Musings

12 Days of Girly Juice 2018: 5 Sex-Savvy Superheroes

Kate Sloan

Welcome back to 12 Days of Girly Juice, my year-end wrap-up series! Today I’m talking about 5 people who’ve influenced and inspired me massively this year in the arenas of sex, kink, and love…

Nadine Thornhill

There is a sex education crisis happening here in Ontario. As I detailed in a column for Herizons this year, our Premier, Doug Ford, has rolled back our schools’ sex ed curriculum to the one from 1998 – so naturally, it leaves out key information about consent, LGBTQ identities, and the modern sexual risks we face in the age of revenge porn and Snapchat. To say the least, Ontarians who care about sexual freedom are not happy with this development. There’s even a court appeal in the works.

Toronto-based sex educator Nadine Thornhill took things into her own hands in an even more direct way: she started a YouTube series called #SaveSexEd, in which she teaches every module of the scrapped 2015 curriculum, one by one. She’s creating a resource for kids and parents alike, which covers anatomy, consent, healthy relationships, sexual orientation, gender, and much more. She is the hero we need right now and I’m honestly amazed by her.

Sinclair Sexsmith

I’ve loved Sinclair’s writing for years, but this was the year when their work had the biggest effect on my actual life, so I knew I needed to put them on this list. I still keenly remember the day when, about a month into my relationship with my Sir, he texted me that he’d been reading a bunch of Sinclair Sexsmith articles – and I knew that our D/s dynamic was about to get an upgrade as a result.

Sinclair has written in detail about protocol – an aspect of my relationship that gives me great joy now but that I wouldn’t have even known I’d like if not for Sinclair’s writing on the subject. They’ve also written a lot about topping, dominance, and daddy identity – all of which has helped me better understand my partners’ headspace so I can be more empathetic and a better submissive. Their writing is often beautiful, or instructive, or both at once, and I find it inspiring as both a kinky person and a writer. If you haven’t explored their work, you owe it to yourself to check it out!

Eva

Eva is the brilliant mind behind the What’s My Body Doing? sex ed series on YouTube, where she takes a compassionate and research-backed approach to explaining concepts like sexual desire, threesomes, and Tinder. She’s also currently a Masters student, doing research on women’s sexting habits. Fascinating stuff!

When I was younger, I used to be intimidated by people like Eva – people who are close to me in age but have achieved so much already and are dazzlingly smart. But these days I’m more often able to be lifted up by their successes. Eva is so full of fascinating ideas and is so much fun to talk to (not to mention, she has the cutest laugh in the entire world) so every time we chat, I feel inspired and propelled forward anew in my own work in the sex field. What a lovely, clever person!

Dirty Lola

Lola does so much wonderful stuff in the world of sex and kink. Most notably, she founded Sex Ed A Go Go, an event which combines education and entertainment into an exciting night out that’ll leave you better informed about sex and kink. She also does a lot of storytelling, speaking, and tweeting about sex, polyamory, race, kink, and being a “picky slut.” I was lucky enough to share a stage with her this year at both the Playground Conference and the Woodhull Sexual Freedom Summit, where we spoke on a panel together (along with Bex and Kevin) about personal storytelling as activism.

Something I admire about Lola is her dedication to what she calls “edutainment”: that balanced blend between imparting important facts and entertaining the viewer in the process. I think it’s a remarkably smart approach to teaching people about sex, a subject many folks want to learn about but are scared of or intimidated by. Lola extends this approach even into her personal life, writing tweets or telling stories about times she’s been sad or angry or hurt, in order to illustrate points everyone can learn from and feel comforted by. She is a powerhouse and I’m honored to know her.

Mark Wiseman

Mark entered my life through a series of happy coincidences this year. I started dating a hypnokinkster, who urged me to read Mind Play, the best existing primer on erotic hypnosis. Later, I told my friend Dick I wanted to interview a hypnokink expert on the radio, and he immediately called up the hypno expert who’d recently guested on his show to see if he’d do it. It was only then that I put the pieces together and realized that this affable hypnosis nerd was the author of Mind Play!

Mark’s book is still the first thing I recommend any curious hypnokinksters read on the subject, because it lays out everything you need to know in order to start hypnotizing people for sexy purposes in a conscientious and ethical way. He’s done a lot to make an oft-stigmatized kink more comprehensible and clear for those who want to explore it, and that’s worth celebrating.

