Personal

A Month’s Worth of Phone Sex

Kate Sloan

Content notes for this post (in alphabetical order): ageplay, alcohol, bruising, bullying, confined spaces, consensual non-consent, Daddy Dom/little girl roleplay, face-fucking, fingerfucking, hypnosis, impact play, incest roleplay, intoxication, marijuana, objectification, self-harm, semi-public sex, sleepy sex.

September 4th. I get home late after Tell Me Something Good, giggly, excited, and slightly tipsy from a double whiskey on the rocks. In telling him how the night went, I ask Sir what story he would tell about us if he ever attended TMSG, and he tells me the tale of our second date the way he would if he was in front of an audience. Then we recount some of our fave sex memories from the weekend we just spent together in Toronto, which definitely turns us both on. He instructs me to smoke some weed, as I’ve had a long, somewhat stressful day and need to relax (and also he likes how I get when I’m high). We want to do some impact, so I get out my Weal & Breech purpleheart truncheon – a mutual fave – and he directs me to start hitting my thigh with it. The rhythm of the impacts makes me a bit trancey, which he capitalizes on by having me imagine that each hit feels like his mouth on my clit, or his fingers on my G-spot, or his cock against my A-spot. He has me use the Double Trouble and Eroscillator, all the while telling me how good I am and how deep he’s fucking me, until I come to the sounds of him saying, “You like that? Is that gonna make you come, if I keep fucking you just like that?” He comes shortly after I do, making great noises. We haven’t had phone sex in 6 whole days before this (!) and it’s clear we’ve both missed it. For aftercare, he reads me some Girly Juice Ebooks tweets out loud, and then we say goodnight around 2:40AM.

September 5th. I’m already high and turned on when Sir calls me around 10:05PM, so we get into dirty talk pretty quickly. He laments how much he misses fingerbanging me, and describes his favorite aspects of that act. The weed causes this to turn me on even faster and more intensely than usual. He asks, “Have you gotten off yet today, little one?” and I haven’t, so he says, “We’ll have to do something about that.” He’s in the mood to hypnotize me again, so he takes me down into a deep trance and then, since I’m already feeling quite little (weed does that sometimes), he plants the suggestion that I will feel like a little girl desperately using all her wiles to get her daddy to fuck her. When he brings me out of trance, we do a highly literal ageplay scene wherein I’m confused by my own arousal and daddy has to explain it to me, also explaining (and demonstrating the uses of) my sexual anatomy all the while. We use the Fucking Sculptures Corkscrew (a fave) and he shows me how to hold the We-Vibe Tango on my clit while he fucks me with the toy (“You’re gonna be my good little helper, okay?”). After a while, I’m having some trouble getting off, so he has me switch to the Double Trouble (“We’re gonna use this big pretty blue glass one, see?”) and mutters in my ear about how he’s gonna keep fucking me hard after I come. When I do – loud and long – he describes unzipping his pants, climbing on top of me, and shoving inside me. He’s gasping “Right there, baby, right there” when he comes about 30 seconds later. After we catch our breaths, he reads aloud the fragrance recommendations I wrote for him earlier that day, and then we joke about how we definitely have more phone sex than anyone we know who doesn’t do it professionally (easily upwards of 220 times in the ~270 days we’ve been dating at this point). He has to go to bed early to get on a plane to a work conference in the morning, so we say goodnight around midnight.

September 7th. Sir’s in a different time zone for the weekend, but we negotiate that he can wake me up at 3AM for phone sex if he wants to, because a) he likes fucking me when I’m sleepy and b) he’s my dom and I love him. He actually calls a little after 2:20AM, because he is punctual and respectful. He tries to make conversation about my day but I’m half-asleep and can’t form sentences, so he says, “Do you just want daddy to fuck you, little one?” I do. He paints a word-picture of fucking me from behind in a spooning position, slow and gentle, as befitting a sleepy girl. He tells me to use a realistic dildo so it’ll feel more authentically like his cock; I grab my current fave, the Fleshjack Brent Corrigan. It’s big, so I sleepily attempt to pour lube onto it in the dark, accidentally getting most of the lube on my belly and chest (it’s late, okay?!). It takes me a while to come, because I’m tired, and I can hear that he keeps getting close, but he just spins this into additional dirty-talk designed to ping my premature ejaculation kink (“It’s so hard for me not to come when I’m this deep inside your tight, hot cunt…”). Finally, with the Eroscillator on my clit and the Fleshjack deep inside me, I come, and then so does he. Then he says nice things to me about how good I am and how hard I’ve worked all day, until I can’t keep my eyes open anymore and have to say goodnight.

September 10th. I lament to Sir, as he’s flying back to the Eastern time zone, that I haven’t come in days (I rarely do outside of our phone sex since we started dating, honestly) and he says maybe he’ll give me two orgasms tonight, if I’m good. When he calls after getting home from the airport, we catch up and joke around for a bit, and then he says he wants to hurt me. He guides me through some impact on my right thigh with my Billiard Banger. “How is that making you feel, little one?” he asks. “Real spacey,” I reply. “Good; that’s what I want,” he says. I’ve just received a new dildo in the mail, the Uberrime Night King, so he has me use that while imagining it’s him fucking me, slow and hard. When I come hard with it and the Eroscillator, I pant, “I like that toy,” and Sir laughs and says, “I know.” An hour or more of aftercare-y giggling and chatting later, I’m craving more impact, so he has me hit my ass with the Weal & Breech truncheon until I’m spacey again. He gets audibly turned on and mentions that if he were kissing my shoulders right now, I would feel his hard cock against me – and it’s like a choose-your-own-adventure where I can decide whether I want to say goodnight and drift off into subspacey sleep, or get fucked again. I choose the latter. He has me use the Magic Wand and Double Trouble to approximate all kinds of delightful sex acts, until we both have absurdly long, strong orgasms. We sigh blissfully and say nice things to each other until we finally have to say goodnight around 3AM.

