different types of tongue strokes – different directions, placements, and lengths – and so you’ll learn a lot, very quickly, about how your partner likes their clit touched. At least, you will if you’re paying attention, rather than trying to remember what letter comes next!

So, if “moves” aren’t important, what is? I think the answer is sex skills. Someone who knows a few recipes will effectively only be able to make those recipes, whereas someone who’s picked up culinary skills will be able to improvise a meal with basically any ingredients you throw at them. That’s how sex should be approached, I think: great sexual partners are not just great at the things they do but also great in the way they do them.

Some of the most important sexual skills are reading a partner’s body, taking feedback well, communicating your needs without being overly critical, and learning and remembering what particular partners like. There are also more physically-based skills, like staying in rhythm, fingerbanging with precision, taking a dick deep in your throat, and relaxing your muscles to take penetration. But I think the mental ones are more important, because once you have those, you’re much better equipped to work on everything else. You’ll have your partner(s) moaning your name – and you’ll know it’s because of you, not some guide you read on the internet.

 

Do you have any favorite “sex moves”? What do you think are the most vital sexual skills?

 

This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.