Personal

Tegan and Sara and My First Sort-Of Love

Kate Sloan

Tegan and Sara’s album The Con came out ten years ago, in the summer of 2007. That was a year full of significant events for me: I turned 15, came out as bisexual, and dated someone for the first time, that someone being, notably, a girl. And all of it is linked inextricably in my mind with The Con, because it was the soundtrack of my year. The soundtrack of my first real romance.

This was the era when someone’s taste in music seemed to say something about them, when MSN Messenger away messages and Facebook statuses were peppered with oblique song lyrics, when I’d creep someone’s Last.FM page alongside their LiveJournal if I wanted to know their heart.

That fall, I had the burn-your-life-down kind of crush on a purple-haired girl I’d met the previous semester in English class. I hadn’t really noticed her until, early in my sophomore year of high school, she confessed to me via Honesty Box that she loved my writing, and then revealed her identity to me, sheepishly, but wanting me to know. She was only the second girl I’d ever had tingly romantic feelings about, but I still recognized them immediately. Oh shit, I am in trouble, I thought one day when our eyes crossed from across the hall and I saw her blush as I felt blood rush into my own cheeks.

“I think I have a crush on her,” I confessed to my best friend, the first person I’d come out to earlier that year, in the girls’ bathroom.

“You should ask her out!” my wildly brave and confident bestie suggested. “I’ve seen the way she looks at you. She likes you too.” I feel a certain kinship with 15-year-old me, because a decade has passed and I’m still that girl who refuses to accept anyone could be interested in me until they tell me in their own goddamn words. I just don’t see myself as worthy of that kind of revere.

As I pined over her, summer hardened into autumn and I listened to The Con on loop. It jibed appealingly with my fledgling queer identity, giving me an image of gay women who were neither fully butch nor fully femme, and who didn’t quite fit the stereotypes of effusively romantic women nor stonily reserved men. They existed in an in-between space that felt familiar to me then. And though their love songs were ambiguous enough that they could’ve been about anyone of any gender, I felt the specialness of these being love songs written by women about women. If there is a particular aesthetic or mood unique to sapphic infatuation, I felt that in the songs of The Con.

One day we had plans to meet up at lunch, but my crush had earned herself a lunch detention, probably for being late to class – she was always late. She told me she’d be stuck sitting on a bench in the office at the time we were supposed to meet. I vowed to come visit her. At the appointed time, she snuck out under the guise of using the bathroom, and we chatted awkwardly and grinningly outside the bathroom door. “Kate! Your face is so red! Are you feeling okay?!” a friend of mine asked when she walked past and spotted us. I blushed even harder. No one was supposed to acknowledge my obvious massive crush on this girl; we weren’t at that stage yet, I felt. I just wanted to luxuriate in the pretense of mystery for a while.

Weeks of coy flirtation elapsed. She called me a “pretty girl” in a Facebook message and I squealed with delight as I read the text to my best friend over lunch. I saw the way her friends eyed her knowingly when she talked to me between classes, like they knew the significance of this because she had told them. We rode the subway together after school and a sudden movement of the train threw me against her as we were hugging goodbye, igniting a million fiery sparks in my nerve endings.

I don’t remember how exactly I decided, but one night I came to the conclusion that I needed to ask her out and I was going to do it by writing her a letter. Tegan and Sara are as likely an explanation as any; there’s a verse in “Soil, Soil” that goes, “I feel like a fool, so I’m going to stop troubling you; buried in my yard, a letter to send to you. And if I forget, or God forbid, die too soon, I hope that you’ll hear me and know that I wrote to you.” I wrote several drafts of the letter and eventually gave it to her at the end of a party. To my surprise, later that evening she called me and said, “So… We should date.”

We had talked many times before that night about how “Call It Off” may have been our favorite track on The Con, an especially perfect jewel on an incredibly perfect album. I even quoted it at the top of the letter I wrote her: “I won’t regret saying this, this thing that I’m saying. Is it better than keeping my mouth shut? That goes without saying.” But it’s a song about a break-up, and I didn’t see the dark prophecy of that at the time. It wasn’t until later that I recognized the foreshadowing as foreshadowing.

Our relationship only lasted five weeks, ending in a tearful phone call where she broke up with me for somewhat vague reasons: “I’m not in a good place to be in a relationship,” “I feel trapped,” “I don’t know what I want but it’s not this.” She cried more than I did. It was a small trauma that has informed every other relationship I’ve had since then: whenever I’m dating someone, I live with a constant anxious fear that they will suddenly decide they don’t want to be with me, and will break up with me for reasons I can neither predict nor understand. That was precisely what happened at the end of my last relationship, almost ten years after that initial blow, and it felt almost exactly the same: a shattering and a crumbling and a sense that I would never adore someone like that again. Like O, like H in your gut.

