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12 Days of Girly Juice 2021: 7 Bangin’ Selfies

Kate Sloan

It’s time for the most self-indulgent instalment of this series: the one where I show you my fave selfies of the year and tell you about why they were meaningful to me! Let’s jump in…

Content note: There will be nudity in this post! You’ve been warned!

 

January 9

I’ve had such a hard time staying in touch with my femmeness during the pandemic. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve waded more deeply into fancy loungewear than I ever had before, I’ve bought myself cute slippers and robes and chemises, I’ve attempted to make “hanging out at home day after day” into something glamorous and aesthetically pleasing… but that stuff can only go so far when you’re depressed about not being able to go out, see people, and do things in the world.

On this night, my partner and I got dressed up to sit at home on the couch watching a livestream of Bawdy Storytelling. A friend of mine was telling a story that night and we wanted to be there to support him (virtually, from afar). Bawdy offers a thing in their virtual shows where you can pay extra to be an “exhibitionist” or a “voyeur,” meaning that your camera can be on during the show so other people can see your look, and/or that you can see other audience members (who’ve consented to it) throughout the show. It’s a really fun way of motivating audience members to dress how they would if they were going to an actual Bawdy show – and to make the flirty personal connections that often at least partially motivate such aesthetic choices.

It felt good to put on lipstick and lashes and a sparkly dress, even if it was “only” to watch an online show. I’m glad to have had opportunities this year to occasionally cosplay like we’re in the Before Times.

 

February 14

Valentine’s Day selfies often end up making their way into this post, because I love to dress cute for Valentine’s Day. It’s one of the few days of the year when I can really “get away with” wearing pink, red, and a whole lotta hearts!

Matt and I usually go out for a fancy romantic dinner on this day, but we decided to do a COVID-friendly version of that this year and ordered delivery from the steakhouse BLT Prime. We sat down at their little dining room table in our pink finery and ate an excellent meal, and it was almost like being at an actual restaurant.

There are always ways to celebrate special occasions even if your options are limited, and I found that dressing up was a major way I celebrated holidays and accomplishments this year. Even in an era where my most frequent and robust socialization happens via Twitter and Discord, there are still times worth dressing up for – and eating a steak with my sweetie in celebration of our love was one of those times.

Side note: Check out that grin. They really do make me this happy. 🥰

 

April 26

When Matt received the sex doll they were supposed to review for my site, we couldn’t stop laughing about how tiny she was. Like, yeah, we knew she wasn’t full-sized, but I don’t think either of us really fully understood just how small she would be until we took her out of her box.

I immediately had a very specific vision for the photo I wanted to take to go along with the review. It needed to convey what we had realized in that moment of opening her up: that she was hilariously, almost disturbingly petite.

But also, having done a fair bit of writing on sex dolls and sex robots and the like, I’m kinda fascinated by the “uncanny valley” and the differences between human sexiness and slick technologically-engineered sexiness. I wanted this photo to convey that tension as well: my tattooed and cellulite-dimpled thighs next to her tiny flat-planed ones, my gravity-affected boobs and her perfectly round ones, my skeptical expression and her total lack of human expressiveness. It’s an odd photo and I like it more every time I look at it.

 

April 30

Upon returning home to Toronto in April after a 7-month stay in New York, I had to go on a long and (for my chronically ill body) arduous journey. I had to take a cab to the airport, go through security, get on the plane, fly, get off the plane, pick up my suitcase, drag it onto a link train, ride the train to my quarantine hotel, check into the hotel, stay there for 3 days, and then trek to my parents’ house to complete the remainder of my quarantine. It was pretty exhausting.

I took this photo, sleep-deprived and mildly manic with anxiety, on the link train between the airport and my hotel, by which point I’d been traveling for something like 7 hours. I was surprised to get a car to myself on the train, and wanted to let Matt know I was doing okay but barely had the energy or brainspace to formulate a coherent message. So instead, I lifted up my shirt, snapped a surreptitious public nude, and sent that.

