Personal

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.

Selling Nudes Scares Me, But I Do It Anyway

Kate Sloan

The first time I ever sold a nude photo wasn’t like a first kiss or a first fuck; it didn’t stick in my memory that concretely, a fully-fledged moment recalled with multidimensional sensory details. It was much plainer than that. Probably some random person sent me a DM, I pulled a list of rates out of my ass, they picked what they wanted and sent a payment, and I scrambled to snap some nervous nudes in my attic bedroom. Not exactly an auspicious start, but hey, it’s something.

Looking through amateur porn galleries always wows me. These people are so brave. I know sometimes “You’re so brave!” is slung condescendingly at people who have chosen unconventional paths, even when they’ve chosen those paths out of necessity rather than courageousness – but I really do think anyone who makes porn of themselves and puts it on the internet is braver than most of their fans will ever even realize.

I know this because my own nudes are available for purchase and it is simultaneously one of the most empowering things I’ve ever done and one of the scariest. Most laypeople’s main worry, when I mention that there is porn of me on the internet, is how it might affect my future employment opportunities, but I feel pretty firmly that that ship has sailed: I’m not going to go into childcare or politics, and I’m not trying to write for conservative publications, so on that level it doesn’t really matter that you can find pics of my genitals online.

No, the thing that still scares me most about being publicly naked is the sheer vulnerability of nudity itself. The likelihood of people saying (or thinking) mean things about my body. The way that internet commentators sometimes speak with such unearned authority that their criticisms creep coldly into my brain and stay lodged there, overriding any calming compliments from loved ones.

But as prevalent and understandable as these fears are, I also know that I have overcome them before, and I can do it again.

When I went quasi-viral a few years ago for writing an article about how some abusive men twist feminist rhetoric to get women to trust them, I was hounded by misogynistic trolls for weeks. They sent me death threats, told me to kill myself, left cruel comments for me across multiple platforms. I was scared for my physical safety. But one of the things that snapped me out of my fight-or-flight daze was seeing these men mock photos of me in a strap-on. They spoke as if this was an inherently disgusting sight, like they didn’t even need to explain why it was grotesque to see a chubby woman looking happy and confident while strapped into pink leather and wielding a glittery dildo. And I laughed and laughed, because… I looked hot in those photos. People whose opinions I actually cared about had told me so, and I thought so myself.

If this was really the best they could do – telling me I looked stupid and gross in a photo where I looked verifiably happy and hot – then they had no real power over me. They had tried to humiliate me and had failed. The spell was broken.

I was reminded of the famous Eleanor Roosevelt quote, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” I have a lot of problems with this quote, most notably that it contributes to victim-blaming rhetoric when survivors get understandably upset about being objectified or harassed or assaulted. But, I do still think that your attitude about your own victimization can contribute to (but isn’t at all solely responsible for) how you end up feeling about that victimization. And since these trolls were sad weirdos whose rage toward me was probably borne from resentments they held toward women they actually knew in their actual lives, rather than being due to anything I’d really done or said, it felt relatively easy to shrug off their bad-faith attacks once I’d seen that they really had no ammo.

I was proud of the things they wanted to shame me for. I loved the things about myself that they claimed were worth hating. My life was full of love and sex, despite their projected insistence that someone like me could neither deserve nor acquire either of those things. Their arguments had no teeth, no real impact, no basis in reality. What they were saying was far more about them than it was about me, and that had been true the whole time.

It still makes me nervous every time I hit “publish” on a new batch of nudes. But it helps to know that all the arguments I’ve ever heard for why I shouldn’t post them are essentially meaningless. I’m not trying to get an office job. I don’t give a shit about impressing misogynist trolls. No decent partner of mine would ever be threatened by me being naked in public. And most crucially of all, although I have my bad body image days like everyone else, I know ultimately – in my heart of hearts and pussy of pussies – that my body is beautiful and worth celebrating. The “someone just bought your nudes!” notifications that show up in my inbox are just one of the many pieces of evidence proving that to be so.

 

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