The break-up was compounded by the fact that we remained friends afterward. Immediately afterward. This is the sort of mistake I doubt I would make now; I’m an emotional masochist in many ways but I also know how to set boundaries and I know what will make me miserable. Remaining friends with my first sort-of-love after she dumped me made me miserable. She told me over and over again, in many different ways, that she regretted the breakup, wished it could’ve gone differently, thought we were a good match, wanted to get back together with me eventually, and didn’t want me to see other people. She was 15, so I forgive these ridiculous manipulations now – but at the time, they felt like knives going in.

“I may have done the upbreaking, but to quote ‘Call It Off’ in its entirety, well, I won’t do that because that would be weird and you probably know the lyrics by heart, but you get where I’m going,” she told me in a loquacious Facebook message a month after the break-up. “So really I’m the heartbreaker for breaking my own heart, except not quite to that crazy heartbreaking angst-ridden extent. And then I had a good thirty-six hours of physically restraining myself from attempting to grab the phone and call you and shout, ‘JUST KIDDING!’ or something to that degree but less comical.”

I listened to “Call It Off” in bed every night, sometimes crying, sometimes just numbly staring into space. “Maybe I would’ve been something you’d be good at,” Tegan warbled. “Maybe you would’ve been something I’d be good at.” It was my first introduction to the idea that sometimes what you mourn after a break-up is not the relationship that was, but the relationship that could have been. The idea of the romance you wanted, moreso than the romance you actually had.

It wasn’t until many months later that the spell finally broke. In July – more than seven months after our break-up – I told my ex-girlfriend about the new girl I was seeing, who absolutely, fully adored me and treated me well, both emotionally and sexually. I was excited and wanted to share the news with my ex, who was also one of my closest friends at the time: I’d just had sex for the first time, and it was great! But I worried she was anti-my-new-relationship, and told her as much in the message.

Her reply came back sooner than expected. “I am not, repeat, not anti-you-having-sex. This is because I am very much pro-you-being-happy-and-doing-whatever-you-want-and-not-giving-a-rat’s-ass-what-anybody-else-thinks,” she wrote. “The only reason I tend to shudder and vocalize rude things at points such as these is because I also happen to sometimes be pro-my-own-sanity. But really, who needs sanity? And anyways, do I really have to go into why I don’t like picturing you having sex with people, when honestly you can probably guess?”

It occurred to me then, as an uncharacteristic blinding rage swept over me, that she was holding me prisoner in a relationship that was never going to be a relationship. Seven months after breaking up with me, she was still moping like it had been anyone’s decision but hers. Still acting like she had any right to withhold love from me, even love from other people. It disgusted me. I couldn’t believe I had been stuck on her for so long.

I stopped clinging to the fiction that maybe we could get back together someday. I stopped hoping against all logic that she might someday be the girlfriend I needed. I stopped obsessively checking her Last.FM page to see if she’d been listening to Tegan and Sara, with the assumption that her musical nostalgia would signal romantic nostalgia about me. We remained friends, but I refused to continue “walking with a ghost.” I had better things to do.

The Departed Dominant & the Jilted Submissive

Kate Sloan

My collar is too tight. I keep tugging at it, loosening it, shifting it against my sweat-slick throat. It doesn’t feel quite right, because my submission doesn’t feel quite right. It’s been five weeks since my dominant dumped me and my submissiveness still doesn’t feel quite right. I’m simultaneously sympathetic to my own cause and furious I’m not over this shit already.

“This is the first time I’ve worn a collar since my breakup,” I tell my best friend, realizing only as I say it out loud that it’s true.

“How are you doing with that?” Bex says, their brow furrowing because they understand the gravity of what I have just said, in a way a vanilla friend might not.

“I’m doing okay,” I respond. Still tugging on the collar even as I try to let it lie.

Whenever someone breaks my heart, I become outraged I let them touch so many things in my life I cared about. Like a bad apple in a barrel, cruel lovers ruin whatever they come into contact with. I can’t watch Steven Universe or listen to DVSN anymore; I can’t order from that one Thai place we used to frequent; I can’t even enjoy media featuring characters who share his first name. It’s all painful and I’m furious it’s painful.