September 11th. Sir and I both had long, stressful days, full of illness and busywork and pressure, so we want to unwind together, as we often do. “It’s easier to get through the day when I remember I get to talk to my little girl at the end of it,” he tells me. “That’s a nice ritual for us.” And it is. After we both vent about what’s stressing us out, he reads a few chapters of Lolita to me (“Time for your bedtime story, little one”). Then he’s in the mood to trance me, so he asks me what I want to feel, and all I really want is to relax. During the induction, he asks me to picture a place that makes me feel relaxed, and immediately I vividly imagine myself on the Maid of the Mist. Once he’s gotten me into a deep trance, he gives me two triggers for the night: getting called “slut” will turn me on fast, and being told to “beg” will make me ask for what I’m craving most in that moment. He wakes me up and uses these two words to brilliant effect during the subsequent phone-fucking, eventually getting me so close to coming with the Eleven and Eroscillator that my mind is too empty to even think of anything to say when told to beg. We both come and then we do cuddly aftercare. My brain’s still all fuzzy and we both got the relaxing catharsis we needed.

September 12th. The trouble with keeping a phone-sex diary (or even a sex diary in general) is that you obviously don’t want to make notes during the encounter, and you certainly don’t want to make notes right after the encounter, when you’re a sweaty unraveled heap in bed. So inevitably, there will be nights like tonight, when I roll over shortly after a long phone-sex sesh and immortalize it in my phone’s Notes app with the following scribble: “some kind of ageplay idk.” Sex fries your brain sometimes. That’s okay. Even if you’re a sex blogger.

September 13th. We ask each other a series of check-in questions, modeled after my friend Taryn’s weekly check-in with her partner but specifically tailored to our relationship and our needs. One of the questions is, “What sexual fantasies are you thinking about lately?” and one that comes up this time is school-bully roleplay, something we’ve previously discussed but haven’t tried yet. Later, when the mood gets sexier, Sir says he’s in the mood to roleplay as a bully, and asks if I’m up for that. I am. There’s a silence, I giggle nervously, he asks me in his tough-guy voice what I’m laughing about, and we’re off to the races. The bully shoves me into a closet, aiming to use his sexual wiles to get me to give him my homework answers for the rest of the semester. It turns out he has a burgeoning hypnokink (who’da thought?!) and wants to hypnotize me to make the proceedings easier. He puts me into a trance and gets my suggestible little brain excited and turned on at the thought of sucking his cock. Rough fucking ensues, with him fucking my face, going down on me, and eventually fucking my cunt – quietly, there in the school closet. A new-ish protocol of ours comes into effect, whereby I’m allowed to choose and use sex toys without Sir’s permission when we’re roleplaying, to best approximate what’s happening in the scene, and I go with the Corkscrew and Eroscillator. We both come achingly hard while he’s inside me, and it takes me a long while to catch my breath. I know we’ve come back to the real world when he says, softly, “I love you, little one.”

September 15th. It’s a bad brain day. I sheepishly text Sir to tell him my anxiety is so bad that I want to hurt myself. He replies, “Well, the good news is, that’s a thing we can do. We can hurt you with supervision and safety and someone else in control. And we’re good at it.” I love him. He calls me around 10PM, and as we’re chatting about random stuff, it comes up that he’s never seen Secretary. We decide to watch it immediately. Coincidentally, it deals with the links between self-harm and consensual sadomasochism, so it feels fitting. After the movie – which we agree is problematic, yet hot – Sir has me hit my thigh with my stone crop, gently at first and then harder, until there’s a big pink bruise we both admire in the photos I take for him. Then he leads me through a comfortingly familiar phone-sex scene: I get daddy’s mouth and fingers and cock, and the Eroscillator and the Pure Wand. Afterward, he stays up with me until almost 3AM, dropping compliments left and right in his smooth baritone until I feel calm enough to go to sleep. The last thing I remember him saying is, “I love being the one who says most of the stuff when we have phone sex. I love listening to your sounds and reactions. You never have to worry you’re not saying enough, okay? This is what I want.”

September 16th. We’re both extremely stressed at work, so after some mutual ranting and consoling, we decide to do a hypno scene. I smoke some weed and put on my headphones and Sir takes me down into a deeeep trance, where he suggests that hearing the phrases “You want to tell me” and “You want to do it” will indeed make me want to tell him or do whatever he wants. When he wakes me up, he somehow intuits – as he often does – exactly which toys I want: the Double Trouble and the Eroscillator. He’ll occasionally cut through my shy giggles by saying, “What do you want? You want to tell me…” and I do. He describes holding me down and fucking me, using me as his fucktoy, taking what he wants from me. He says, in this caring, paternal voice, “I’m gonna get a little deeper so you come on the whole thing, okay?” and that pushes me over the edge; he comes soon after me and I imagine his teeth sinking into the flesh of my shoulder as he does. We talk and laugh more for about an hour – he reads me some terrible old tweets of mine – and then his voice gets dark and gruff and I know what he’s going to say before he says it: “I wanna fuck you again, little one.” I’m not turned on at all anymore, but he’s very, very good at making that happen, and I trust completely that he will. He talks about the last time he made me squirt in person – how he did it, what it felt like, why he likes it – and, whoops, now we both want to make me squirt. He tells me to slip the Seduction inside me and then talks about fingering my G-spot, first gently and then more firmly, while licking my clit. It takes me a while, but eventually I get very close, and he tells me to turn up my Magic Wand at the exact perfect moment to make me come hard. I keep pounding myself with the wooden toy afterward until I squirt a tiny amount on my sheets. Then he groans that he wants to fuck my face, and I say, “I’m sleepy, daddy,” and he promises, “You can just take a little nap while daddy fucks your face, baby,” and then he comes immediately, because, surprise, the guy who goes by “Super Sleepy Dude” online has a sleepy-sex kink! We catch our breaths and send kisses through the phone and go to sleep around 2:30AM.

