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12 Days of Girly Juice 2018: 7 Bangin’ Selfies

Kate Sloan

Today’s 12 Days of Girly Juice post highlights the 7 selfies I took this year that really tell the story of my 2018, which was… a difficult call, to say the least. Also, yeesh, it was hard not to make these just 7 great pictures of me with my boyfriend, BUT I REFRAINED. (Partially.) Enjoy…

I spent many, many hours on the phone with my Sir this year. If we conservatively guesstimate 2.5 hours a night, every night – keeping in mind that most of our phone calls last about 4 hours, but we skip nights here and there – that adds up to over 900 hours on the phone. But, as I reasoned to myself every time I wondered if this is excessive: if we weren’t a long-distance couple, it’s likely we would have spent at least that many hours together over the course of the year. So. Maybe it’s slightly less ridiculous viewed through that lens.

In any case, this is a photo I took while on the phone with mb, and it captures a joy I rarely manage to depict in my selfies. I’m relaxed, I’m subby, I’m collared, I’m little, and I’m talking to someone I love. Last year’s selfies roundup also included a gleeful moment on the phone; I guess long, intimate, giggly calls with beaux have brought out some of my happiest times in the past year. And I’m fine with that. Some naysayers criticize technology for encouraging social detachment and isolation, but for me this year, technology – like FaceTime and Apple Calendar and Google Docs – served mostly to make me feel closer to my loved ones, not further away from them. Any technology that brings forth a smile this gleeful can’t be all bad.

The most important aesthetic decision I made this year was getting a new tattoo. Big, beautiful flowers framed by a bold, unmissable message. Shout-outs once again to Tender Ghost for the original idea and to Laura Blaney for bringing my vision to life in her signature gorgeous style; I’m happy with this beaut every time I look at it.

I took lots of selfies in the days and weeks after getting this image inked on me. Like all the best tattoos, it helped me feel more connected to my appearance, like I had more of a stake in it and more control over it. Even on days when I otherwise felt unattractive, seeing this art on my arm made me feel like I was, myself, a work of art. So I took selfie after selfie, showing myself – proving to myself – just how deeply pretty I really am.

Another moment of unadulterated glee. We snapped this on a sunny day in July, during one of mb’s many visits to me in Toronto. We had just done an impromptu hypno scene in a nearby parkette, hence the mutual post-kink glow. I love looking for hints of our D/s dynamic in photos of us: the shyness of my submissive smile, the “watchful proud daddy” vibes in his face and his posture.

Also notable: our matching outfits. A mantra in our relationship is “We match”; I like to say it when one or the other of us is worried that our feelings are excessive, unprecedented. If one of us is feeling “too” in love and panicking about it, or missing the other “too” much and feeling guilty about it, it’s helpful to be reminded that we’re almost always on the same page, feelings-wise. We love each other a lot. We have no chill. We match. It’s for this reason that mb started choosing coordinating ensembles for us when possible, and I love it. Especially when we’re both in blue, because, well… we have a history with that color.

It’s impossible to write about my 2018 without writing about travel, since I did so much of it – and it’s impossible for me to write about travel without complaining about it, because travel stresses me the fuck out. (Extremely #FirstWorldProblems, I am well aware.)

This is one of those photos taken automatically by a machine in the customs area of an airport – “Remove your hat and sunglasses; look at the camera; we are now taking your picture” – and, while they’re never very flattering, this one takes the cake. I had never before seen a photo of me that so perfectly captures how I feel about traveling.

It’s strange that someone with so many airport-related anxieties, someone prone to fainting on buses and crying on trains, would end up in a long-distance relationship. But maybe it’s actually perfect. Maybe being reunited once again with my beloved is one of the only things capable of pushing me through those fears to the other side.

That said, I definitely prefer when he comes to visit me and I can just meet him in the arrivals area and then go home. There are, after all, no TSA agents or grumpy entitled men or bureaucratic nightmares in my home – and there is a comfy bed where I get to kiss my boyfriend and don’t even have to show anyone my passport in order to be admitted.