But what hurts even worse is the places he touched that are buried deeper in me, more central to my heart than my entertainment preferences: my sexuality, my sensuality, my submissiveness. I let him own me while he was my dominant; it’s unfair he still gets to own part of me now that he’s gone. I want those parts of me back, but that’s like trying to make dirt-trampled slush back into clean white snow.

I miss my bruises. I miss my bite marks, scratches, and hickeys. For the first several days after the breakup, I think this thought at least once an hour and cry every time.

Holding my ghost-white forearm out in front of me while sitting on my friend’s bed, I splutter, “There’s a bite mark here. You can barely see it. Soon it will be gone, and I’ll have none left.” My friend is listening but I might as well be monologuing to myself; I’m so absorbed in my own internal drama these days.

Later, I tell Bex the same thing via text. I’m repetitive when I’m heartbroken. “You’ll get more,” Bex suggests.

“I don’t want more from anyone else.” It feels true when I type it. It feels like it will always be true.

“You will one day,” Bex replies. “Or not. And that’s okay too.”

My heart folds in on itself then, crumpled and dissolute. What if they’re right? What if this prophesied nightmare comes true and I never find my way back to my submission? What if I left my kink in that man’s hands and he still has it and he’ll never give it back?

I bend over in front of a mirror and stare at my ass, dappled with bruises from a scene with a one-off hookup last week. I stare and stare at the wine-dark marks and feel blindingly angry that these meaningless splotches still linger while that bite mark, that one last precious vestige, is nearly gone.

Relationship psychology fascinates me, and so do sex toys, and one intersection between the two is the intriguing question: who keeps the sex toys the two of you shared when you break up?

My toys are mostly mine, purchased with my own dollars or acquired with my professional clout. But them being technically mine and mine alone does not stop them soaking up meaning from past relationships. There’s the metal hanger rail I can’t bring myself to use with anyone but the man who pried it out of a hotel closet for me; the silicone dick extender I got to fulfill a specific partner’s fantasy and likely won’t use again; and now, the multitude of kink implements that remind me only of the dom who debuted them on me.

How long will it be until my favorite paddles no longer feel like his? How long until I can use my shiny new wand vibe without thinking of how he, at my request, tied me down and held it against me until I squirmed and screamed? Will I ever be able to repurpose the wooden dowel he bought for me at a hardware store, sawed and sanded down to size, and used to smack stripes onto my skin?

A week after the breakup, he drops by to return the nipple clamps I forgot at his house. I’m filled with bitter rage – Yeah! He SHOULD give those back to me! I bought them with my own money, dammit! – while also knowing it might be a long, long time before I want to use them again. I hold the clinking clamps in my sweaty palm and tear up, thinking: You damn fool. Crying over nipple clamps.

I move into his neighborhood – not on purpose, just a cruel coincidence – and develop a crippling fear of running into him. I won’t leave my building without first slipping on a low-key disguise: sunglasses, headphones, modern shields against creeping invaders. I add extra blocks to my walks so I won’t have to take streets I know he frequents.

What am I so afraid of? He did this, he fucked this up; I don’t have to be ashamed. But I’m scared that if I see him, he’ll still feel like my Daddy. Or worse, I’m scared that he won’t.

I pass by his house and (insanely) want to knock on the door. My phone beeps a text tone and (insanely) I wonder if it’s him, wanting me back; wonder if I should text to ask. A distant ex sends me a long-overdue apology out of the blue, and (insanely) I consider seeing him again. I don’t do any of it, and (insanely) I very, very much want to.

I try to make everyone into my dom, because I feel unmoored without one. I say self-effacing shit until friends have to command me to shape up; I pretend my to-do list is a written decree from a bossy babe; I spend more time around my parents because there is no one else now to make me feel small and cared for. When texting with casual beaux and Tinder randos, my once-flirty banter tricks like “Is that an order?” and “Make me!” become, instead, thinly-veiled desperate pleas.

But just as a tree falling in the forest is inaudible if there’s no one there to hear it, a bratty submissive is just an aimless failure if there’s no one there to rein her in. When I make silly decisions, like skipping meals, forgetting my iron supplement, and putting off my work until late at night, no one scolds me or spanks me or throws me a stern look. No one tells me to straighten up and fly right. I am neither punished nor rewarded for anything I do. I must be a Goddamn Adult and supply my own motivation. I can barely remember how.

