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12 Days of Girly Juice 2017: 6 Journal Entries

Kate Sloan

Once again this year, journaling was a core part of my mood management toolbox. It helped me through countless emotional snafus and cognitive difficulties. In conjunction with cognitive-behavioral therapy and good social supports, it’s probably saved my life multiple times this year. I combed through my Moleskine journals from 2017 and picked out 6 of my favorite excerpts…

March 25th

Feeling casually miserable today. I’m sad about C___ in the sense that mild C___-sadness has been a baseline of my mood for the past year and a half. Wanting him feels like a permanent feature of my heart at this point. And it’s not like I want him passionately, irrationally, like I used to – and it’s not like I can’t be around him with wanting to cry or say “I love you” – but it’s still there. It’s melodramatic to say I’ll always be a little bit in love with him; I don’t think that’s strictly true. But it’ll probably be a while before I stop mentally comparing all romantic and sexual interests to him and finding that he invariably wins in all the ways that matter most deeply to me.

April 15th

Went on a dinner/drinks date with that guy T___ last night. He is a mega-dork, very polite and gentlemanly and respectful. We had a good long conversation, but I wasn’t entirely sold on him; however, then we made out in a dark alcove and I felt… swayed by biology. He just feels good in my senses. He smells and tastes and feels good to me, just his skin and his essence. Ungh.

He’s also a gooooood kisser, which I’ve become increasingly aware is an important thing to me over the past few years. I remember how K___’s makeout skillz kept me hooked even though he was demonstrably a bad-for-me weirdo, and how V___’s overzealous tongue was the nail in the coffin of any attraction that might have been. T___’s lips felt thick and soft, and he alternately cupped my face and groped my ass, and he’s tall enough that I feel towered over but not so tall that we can’t get all tangled up and breathlessly close. (I keep having to take breaks while writing this to sigh dramatically and smile like a goon.)

Occasionally people would walk by and he would stop kissing me because he knew I was uncomfortable with the PDA (such a gentleman) but he would still stand so close to me. “They’ll just think we’re having a heart-to-heart,” he said, and I laughed into his suit jacket.

May 3rd

A New Relationship Energy vignette in point form:

-There are bite marks on my neck, hip, breast, shoulder, and thighs.

-Last night G___ took me to have drinks with some of his friends because it’d be “a good way for us to do a thing together that involves other humans and isn’t sex for a minute. Before we go back to mine and have sex.” I like his friends and we had fun.

-This morning he had me lie over his lap while he gave me a long, thorough spanking. He is really sadistic in ways that I love. It’s so nice to not have to feel like a partner is administering a spanking because I want it, but rather because we both want it. Ahhh.

-We went to the café around the corner, where he made me a soy latte with his impressive and hot barista skillz and then we played Scrabble while occasionally smiling like idiots at each other.

-I was about to get on the streetcar when we started discussing the possibility of making out in a park or an alley somewhere, because neither of us had anything important to do today. We walked by an alley and I said, “This could work,” but he kept walking and said, casually, confidently, “I was thinking we would just go back to my house and I would fuck you.” Uh, he is very very good.

September 24th

Q. What have I gained since my relationship ended?

A. An even clearer idea of how much my friends love me. A print byline in Glamour magazine. My first apartment. A greater sense of independence, and also a greater knowledge of on whom I can actually depend. A new kinda-beau. A new set of nipple clamps. Thousands of dollars, and additional shameless confidence about how much money I make. A huge full-length mirror in which to contemplate my own beauty. More blog readers, Twitter followers, admirers. A ton of smart, funny, insightful writing about what I have just been through. The knowledge, ultimately, that even someone I love breaking my heart cannot really break me; that the things I most fear are never actually that bad. An increased ease of breathing, now that the constant fear of being dumped doesn’t loom over me anymore. Much more time to myself, to write, read, rest, listen to jazz, enjoy my own company, go to shows, go on dates, imagine the kind of life I want. The freedom to ponder, unfettered and unbiased, what degree of non-monogamy I want my future relationships to involve. An increased frequency and enjoyment of masturbation, fantasies and all. Money I would have spent on him, available to be saved, or spent on things that make me happy.

October 11th

It’s been 2 months since my break-up, and over 9 weeks since the last time we had sex. I am plagued by nostalgic sexual fantasies about him. My horndog brain replays all the orgasms and hot encounters ad nauseum and tells me I’ll never find sex that good again, I don’t deserve to. I know that’s bullshit but also it gets all tangled up with nonsexual break-up sadness (of which there is much less than the sexual kind, at this point) and that makes what happened feel insurmountable, still stupidly absorbing, even this long after.

I still – frequently – fantasize/daydream/hope/dread that I will run into him in a public place, that he will be filled with regret and lust and grief and desire, and that we will have sex again and everything will be solved. I know realistically that even if sex with him were to become an option again (which it will not), that I could not go deep into kink and immersively good sex with someone I know I cannot trust anymore with my delicate heart. I desperately miss fucking someone who knew all my buttons and exactly how to push them, but that person can never be him again, and there will be others. I know. I know.

October 18th

Was talking to C___ today about our respective romantic obsessions du jour – his, a cute girl who he fingerbanged after their first date last night; mine, these thus-far fruitless and pathetic crushy pangs toward N___ – and we both kind of cynically half-acknowledged how prone we are to brief, fiery fixations that burn our lives down and then dissolve in a puff of smoke.

This is, I think, one of the core kernels of our enduring friendship: this shared tendency to over-rely on romantic and sexual stimulation for validation and happiness, and a problem staying interested in people once we discover they don’t solve every problem we’ve ever had. It’s hilarious how similar we are in this way. And it’s nice to have a friend in my life who directly understands this quality of mine, unlike people like Bex and Cadence, who (although I love them very much) are too level-headed to really ever take my mega-crushes seriously. (Not that anyone should necessarily take them seriously. I mean, for heaven’s sake, I’m sitting here at the sex shop imagining what it would be like to be used as a footstool by a man I can’t even find the courage to talk to. I am a joke and it’s hysterical.)