The wildness in my eyes makes me laugh, because I was really on a different planet mentally at that moment than I am in normal everyday life. I was just So Over It, and you can tell. This isn’t really a sexy nude. It isn’t really a funny one either. It’s just… weird. But I like that about it.

 

May 16

Both of my vaccine shots happened somewhat suddenly and unexpectedly – I’d hear about a pop-up vaccination clinic way up in North York or way out in Scarborough, do a little scoping online to see if it was for real, and then hop on the subway or in an Uber and get my ass there ASAP. It was quite a rush, like the public-health equivalent of managing to score tickets to your fave band’s big arena show just moments before it sells out.

Upon arriving back home after my first shot, I was glowing with happiness from having been able to get this thing I’d been (like most other people at that time) desperately and impatiently hoping and wishing for. So I decided to take a nude, of course.

This photo is such a 2020/2021 mood. I love that about it. In no other years so far in my lifetime would it make sense, let alone be hot, to take a lewd selfie with a band-aid slapped onto your arm like a sexy accessory. And yet, this is probably one of the most sensual photos I took all year, if just because of what it portends. After all, wouldn’t you rather kiss someone who’s got their shot than someone who hasn’t yet?

 

August 26

Another sexy one! Damn, there are a lot of those this year.

I had a bunch of ideas for photos I wanted to take when copies of my book first arrived on my doorstep. I wanted to line them up in flat-lays with whips and chains, hold them between my legs like a naughty secret, surround myself with them like I was drowning in my own words. But also, I wanted to put one on my ass.

Something I like about this photo is that I would have no idea how to interpret it if you showed it to me-from-10-years-ago. I wouldn’t immediately clock this ass as my own, because I didn’t have those distinctive tattoos back then, and I certainly wouldn’t know how to parse the sight of my own name on a beautiful book like this.

In many ways, this is a photo of the version of me I’ve manifested into existence over the years, the me who I’ve fought to become. A good girl, an inked-up queer femme, a freelance writer lounging half-nude at home, a published author who doesn’t have to care if people online have seen her butt or not. It’s essentially a self-portrait of some of my favorite things about myself and my life.

Plus it’s made a great promo shot for the book. I mean, if you saw this on a billboard or something, wouldn’t you be curious?!

 

October 24

Because we’re romantics, Matt and I celebrated the one-year anniversary of them proposing to me by returning to the place where it happened, the High Line park.

We walked the entire length of the park twice, first one way and then the other, stopping in various spots where we’d had romantic moments on previous visits: places where we kissed, where we held hands, where we laughed at odd things we’d overheard other people saying.

But the most meaningful spot in the whole High Line for us is the picturesque lookout where Matt got on one knee and asked me to marry them. They’d chosen it specifically, over any other place in the park, because it was so beautiful. So we returned there and took a selfie to document the moment, and our joy.

I love them so much and I’m still so glad I said yes to them that evening in the park, late in 2020. I think our smiles say it all.

Cybersex in Roleplaying Games Made Me Who I Am

Kate Sloan

Content notes: This essay discusses some of my early experiences with cybersex. I was underage at the time (probably 12-14 in most cases). All of this was consensual on my part (personally, if not legally), but if underage sexuality squicks you out, that’s understandable and please feel free to skip this one! There are also mentions of master/slave language.

 

Cybersex in online roleplaying games made me feel like an adult for one of the first times in my life. In some ways, no other online sexual experiences I’ve had since then have quite scratched the same itch.

I was always a sexually precocious kid, scribbling anatomically uninformed erotica in my journals and googling for lists of masturbation techniques to marvel over. Porn didn’t particularly interest me – there were few safe porn sites at the time that would neither load a virus onto our shared family computer nor crash it with pop-up ads blaring autoplay moans – but I loved to read about sex. That’s still largely how my sexuality works to this day: although I’ve gained an appreciation for some types of porn, in many cases I’d rather read someone’s detailed cunnilingus guide or a well-crafted erotic fanfiction story than ogle cumshots and gangbangs.

Massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) were some of my first online social spaces, after early forays into ICQ chatrooms and TeenOpenDiary blogging. My two favorite games in this genre were Furcadia, a highly user-customizable world where everyone was an anthropomorphized animal and you had to learn a basic coding language to craft your own private rooms, and Runescape, a vast medieval fantasy world involving quests, guilds, mining, and magic. It was in these two strange universes that I began to understand the massive implications the internet had for people like me, people who were shy and reserved in the “real world” but came alive online, making friends and having adventures.

I was surely too young to be having cybersex, legally speaking. That’s the detail of this story that makes me cringe to type out. Sometimes I told other users my real age – and many of them were, or at least were pretending to be, teens as well – but sometimes I didn’t. Young people’s burgeoning sexuality is a highly controversial and fraught topic I’m probably not qualified to make any definitive statements about. But I can tell you that in my case, everything I pursued in these mediums was something I had consented to and was not traumatized by, and any time anyone made me feel at all uncomfortable, I had no qualms about closing the window or teleporting to a different corner of the virtual world I was navigating.

In Furcadia, as I mentioned, you could create your own areas – called “dreams” – by coding them yourself and then uploading them to a communal space, where others could visit them if they so chose. I have always been profoundly nerdy and was immediately interested in this aspect of the game, for the huge amount of freedom it provided. It wasn’t long before I started building myself elaborate mansions with big, ornate bedrooms, complete with doors that locked at the flip of a lever due to my careful coding. It delighted me to build secret entrances, hidden teleportation pads, dim dank dungeons no one would know about unless I showed them.

There was an 18+ area in Furcadia, where, of course, I spent a good deal of time long before turning 18. Within that area was a place called The Slave Auction. (I must note here that the language of slavery is no longer something I’m comfy playing with, in kink or otherwise, due to, y’know, centuries of systemic white supremacy and horrific violence against enslaved Black people. I’m white so that language isn’t mine to reclaim or subvert.) In that area, you could line up to be “auctioned off” to a buyer in the crowd. No money was exchanged, actual or virtual; this was all fantasy. I find it telling that this was probably the communal space where I spent the most time in my years as a Furcadia user, despite believing until about a decade later that I was vanilla and had no kinks. (Oh, precious baby Kate, there is so much you didn’t know.)

When someone “bought” me, typically I would take them back to my “dream,” lead them to the ostentatious bedroom I’d hand-coded for the occasion, and commence having cybersex.

Much like sexting today, different people had different ways of approaching cybersex. I would always click on potential partners to see the bio they’d written for themselves, and if it was a long paragraph full of big words and impeccably-employed punctuation, I knew I’d get the type of cyber-fuck I liked best: articulate, loquacious, and seductive. When I had them in my virtual bed, we’d start describing – in walls of text that took so long to type, you could be waiting 3-5 minutes between missives – removing each other’s clothes, kissing, touching, and whatever came next. My replies were probably fairly generic and naïve. I was much more interested in what the other person typed.

It’s telling, too, that I tended to guide the conversation toward cunnilingus. Being a person who’d learned to masturbate via only clitoral stimulation, and had rarely – if ever – done anything else, I found descriptions of penetrative sex boring and hard to relate to. Instead I would prompt my pixelated paramour to craft strings of sentences about going down on me, and would reply with paragraph-length descriptions of my own moaning and writhing. A pillow princess in the extreme.

There were people who, upon noticing these limitations of my lust, would vanish to another realm, leaving me alone in my abandoned dream. That is fair enough. But there were also people who would stick around the whole time, giving me what I obviously wanted, and those people shaped my sexuality in ways they’ll never know. These were some of the first instances of me ever formulating a clear sexual desire and asking someone else (albeit indirectly) to fulfill it. The skills I took away from these interactions (including typing fast one-handed) would serve me for many years to come.