In navigating this sudden crisis, I am reminded of the existentialist philosophy classes I took in high school and university. When existentialists came to the ultimate conclusion that there is no God, no watchful deity, no inherent meaning or purpose to life, at first they felt deeply anxious and upset. It was like being cast out of an airplane with no parachute, reeling, not even certain where the ground lay. But soon, they came to realize: one can make meaning out of one’s own life. One can select a purpose, a direction, a vision for oneself, instead of waiting for some distant God or Divine Right Order to do it. What was terrifying at first becomes empowering as you sit with it and think it through.

I have to make my own meaning. I have to be my own dom. I know this. And one day I will figure out how to do it.

 

This post was sponsored by the amazingly generous folks at SheVibe. As always, all writing and opinions are my own. Check out their selection of restraints, spanking implements, fetish wear, and other kink products!

Do I Have a Wink Kink?

Kate Sloan

As with many kinks, it began with the thought: “I just like it. I don’t think it’s a sex thing.”

I’ve always reacted with glee to being winked at. I suppose this is a not-uncommon reaction – they’re intended as an expression of flirtation, humor, or solidarity, after all, so they’re intended to create a positive feeling in the recipient. But the degree of my reaction seems… unusual. I’ve never quite been able to pin down why. Kinks, after all, are never simple.

As with many kinks, too, its unfolding turned me into a bit of a creep. Sometime around the end of 2015, I started occasionally mentioning it while out on first dates: “I have a thing about winks,” I’d ambiguously admit if the subject of flirtation or odd romantic tastes came up in conversation. Sometimes, if I got tipsy enough, I’d just ask outright, “Do you have a good wink?” The question caught my dates off-guard. They’d not considered this before. I see now that I was doing a thing akin to when foot fetishists get a little too curious about my shoe collection or ageplay fetishists call me a “little girl” without asking – i.e. things people do in service of their kinks that aren’t strictly okay without consent – and I feel bad about it. I wasn’t thinking of it as a kink then.

I went out for drinks once with someone I had strong feelings for, and inquired at some point about his wink. He was a shameless show-off of a man, theatrical and broad, so he launched into not only a wink demonstration but also a verbal lesson on how best to wink (“You gotta do it so fast that the other person almost doesn’t see it, and wonders, ‘Did he just wink at me?!'”). My burgeoning fixation crossed paths with my teaching and learning kinks, and the result was a whole lot of giggling and blushing.

That same friend once pounded me with my favorite dildo, mercilessly, masterfully, as hard as I wanted. I squeezed my eyes shut as I shouted my orgasm into the heavy, humid air. When I returned to earth, I opened my eyes to see my fuckbuddy staring at me intensely, a look of lusty concentration on his face – and then he fucking winked at me. I actually moaned. If I didn’t know it was a kink before that, it was that moment which solidified it.

Friends started sending me gifs or YouTube clips of good winks. On days when I felt sad or unloved, I’d put out a call for winks on Snapchat or Twitter, and watch my phone blow up with flirty babes.

I told a new beau he had a good wink, and he kissed me tenderly for long minutes, occasionally leaning back just enough to wink at me between kisses. He held my face still in his hands, so I could not look away. It was like a forced orgasm scene, but more intimate, and more “erotic tease” than “whole hog.” I died a little bit.

I went to a house party, and drank enough to get me into extra-giggly mode. Somehow, word of my penchant for winks got out around the party, and suddenly, random people were coming up to me just to wink at me and see my reaction. “Hey Kate,” they’d say, to get my attention, and then I’d be accosted with a razor-quick one-eyed straight shot of glee to my heart and genitals. It was a strange sensation, strangers and acquaintances knowing this little shortcut; it felt intense, almost boundary-crossing. I felt the way I do when someone spanks me who I don’t quiiite trust enough for that yet: breathless, shaken, turned on but undone. I wasn’t entirely sure I liked it.

One night I went on a first date at a sexy storytelling event, and afterward, the date and I stuck around to chat with my friends. One of them knowingly threw a wink my way, and when I had my predictable giggle/shriek/blush reaction, my pals explained to my date that I have a thing about winks. I was quick to add that it gets strange when people think they can just wink at me willy-nilly. “I’d rather they get my consent first,” I explained. “Ugh, that sounds so weird, doesn’t it?”

My date, an experienced kinkster, shook his head with solemnity. “No, it doesn’t.”

Fast forward a few weeks, and we were dating and fucking and falling in love. One day in bed, after sex, he lay beside me stroking my hair and staring into my eyes. “Do you think we’re at a point yet where I could wink at you?”

