Personal

Come See Me Do Musical Improv In-Person In Toronto!

Kate Sloan

“What is musical improv, exactly?”

A number of friends have asked me this question over the past few months, as I’ve worked my way through the beginner and advanced musical improv classes at Comedy Bar here in Toronto.

I’m always glad they asked, because I’ve been obsessed with this art form for years, even before I gathered the guts to get involved in it myself. I could yap about it for hours.

our ask-for was “a room in the house”

the suggestion we got was “mud room”

I was given the song title “It’s Too Mud-Roomy”

I sang a soulful solo about divorce and muddy boots 😂

[image or embed]

— Kate Sloan (she/her) (@katesloan.com) April 4, 2025 at 11:43 AM

When they ask about it, I explain to them that this type of musical improv (as opposed to, say, instrumental jazz improv) involves singing songs you make up on the spot, with the help of a musical director who’s playing the piano. Often it’s shortform games you might’ve seen on old episodes of Whose Line Is It Anyway, like Hoedown or Irish Drinking Song, in which you make up lyrics as a group to a pre-existing melody.

But other times, we make up the lyrics and the melody simultaneously, and – to quote the musical improvisor Zach Reino – “if that sounds terrifying… thank you!”

It is terrifying, but that’s part of why I love it. You’re surfing the razor’s edge of adrenaline at all times, always trying to land that next line, that next rhyme. And because improv is based on the momentary impulses of our strange brains, sometimes it goes to some zany places.

yay, I can upload longer videos here now, so I can share this:

my solo song from my musical improv show earlier this week!

the suggestion I got was “THE VERY LAST PIZZA”

this show was completely wild for me because I wasn’t nervous at all, which I’m pretty sure has never happened to me in my LIFE

[image or embed]

— Kate Sloan (she/her) (@katesloan.com) March 12, 2025 at 11:03 AM

All this to say, darlings, that this semester I’ve been bumped up to the ‘pro’ musical improv class, and we’re doing a bunch of shows!! And you’re invited, assuming you’re in/near Toronto or can get here!

My class and I will be performing in 8 weekly shows at Comedy Bar’s Danforth location. You can buy tickets at this link for whichever performance(s) you’d like to attend. I’m gonna be in these ones:

  • Sunday, April 27th at 7:30 p.m.
  • Sunday, May 4th at 7:30 p.m.
  • Sunday, May 11th at 7:30 p.m.
  • Sunday, May 18th at 7:30 p.m.
  • Sunday, May 25th at 7:30 p.m.
  • Sunday, June 1st at 7:30 p.m.
  • Sunday, June 8th at 7:30 p.m.
  • Sunday, June 15th at 7:30 p.m.

Incidentally, each of these shows ends with a musical ‘improv jam’ where you can (optionally!) put your name in a hat and get called up to do impromptu improv with a bunch of other cool comedy nerds, myself likely included (depending on post-show energy levels). So if you enjoy the show and it gets you curious about trying musical improv yourself, you can give it a shot immediately, with supportive folks – including (I think) our ultra-talented musical director Jacob Ollivier on the keys!

if I may tempt you further, here is a brief clip from my last musical improv show, of me improvising a blues verse about spaceships & Jeff Bezos 🚀

[image or embed]

— Kate Sloan (she/her) (@katesloan.com) March 4, 2025 at 5:31 PM

It’s so exciting to be doing so much improv performance again; prior to this latest stint, I hadn’t really done improv since high school (which was 14 years ago!!), and getting back into it has reminded me that laughter and joy are more important now than ever… and that when you force yourself to do fun-scary things, it gets easier to do hard-scary things, too.

Hope to see you at Comedy Bar for some unhinged, off-the-cuff musical fun 😘

How I Fell in Love With Cock & Ball Torture 😈 💜

Kate Sloan

Helen: You can’t possibly know how you’ll respond to something until you try it.

Jessica: I happen to disagree. I happen to think, if you know yourself well, you can gauge how you’re going to react to something…

Helen: You know how you’ll react to everything?

Jessica: Pretty much, yes.

[Helen suddenly kisses her; Jessica falls silent, shocked]

Helen: I guess you’re right. You seem to know yourself pretty well.

This dialogue from the movie Kissing Jessica Stein sums up exactly why it took me so long to realize I liked doing cock & ball torture (a.k.a. CBT, not to be confused with cognitive-behavioral therapy). I thought I knew myself well enough to already know, more-or-less, which kinks could appeal to me and which simply couldn’t. But I was wrong about that.