September 17th. Sir’s phone is broken and getting repaired overnight so he hooks up his AirPods to his iPad (confirmed Apple nerd over here) and, even when we’re just chatting about our days, I’m vaguely aware that we’re definitely gonna have phone sex sans phone. My chronic joint pain is flaring up, so Sir wants to be gentle with me and also to give me some consensual pain to distract me from the nonconsensual kind. He has me slap my face over FaceTime (…FaceSlapTime?) and says repeatedly how much he loves my subspacey face, making me feel beautiful even as my body feels broken. Then we switch to audio-only and he has me put on some nipple clamps and tug on the chain when he tells me to. At his behest, I slather my Eleven in lube, push it inside me, and pair it with the Eroscillator. He talks through a fairly standard daddy-fucking-me scene, because I’m too achy and irritable for anything wilder, and it’s perfect. I come shortly after he says something like, “You’re so tight I can barely move, so I can just do those tiny little motions you like, rubbing your spot over and over with the head of my cock.” I’ve told him before that hearing in detail about his minute movements inside me really turns me on for some reason, and, uh, he takes direction well. Through my disoriented haze, I beg him to fuck me harder until he comes. Afterward, I show him the draft-in-progress of this post, and he gets all emotional and says, “Even if you never do this again, it’s such a perfect time capsule of our sex life over the phone, and how varied and romantic and good it is.” I cry, because he always understands me and my work so completely. He kisses his iPad goodnight and we go to sleep.

September 18th. I’m already extremely high when he calls me. He’s so good at dealing with me when I’m intoxicated, because it’s a state so similar to subspace and trance, both of which he’s highly familiar with. He says sweet, positive, uncomplicated things to me, and makes me blush and giggle, and turns me on without even trying. My period has started so he has me put my Magic Wand on my clit and, in lieu of suggesting I take out my menstrual cup to put a dildo inside me (something of which I’d be incapable in my current state), he just describes in lascivious detail how exactly he would fuck me and how good it would feel. I have a sharp, overwhelming orgasm against the head of the wand, and then I listen, smiling dazedly, as he comes soon after I do. During aftercare, our conversation drifts to a new D/s thing we’re trying as of today – my daily to-do list is a shared note with him now, so he can check on my progress at any time – and he explains how good this makes him feel, how it connects us even more fiercely, the sharing of this mundane-but-intimate thing. “It’s such a gift,” he insists. “I can’t thank you enough for that, little one.” I’m still tingling and smiling when I drift off to sleep.

September 24th. We just got back from spending the weekend in Boston together, and it’s already difficult being apart again. “I missed having phone sex with you,” Sir says, and I admit I did too, despite us having had tons of in-person sex all weekend. “I don’t know how or why that happens, but it does.” He has me smoke some weed and then we do a bunch of impact on my ass with a Kronic Sensations wooden bat I was supposed to bring on the Boston trip but didn’t because of TSA concerns. He tells me to rub my clit and that he’s going to watch my cunt get wet and ready for him while I fantasize about what his cock will feel like inside me (oof). Armed with my Eleven and Eroscillator, I listen to him describing fucking me hard and deep, until I come sometime after he mentions dripping precum into me and hitting my spot on purpose so I’ll come all over his cock. I love listening to him come after me; I heard those sounds in person all weekend but hearing them over the phone is still special and necessary somehow. He reads me silly tweets afterward, and then we say goodnight and hang up. I get a text from him a few minutes later that says, “I’m so in love with you.”

September 25th. Sir tells me he was fantasizing about the Neon Wand earlier and wants to use it on me. He directs me, using just his voice and his attentive ears, to zap myself the way he wants to zap me: on my wrists, my tits, my thighs. It goes on until I’m subspacey as hell and somewhat overwhelmed and use my “yellow” safeword, so he has me zap my inner wrist for a little longer and then put the wand away. Then he tells me to smoke some weed. “What are you gonna do to me?!” I ask as I load my pipe. “What do you think I’m gonna do to you?” he counters. “I think you’re gonna try to trance me,” I tell him. He says, “I’m not going to just try, little one. I’m going to do it.” And he’s right. He mesmerizes me with his voice, and makes it so that the words “off” and “on” manipulate my mind in and out of trance like a lightswitch. Then he tells me he can immobilize certain parts of my body, or my entire body, by commanding me to “freeze.” He freezes my arms over my head so I can’t move while he describes kissing me and grinding into me – so frustrating! He has me slide the Fucking Sculptures Corkscrew into my cunt and then freezes my arm so I can’t move it in and out yet. He makes me position the Magic Wand on my clit and then freezes that arm so I can’t remove the vibe by myself. Eventually he lets me fuck myself with the dildo, and explains exactly how he likes to fuck me until I come, sharp and hard. A few seconds later, he freezes my whole body, and I guess it turns him on to think about fucking his immobilized little girl because he comes soon after that. My swollen G-spot wants to squirt, so he murmurs the word “now” to an increasingly frenetic rhythm to make me fuck myself as fast as he wants, and I squirt a little on my sheets. In the afterglow, I munch some chocolate and he kisses me goodnight over the phone, telling me I should be good, i.e. drink some water because I squirted and try not to stay up too late.