The thoughtfulness of the question touched me. I may have cried a little bit. And then a little more, laughingly, when I realized what a silly thing it was to cry about. But it was the gesture that had affected me: the caring about my comfort, the remembering of inane details, the wanting to make me happy but only on my terms.

I nodded. “Yeah, you can.” He did. I giggled, and my heart clenched up in that now-familiar way. But it was a world away from those stranger-winks at the party. Like the difference between oral sex from a random hookup and oral from a long-term partner who knows your body and your brain inside and out, there was a sense of intimacy and mastery to it that pulled me inside the moment, rather than making me want to nervously run away from it. Each wink from him was like a slap in the face – but the consensual, cathartic, kinky kind.

Now that that relationship has dissolved, actually the only piece of that man I still own is his wink. Once, at my request, he offered me the incentive of a short video of him winking if I finished a big project I was working on. Motivated anew, I drudged through it, and sent him the completed file. “Wink, please!”

The clip still sits in my Twitter DMs, haunting me if I scroll back far enough. It’s only three seconds long, but it’s three seconds of someone who loved me, showing me just how much he did.

Kinks are never simple.

My Best Friend Bex: A Dildorky Love Story

Kate Sloan
Photo via Clitsta Anne.

If you listen to Erin Pim interviewing me on the Bed Post Podcast, you’ll hear her ask me: “Do you have a primary partner?” And you’ll hear me stammer through my nervous answer: “Not right now. Probably my steadiest sexual relationship is a fuckbuddy who doesn’t even live where I live, and is occasionally visiting. He’s my favorite person to bang. But like, right now, I’m not dating anybody.”

It’s a deflection, a half-truth. At the time, I was deep in unreturned love with said fuckbuddy, and struggling with the lack of a romantic label on our relationship – or on any of my sexual relationships.

In contrast to this noncommittal answer, though, toward the start of the podcast, Erin asks me about my friendship with Bex – and I elaborate with enthusiasm. “They’re my best friend in the world,” I declare. “Our friendship is, weirdly, one of the great love stories of my life.”

I have never had trouble defining my relationship with Bex. We’ve been best friends ever since we threesomed with a mutual friend at the Playground Conference in 2015. I’ve never felt so certain about a friendship so fast. It’s their 26th birthday today, so here are a few of my favorite moments from our almost-two-years of best-friendship thus far.

December 30th, 2015. Bex makes the impulsive decision to drive all the way to Toronto to spend New Year’s Eve with me. I scream.

At the New Year’s party at Round Venue, we dance up a storm, drink too much, make out with drag kings. As the clock ticks midnight, someone pops a balloon full of silver confetti over our heads, and we hug – like the platonic (and, frankly, superior) version of a romantic New Year’s kiss. This bodes well for the year ahead.

I ride a bus for 3 hours to go see a boy I have a crush on. We spend that night in his bed, drinking red wine, giggling, and kissing. The next day, I while away my entire 3-hour-long return trip texting Bex every detail of what happened.

The following week, that same boy comes to a party I host, and we flirt all night long. He invites me to have dinner with him the next day. We kiss goodnight, and I panic at the friend who co-hosted the party with me: “Is he going to ask me to be his girlfriend?! Doesn’t it seem like he wants to date me?!”

She thinks so, yes, but she isn’t sure. I grab my phone and type some all-caps concerns at Bex, who’s away from their phone because they’re at work. I know they won’t see my messages for hours – maybe not even until tomorrow – and that feels unthinkable. I need to know their take on this.

“I feel like half my brain is missing,” I whine miserably at my friend. She’s one of my best pals, and I love her. But she isn’t the other half of my brain. Bex is. I need Bex.

On our way to Caitlin‘s house to watch the new Spit porn scene, Bex and I stop in at Starbucks for coffee and snacks. “What are you two up to today?” the barista asks us brightly.

“Uhh, we’re going to a friend’s house,” I hedge.

“Oh yeah? What are you gonna do there?”

Bex and I look at each other nervously. “We’re going to watch a movie.”

“What type of movie?”

We laugh. “We don’t know yet,” I lie. “We’ll decide when we get there, I guess.”

I watch my best friend practically giggle half a scone out their nose, and we shuffle out of the Starbucks, barely containing our guffaws.

I attempt to double-penetrate myself with two giant dildos – while livetweeting, obviously. Bex coaches me through it via text, reminding me when to put a vibe on my clit, add more lube, or move on to the next warm-up toy. Meanwhile, we’re also carrying on a side conversation about movies we love and TV shows we recommend. None of this feels unnatural. All of this feels on-brand. This is true love.