 

My first CBT experience

My first few penis’ed partners had no interest in genital torture – and to be fair, neither did I – so it wasn’t until my mid-twenties that I encountered someone who wanted me to hurt his dick.

He brought it up during a late-night handjob. We hadn’t been dating for very long, and I was still trying to get a grasp on what worked for him, so to speak. I hadn’t been able to make him come yet, despite ample effort and interest; I had only occasionally laid beside him in bed while he got himself off instead.

Tonight I’d wanted to give it another go, but his dick still seemed unimpressed. So I floundered, technique-wise, trying anything I could think of, until… he put his hand on mine, to pause my stroking, and said, simply: “Pinch the skin as hard as you can.”

I remember thinking: As HARD as I CAN?! Are you SURE?!

But lo and behold, when I picked a spot on his shaft and followed his instruction, within seconds he was coming all over my hands.

That relationship didn’t last long, for a whole host of reasons (some sexual, some less so), but it taught me some important lessons that I would take with me into the rest of my sex & dating life – including that dick pain could be a turn-on for some people, and that apparently I was one of those people.

 

Why I like CBT now

It’s been nearly a decade since that initial pinchy handjob that kicked everything off, and I’ve done a fair bit more CBT since then. I’m certainly no pro, like the ballbusting experts you’ll see on clip sites and at certain fetish parties (you know who you are!), but I do it semi-regularly and with relish. Here are a few reasons I like topping for CBT…

• Hurting people who want to be hurt is hot! I wouldn’t enjoy slapping someone’s dick around unless they really, really wanted me to, because masochists’ desire for pain and positive responses to pain are what make the interaction sexy to me, for the most part. Someone begging you to hurt them, if you’re both into that, can be as hot as someone begging you to fuck them, and for the same reasons: it means they want you and they trust you. That’s high praise!

• Penises are culturally weighty. Slapping someone’s cock is really different from slapping, say, their ass or their face. Not only does it feel very physically different because of the different concentrations of nerve endings involved; it also feels pretty different psychologically for both the top and the bottom. People’s feelings about their own genitals may relate to their understandings of gender, power, desirability/attractiveness, and more, and all of that may come up during CBT play (which is part of why pre-negotiation and aftercare are so important!). Likewise, I know my own feelings about CBT as a top are influenced by cultural baggage I’ve absorbed about dicks; over the course of my life, I have felt afraid of them, fascinated by them, desirous of them, and often some combination thereof, so it’s an interesting experience psychologically to inflict consensual pain on one.

• New routes to pleasure/orgasm are cool! Few things are sexier to me than seeing someone being overwhelmed by pleasure, especially unexpectedly intense pleasure – and even though I’ve made my partner come many times by slapping their cock at this point, I still find it astonishing every single time. Aside from that one experience with a previous partner that I described above, neither my spouse nor I had played with this kink to this extent before, so it feels intimate and sweet that we’ve found this new-to-us way to share pleasure through pain.

 

How about you, dear reader? Are you a CBT aficionado, or is it a bridge too far for your delicate, uh, sensibilities? 😉

 

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

Making VR Porn With My Partner Was Hot, Cool, & Weird…

Kate Sloan
Playing the ukulele with an Apple Vision Pro on for some reason

“Would you fuck your clone?”

This is one of the many questions that us sex nerds tend to debate with each other. It’ll come up in the blogger lounge at the sex conference, or in the back row of the sexual psychology lecture, or in the aftercare cuddle puddle at the play party. No matter the answers amongst the group, it’s sure to be an interesting conversation.

There are some standard sub-questions that arise as a result of this bigger, broader question, like: Is fucking your clone closer to incest, or masturbation? Are you sexually compatible with yourself, or would you run into some classic top4top or bottom4bottom difficulties in trying to fuck yourself? Are you attracted to yourself, and if not, does that even affect your answer?

That last one is really the clincher for me, and is the main reason I would not fuck my clone: I’m just not that into me. Granted, you don’t have to be attracted to someone to fuck them, and I certainly haven’t been super attracted to every person I’ve ever hooked up with – but I think, in this case, I would find that hurdle tough to overcome.

I bring this up because making VR blowjob porn with my partner, and subsequently watching said porn on my partner’s VR headset, is probably the closest I’ll ever come to fucking my clone – and it was both very weird and very cool.