September 26th. Sir’s feeling romantic and sentimental tonight, I guess, because he launches unprompted into a monologue about how he wants to be with me for years and he loves me and is committed to our relationship. This isn’t uncommon for him, but I burst into tears nonetheless, and he keeps talking until I’m so wracked with emotion that I tell him I feel like we’re doing a kink scene where his express goal is to overwhelm me. He says, “I like that. I like fucking you when you’re already all vulnerable and teary from emotional conversations earlier. I guess that’s, like, ‘lovemaking’ or whatever.” I snicker at this, but that’s the word that came to mind for me too. Then, proving he knows exactly how to make love to me, he has me hit my thigh with my stone crop, first gently and then harder, until I have a beautiful purply-red bruise. I cry more, and he tells me to set the crop down. “It’s okay to feel whatever you’re feeling,” he murmurs helpfully. “You know how sometimes you’re worried you take too long to come, and I tell you to take as long as you need? You can take as long as you need to cry and feel your feelings, too.” So I do. Then he has me rub my clit slowly to get myself turned on, while saying hot things I won’t recall later because I’m so overwhelmed. I fuck myself with the Double Trouble, to the slow rhythm he dictates, while holding the Eroscillator on my clit. After we both come, he says somberly, “I love you so much,” and then, a moment later, switches into a goofy British accent to announce, “I could just float away. I have no use for this corporeal form anymore. I have transcended it.” I love him.

September 27th. I’m staying over at my parents’ house, where there isn’t much privacy. Sir calls me shortly after 10PM and we chat and laugh until the new Hippo Campus album drops at midnight, at which point we listen to it together over the phone, repeatedly vocally wishing we were together so we could kiss/cuddle/have extremely high sex to this sonic masterwork. I’ve been snacking on banana bread intermittently and ask Sir if I can have another slice, and he laughs and says, “No, not yet; I wanna fuck you first.” I dutifully retrieve the sex toys I’ve stashed in my parents’ piano bench for this exact scenario – the Lelo Gigi 2 and NobEssence Fling – and creep down to the basement to get some privacy. Sir starts doing a literal DD/lg roleplay and asks, “Where did you get those toys from, little one?” and I burst out laughing because it’s hilarious to me that a little girl would’ve started her own sex toy review blog, but I can’t think of another answer to give my daddy. He says he’ll help me test out the toys so I can do my “little job.” We both come really hard (though quietly), and I rinse off the toys and stow them back in the piano bench.

September 28th. We had busy weeks and decide to de-stress by spending our Friday night watching The Artist & the Pervert, the excellent documentary about Mollena Williams and Georg Friedrich Haas and their 24/7 D/s dynamic. I’ve seen it before so I know there’s a spanking scene that Sir will probably like, and he does. After the movie, when we’re tripping and falling into some flirty phone-sex foreplay, he asks for the exact thing I want at that moment: to hit me on my ass with my Weal & Breech truncheon. Sometimes it really seems like he is reading my mind. He builds up to even harder hits than he normally does, and after a while, I’m so spacey I can hardly speak. He has me fuck myself with my Double Trouble and Eroscillator – also the exact toys I was craving – while unleashing a stream of objectifying-yet-sweet dirty talk about how I’m just a receptacle for his cum. We both come hard, say adorable romantic things to each other, and say goodnight.

September 29th. I arrive home from a hypno play party at a dungeon, where I didn’t see any actual hypnosis happening but saw a lot of impact, bondage, and D/s (woof). I’ve been a grown-ass sexy adult around strangers all night and now I want to be little with my daddy. After we catch up about our days, he says he wants to trance me and asks what I want to feel; I say I want to feel like I have a crush on him and he has one on me. (Little Kate has simple needs.) He puts me into a deep trance and sets three triggers: “love” makes me feel flooded with happily reciprocated crushy feelings, “little” makes me feel even younger and smaller, and “squeeze” makes me squeeze my PC muscles and get turned on. Once he wakes me up and plays with these a bit, he asks me what I’m fantasizing about, and through my disoriented haze, I manage to tell him I want to hear what he’d say if he was teaching someone else how to make me come. (This is a long-standing fantasy related to my “you knowing exactly how to get me off” kink.) Ever the good sport, he asks one clarifying question about who this person is (“whoever… they’re nameless and faceless”) and then says “I guess I’m teaching a class, then!” and launches into a detailed monologue instructing someone on how to turn me on and get me off. He describes holding a Magic Wand on my clit while this other person pounds me with an Eleven, and then says, “You want daddy to take over fucking you, little one?” and I do. He fucks me until I come. I’m in a dreamy fog and don’t retain much after that massive orgasm. That’s often how these things go.

A Year of Independent Living

Kate Sloan

A year ago today, I moved into the little west-Toronto nook that’s now my home. A terse duo of Russian men packed all my worldly possessions into a truck outside my parents’ house, and then my mom, brother, and I hopped in a car and followed them across town to my new place. We watched as they hauled my mattress upstairs, my dresser, my desk. And then, all of a sudden, I lived in a new location. My first move since my parents vacated our little Degrassi Street house when I was a baby.

Depressed people like me often move through life more slowly than our neurotypical peers. When just staying afloat and staying alive takes massive energy, it can be difficult to put additional energy into propelling yourself forward – so you can feel “stuck” as you watch your more emotionally balanced friends chase after new homes, new careers, new relationships. This is largely why it took me until age 25 to move out of my parents’ home and into my own: the financial and emotional stability necessary for this move were hard-won for me, and I wanted to make sure both were firmly in place before I took the leap. (The immense privilege of my parents’ support until that time is one I don’t overlook and can never really repay them for. What a gift. I was, and am, so lucky.)

A couple months after landing my current dayjob, I spotted a post on Facebook about a room availability in an apartment. It was within my budget, located in a neighborhood I loved, and my potential roommate would be a cool sex-positive and 420-friendly friend-of-a-friend. I reached out to her to ask if I could come see the place, and on one Friday afternoon that August, I did. She showed me the room, and I was instantly enamored: it was huge (for a downtown Toronto bedroom), had ample natural light (important for combating my seasonal depression), and had two closets (oh, the sex toy storage possibilities!). We discussed details, and I told her I’d have to run it by my parents, but I knew in my heart that my answer was already yes. I wanted this big, bright apartment to be my new home.

Weirdly, the day of that viewing was also the day my last boyfriend broke up with me. He’d been cold and distant for a couple days, and wanted me to come over so we could talk – which, naturally, spiked my anxiety like whoa. His apartment was walking distance from the one I’d just been to see, so I ambled in his direction after the viewing. “It’s weird to have looked at the new place right before doing this,” I texted my best friend. “I’m all jazzed and energetic on my way to the guillotine.”