12 Days of Girly Juice 2017: 7 Bangin’ Selfies

Kate Sloan

It’s hard to pick selfies that sum up your whole year, but these are some strong contenders! (Content note: there are boobs in this post!)

Femme friends were so important to me this year, and every year. One such pal is Rosaline, a pink-haired pixie who’s always around to cheer me on and pump me up over a bottle of white wine.

We had lots of goofy adventures together this year, mostly involving pre-drinking for various parties, doing our makeup together, and then marching into said parties all flirty and long-lashed like queens. I love how my femme friends remind me of immutable truths: being a femme person in this world is hard but it is also wonderful, and femmes are even more brave and powerful than the misogynist cultural forces that aim to keep us down. I hope to continue to foster my femme friendships in 2018 and beyond.

Speaking of good friends… I didn’t get to spend as much time with Brent this year as I have in previous years, because he wasn’t in Toronto as much. But when we did hang out, we made it count: we laughed a lot over beers, played a ton of Use Your Words, and on one memorable occasion, he saved me from a bunch of pill bugs I accidentally sat on. Our friendship is strange and lovely.

The night this photo was taken, I attended Use Your Words’ Toronto launch party because I was a staff writer on the game (fancy!). Between talking, schmoozing, and playing the game, Brent and I decided to order a couple of corndogs from the bar kitchen. “Can I take a selfie of us eating these?” I asked him, to which he replied, “Only if we both put ’em in our mouths like we’re fellating them.” Stuff like this is why we’re friends.

In March, my local community discovered someone we thought we could trust was actually a misogynist shitbag, and it shook the foundations of what we thought we knew. For weeks, I felt unable to trust any men (moreso even than usual). What was the point, if any so-called feminist man could turn out to be a total garbage fire?

I had coincidentally been invited to a party later that week whose theme was “femme witch power.” We were encouraged to wear whatever made us feel feminine and powerful. I slung on a navy skater dress, rimmed my eyes in dark eyeshadow, and painted on a deep maroon liquid lipstick. At the last minute before leaving the house, I added my glass eyeball necklace, pulled my tits out of my dress, and took some fierce-faced selfies on my laptop webcam.

I didn’t feel like smiling that day. I wanted to wield my femininity and sexuality like a weapon. So I resisted the urge to pull a smile or make a “pretty” face, and just stared down the camera, fierce and unforgiving. I felt beautiful, but in a way that was just for me – not for the consumption of the abusive fuckfaces who think they can just take and take and take.

I took this while out getting ice cream with Suz and Bex before a jaunt to Tell Me Something Good, our local sexy storytelling night. It was a lovely evening out with friends, and equally wonderful was that sometime either before or after this photo was taken, someone came up to us on the street to tell us they read and loved all three of our blogs. Getting recognized in public is a special kind of thrill, and the more it happens, the more my impostor syndrome melts away and I feel like a Real Writer doing Real, Important Things!

This was taken on one of the first days I actually felt slightly cute, competent, and coherent after a breakup that totally devastated me. I like how you can see in my facial expression that I’m still kind of a mess: I’ve heard fellow depressed people describe feeling “like an alien” who can’t even tell whether their face is forming appropriate and normal facial expressions, because they’re so numb and blunted, and that’s how I felt on this day. Unsure how all my different components hung together, but attempting to make a good show of myself nonetheless. Like Tony Kushner wrote on heartbreak in his magnum opus Angels in America: “Just mangled guts, pretending.”

It’s telling that I’m wearing short shorts and have tied my shirt into a crop top. Depression makes me want to hide, but as I surface from that cave, I begin to want to show off again. Maybe just a little. Maybe still from the safety of monochromes and familiar fabrics. Bit by bit, I always come crawling back to my joy, even if it takes all the strength I can summon.

(Content note for suicidal ideations in this one, folks.) One of the most exciting events of my year was going to a My Brother, My Brother and Me live podcast recording at the Kings Theatre in Brooklyn. I first started listening to MBMBaM almost three years ago, and in that time, these boys have literally saved my life on countless occasions. When I’m too mind-numbingly depressed to be trusted with my sad thoughts in solitude, let alone to get out of bed and rejoin society, I put on a McElroy podcast. They keep me occupied until I can get back to living without wanting to die.

I went to this show by myself, because I didn’t know anyone else who was both as McElroy-obsessed as me and financially and temporally able to get to the venue. I snapped this photo quickly, self-consciously, as I stood in line amongst throngs of other fans. Moments later, when the line moved ahead and I walked into the theatre, tears burned down my cheeks. I couldn’t believe I was so physically close to these boys who had saved my life, walked me through dark days, made me laugh when nothing else could. Thankfully, no one seemed to think my weeping was weird. I bought a poster, waited in line for a radioactively green cocktail, settled into my seat surrounded by jovial strangers, and laughed the night away.

I’ll close here with a moment of genuine joy; it’s a good note to go out on.

One night earlier this month, I was on the phone with someone who makes my heart feel all fuzzy and stupid. We exchanged goofy selfies while we talked, trying to disarm each other, to feel physically close though we were not.

He had asked me about the way my hair was cut, so I shook it out to its full glory so I could capture it in a selfie. Just as I went to hit the shutter, he made some dumb joke that set off sparks in my heart, and I burst into giggles and snapped this shot. “Aw, you made me laugh mid-selfie,” I commented, looking at the result on my phone screen and trying to decide if it was too silly to send.

No, I thought. This is how I wish I looked all the time. Lost in giggly reverie.

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.