A quick rundown on VR porn for those unacquainted: Virtual-reality headsets, while commonly used for video games, can also be used to watch hyperrealistic, three-dimensional media, including porn. Websites such as Virtual Real Porn offer VR videos, for instance, as do some early-adopter independent creators. Some sex toys can even be synced up with VR porn for an extra-realistic experience – for example, a stroker might slide up and down on your dick to the exact rhythm and depth depicted in the 3D clip you’re watching. The future is here, and it is sexy!

When my partner got an Apple Vision Pro headset shortly after its launch, she let me try it out, and showed me various cool features on it – and because we’re both perverts, she also asked me if I wanted to watch and/or make porn on it. Naturally, I said yes!

One of my all-time favorite porn genres is POV blowjobs, so we decided to start with one of those. The Vision Pro can take 3D video, so my partner strapped hers on and hit ‘record,’ and I got to work. Giving head to someone who’s wearing an enormous VR headset is pretty hilarious, I have to admit – but there were also times when it felt hot in a deeply perverse way, like I was being coolly surveilled by a bug-eyed alien, or blowing a disinterested gamer during a LoL raid.

It wasn’t my first rodeo (or, uh, blow-deo) – I’ve starred in BJ porn a handful of other times before – but something still felt new and fresh about it, I think because I was aware that people other than my partner might watch the video one day, and might therefore feel like I’m blowing them, and so I felt a certain responsibility to ‘play all the hits,’ as it were – to be a crowd-pleaser, all the way through. (The video isn’t currently available for purchase, although another (non-VR) POV blowjob of mine is.)

The most surreal part for me was watching the video later on, while wearing the headset myself. It was nothing like the times before when I’d watched my own 2D blowjob videos in a QuickTime window on my laptop screen – now, the image filled my entire field of view, and appeared so three-dimensional that I almost thought I could reach down and brush my own hair out of my face.

I got to observe a blowjob I’d already experienced, but from a different angle. In essence, I got to receive a BJ from my clone… and it was weeeeeird! Despite POV blowjobs being a go-to search term for me on any porn site, I just couldn’t get into this one. I was too consumed with self-criticism, too zoomed in on my flaws, my awkwardness, and the sheer fact of me being me.

So, no – I don’t think I would fuck my clone. But would I watch her suck off my partner in 3D, just to revel in the frisson of charged discomfort it conjures? Abso-fuckin-lutely. I have, and I would do it again.

 

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

My New Tattoo is Romantic as Hell 💖

Kate Sloan

It’s no secret that I love hearts, and pink and red things, and the whole lovecore aesthetic. I mean, I just wrote a whole blog post last week about pink-and-red outfits I devised to match a pink-and-red dildo… Suffice it to say, I’m a fan of these colors!

I think what draws me to the lovecore look even more than its pretty colors, though, is its emphasis on love and romance. They are really important themes in my life – I mean, I have a whole blog category dedicated to them! Love and romance have guided me toward many of my greatest joys and my happiest days – and not just because romance itself is fun and uplifting, but because crushes encourage growth!

If you are a person who experiences attraction (sexual, romantic, or otherwise), you can probably remember a time when you wanted to impress someone you were attracted to, or even just wanted to understand them more deeply – and in this effort, you researched a topic that was new to you, or consumed media you would’ve never stumbled across otherwise, or discovered a whole new side of your personality that you never knew existed. Whether or not our attractions ever “pan out” into “anything more” (which we can’t always control, anyway), they still pull us in the direction of who we want to become, and I think that’s fucking magical.

As we get older, every heartbreak and rejection can make it harder to keep pursuing love and connection. It seems scarier and scarier to go out into the world and take big, foolhardy risks with your heart – and gosh, wouldn’t it be so much easier to stay home on your sofa, numbing out with Netflix and living vicariously through other people’s loves? (If you feel called out, trust me, I’m calling myself out even more!)

It takes a concerted effort to push back against that impulse to self-isolate. Risk-aversion may be a prudent approach in finance or business, but it’s rarely the right impulse when it comes to human relationships, which inherently require some degree of risk. The ‘finding people to date’ part is risky and scary, the ‘actually going on dates’ part is risky and scary, and the ‘opening yourself up emotionally and physically to a new person’ part is definitely risky and scary… but when those risks pay off, it’s like winning the emotional jackpot.