We go out for lunch at 7 West with my new boyfriend. I know he’s kinky, but I’m not totally sure yet how kinky, or in what ways. In the midst of a theoretical discussion of kinks, Bex rattles off some examples: “Teacher/student roleplay, or doctor/patient, or Daddy Dom/little girl…” Boyfriend doesn’t say anything, but noticeably perks up, like an eager little dominant puppy.

Later, I comment, “That was funny, how he reacted when you mentioned DD/lg.” Bex scoffs, “Oh, I 100% did that on purpose to test his reaction, and he 100% passed the test.”

I wish everyone could have a best friend who wants a fulfilling sex life for their friends as much as Bex wants one for me.

In one of our many, many, many conversations about our various internet crushes, Bex and I decide we’re going to have a four-way wedding someday. This seems like the natural conclusion of our strange, incestuous-yet-nonsexual relationship.

It’s a slow day at my customer service job, so I muck around on my iPad and manage to calculate the exact average location between the four cities in which Bex, Bex’s current crush, my current crush and I each live. I scroll around the map and notice the magic spot is right near a town called… Dorking. “It’s settled. We’re getting married in Dorking,” I announce, sending Bex a link.

“Holy shit. Yes. Perfection,” they reply.

Bex never calls the men I kiss/fuck/date by their names – only by nicknames, which are often a bit cruel. Men don’t get names until they’ve earned them by being not-terrible, which most don’t.

The guy I’m interested in around the time Bex and I first become friends is called Good-Dick Garbage Human, because, well, his dick is great but he’s kind of awful. This naming convention becomes a recurring motif in our nicknames for boys: we are both forever questing for the fabled Good-Dick Good Human. Occasionally we meet a Good-Fingers Good Human, or a Good-Dick Okay Human. One step at a time.

We go to visit my fuckpal-du-jour at the store where he works. After some pleasantries and semi-flirtations, we say goodbye, and he shouts after me, “Don’t be a stranger!” We’re barely three steps out of the store when Bex turns to me and says, “That means he wants his dick in your mouth again.” That particular fuckpal is known simply as “Weird Dude” in the Bexicon forever after.

When I start dating a 5-foot-tall dominant, Bex christens him Napoleon, “because he’s short and thinks he’s in charge.”

Bex and I start using a hashtag in some of our text correspondence: #ThingsIdOnlyTellYou.

Some of the secrets chronicled therein: TMI missives about butts and vaginas, petty complaints about my metamours (#Pettymour), arrogant self-praise, suicidal ideations, creepy shit about crushes, slutty accomplishments, and stuff like this: “Help! I sucked off a Mustang while jerking off today, and it helped a lot with BJ cravings. #ThingsIdOnlyTellYou #INeedToGetLaid”

We joke that these confessions should be published in a book someday when we’re both dead, but dear god, no, don’t do that.

As I’m getting ready to go visit sex shops in Minneapolis, my phone buzzes. It’s a text from Kidder. I burst out laughing, a high-pitched giggly shriek.

From two rooms away, Bex calls, “What did Kidder say?”

“How did you know it was him?!” I inquire, mystified.

I can hear the self-satisfied smirk in their voice. “That was your surprised/funny/turned-on sound,” they attempt to explain. Best-friend mind-reading on point.

I find out Bex has never smoked weed before, and offer to guide them through their first time. One night on one of their many trips up to Toronto, we hole up in my bedroom with a vape, a grinder, some bud we just acquired at a dispensary, and a few blowjob porn scenes on tap, because we will need entertainment once we are blazed.

Bex isn’t much of a lightweight when it comes to booze, so they’re not sure how weed will affect them. “I don’t think I’m high,” they say, wrinkling their nose at me quizzically.

“Touch your leg,” I suggest, drawing from my own experiences of what being high feels like. “See if your skin feels weird.”

They run their hand along their calf. “Oooh, furry! No, I don’t think I’m high,” they chirp, and I laugh. They are definitely, definitely high.

Bex and I smoke a bunch of weed before heading out to see a show at Comedy Bar. On the way to the subway station, we both hear – clear as a bell – the sound of a coin dropping. We spend five minutes looking around on the ground, trying to find the missing coin. We never find it, and reach the conclusion that we must just have both hallucinated the same exact sound at the same exact moment. As best friends do.

At Comedy Bar, we run into my ex-boyfriend, a comedian. We’re both way, way, way too high to navigate this interaction, so it goes horribly. After he leaves, I turn to Bex and say, “Did that actually just happen?”