Indeed, when I got there, he broke up with me on the spot, and sent me home with an armful of items I’d been keeping at his house: a vape, a paddle, a vibrator. I cried behind my sunglasses on the seemingly endless streetcar ride, all the way across town, thinking about how I was alone, and I had so much to do before the move, and I was alone, and I was alone, and I was so so so alone.

But the truth was, I wasn’t alone. A friend invited me over to her place, made me a gin and tonic (which I sobbed into), and sat with me quietly reading a book while I finished some dayjob work. When I had steadied myself enough to form complete sentences, I told her about the apartment – how perfect it was, how excited I was to move there, even though the brick blanket of breakup depression had already settled on my bones.

My pal vowed to help me with my packing over the coming weeks, because she – a fellow depression-sufferer – knew how grief and malaise can weigh on you in a very real way, making it feel impossible to even move through the motions of your day. Over the 3 weeks that remained before moving day, she came over to my parents’ house a few times, and spent hours with me in my hot attic bedroom, deciding which clothes, books, and sex toys to take with me and which to leave behind. She listened to me cry and rant about my ex as we picked through the detritus of my entire life. It was a catharsis, an excavation, a salvaging.

And so everything got packed, and the Russian men came to take my stuff away, and I became – by at least this one measure – an independent adult. My mom, an ever-hovering maternal firecracker, wanted to make my bed for me with the sheets and shams we’d hauled over from my old room – but I told her no, I wanted to do it myself. I appreciated her love and care, on levels so deep I couldn’t even verbalize my feelings, but I wanted this new place to be mine. I felt invigorated by the knowledge that depression could not defeat me, not even when I’d been faced with a task as dauntingly huge as moving across the city in the wake of a breakup.

That first night, my friend Brent happened to be playing a show at a bar downtown, and I went. A random dude in the audience recognized me from Instagram, bought me shots of whiskey, and made out with me in front of the stage. I cheered and clapped and cried as Brent performed his set. At the end of the night, drunk on attention and booze, I left the bar in my little leather jacket and wandered back to my new home-that-didn’t-yet-feel-like-home. On the way, I stopped off for some tipsy McDonald’s. This would become a tradition of mine on mellow, merry nights.

The first few months in my new place were resolutely lonely. There were days when I felt paralyzed by anxiety, unsure where in the neighborhood to get food or coffee, so I just stayed in bed writing and crying. There were nights when I desperately wanted to go to a comedy show, but feared going alone, so I’d get high and go out or stay sober and stay in. I texted my family whenever the loneliness felt overwhelming, and visited them at least once a week, sleeping on the den couch because the centerpiece of my old bedroom was now just a bare boxspring. I defied my introverted nature to make plans with friends as often as I could, aching to fill the void left by my old home and my dissolved relationship. It frequently didn’t feel like enough, and I spent many nights numbing out with weed and Netflix, wondering if I’d made a massive mistake – or perhaps a series of them.

But, over time, it got easier. On days when I felt strong enough to confront my anxieties, I marched into heretofore-unexplored cafés, diners, grocery stores, and bookshops, laying claim to happy new haunts. I refamiliarized myself with the reality that no one actually thinks it’s that weird if you go see an improv show by yourself. I blasted jazz through my speakers while sipping wine and writing, imbuing my new home with my old rhythms. I wrote in my journal that my ex felt “like a dark spectre looming over my life, a half-imagined ghost of what could have been, hazy at the edges and fading day by day.” I made out with a cute boy from OkCupid in a dark alley after a couple of beers. I flirted with Twitter crushes and Facebook friends-of-friends. I kept on visiting my family once a week, less because I needed them and more because I loved them.

It’s been a year now since I moved in here, and I have rituals and routines in my neighborhood now that make me feel grounded and safe. I’m not lonely anymore, most of the time: I have good friends, and a boyfriend who I get to see about once a month. Waking up beside him in my bed, in this bright and spacious bedroom, always makes me reflect on how wonderful it is to have found places – and people – that feel, at last, like home.

Down in the Well: Safety in Submission

Kate Sloan

There was a time – I tell you late one night, in one of our verbose phone chats – when I felt safe more-or-less all the time. When the harshest hero’s quest I ever had to face was a 9AM improv class or the first day at a new job.

And then my 19th birthday came, and my 20th, and my 21st, and somewhere in there, my brain chemistry got muddled like a botched cocktail. I became afraid all the time. Afraid of onlookers’ judgments (which never actually materialized), of strange men with knives (who never actually appeared), of calamitous catastrophes (which never actually took place).

“Social anxiety disorder,” a psychologist pronounced, finally, when I was 24. But that still didn’t feel big enough, all-encompassing enough. My fear flooded my brain and permeated my veins. It was with me always, like a clingy friend who can’t take a hint. It fused to my personality to make a new version of me, one saddled with neuroses I never dreamed I’d succumb to. All I could do was try to move forward into this new life of fear.

I don’t recall the first time someone laid on top of me after a spanking, but I do recall the immediate relief. Like a weighted blanket with a heartbeat, their mass pressed me into the mattress and seemed to say: You’re okay. I was guarded on all sides by flesh and memory foam. An old feeling came back to me that I’d forgotten: safety.

You do this to me now, sometimes, because once I asked you to. You do it unprompted, and somehow always at the right times. Your lanky boy-body sinks into me from above, cradling me from neck to ankles, as I sob and breathe and let the pain dissipate. Sometimes you whisper, You’re safe, you’re safe, you’re safe, but these rumblings are redundancies; my safety is implied. I can feel it in your weight, your steady breath, the very fact that you’re still here.