 

Who were your major heroes in the world of sex/kink/love this year?

12 Days of Girly Juice 2018: 8 Classic Tweets

Kate Sloan

I hit 9,000 followers on Twitter recently! Hoping to get to 10K in 2019. My crew on there is such a beloved part of my day and I enjoy sharing my weird thoughts with them. Here are 8 of my favorite things I tweeted this year…

I still cry with laughter whenever I think about this exchange, honestly. Bless my FWB.

My Sir really knows what I like to hear.

This was one of my most popular tweets of the year. Lots of replies mentioned that this multi-cake feast would involve a lot of Google Calendar scheduling. #polyjokes

Some of my favorite tweets this year were conversations between me and my Sir, or just hilarious things he’s said – see, for example, these classics about bottoming skills, lube in butts, wax play, sext grammar, stand-up comedy, and croissants. This Johnson/Dodson joke really cracks me up, though, because it is exactly the kind of joke that only someone I adored would make: a silly pun necessitating nerdy niche knowledge. I love this boy.

I am probably as cynical about casual sex these days as I have ever been in my life, and this joke really captures that.

“My boyfriend trash-talking shitty men” is one of my favorite genres of comedy.

I want this printed on a T-shirt and I want to wear that T-shirt all of the time.

This is what I aim for with most of my writing. It’s what I hope to continue to aim for in 2019. Auld wang syne, am I right?

12 Days of Girly Juice 2018: 10 Perfect Sex Songs

Kate Sloan

Welcome back to 12 Days of Girly Juice, my year-end celebration of all things sexy and beloved! Today I’m writing about 10 of the best songs I enjoyed for sensual (and adjacent) purposes this year… (As ever, you can listen to all these songs – and most of my picks from previous years – in my 12 Days of Girly Juice playlist!)

Cruisr – Kidnap Me

So, uh, as you might have intuited from the title of this song, it’s kinda kinky. I don’t know if that was the band’s intention – to write a love song that is at once adorably sweet and ruthlessly perverted – but that is what they have done. “Shackle me up and lock it; I can live in your pocket. When you gonna kidnap me?” the lead singer chirps. “Tie me up to a chair; I could live in your hair. When you gonna kidnap me?”

I’m sure a vanilla person would listen to this song and think it satirical, like montages in horror movies where a killer dismembers somebody to the stylings of ’80s pop. But when I listen to it, I just hear pure, deep, perverse romance.

Say Anything – Wow, I Can Get Sexual Too

Making playlists for each other (or perhaps mix tapes, depending on your era and your level of dedication to the analog arts) is sort of a millennial-romance rite of passage. It’s a way to show your beloved both how you feel about them and how brilliant you are. A double-whammy of confessional hotness.

My Sir and I engaged in this time-honored ritual way back in February. I remember I was running around the Playground Conference, ducking in and out of panels and workshops and podcast recordings, while receiving many a text from this new beau about the epic playlist he was making me. I listened to it on my way home from the conference and cried… a lot. It had Imogen Heap and Feist and the Beach Boys and the Beatles, musical theatre and bubblegum pop, classically millennial love anthems like “Such Great Heights” and “I Really Like You.” It made me feel cradled and appreciated and seen.

One of my faves in the playlist, though, was this Say Anything song, which is about phone sex – something my Sir and I had done a lot of at that point and would continue to do a lot of. “I called her on the phone and she touched herself,” the lead singer whines in the chorus, and maybe it doesn’t sound especially romantic, but to me, it was.

Hippo Campus – Warm Glow

After my first-ever knifeplay scene, Dick asked me what I wanted to listen to during aftercare, and I told him to play some Hippo Campus. They’re my favorite band, so I didn’t even really care which songs we listened to – I know all of them practically by heart. But when he hit shuffle on their discography, this song, “Warm Glow,” was the first one that played, and it was absolutely perfect.

Longer and slower than the Hippo boys’ usual fare, “Warm Glow” has been called “a perennial anthem of positivity,” and that’s part of why I love it as an aftercare song. But I also love that it’s comfortingly repetitive, full of beautifully soothing sounds, and takes its sweet time to build up to an emotional climax. It’s exactly what I need from an aftercare song. (Want more like this? Check out my Aftercare playlist.)

The Japanese House – Saw You in a Dream

This came up in one of my Spotify Discover Weekly playlists and I was immediately hooked. Dream-pop is my jam (thanks, Spotify, you know me all too well) and this song epitomizes my favorite qualities of that genre. It’s loopy and lazy and hauntingly beautiful and sweetly wistful.