They look just as bewildered as I feel. “I think so,” they say. We laugh nervously.

Trying to come back home from New York in January, I miscalculate my subway route on the way to the airport, and accidentally miss my flight. Rather, I get there an hour before takeoff, but that’s too late – they won’t let me fly.

I break down in the departures hall, leaning against my suitcase for strength, crying, hyperventilating. I was already descending into a post-travel mental health drop, and this development just kicked it into overdrive. I panic. I freak out. I want to die. I text Bex.

They calm me down, like they always do. Slowly and carefully, like they’re addressing a child (because right now, they kind of are), they talk me through the process of investigating other ticket options, finding out what can be done about my situation. When the answer is “nothing,” they go online and buy me a ticket for the following morning. Then they text me detailed instructions for how to get back to their house on the subway, and insist I update them regularly as I go along.

Suicidal ideations gnaw at me even harder as I drag my suitcase back into the subway system. I feel like a senseless failure, a pointless waste of space. I’ve long since exhausted the limited supply of tissues I keep in my purse, and I text Bex, amid scary confessions and depressed rambles, “I want to go to the CVS and buy more Kleenex. Like, so much that I will never run out. I want my next boyfriend to be made of an absorbent material.”

Dissociating from my body a bit, as I often do when severely depressed, I tell Bex, “I might be a ghost. A wet ghost.” Always witty, even at the toughest of times, Bex calmly responds, “Then you can haunt me and make me a better writer.” I write back, “This sentence is too woooordyyyy!” They quip, “Use less commaaaaas!” I laugh a little on the subway and type back, “Fewer commaaaaas!”

When I finally, finally reach the subway station closest to Bex’s apartment, I lug my suitcase down the endless stairs, hollow and empty and dead inside. At the bottom of the stairs is my best friend, my angel, my knight, wearing a Batman pajama onesie and a leather collar, and holding a brand-new bright yellow box of Kleenex just for me.

They put their arm around me and we walk to the CVS, where they make me buy some food I don’t want to eat, and then we go back to their place, where they make me eat the food because I need to. Then they set me up in front of their computer and let me watch whatever YouTube videos will make my bone-aching depression lift even the slightest bit: McElroy brothers clips, Goodbye Honolulu music videos, John Mulaney stand-up. I feel a little better.

Early early early the next morning, Bex wakes me up and helps me to an Uber. I get to the airport hours early for my new flight. I sit in the departures lounge silently, profoundly awed that I have found such a wonderful friend, of whom I often feel unworthy but without whom I simply cannot imagine going through life.

5 Times Kink Helped Me Love My Body

Kate Sloan

One of kink’s many magical qualities: you have to keep talking about it. All the time. There are no assumptions, no scripts, nothing for which consent is presupposed. At least, not the way I prefer to do it.

My first dominant fuckbuddy teaches me this. Our sext exchanges have consent conversations built right in. “I like restraining partners with chains,” he says. “I’m not a fan of being choked,” I say. “Teach me how to make you come with a toy,” he pleads. “I think I want to sit on your face,” I hypothesize.

I get good at asking for what I want. In the throes of subspace during my BDSM hookups, sometimes I lose my words, unable to form sentences longer than “Yes,” “No,” or “Harder” – but the more I try, the easier it gets. Though power exchange often leaves me literally gagged and silenced, it also makes me better at speaking up when I need to.

So after my fuckpal makes one too many vagina-shaming comments in my presence, I decide I don’t want to see him anymore. He’s not into period sex, he’s not into “excessive” wetness, he’s not into falling asleep next to me unshowered after sex – and while it’s fine for him to have his boundaries, it’s also fine for me to have mine. I want sex while I’m bleeding, wet, and/or dirty. My sexual menu just doesn’t feel complete without those things. A partner who can’t unabashedly adore my body in all its various weird states is not a partner I want to give myself over to.

So I tell him. “I don’t think I want to do sex/kink things with you anymore. I’d still like to be friends, though.”

He’s a little taken aback, but fine with it. My sigh of relief is immediately followed by a rush of pride: I identified an unmet need in my life and did something about it. I owned my desires and asserted them. And now I’ll no longer have to bang someone who makes me feel, in the smallest and saddest of ways, like my body is to be tolerated and not to be devoured.

I’m wearing nothing but lingerie in front of a crowd at a sex club. A photographer is snapping pictures. It’s terrifying – but I’m less scared than I thought I’d be, because a hot, brassy babe is bossing me around.