The silly thing is, I am safe, most of the time – I just don’t feel it. I’m deeply privileged to have never experienced violence on the basis of my race, sexual orientation, or gender. I’ve received death threats, sure – what outspoken woman or LGBTQ person on the internet hasn’t, at this point? – but they’ve all stopped cold at my computer screen. No one is after me with a gun or a knife. No one wants my people dead, except the occasional radical incel in the news or skinheaded antisemite on a street corner. To be in this position is to have won the genetic lottery a million times over.

Like many people with mental illnesses that affect their grip on the truth, I don’t know how to reconcile my reality with my ruminations. I cannot even imagine what it must be like to both feel and be unsafe, if I can barely handle the feeling part.

One night, you push me – as you often do – into catharsis through consensual pain.

It’s one of my very favorite things, and also I hate it. The slaps hammer my face or my ass, harder and faster until my brain can hardly process them. Bad thoughts bubble to the surface. I deserve this. I am trash. No one loves me. No one has ever loved me. Or sometimes my mind is just blank. I like that better.

It is difficult to explain, to anyone who does not also partake of this perversion, that sometimes this sadness is what I want. That to consent to misery and fear somehow makes those feelings more palatable than when they just rain down unbidden. The depths of my submissive sadness are like the bottom of a well – dark, musty, hopeless – but sometimes I want that well. If I’m going to end up there anyway, it feels better to climb down with conviction than to fall in or be pushed.

On this night, it feels like the tears will never end. Like I am sad because I am sadness and sadness is me. Like sadness is the way of my heart, has always been, will always be. The question flickers across my mind: Am I safe? I truly don’t know.

“You’re safe,” you say, as if you heard my thoughts somehow. I cry harder, but not for much longer, because with these words, you’ve tossed a rickety rope ladder down into my well.

Being a masochistic submissive, I date my fair share of sadistic dominants, many of whom are turned on by tears and other signs of distress. Though most have been consent-conscious and good-hearted, in many cases their arousal pushed them to push me. Unlike some submissives, I do not feel sexy when tears are streaming down my face. I feel inconsolable: sad to the point of sickness. It always passes, and then I am often ready for hot mouths and hard cocks – but not before.

You know this. You wait. You give me gentle kisses and ample assurances. And if it is important, then, to blast the panic from my brain with an orgasm, you are well-equipped to do that too.

We attend a session together about anarchist D/s at a sex conference, and I cry more than I was expecting to. Which, let’s be real: I was expecting to cry a fair bit.

One panelist describes how care and love can look different in power-play dynamics than they do for vanilla folks, but they are still care and love. Case in point: their dom sometimes locks them in a closet to mitigate their panic attacks. I scribble furiously in my notebook: You’re safe in that small, contained space, and you don’t have to come out until someone else makes the choice for you. It would be reductive to say I sigh with relief. My whole body relaxes with a profound and transformative yes.

“You can use the world-building tools of D/s to create a safe space for someone who never feels safe,” the panelist continues. They glance over at their dom and earn a nod of approval. “It’s like: ‘I’m in charge here, so you have to believe what I say, and what I’m saying is that you are safe, because I said so.'”

You grab my thigh with your big warm hand, and I know you’re feeling what I’m feeling. Our eyes dart toward one another’s in silent recognition. Hot tears spill down my cheeks and onto my frazzled notes. Crying in public is one of my biggest fears, but I don’t feel scared now. Your steely blue eyes are holding mine like a wooden ship, like a dustjacket, like a pair of strong arms.

Later, in our hotel room, we wander into the closet, as if magnetically tugged. You shut the slatted door behind us. I breathe in the scent of your suit jacket hanging there, and, closer: you. The man I desperately love.

I think, as you begin to push me against a folded ironing board and kiss me hard, that we’ve messed up this thing we were trying to try. The idea was for you to leave me in the closet alone, see what it did to my anxiety. But, as per usual, you’ve joined me in my darkness. You don’t want me to be scared or to feel scared, to feel alone or to be alone. Your hand on my face makes it clear that I’m not.

There is a big metal safe in this closet, with a combination lock and a sense of heavy justice. But though I’m afraid of everything, I don’t want to lock myself away, because that would mean I’d have to stop touching you.

It is terrifying to rely on a person – any person – for one’s sense of safety, because that person could leave at any time. I learned this all too well last summer when my daddy dom – a role I had thought meant something along the lines of unconditional love and acceptance – dropped me in a flash. Once I had collected the shards of my broken heart off the floor, I vowed never to trust anyone that much again, never to rely on anyone that much again. These are not new or unique promises to make after a heartbreak, but we keep making them again and again because they feel that salient, that necessary.

However, in re-integrating into the world, I’ve come to see that no one is truly independent, nor is that necessarily a state to aspire to. For my sense of safety, I rely not only on you but on my friends, my family, even the characters in shows I watch on bad depression nights. “Needing others is perceived [in modern Western culture] as a weakness,” Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor write in their book On Kindness. “Dependence is scorned even in intimate relationships, as though dependence were incompatible with self-reliance rather than the only thing that makes it possible.”

You speak often of how you want our D/s dynamic to be a mentorship of sorts, prodding me toward my goals and shoring up my self-esteem. You are teaching me, little by little, to feel safe; to recognize and accept when I am safe. My body and brain are practicing this sensation under your watchful dominance. It is quite unlike any education I have ever endured.

BDSM is an infinite imaginative space, one that allows for off-the-wall roleplays and absurd scenarios. You can be a rock star, a pirate, an alien. But the situation I reach for most often in kink – the one that turns me on most potently, in my head and down my skirt – is simply that I am loved and I am safe.

This is telling. This is embarrassing, perhaps. And I don’t want to stop.

Vibe Diaries: My Vital Vibrator Memories

Kate Sloan

New Year’s Eve 2007. I am 15 years old. Do they even let 15-year-olds into sex shops? I’m panicking and pacing outside my local feminist vibrator vendor. “Do they even let 15-year-olds into sex shops?” I ask my friend, who has brought me here today.