I think most of us have had the experience described in this song, of seeing an ex-lover in a dream and feeling shaken up beyond reason by seeing them again, even just in unreality. People can seem so much lovelier in retrospect than they did when they were in your life, and sometimes it’s painful. “You were the sweetest apparition, such a pretty vision,” the Japanese House’s lead singer Amber Bain croons in verse 2. “There was no reason, no explanation: the perfect hallucination.” Sometimes reminiscing about an ex can be too agonizing to bear, but other times it can be a mollifying meander down Memory Lane. Maybe it can even turn you on.

P.S. If you can’t get enough of this song – and I can’t blame you – listen to this a cappella rendition. Ideally while blazed.

Ought – Beautiful Blue Sky

This song is sexy in the way that it’s sexy to fuck someone who is almost robotically dominant: “We do this my way, we do it efficiently, and we do it now.” The driving drums and mechanical guitars forge a rhythm that builds and builds, and then there’s Tim Darcy shouting erratically on top of it all. At times, he seems to be making fun of the whole concept of small talk – “How’s the family? How’s your health been? Fancy seeing you here! Beautiful weather today!” – and the effect is of someone who desperately wants to fuck you, and will do a good job if he does, but doesn’t quite know how to get there from here.

I want my G-spot pounded to the beat of this song. It just feels right.

Ben Rector – Paris

This song is the purest distillation I’ve found of what it feels like to be in New Relationship Energy – or to be in an established relationship that still lapses back into an NRE-esque mode, raw and fresh and sweet. “I haven’t seen her for a month or so,” Ben sings; “Young love feels like finding buried gold.”

I listened to this a lot while falling in love with my Sir. Ben sings in the second verse, “I feel sixteen while we are making love,” and that’s how I felt, too: transported back to a youthful mood where everything was warm and hopeful, and nothing could touch me because I was in love! That’s not always an explicitly sexy feeling – I could write a whole essay about how NRE makes me feel a bit like a haggard zombie running on endorphin fumes – but sometimes it is, and that’s what this song feels like to me. Lust, love, and silly optimism.

John Mayer – Love on the Weekend

My brother showed me this one first. We share a long-standing love of John Mayer – his problematic qualities notwithstanding – and when this song dropped, Max said, “You’ve gotta listen to this one.” Max is usually right about such things, so I did, and damn, the boy knows me: this track is very up my alley.

Like “Paris,” “Love on the Weekend” is definitely an NRE anthem. John sings, “I’ll be dreaming of the next time we can go into another serotonin overflow,” capturing the clinical reality of love’s early days without diminishing its effects. I found this song relatable as my Sir and I fell into a more-or-less monthly routine of one of us visiting the other for a long, luxurious weekend. “It’s a Friday; we finally made it. I can’t believe I get to see your face. You’ve been working, and I’ve been waiting to pick you up and take you from this place.” Oh, John. I’ve loved you for almost two decades and you still manage to sing what my heart is thinking.

Sufjan Stevens – Movement II: Sleeping Invader

This is a standout track on Stevens’ gorgeous instrumental album The BQE, which I’ve loved for years and listened to most memorably through noise-canceling headphones during a sensory deprivation scene with my Sir this year.

Sensory deprivation – like some drugs – can have the effect of amplifying the sensations you can feel. Listening to music while high or sensory-deprived (or both) can cause my brain to organize the input it’s receiving into a narrative that fits with the music I’m hearing. So as my Sir did painful/pleasurable things to my restrained, blindfolded, high little body, I found that those sensations mapped themselves onto the orchestral swells and pulses and pings of The BQE. The album wasn’t just background noise for the scene; to me, it guided the scene, echoed it, co-created it, fused with it.

This felt like a natural continuation of my relationship with this album, which I had once listened to while high and gotten so turned on from the beauty of it that I almost came, untouched. Music is strange like that.

Alina Baraz – Yours

Alina is on this list every year, and not just because it’s tradition at this point: she creates some of the sexiest music I’ve ever heard.

