Date Diaries: Montreal

Kate Sloan

Montreal is a beautiful city that I love. I’ve only been there a handful of times, but each time, I’ve fallen in love all over again with the bilingualism, the cultural flair, the low rents compared to Toronto (!), the beautiful restaurants and cafés. It’s a city I would love to live in, if my French were a little sharper.

My partner and I spent a week in Montreal recently, and he’s the type to seek out the absolute best places on Foursquare whenever we go anywhere new, so I got to experience a lot of MTL highlights. Here are some spots I think you should check out if you and your beloved(s) ever set foot in this city…

Toqué!

If you’re looking for fine food and great wine, this spot is a must-do. Their foie gras is absolutely divine, and I loved their duck. Their dishes are plated meticulously and artfully – “tweezified,” as my partner says. We were also charmed by how they brought over a portable hook to our table for me to hang my bag from!

Onoir

This was a recommendation from Rae and Piph, whose tastes I trust, so we knew we had to check it out. It’s a restaurant where you eat in COMPLETE DARKNESS. The waitstaff are all blind, and once you’ve been briefed on the protocol of the place and chosen your menu selections, they lead you into a pitch-black room as you cling to their shoulder with one hand. Then they bring you food and drink, bumping each dish or glass into your shoulder so you can take it and place it on the table in front of you, hoping against hope that you won’t lose it once you’ve set it down.

It was an absolutely wild experience having dinner across from someone I’ve had many dinners with but being unable to see him, or my food. It completely changed the way I experienced the meal, and the date. Certainly it gave me more empathy for the blind (though, notably, not all blind people think the restaurant is a great idea), and it also amped up my appreciation for the taste and texture of my food. However, by the end of the meal, my partner and I were starting to panic a little; we wanted to get back to our lit-up, visible world! I’ll always remember shouting our waiter’s name – “MAURICE!” – as we sat together in the dark, frozen in fear but also giggling in glee…

La Finca

This sweet little café was less than a block away from the hotel we stayed at, so we went here several times, and it was great every time. Great coffee, great baked goods, great vibe.

Boho

The classy and tropical vibe of this cocktail bar makes it feel like someplace Don Draper might go while vacationing in Hawaii. And my drink was served in a plastic pineapple, so I don’t know what else you could want from an establishment, really.

Le Cartet

Hard to go past this place for fancy breakfast/brunch! I ordered a big skillet full of eggs, bacon, sausage, ham, and toast – pretty much everything I could want from a breakfast – and a big ol’ maple latte. (When in Québec, consume as much maple stuff as possible. You gotta.)

Le Mal Nécessaire

While my boyfriend tells me this isn’t technically a tiki bar because we didn’t see any tikis, they do have a tiki-ish vibe and you can order a cocktail served in a full-size pineapple, so there’s that. I loved the atmosphere in this cute little underground bar.

Bagel, Etc.

Leonard Cohen supposedly hung out here a lot when he lived in Montreal. It’s an eclectically-decorated restaurant known for its breakfast and brunch offerings. I love to get a big breakfast special here – eggs, bacon, the works – with an obligatory locally-made bagel. Divine.

La Grande Roue de Montreal

If you think Ferris wheels are at all romantic or exciting, this one’s worth a visit. You get a fantastic view of the city, plus you get to walk along the lovely waterfront to get there. You’ll be placed in groups of 8 for the ride, so it’s not the most intimate experience, but it’s still nice nonetheless.

Moishes

This steakhouse obviously does steak quite well; their shrimp cocktail is also great and our meal came with GIANT PICKLES that delighted me to no end. Also, can confirm that Moishes leftovers hold up: the day after our dinner here, I shoveled cold steak and potatoes into my face while sitting in our hotel bed and they were honestly still delightful.

Olive et Gourmando

I’m still daydreaming about the sweet ricotta dish at this sweet brunch spot in historic Old Montreal. They also had fantastic fresh-squeezed orange juice, and staff who were attentive and (frankly) attractive as hell. We will definitely go back here next time we’re in MTL.

Dominion Square Tavern

This unassuming gastropub ranks among the best cocktail spots in Montreal, which I felt doubtful about until I actually tried one of their drinks. Their “Gin & Mint” – actually just a Southside, my fave, with lemon juice – was blissful, and they do a super-boozy “Canadian Old Fashioned” that led to some good sloshed conversations at their cozy bar. I bet their food is great too, but we didn’t try any.