While some therapists and friends of mine, in the years since, have sometimes (very reasonably) expressed concern upon hearing about these youthful dalliances, for me, cybersex was never a site of victimization or violation. I know many people have had a different experience. I’m lucky enough to be able to credit those late nights of furtive typing with making me into the sexually fulfilled, adventurous, and communicative person I am today.

 

This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

Rest is Crucial, Sacred, & Sexy

Kate Sloan

I recently quit my part-time social media job after 4 years of working there. I’ve long called this gig my “dayjob” because it did the thing for me that dayjobs do for creative types: it gave me a steady, reliable income that tethered me to the working world and afforded me the time, money, and brainspace to do my passion projects on the side. But in recent months, my “dayjob” had begun to bring in only about 7% of my total income, while taking up about a quarter of my working hours – and with book deadlines and health issues weighing heavily on me, I decided it was time to move on.

This was a challenging decision for me, in no small part because I have loved working at that company and with the people there, albeit remotely, these past 4 years. I had other resistances to leaving, though, and spent a whole hour discussing them with my therapist recently. I worried that my other projects would dry up, leaving me regretful to have quit – although there’s no evidence that will happen. I worried that without time-sensitive morning tasks to complete each weekday, I’d let my depression get the better of me, lazing about in bed into the afternoon. I worried that firm daily deadlines were the glue holding my life together, and that without them, I’d lack the conviction and self-direction to manage my time effectively.

But as my therapist reminded me, this is internalized ableism, internalized capitalism. The discourse around “laziness” is too often aimed at people whose systemic struggles and marginalizations are framed as personal failures. The freelancer community’s obsession with “hustling” is borne of capitalistic imperatives. A person’s “hustle,” or lack thereof, says nothing about their inherent value as a human being. Not all people have the same abilities; we can’t all hustle as hard as we think we “should.”

It feels shameful to admit that one of the reasons I quit my job was so I could rest more. I feel like I already rest a great deal, certainly more than my friends who work long hours at cafés or retail stores. But this mindset comes from holding myself to able-bodied standards despite being increasingly, invisibly disabled. My chronic pain and chronic fatigue are worse and more frequent than they’ve ever been. I often need a 3-hour nap just to get through the day, or to “catch up on sleep” into the luxuriant afternoon hours on weekends. The simple fact of living in a pain-wracked body is uniquely exhausting. I can’t pretend that away.

I have to banish culture-borne ideas of “laziness” in order to plan a schedule that actually works for my body and my brain. Now that I’ll soon be fully self-employed, with most of my deadlines being self-imposed or flexible, I can rearrange my schedule as needed to fit with my lifestyle and desires – something I’ve longed for my entire adult life. I’ve been fantasizing about “Weekend Wednesdays” and impromptu staycations and “the 4-hour work week.” It feels blissful, in the truest possible sense of that word, to envision the freedom my self-employment will now afford. And I know it is an enormous privilege, one that comes from my position in society as an educated white person as well as my many years of hard work to establish this lifestyle for myself. But I can’t shake the feeling that it’s wrong somehow to rest as much as I do, or as much as I want to. That I “should” work more, to “earn” the happiness I get from having a career that genuinely delights me.

My therapist told me, “You’re working as much as you comfortably can, and you’re earning enough money to live on. That’s all that matters here.” I felt my body relax when she said this. It’s so wild that capitalism instills in us, from birth, the belief that our work, our productivity, and our output are what define our value as human beings. Even sworn anti-capitalists sometimes still struggle to unlearn this. It’s as if we’ve forgotten that “jobs” and “careers,” as they are defined in modern times, did not always exist and do not need to exist. If human didn’t need to work in order to survive, what would we do instead? Would we make art, socialize, have sex, eat, drink, sleep, think? Would we feel fulfilled then? Would we feel we had done “enough” at the end of each day?

It’s impossible to say. But I’m working on accepting that my rest time is every bit as valid and important as my work time. When my achy, sleepy body demands a 1 p.m. nap, I need not admonish it or deny it. When my inner child pipes up to say that Wednesdays should be days off for playing in the sunshine, I can and should listen. When all I want, at a bone-deep level, is to stay in bed all day playing Pokémon games and listening to comedy podcasts, that’s likely a signal I should heed. This feels sinful and embarrassing to even type out. But that’s because it’s a new belief system for me, one that butts up against bullshit I’ve been inundated with my whole life.