This photo was taken impulsively during a jaunt to a local sex shop with a few other sex-blogger babes, just after the Playground Conference here in Toronto. I was, and am, stunned that this career and this community have enabled me to make friends from literally all around the world: the ladies pictured here come from areas as wide-reaching as Hamilton, New England, and (wait for it) FINLAND. Amazing!

When I was a baby sex nerd reading erotica anthologies in my childhood bedroom and illicitly listening to sex podcasts in math class, I never dreamed that one day my sex-nerdiness would lead me not only to an incredible career but also to friendships that cross national borders and lift me up every day. What a beautiful life I’ve carved out for myself, and what wonderful people I’ve found to share it with.

No post like this would be complete without a selfie taken with Bex, my best friend. We didn’t take many this year, but hopefully that just means we’ll take more next year.

This smiley selfie was snapped at a sexual science symposium. (I like alliteration!) We got together with my ex-sugar daddy and his wife – quite an odd crew, to say the least – and went to this big gorgeous science center in New York to chat with dildo-makers, sexual psychologists, strap-on experts, and more.

When this photo was taken, Bex and I were extremely high from some pre-event tokin’ and smokin’. It was around Valentine’s Day so the whole joint was littered with little heart-shaped candies, which we kept munching because weed. With Bex giggling next to me, asking the speakers pertinent questions, and occasionally producing candy from their jacket pocket to appease me, I knew that he was truly the best friend I need and deserve.

I’ll close on another happy note. mb took this picture of us in our hotel bathroom on our first night at the Woodhull Sexual Freedom Summit – one of the first events we’d ever attended together as a couple, and the first time I was introducing him to many of my friends in the blogging community. I’m visibly proud to be at an industry event, representing my business and my brand, with someone I love so much.

And once again, we match. Blue and pink: my blog-branding colors, my two favorite colors, and also two of the bi pride colors (we’re both queerdos!). Someone noticed our coordinating outfits, and asked mb, gesturing at his shirt, “Did you do that on purpose?” He smiled a proud-daddy smile and replied, “Of course.” I felt as brightly happy as the pink flowers bursting open on my dress.

Protocol Diaries: To-Do, Ta-Da!

Kate Sloan

It started – as many of our protocols do – with a more unofficial version, before either of us could acknowledge with confidence that we wanted something more.

Throughout the early months of our D/s dynamic, I would sometimes text my Sir a frazzled list of my various tasks for the day: finish dayjob work, write blog post, take photos, wash dishes, do laundry, and so on. I did this because I wanted him to press me to actually do those things, which, fortunately, he did. There are few things more disappointing, as a submissive, than hinting that you want some measure of discipline and receiving, instead, an oblivious nothing.

As time progressed, I took to copy-and-pasting my to-do list from my Notes app directly into a text to him – not every day, but sometimes. And then its frequency crept closer to daily. He said he enjoyed knowing what I was up to, on a granular level, at any given day – that it made him feel closer to me, even though we’re long-distance.

One day in September, after weeks of this, I tentatively texted him: “I wonder if my daily to-do list should be a shared note with you. Or is that too hardcore DD/lg for us?” We already had several shared notes – most notably, one that lays out our rules, protocols, and relationship boundaries, like a D/s contract for the digital age – but I was concerned that this one would be placing too much responsibility on him. Having everyday access to my to-do list would implicitly come with the duty to keep an eye on my tasks and my status, and to reward or perhaps punish me accordingly.

It took him fifteen minutes to get back to me, because he was swamped at work, but those minutes felt interminable because I was so worried he would say no. Instead, when he did respond, he said, “Oh my god. How did you read my mind? I thought about that all day yesterday.”

As we discussed it more, it came out that both of us had been wanting this for a while but had felt guilty about wanting it. This has been a recurring theme in our ever-evolving D/s negotiations. I’ve learned to trust, at this point, that if I want something, or have thought about it, odds are good that he wants it or has thought about it too. Some would say we’re in sync because we’re profoundly in love and an uncommonly good match; I would add that we’re also both total pervs, in many of the same peculiar little ways.