She shrugs. “I’ve been in before and no one said anything to me about age restrictions.” I gulp and follow her into the clean, quiet little shop.

After much deliberation – and, inevitably, too much giggling – I pick out a rubber duck vibrator and pay for it at the cash register. It’s not a great toy, or even a good one, not by 2018 standards, but teenage-me loves it. She takes it home, nicknames it Olivia (after Olivia Wilde), has many orgasms with it, and keeps it hidden in a pink hatbox beside her bed like a secret pleasure relic.

But first, she goes to a New Year’s party, gets drunk, and announces to the whole room of near-strangers that she just bought her first vibrator. What does it mean to be 15 if not to make an ass of yourself in public?

Spring 2008. The close friend who’s soon to become my first friend-with-benefits pulls me aside at a party. “Here it is,” she says, and hands me a plastic grocery bag containing a purple rabbit vibrator.

I asked her to bring this vibe tonight, because ever since she bought it last week, I’ve been curious as hell about it. Dual-stimulation? A twisting shaft, rotating beads, and buzzing bunny ears? Ever the burgeoning sex nerd, I gotta try this thing out for myself. And luckily, my friend is willing to let me give hers a test drive. What a pal.

I abscond to the bathroom and shove the thing into myself, unlubed and unaroused – so it’s no wonder I instantly hate it. “I don’t think it’s really my thing,” I tell my friend later when I return the vibe to her after cleaning it. Dual-stimulation vibes, still to this day, don’t do much for me – but I wonder if I’d like them more if my first foray into that category had been a bit more ceremonious.

Summer 2009 (ish). Having grown ever-so-slightly more discerning with age – not to mention braver – I wander back to the sex shop with a modest budget and a mission. It’s time for a vibrator upgrade.

After testing every single vibe on my hand, I settle on the Slimline G. Considered a “beginner-friendly” classic for a reason, it’s remarkably powerful for its price point, and made of hard plastic so it won’t burn your innards with phthalate fumes.

It’s also rumblier than the rubber duck, a concept I don’t yet have language for but can feel when I touch the toy to my skin. At 17, I don’t know about motor mechanics; I just know my new vibe triggers orgasms more easily and more pleasurably than I’m used to. I nickname this one Gavin, after an androgynous crush from Flickr. My sex toy collection is still small enough that I can individually name each toy, like they compose a happy family living in my hatbox.

Winter 2010. I take a sexually inexperienced friend to a sex shop – that same shop that was my first, so many years ago. She does a thing I no doubt did when I first came here, but didn’t realize, until now, that I’d probably done: she whispers. Like we’re in a library. Or a vibrary, I guess you could say.

“What does this one do?” she asks in the meekest little voice. “Isn’t this one a little big? How do these even work?”

I find myself feeling breezily confident as I answer her questions; my courage flows to complement the way hers is ebbing. We eventually settle on a bullet vibrator that meets her specifications.

When I see her at school the next morning, she’s glowing, grinning, a changed girl. “That vibrator is really something,” she announces, not whispering at all. I smile back at my dear friend.

Summer 2011. I’m dating a cis man for the first time and I just… can’t figure out this whole penis-in-vagina-sex thing. How do people do this? Why do people enjoy this? How do people get off from this?!

My partner wants nothing more than to make me come this way, however, so I give it a shot. I supply my own “extra” external stimulation during the act, first with my hand, and later with a clitoral vibrator. It takes focus, and effort, and determination, but eventually – with him thrusting inside me and me white-knuckling a vibe against my finicky clit – I come, and it’s quite unlike anything I’ve ever felt before.

I wipe the sweat off my brow and announce, “We did it!” My boyfriend just laughs and keeps fucking me. He’s well-accustomed to what a weirdo I am by now.

 

This post was generously sponsored by the folks at The Adult Toy Shop. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

Long-Time Listener, First-Time Collar

Kate Sloan

I didn’t want to buy my own collar. I was a single submissive, unowned, unneeded, and unmoored. As much as I might want a band of evocative leather around my throat, buying one seemed as gauche as buying one’s own engagement ring before even meeting a person one would like to marry. But I wanted one nonetheless. (A collar, that is; not an engagement ring. Although, for some kinksters, that’s a distinction without a difference.)

My best friend Bex bought me my first collar. They presented it to me on my 24th birthday, in the front seat of their car, while we zoomed from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin on the middle leg of a road trip. It was exactly perfect: the Aslan Leather Nicki collar, made of berry-pink leather banded with black.

I gasped. I cried. “I can be my own daddy,” I mused, clutching the leather to my chest.

“Exactly,” Bex said, and I knew they understood me more deeply than any best friend I’d ever had.

Later that day, somewhere in Cleveland, we pulled over on a side street and got out to go scavenge for lunch. “Do I have to take my collar off because we’re going to be around vanilla people?” I asked, tugging self-consciously on the metal ring at my throat.

“No,” Bex said.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m positive, little one.”

We strolled along that sunny side street and our glamorous friend C. added, “If anybody catcalls you or says anything about your collar, I’ll hit them with my parasol.” Thankfully, they didn’t have to.

Sometimes you don’t know how badly you want something until you almost-but-don’t-quite get it.

My first daddy dom told me five days after we met that he was available to be the primary partner I wanted, then told me weeks later, by which time he was juggling three partners, “I don’t remember saying that, and I don’t think I would have said that.” He promised to turn an old telephone table into a spanking bench painted my favorite colors, but only got as far as sanding before giving up on the project and on me. His idea of love and care was “I thought about bringing you chocolate, but I ran out of time.” “I almost texted you, but then I got distracted.” “Really? Did I say that? That doesn’t sound like something I would say.”

So I shouldn’t have been surprised when he promised to make me a collar and that never happened either.

I was so excited when he made this offhand vow. I went home and started Googling collar pictures: collars with chainmail, collars with filigree, collars with hearts. I wanted one with a heart, I knew. There was never any question in my mind.