Anyway, all of this has been on my mind for a long time, but especially since the pandemic kicked off. It’s never been easier to self-isolate. It’s never been easier to avoid relational risk. But I don’t want to do that. So I got a new tattoo to remind me: it’ll always be worth it to roll the dice on love.

My friend Addison Finch is an artist extraordinaire; you might know him as the creator of the current Dildorks album art, or the Making Magic album art, or his illustrations on the Funkit Toys Random Encounters sex dice, or any of the numerous other projects he’s done in the sex-positive sphere. He’s also a tattoo artist, so when he mentioned to me that he was going to be visiting my city and doing a guest spot at a local tattoo shop, I knew right away that I wanted some of his art on my skin!

I considered a few different possibilities, but kept coming back to an idea I had seen represented by various different illustrators over the years (including RubyRoller-Art, xPixelPerfect and Eidalfina): pink dice decorated with red hearts. To me, it was the perfect encapsulation of my current goals vis-à-vis love and romance: Roll the dice. Take a risk. See what happens.

After some discussions of layout and placement, Addison drew up a design in his own style for me to look at, and I loved it. He set to work tattooing it on me, while we chatted about life, love, kink, and art for a couple of hours. When I saw the completed ink on my arm, it felt right immediately – almost like it had always been there.

I’m not the bravest person in the world when it comes to love (or anything else). But I hope this tattoo will give me a kick in the pants when I need it, reminding me that love might hurt, and it might surprise me, and it might even blow up in my face – but it’s always, always worth rolling the dice on.

Why Does Ovulation Make Me Crave Realistic Dildos So Bad?!

Kate Sloan
Pictured: realistic dildos made by Solina, Vixen Creations, and the Pleasure Tailor

One Sunday afternoon, I grabbed the bin of dirty sex toys from under my bed and brought it to the sink for cleaning. As I stared down into its contents, I was confronted with the realization: Every single toy in the bin was a realistic dildo. Apparently, I had craved cock – and only cock – for the past week or more.

I chuckled about this as I began soaping up the dildos, giving them sudsy handjobs under running water. I wondered what could possibly explain this sudden phallic fascination. On a hunch, I whipped out my phone to check my cycle tracking app – and lo and behold, I was (very likely) ovulating. Suddenly, it all made perfect sense.

Now, don’t get it twisted – I am a huge fan of dicks, and of their silicone facsimiles, on most days of the month, not just when I’m ovulating. But despite how much I like getting dicked down, I don’t fantasize about it all that often. Like the majority of people with vulvas, most of my pleasure – and all of my orgasms – come from clit stimulation, so when I’m fantasizing about having stuff done to me, usually it’s some kind of clit stuff.

But around ovulation time, I’ve noticed that my thoughts seem to wander to dicks more often. I used to notice this most acutely when I worked in sex toy retail and would catch myself staring longingly at the dildo display, filthy images flitting through my mind – but only at that particular time in my cycle. And now, I see it in my dirty-toy bin, which tells me truths about my current headspace like prophetic tea leaves in a cup.

Of course, from an evo-psych perspective, it makes complete sense that I would crave peen-in-vag sex at the time when that type of sex could most readily knock me up. I don’t even know whether I’m physically capable of getting pregnant (I’ve never knowingly been pregnant, never had a pregnancy scare, and have a history of ovarian cysts and irregular periods), but nonetheless, my body and brain seem to be pushing me toward that outcome when I ovulate.

This is a good illustration of something I strongly believe about sex toys: that they can help us make better sexual decisions for ourselves – decisions that are more in line with our values, preferences, and goals, both in and out of the bedroom. Back in the day, for instance, I used to sate my cyclical cock cravings by finding people to hook up with on dating apps – and while there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, the urgency of my desire would sometimes lead me to ignore red flags and rush into an evening of stilted conversation and bad sex.

These days, the only dicks that interest me are the ones attached to people I actually like, and the disembodied ones in my nightstand drawers. I would much rather keep myself satisfied with sex toys as needed, and only go out with people who genuinely excite me and treat me well, than roll the dice on impulsive hookups that are almost never as good as the fantasies in my head.

I’m sure some people would argue, “It’s not the same! Using a dildo could never feel as good as real human connection!” and to those people, I would say: Have you even felt dual-density silicone, babe?! It feels pretty fuckin’ good, my dude!!

But also: I do experience real human connection when masturbating. It’s a connection with myself, my body, and my fantasies. And anyone who doesn’t see the intrinsic value in that is just not someone I’d allow into my life – let alone into my holes.

 

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