I got a little misty-eyed the first time I heard this song, because in the chorus, Alina sings: “Love me like I’m never gonna leave. Love me like I’m yours.” It reminded me so much of my Sir’s dependable assurances that he has no plans to break up with me, despite my anxious brain always fearing I’m about to lose him. There is something so sexy about simply feeling safe, especially when you go through your day-to-day life never being entirely convinced of your safety. I am skeptical of the whole concept of “lovemaking” – that ooey-gooey brand of hyper-vanilla sex that’s overrepresented in mainstream media and makes my skin crawl – but the arguably romantic act of my Sir murmuring “You’re safe” while he spanks me and steps on me and fucks me is nonetheless as hot and rejuvenating to me as a shot of cinnamon whiskey. It warms me from the inside out. So does this song.

The Esbjörn Svensson Trio – Eighty-Eight Days in My Veins

I can’t believe this song hasn’t made it onto this list before! I’ve loved it for at least ten years, since the days when I’d listen to JazzFM when I couldn’t sleep and take diligent notes on my favorite tracks if the announcers remembered to mention their names (this was pre-Shazam!). I remember hearing the intense, complex lead piano part on this track and feeling transported to another dimension, somewhere icy and angry and full of longing. (My love for this song, and this trio, deepened even further when I found out years later that Esbjörn Svensson had tragically died in a scuba-diving accident at age 44, with decades of beautiful piano-playing still left in him. Rest in power, you Swedish god.)

This song’s been in my aftercare playlist for a while, because it’s so familiar to me as to be soothing – I can sing along with the piano part as it skips erratically all over the musical map (what a nerd). But it’s a sexy song in its own right. One memorable evening this year, my Sir connected my phone to the Bluetooth speakers in the hotel we were staying at so I could pipe my aftercare playlist throughout our room after sex, but by the time we got to this song, we were already fucking again. He came in my throat sometime around the intense, syncopated climax of “Eighty-Eight Days.” It was for that reason that I texted him gleefully to announce when our relationship turned 88 days old. We are nerds and we are in love.

What sexy songs did you love this year?

The “Helpless Little Slut” Instruction Manual

Kate Sloan

Author’s note: Last Christmas Eve, I had just met my boyfriend 2 weeks earlier and already we were sexting rather frequently and intensely. He was my Sir and my daddy, and I was his good girl and his helpless little slut. I mentioned to him in passing that it can be hard to get me off more than once in a session, and that partners usually only figure out how to do it after lots of practice. Sir had an idea – he assigned me the task of writing instructions for giving me multiple orgasms, in the style of a toy’s instruction manual. Ever a teacher’s pet, I started writing immediately, and later that night – after a distracted viewing of It’s a Wonderful Life during which I wrote and wrote – I sent him this. Enjoy!

Congratulations on the purchase of your very own Helpless Little Slut®, this season’s hottest toy!

Your new fuckdoll comes equipped with several built-in parts which enable her to reach Orgasm or (for advanced players) Multiple Orgasms. These parts include:
• Her Clit
• Her G-Spot (located 2–3 inches inside her Pussy on the front wall)
• Her A-Spot (located 5–6 inches inside her Pussy on the front wall, in front of her Cervix)

Understanding these features is vital to making full use of your Slut, so take a few moments to locate them before playing!

What follows is a guide for inducing Multiple Orgasms in your Slut. She doesn’t require batteries, so with skill, attention, and patience, you’ll learn how to make her keep going and going and going!

Step One: Warm-Up

Your Slut works best when powered up gradually and with care. Take your time with this for optimal operation later on.

Jumping straight to your Slut’s sensitive Clit can short-circuit her system. Approach with caution!

Before you proceed to her Pussy, we recommend warming up your Slut with activities including, but not limited to:
• Kissing her Lips, Face, Neck, Shoulders, Breasts, Belly, and Thighs
• Biting her Lips, Neck, Shoulders, Arms, Breasts, and Thighs
• Sucking her Lips (the ones on her face) and Nipples
• Holding her down with firm pressure on her Wrists, Arms, or Chest
• Slapping her Breasts, Ass, Thighs, and Face
• Exploring and discovering your own technique(s)!

You’ll know your Slut is ready for the next step when she is:
• Moaning
• Rolling her Hips
• Flushed
• Wet
• Increasingly incoherent
• Begging for it

Step Two: External Stimulation

Your Slut’s Clit is the most sensitive and responsive part of her anatomy. Approach it with care and caution so as not to overload her processor.