There was never any question, either, about whether he was the right person to put my first capital-C Collar on me, the first person to have that degree of power over me. “Fuuuck,” I wrote in my journal. “How have I known this person less than two weeks and already I want him to own me?” He wasn’t even “boyfriend” yet and already I wanted him to be Daddy, Sir, owner. How like me, to give my heart away with the force and velocity of a six-year-old playing a game of Hot Potato.

One hot July night, he cancelled our plans to go to Tell Me Something Good together at the last minute, playing the “tired” card – another broken promise – so I went with a gaggle of pals instead. I got up and told the crowd a story about a spanking gone awry, and garnered scores high enough to win a prize at the end of the night. My eyes swept across the prize table, trying to select my reward, when I saw it: a silver heart-shaped padlock, glittering with rhinestones. I seized it in my eager paws, daydreaming already of the chain he would thread it onto, the words he would say as he clasped it around my neck.

The next time I saw him, I intoned modestly, “I’ve got something to show you,” and produced the lock from a drawer. I thought he’d know immediately what it was for, but instead he just looked at me quizzically. “It’s pretty,” I think he said, unsure what I was getting at.

“I thought you could use it when you make my collar!” I finally explained – and even then, his eyes did not light up. I wonder now if he’d changed his mind about wanting to own me; if perhaps I had already lost my lustre, the way shiny new possessions inevitably, eventually do.

He ended our relationship two weeks later. For months, I couldn’t look at that heart-shaped lock without comparing it to my own heart: given unreservedly but unwanted; relegated to a sad, dusty drawer.

In December of that year, I met a boy in New York. Nine days later, I was calling him “Sir” and asking him which collar I should wear to the theatre. What can I say; when I fall, I fall fast. It’s a character flaw. Or maybe a superpower.

I texted him a selfie from my seat in the Young Centre, my hair tumbling over the turquoise suede he’d told me to wear. “Hiding your collar!” he replied immediately, to which I retorted – drunk on one beer and new-relationship adrenaline – “It’s there, I promise. Reminding me of whose I am.”

Alarm bells sounded in my head even as I typed the words. Too fast too soon too much. Remember last time? But I wanted the risk, the rush. I wanted to believe.

“Fuckkkk. That ownership language makes me feel very fucking special,” he thumbed back in a blur, and I felt the internal stirring and whirring of a hope blossoming into a wish.

He asked me to wear the turquoise choker again the following day. I did, to a nearby café, pulling nervously at it the whole block-long walk. “Maybe next time I see you in person, we should go buy a collar together,” I suggested. A test. A dare. I didn’t want us to keep using collars I already owned as symbols of our burgeoning power dynamic; they made me feel dirty with past associations, like going on a first date wearing an ex’s sweater that still smells of heartbreak.

“What makes you think I won’t have one in my hand?” he replied. I nearly dropped my phone on the icy sidewalk. Too fast too soon too much, I thought again. And also: I want more.

Sex nerds, kink nerds, and psychology nerds all like to talk about their intentions and motivations. Both of us are all three. We talked a lot.

“What does a collar mean to you?” one of us asked the other, and we each threw out phrase after phrase, “yes” after “yes,” ascending a tower of assent. It’s an intensifier. A motivator. Ownership. Affection. Pride. A solidification, a sign of safety, of commitment. (We weren’t even ready to call each other “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” – and yet. Love is absurd.)

I listened to him over the phone while he made the purchase: a royal blue suede collar we’d chosen together. We giggled resolutely, and then I heard nervousness creep into his voice. “I want to make explicit,” he began, wavering, “that I don’t want you to wear it with anyone else.”

It had never occurred to me to wear it with anyone else. It was his collar. His gift to me, and mine to him. His symbolic hand wrapped around my throat. I’m staunchly non-monogamous, so there are times when my lips and my cunt and my submission are for other people. But that collar was not for other people. Only for him.

We wrote the rules of the collar together, in our shared note of protocols entitled “Sir and little one.” There are only a few rules, but each is important.

  1. Whenever Sir and little one are together, he will collar her. She will not use their collar with anyone else, put it on without being ordered to by Sir, or allow anyone else to touch it.
  2. When ordered to wear her collar, little one must continue wearing it until she completes any assigned tasks or work and receives permission to remove it.
  3. Little one may temporarily remove her collar without permission if necessary to protect herself or the collar.

I swooned as he drafted the phrasing for each decree. The care and love he poured into this exercise – even before we were calling this thing between us “love” – was so evident, so huge. No romantic symbol can really mean anything unless you’re certain it means the same thing to both of you – and I knew that this one did. It was as clear as the words in our respective Notes apps, black text on a backlit screen.

He put it around my neck on a February night – the same night he kissed me in the lineup outside Brooklyn Steel, and danced with me to my favorite band, and told me he loved me for the first time. Every time he looked at me, all night, his eyes dipped to the collar around my neck, then narrowed as his expression hardened into what I can only call “the dom face.” Every dom has one. His makes me shiver and bite my lip.

He would get distracted and trail off mid-sentence when his eyes caught on the collar. “Sorry, it just… looks really good on you,” he attempted to explain each time. He meant, I knew, not so much that the collar looked good on me but that submission did. Being small and compliant looked good on me. Being his looked good on me.

We’ve talked a lot about our collar since before we even picked it out, and we still talk about it. What it means. When I should and shouldn’t wear it. What we would do if I dropped it down a subway grate by accident. What we would do if we broke up.

There’s a lot in this world of which I’m uncertain, and a lot that frightens me in its uncertainty. But this collar – for all the time I spent hoping for it and wishing for it – feels certain to me, fixed, decided. I know what it means; my love and I swing this shared meaning between us like a tether.

If I can’t know anything else for sure in this world, at least I can know that I’m owned by someone who loves me; that he loves me enough to have put a piece of sacred suede around my neck; that he loves me enough to go all dark-eyed and dom-faced whenever he looks at the collar that means I’m his.