We’ve gone several weeks now with me making a to-do list almost every day (every weekday, some weekends), and we talk often about how much we both love it. He loves it because it makes him feel more closely entangled in my daily life, it gives him a sense of how much is on my plate on any given day so he knows whether he can safely assign me additional tasks, it supplies information he needs to support and encourage me properly as a dom, and it’s an incredibly intimate window into my brain (always a selling point for a hypnokinkster). I love it because it feels like a deep sign of mutual trust, it helps me feel more accomplished when I get things done, and it makes me likelier to actually do the things I need to do.

I felt guilty about this at first, and spiralled into self-doubting thoughts. Why is it easier for me to stay on top of my tasks when a man is supervising my progress? Shouldn’t I be self-sufficient, driven, and motivated all on my own? Isn’t it unfeminist, unevolved, or psychologically lazy of me to rely on someone else to fuel my motivation?

But in thinking about it more, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that there’s nothing inherently wrong with pursuing externally-imposed structure and validation. We all do it, to some extent. It’s part of why we post things on Facebook, dress to impress when we go out, and curate our life’s aesthetic to be more Instagram-friendly. My friend Bex once told me that he sometimes goes on wild adventures just so he’ll be able to say he did on social media, and that if it takes an external force to get him to do something fun (like pose for kinky pictures with Santa), so what? He still did the fun thing, so everyone wins. In this case, I usually complete every task on my to-do list and I deepen and intensify my connection with my partner, so… what’s really the problem here?

I think our culture is over-invested in the myth of total self-sufficiency, of “independence,” when what we should really be focusing on is interdependence and how we can support each other and lift each other up. No man is an island, as the saying goes. D/s just makes those connections more explicit in how they function and what’s expected of them – and makes them hotter, in the process, to those involved.

My partner has told me that he wants me to eventually become more self-sustaining – and I’ve already seen that happen in some of our other protocols. Sometimes, for example, I take my iron pill and forget to text him about it, because the daily habit of texting him about it has also instilled the daily habit of taking the pill. Maybe one day I’ll feel as fired up about plowing through my to-do list solo as I do when I know my dom has his eye on it. This is yet another way kink makes me a stronger, better, more fulfilled person.

When Your Partner Comes Out As Your Partner

Kate Sloan

It all started when a friend kept referring to my boyfriend’s other partner as his “primary partner.”

Granted, this friend isn’t super schooled in the technicalities of non-hierarchical polyamory. He didn’t fully grasp, I think, that it’s possible to be equally romantically devoted to more than one person at once – or that it would be hurtful for me to hear myself implicitly referred to as the secondary partner. The less-important one. The sidepiece.

See, this type of language just fanned the flames of fears I already harbored. Despite my boyfriend always treating me as a priority, and making it clear that I wasn’t less-than in any way, I still felt like the “side” girlfriend moreso than the “main” one. As we discussed this in a tearful phone call, it became clear that there were three factors contributing to this impression: I felt inconsequential next to my partner’s other relationship’s longer history and future plans; they live together, while he and I live 500 miles apart; and they each publicly acknowledge their partnership, on social media and elsewhere, while he and I do not – because I am a sex writer.

“Well, the last one’s the easiest one to fix,” my boyfriend said, “so let’s fix it.”

I was floored, though I shouldn’t have been. He had been telling me for a few months that he eventually wanted to be “out” as my partner – which meant, in turn, being “out” as kinky. He’d already come out to friends, family, and colleagues as bisexual and polyamorous over the years – so why not this, too?

As we talked, it suddenly occurred to me – like the lid being ripped off a paint can and spilling bright pigment every which way – that I’ve never really had a partner publicly acknowledge being my partner for the whole time I’ve been a sex writer, except for those who also already worked in the sex industry. A couple of short-term boyfriends didn’t mind being associated with me on Twitter and such, but usually they had nothing in particular to lose, and sometimes they even had something to gain: they were porn or camming hopefuls, and I felt that they wanted to use my following to help launch those ambitions.