As you wait for her Clit to reach full sensitivity and readiness, we recommend exploring and stimulating these nearby areas on your Slut:
• Inner Thighs
• Mons Pubis
• Outer Labia
• Inner Labia
• Vaginal Opening (taste it for a burst of flavor!)
• External G-Spot (easily locatable due to red heart decal ❤️)

When your Slut is ready to have her Clit touched, she’ll make telltale whining and groaning sounds. See how loud you can make her before you deign to proceed!

Your fuckdoll’s Clit comes equipped with a Clitoral Hood which serves to protect her Clit from overstimulation and pain. Stimulate her Clit through its Hood and/or the Inner Labia at all times for best performance! (This rule may occasionally be broken by advanced players but we do not recommend beginners eschew this measure.)

Hint: Giving Multiple Orgasms to your Slut is easiest if her first Orgasm occurs from solely Clit stimulation.

Use your fingers and/or mouth on your Slut’s Clit. Listen and respond to her sound effects to learn what to do!

Hint: Your Slut’s first Orgasm can usually be induced without the use of a Vibrator, but subsequently she may need the additional power of a mechanical supplement, such as the We-Vibe Tango or Magic Wand Rechargeable. Hold it yourself or (for your added convenience and freedom) instruct her to do so!

Troubleshooting: If your Slut freezes up with an Anxiety Error, try these handy passphrases, or variations thereof, to get her functioning again:
• “You taste delicious.”
• “You’re beautiful.”
• “Just relax and enjoy.”
• “I could do this all night.”
• “Does that feel good, baby?”

Increase the length and intensity of your Slut’s Orgasm by applying rhythmic, firm pressure to her Clit, Clitoral Hood, and Clitoral Shaft while her Orgasm occurs.

Step Three: Interlude

After Orgasm, your Slut’s delicate Clit needs time to reset. However, you can still play with her! This is an opportune time for other activities, including but not limited to:
• Kissing, Biting, and Slapping (see above)
• Blowjobs (your Slut’s yielding Mouth becomes even more so after Orgasm!)
• Penetration (see below)
• Cuddling
• Touching and/or Squeezing her Shoulders, Breasts, Back, and Hips
• Pressing her External G-Spot with firm, circular pressure

Your Slut’s Refractory Period may last as few as ten minutes or as long as an hour. Don’t despair: there are lots of fun ways to use her in the meantime!

Troubleshooting: if your Slut seems overly fatigued after Orgasm, she may be in need of water, a snack, and/or some words of reassurance. However, some fatigue and incoherence is normal at this stage. (For advanced players: she may be particularly susceptible at this stage to Erotic Hypnosis.)

Hint: We recommend returning to the Warm-Up step (see above), albeit for perhaps a shorter period, before attempting to give your Slut a second Orgasm.

Step Four: Penetration

Optionally, you may touch the inside of your Slut’s Pussy with your fingers, your cock, and/or a Dildo.

Your Slut’s G-Spot responds to hard pounding or pulsing, while her A-Spot prefers firm stroking and pulling. Both Spots work best when stroked with a consistent, steady rhythm. Your Slut may ask for a faster rhythm as she approaches Orgasm; it is up to your discretion whether you give her what she wants!

Hint: Your Slut comes pre-equipped with interactive communication abilities for easier location and stimulation of her Spots. Override your Slut’s frequent incoherence by asking simple “yes/no” or “either/or” questions, such as:
• “Do you want it deeper?”
• “Harder or softer?”
• “Faster or slower?”

Important: Though your Slut responds positively to Penetration, her Clit must also be touched if Orgasm is your goal. Handily, your Slut can handle this herself with her Fingers or a Vibrator if you are otherwise occupied. (Don’t forget to release her Dominant Hand [the right one on the standard model] from any restraints that may be restricting it if you would like to activate her Self-Stimulation Mode.)

Penetration makes Orgasm easier for your Slut and also results in a stronger, longer Orgasm. Note: this means Multiple Orgasms are most easily achieved if you deny your Slut the Penetration she craves until after her first Orgasm.

Troubleshooting: Add Lube to your Slut’s Pussy as needed if it becomes dry or uncomfortable, so she can remain usable for you as long as possible! (Some types we recommend: Sliquid Sassy and Sutil.)

After each Orgasm, return to the Interlude stage to keep from overloading your Slut’s Clit.

Note: Your Slut’s daily Orgasm limit is likely to be three, depending on her comfort, sensitivity, recency of other Orgasms, and other pertinent factors. However, we invite you to aim for the stars!