We need rest to survive. That’s especially true for disabled folks. I feel no sensuality and sexiness in my body when my nose is constantly pressed to the grindstone. I get precious little joy from life when my every waking minute is mired in work and worry. I have no time or energy left over for the fun things, or even the necessary things, when work swallows me whole.

Rest is crucial. Not all of us have the ability, or the privilege, to honor that fact and live it out fully. But don’t let anyone tell you it’s not. You deserve the rest you need – and the rest you want.

I Miss Strip Clubs (…But I’ve Only Ever Been to One)

Kate Sloan
I don’t have any photos of strip clubs, but I do have this picture of me naked at a sex club… Close enough, I guess?!

One of the first things I learned about Portland upon arriving there was that it apparently has some of the best strip clubs in the country. I didn’t know how or why this was true yet, but my friends who lived there insisted that it was. I believed them wholeheartedly. I put on a low-cut dress and some sparkly shoes, and off we went.

It turns out that the reason Portland’s strip clubs are so great is partly a legal one: unlike clubs in some other states, they’re allowed to show you full nudity on stage – and to serve alcohol. While I’m sure that’s a combination that can get messy at times, on the night I took advantage of these two freedoms, it was nothing but bliss.

My friends and I crowded along the tip rail, clutching dollar bills and cocktails. Boobs were shoved in my face. Thighs were parted directly in front of me. I could hear the squeak of hot skin against the metal pole. My glasses – worn so I could see the dancers’ beautiful bodies better – were complimented and then removed from my face to prevent them from getting smashed by errant legs. It was a whirlwind of soft flesh, big beats, sweet drinks, and good vibes. I threw money onto the stage with abandon during every dance, mesmerized.

I thought of this recently when I read sex journalist Tracy Clark-Flory’s new memoir Want Me, in which she recounts – among numerous other things – many a night spent as a customer at local strip clubs, drinking in the atmosphere, tipping dancers, and intermingling bittersweetly with the raucous dudes in the crowd. While acknowledging that strippers are people and that sex workers don’t deserve to be reduced to stereotypes or props, Tracy also notes that being in that type of sexually charged space made her feel empowered and excited, in a way that may be unique to female clientele at strip clubs. It’s a very particular experience, and one that I miss, despite only having tried it once.

That’s right – I, a seasoned sex writer, have only been to a strip club ONCE!! This is 100% just because of social anxiety – I basically can’t go to unfamiliar places without someone to accompany me, and such plans have never lined up quite right for me to be able to check out a strip club in Toronto, where I live. I dearly wish I was the type of woman who could be brave enough to stroll confidently into a strip club, solo, but that’s just not who I am (yet?). I could always look into making a private exotic dancer booking, for a less nervewracking experience, but I miss the atmosphere of a strip club itself just as much as I crave seeing strippers show off their talents.

The pandemic has been a potent time for reflecting on regrets, and fantasizing about the future. Everyone I know seems to have a mental list of things they want to do, people they want to see, and places they want to go – whether for the first time or the hundredth – when they’re safely able to again. The more that I think about it, the more I realize that going to a strip club is one of those wistful wishes for me. In many ways it feels like the polar opposite of what the pandemic has entailed: people crowded closely together, maskless, eating and drinking and staring up at charismatic naked beauties on stage. I’m no expert, but I would imagine that a lot of the people who regularly go to strip clubs do so in part because they like the bustling and in-your-face vivid vibe of that environment – otherwise, wouldn’t they just stay home and watch striptease videos? – and all these months of social distancing have given me an increased appreciation for that type of energy.

I’ll still be deeply nervous when I eventually go to a strip club again, I’m sure. This year of lockdown hasn’t magically transformed me into a shameless extrovert. But I think I’ll have an even greater appreciation for strip shows now than I did before, especially having seen how much sex workers – an already profoundly stigmatized and marginalized group – struggled to make ends meet during these lean times.