Needless to say, it provokes a pretty creepy-crawly feeling when the people who will happily admit to dating you are mostly people for whom doing so would be a tactical advantage more than an intimate celebration. All these feelings spilled out of me during that conversation with my boyfriend: I’d realized, in one fell swoop, just how much damage had been done to my psyche over the years by partners wanting to hide in the shadows, deny our connection in public, and treat me essentially as the “secret” girlfriend. Of course I always felt like the least important one when my beaux had multiple partners; I was usually the only one conspicuously missing from their Facebook posts, their Instagram selfies, their smitten tweets.

The thing is, I completely understand why someone wouldn’t want to associate themselves with me publicly, even if they love me. Being as loudly pervy as I am is a risk not everyone can afford to take, and I’m immensely privileged to be in a position where my absurd kinks and sexcapades don’t (usually) harm me or limit me. This is my career, this is the life I have chosen, and not everyone who dates me or fucks me has made that same choice, nor should they necessarily have to. My boyfriend owns a company, so in managing his own public image, he’s making decisions not only for himself but potentially also for his business partners and his employees, not to mention the other people in his life who might be affected by this disclosure. We all deserve privacy, and no one should have to give that up just because of who they’re dating.

But I also know now, after much reflection, that I don’t think a serious relationship is sustainable for me if I’m made to feel like my partner is ashamed of who I am and what I do. It may be kinder to them to downplay my own needs and insist they can hide behind a veil of anonymity, but it is, in the long-term, gravely unkind to myself. It digs me deeper into a preexisting negative self-image, and furthers my feeling that my relationships are somehow illegitimate or unimportant to the other people in them, no matter how big and beautiful they may feel to me.

It was difficult to phrase this to my partner in a way that didn’t make it sound like an ultimatum – which it isn’t really; I could keep dating him if he wanted to stay anonymous, albeit not altogether happily – but fortunately he didn’t take it as such. He understood immediately why it would be painful for me to publicly pretend my partner is a Man of Mystery, instead of acknowledging the marvelous man he is in reality. Like me, he grew up on the internet, so he grasped that if something doesn’t exist online, in some ways it doesn’t fully exist at all. It has always been hard for me to see my non-sex-industry friends posting cute selfies with their partners, or tagging their sweethearts in tweets about date nights and romantic adventures, believing I would never be able to do that. I am so grateful that my boyfriend understood that particular pain and decided it wasn’t worth putting me through.

He is careful and thoughtful in everything he does, and this endeavor was no exception. He spoke to his therapist, his business partners, his other girlfriend, his friends, and even some casual business acquaintances, trying to get a read on whether coming out as a kinky sex blogger’s boyfriend and dom would be a disastrous error. Most of them knew he’d wanted this for a while and seemed surprised he hadn’t done it sooner. Few of them expressed any reservations, and the few they brought up were risks he had already considered and decided he could accept.

I kept telling him, whenever we discussed this, “You know you don’t have to do this, right?” – to which he would always say, “I know. I’m not doing it because I have to. I’m doing it because I want to.” Invariably I would start crying so hard as to become unintelligible. Being a loud-and-proud sex writer, I’d sort of just accepted that no one would ever want to be linked to me by anything more solid than a false name or a censored selfie. I’d assumed that no one would ever love me enough to be visibly mine, and that belief was slowly poisoning my self-worth from the inside out. And here was this man, telling me that not only did he love me, but he wanted to shout it from the proverbial rooftops.

Though he got all his ducks in a row a few weeks ago, we agreed we should wait until we were together in person to actually pull the trigger. “I’m going to want to touch you after that,” he told me, which is the same thing he said when we discussed whether we were ready to say “I love you” for the first time. In a way, it feels like the same act, just shifted and magnified: this is him showing me he loves me in a way that feels even more impactful than the words themselves. He’ll dash off a tweet, casually-but-not-casually mentioning that I’m his girlfriend, and it’ll change our relationship and our lives. I can’t think of anything more romantic.

All this to say: my Sir’s name is mb. He wanted me to let you know.

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.