“Bend over and show the crowd your ass,” she barks. “There you go. Good girl. Doesn’t she have a great ass, folks?!”

The crowd bursts into applause, whoops, and yells of affirmation. Apparently they agree with her. I grin and laugh and blush and laugh some more.

I’m midway through a blowjob when my one-night stand starts to get antsy. “Come here,” he growls. My eyes flick upward, quizzical. Can’t I just… stay down here?

I climb up his body to kiss him. “No. Higher.” I straddle his belly. Is he really asking me to…? “Higher,” he commands again. Yep, I guess we’re doing this. I slide over his chest until my vulva is settled over his mouth. He wraps his big strong hands around my thighs and hips and pulls me toward him. My clit has no choice but to tangle with his tongue. I gasp and clutch at the headboard. Fuck, he’s good at that.

I’ve never sat on someone’s face on a first date before. Usually I date someone for months before I let them invite me onto their face. It’s just a lot: they get a mouthful and noseful of pussy, plus an eyeful of belly and underboob and double chin. I worry I’ll crush them with my chubby body, drown them in my juices, embarrass myself with unladylike sounds. I need to believe someone 100% wants me, in all my weird and overwhelming glory, before I’ll feel comfortable giving them that. This requires at least a few months of dating… or, apparently, a well-placed command from a one-off hookup.

See, when you command me to do something, I have to assume you want that thing. Maybe this is part of why I’m submissive: my irksome sexual anxiety insists I’m unattractive, unless and until someone cute is there to insist on the opposite. So, while “I love your body and find you gorgeous” is a highly effective line, “Come here and sit on my face immediately” achieves more-or-less the same purpose.

Sometimes there’s no time to worry about whether I’m “attractive enough,” because I’ve been given an order and I have to do what I’ve been told immediately. It’s important, after all, that I be a good girl.

We’re hours deep into our second date, lying on his bed in the hazy afternoon sun, stoned as fuck. The weed, as per usual, is working its magic: I am craving pain, knowing it will permute into pleasure. I turn to this boy I only met three days earlier and say, slyly: “I want you to spank me.”

I see his reaction in slow motion, because weed does that. He bites his lip, smirks, breaks into a grin. And then he says it: “With what?”

Everything else is slow and so too is the spread of goosebumps over my entire body, from my shoulders down my arms and all down my back. His question outs him as a true kinkster, one experienced with impact play and potentially owning a collection of implements. But what really excites me about this question is the tone of voice in which he said it: dark, rough, and absolutely dripping with want. I can tell he cannot fucking wait until I’m over his lap. And I don’t want to wait, either.

“Your hand, please,” I reply, and hitch up my skirt.

I’ve always hated my butt. The jiggly cellulite, the amorphous shape. I grew up on a steady diet of SuicideGirls and vintage pinups, and coveted those perfect, round butts. Mine did not look like theirs.

I didn’t know, when I got pretty pink bows and the words “good girl” tattooed on my upper thighs, that they would unravel years’ worth of insecurities in one fell swoop. Overnight, I went from trying to orient my body so partners couldn’t see my butt during sex, to openly showing it off and asking gleefully, “Do you like my tattoos?!” It felt odd to go back and look at photos of my backside pre-tattoos – not only did I dislike how it looked, but it also simply didn’t seem like it was mine.

One summer evening, I’m hanging out in an upscale Toronto sex shop with my friend Taylor. He’s teaching an impact play class, and I am the demo bottom. After the introductory preamble, it comes time for me to get spanked. “Should I take my dress off now?” I ask, and Taylor nods. I pull my simple cotton dress off over my head, revealing a matching set of lingerie underneath, and bend over the shop’s grey sofa to show off my ass to the crowd. Taylor explains how to wield a paddle, and then demonstrates. I smile through my grimace of pain, because I know I can handle this.

“You looked so confident tonight,” my boyfriend tells me later when I’m tucked into his bed, “just wearing lingerie in front of all those people.” He’s running his hands all over me and it’s hard to focus on his words, but when I do clue in to what he’s said, I feel proud.

“It wasn’t hard,” I say with a nonchalant shrug. It would’ve been, five years ago, or even one year ago. It would’ve made me cringe and blush and doubt myself. But tonight it was easy. Because I love my body and don’t care if other people don’t.

Just as long as the people I’m dating/kissing/fucking think I’m hot. And judging by the way my boyfriend is groping my ass and nibbling my neck, I would say that he does.

 

This post was sponsored, and as always, all writing and opinions are my own!