I’m not really religious, but I could see how going to a strip club after a pandemic could be a spiritual experience. What secular act could be more church-like than gathering in a darkened room with other congregants, imbibing sacred libations, and tithing dollar bills to dazzling goddesses dancing under dappled lights?

 

This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

Protocol Diaries: I’ll Have What They’re Having

Kate Sloan

Wouldn’t it be great if you could order your ideal sexual experience off a menu? Well, in certain sex work contexts you can… but that’s not exactly what I’m talking about here.

For a couple months or so, my partner and I have been using two shared notes in our Notes app to basically do exactly that. It’s a communication tool that has helped us both, particularly in these stressful times when it can be hard to drum up the energy for good sex, let alone good, clear, useful communication about sex. The two notes are called the Sex Menu and the Porn Menu, and I’ll talk about them both here incase any of you find this idea useful and want to “yoink” it for your own sex life. (All credit goes to Matt for inventing these innovations – I’m blessed to have a spouse just as sex-nerdy as I am, and much more tech-nerdy than I am, who comes up with inventive and sexy usages for things like the Notes app!)

 

The Sex Menu is a checklist of all the sex and kink acts that my partner and I do regularly, ranging from the tame (kissing, breast stimulation, oral sex) to the wild (watersports, electrostimulation, ruined orgasms). As I’m the more submissive/bottom-y person in our dynamic, usually I fill it out to give my partner a sense of all the things I’m up for during a particular session, so that they don’t have to individually ask me about each and every thing they’re considering doing.

However, sometimes we switch it up by having them fill it out so that I can then go through it and uncheck anything I definitely don’t want to do. I tend to have more limits and limitations than my partner does, just due to the nature of our differing brains and bodies, so this works best for us, though of course you can adapt it to suit your particular dynamic.

This tool is especially wonderful for those of us who have a hard time asserting our boundaries and/or stating our desires; it gives me a way to express those things without feeling like I’m being rude, demanding, or overbearing. It also helps remind me of all the acts and toys I tend to forget about; on a stressful day I might not remember that a wax-play scene could help reduce my anxiety, until I see wax on the list and go, “Oh yeah! That could work.”

Because I have a chronic pain disorder, we keep a spot at the top of the Sex Menu for me to fill out my pain level du jour and the locations of the pain. This gives my partner a clear picture of what my body might be capable or incapable of on a particular night. Communicating about my pain can be difficult for me, especially when I feel I’ve been complaining about it a lot lately (which is usually the case these days, tbh), so I like having a built-in spot to describe it; it takes the pressure off me to be my own proactive health advocate.

 

The Porn Menu is another document, in which one of us will prepare a set of links to 2-3 porn videos for us to watch together before having sex. I have found shared porn-viewing to be a super useful pre-sex practice for me this past year, when pandemic stress has made my already-finicky libido even tougher to coax into action. Since my desire is responsive (à la “dual-control model of sexual response” as laid out in Emily Nagoski’s book Come As You Are), I usually need a little help – or a lot of help – to get turned on, and porn has almost always been a big source of that help for me.

My partner and I are both not the biggest fans of mainstream porn with high production values, and tend toward buying clips from indie creators instead. (Pay for your porn if you want porn to keep existing!) Usually we’ll try to match up our porn choices to what we’ve selected on the Sex Menu, so if I said I want oral, I’ll look for cunnilingus porn, and if I said I want to be fucked with a dildo, I’ll scroll through dildo porn sites – you get the picture!

 

Used in tandem, these two “menus” help me and my partner get on the same page about the sex we want to have, and get turned on together even when our lives are stressful. They’re also a reminder that sometimes the simplest communication tools are the best ones!

 

 

This post was sponsored by the folks at MyPornAdviser – feel free to check out their Anilos review if you’re curious about MILF porn! As always, all writing and opinions in this post are my own.