By following these instructions, you’ll be able to maximize your enjoyment of your brand-new Helpless Little Slut®!

Blue Suede; He Stayed

Kate Sloan

I’m a sucker for physical objects that represent relationships. I still occasionally wear an ex-boyfriend’s boxers, clutch a stuffed bunny that a beau bought me when I can’t sleep, sigh contentedly at an emerald ring gifted by an ex-girlfriend on our first Valentine’s Day. These things mean something to me, even when the relationships from which they surfaced no longer do. What they mean is this: I loved and was loved. It happened. There is physical proof.

But these are all objects which outlasted relationships. It’s rare, in my life, for a relationship to outlast an object it contains.

When my Sir bought me my first collar – not my first-ever collar, you understand, but the first collar I’d worn as an agreed-upon, mutually meaningful symbol of a D/s dynamic folded into a romance – no discussion was had about how long we foresaw the object lasting, and what we would do if and when it needed replacing. The closest we got was a conversation about what we would do if I accidentally lost my collar: dropped it down a subway grate, forgot it at a restaurant, lost sight of it in a TSA tussle. We agreed that we would be sad in such a case, but that we would soldier on and get another one, because it was the symbolism of the item, not the item itself, that ultimately mattered.

“I don’t think we would get the same one; I would want to get one that was a better reflection of our relationship at that time,” my Sir told me, and those words stuck in my head. He, with his history of fewer but much longer relationships than I had had, believed in our future – in our ability to persevere and grow as a couple. It had been so long since I had done such a thing that I hardly believed it was still possible for me.

Our first collar was suede with a silver heart at the front. We chose it after multiple long slogs through the kinky corners of the internet, fixating on it for its bright cobalt color and its simple, versatile aesthetic. Weirdly, although I knew from past experience the kinds of things that can happen to suede when it gets wet and well-worn, it didn’t occur to me that such things would happen to this collar, too. It seemed as though the symbolic importance of the item would permeate its pores and prevent any harm from befalling it. The night he gave it to me, I wore it to a crowded concert in chilly New York, double-dousing it in sweat, snow, and maybe some stray droplets of bourbon as we moshed and kissed and laughed.

It didn’t take long for the royal blue suede to darken to a formidable navy, especially given that I tended to wear the collar in sweaty situations: sex with my Sir when he was nearby, or nervewracking days when he was far away and I needed some encouragement to get through my work. The collar’s color changed so much that one of its makers remarked on it with alarm when he saw it on me at an industry event. I just laughed; I liked owning such a tangible sign of my relationship’s cozy comfort, its establishedness. But part of me missed that bright blue.

At some point, my Sir and I began discussing the possibility of replacing my collar. We were both, at once, sad and excited about it; the beginning of a new chapter inevitably also brings the end of another. Much like trading in the irrational distractibility of New Relationship Energy for something warmer and sturdier, it felt bittersweet but like a definite step forward, one we wanted to take.

We once again combed the internet for collars. We looked at fancy ones, cutesy ones, over-the-top ones. There were a few criteria: it had to be blue, it had to have a heart on it, and it had to be comfortable enough for all-day wear but easy to take off quickly, because I don’t wear it on a 24/7 or even everyday basis. It was surprisingly hard to find collars that fit these parameters and weren’t ugly as fuck, so once again, we gravitated to that L’Amour-Propre collar we’d chosen in the first place.

I thought it would work better for our purposes if it was regular leather – as opposed to suede – so my Sir reached out to the company to see if they could make that happen for us. They had to visit their leather supplier and pick out a piece for us, which they were happy to do. We pored over the one photo they sent us of the leather, trying to discern whether it was perfect or not quite right. We trusted the process. We started getting excited.

It was easier than I expected to transfer the psychic energy of one collar into another. It helped that we stuck to traditions from last time (we earth signs love our rituals and routines). Like our first collaring, the second one happened on the night of a Hippo Campus concert; my Sir pulled the beautiful piece of blue leather out of an elegant watch case he’d stored it in; he stood behind me as I knelt, and slid it around my neck. We went and looked at in together in the mirror. Tears may have been shed.

My new collar hasn’t had time yet to absorb the scent of my skin, my sweat, and my perfume. It hasn’t yet molded to the shape of my neck, tarnished from use, or rippled on the inside. But it still carries with it the weight of my relationship, my D/s dynamic, my love, so it’s more valuable to me than many objects I’ve had for years.