Divine Chocolatier

If artisanal chocolate is your jam (so to speak), you gotta check out this little chocolate shop. Their truffles are adorable little bites of perfection, and their “secret bar” is intriguingly delicious. (I asked “What makes it a ‘secret’ bar?” and the owner smiled mysteriously and told me, “It’s a secret.”)

Belon

This oyster bar was a block from our hotel, and boy, were we glad. It’s spacious and sophisticated, with a fully-stocked bar and – of course – amazing oysters, with all the fixins. We were feeling indulgent and had two dozen – whoops.

Au Pied de Cochon

This very, very French spot has some weird-yet-delicious items on their menu. I got a squid ink risotto – definitely one of the strangest things I’ve ever eaten or even seen at a restaurant – and my partner got this odd “duck in a can” dish. The portions were big and the atmosphere was jovial. I mean, how can you not love a place that’ll serve you champagne and a jet-black risotto that “tastes like the sea”?

Café Olimpico

This Mile End spot is known for its excellent coffee. It’s also the spot where author Sean Michaels (my cousin) wrote his Giller Prize-winning novel Us Conductors, which I love, so I’m biased. Get an allongé and a biscotti and soak up the atmosphere.

Montreal Improv

Montreal has a robust improv comedy scene, and this theatre offers shows in both English and French. If you can see anything featuring their director, Marc Rowland, absolutely do – I’m a total improv snob and have rarely laughed so hard at a show as I did watching him do a longform set at Sunday Sunday.

The Coldroom

You have to ring a bell at a mysteriously blank door and wait to be let into this secretive underground cocktail bar, but it’s worth the rigamarole. They can make you any classic cocktail, as well as several drinks from their in-house menu. I’ve ordered a Southside at nearly every bar I’ve visited in Canada and the U.S. over the past year and a half, and the one a bartender made me here was one of my all-time faves.

Atwater Cocktail Club

Another must-visit if you love cocktails, especially classics. The bartenders here are skilled and personable – ours took the time to learn our names, and chatted with us in between bringing us stellar drinks (the margarita I had here was one of my fave drinks of the whole trip). It’s a bit tricky to find the entrance of this place, hidden away between two buildings, but it’s worth sleuthing out.

L’Express

This place is just a good old-fashioned classy French restaurant, complete with charmingly cordial waiters, an epic wine menu, and a killer cacio e pepe that rivals the ones I had in Italy. Their desserts are particularly magnificent.

 

Do you have favorite date spots in Montreal?

5 Fun Things You Can Do With Used Panties

Kate Sloan

There are few objects as sexually charged and culturally revered as panties. They can symbolize so many things: femininity or gender transgression, raunch or innocence, private secrets or public pageantry. With all these meanings floating around them, plus their frequent proximity to genitals, it’s no wonder why these dainty underthings are so frequently fetishized.

But they’re not just for looking at – there’s lots you can do with a pair of panties! Here are 5 fun ideas…

Use them as a gag

A balled-up pair of underwear makes a great gag: it tastes like whoever was wearing it last (even if it was the person being gagged themselves!), it muffles sounds without stopping up your breathing, and it carries a whiff of the illicit. It can be fun to “punish” a submissive by pointing out to them, in this very direct way, just how wet they got their underwear – and just how obedient they’re going to be for you.

Stuff them in a vagina

Panty-stuffing is a significant subset of panty fetishism; there’s a surprising amount of porn that features it! While I would imagine that it doesn’t feel amazing for the person being stuffed, it will likely leave you with a thoroughly soaked pair of underwear – all the better for smelling and tasting, if you’re into that.

Sell them

You can buy and sell used underwear on websites like Sofia Gray, or on a direct person-to-person basis if you know any interested buyers. This endeavor is so popular that in Japan, there are supposedly vending machines that dispense used panties! I’ve sold my underwear once or twice and it’s always been a lovely experience: I got to make someone’s fantasy come true, while making a little dosh for myself. It’s a win-win!

Use them in a feminization scene

As humiliatrix Princess Kali points out in her book Enough to Make You Blush, a man in panties won’t automatically be embarrassed to be wearing them – it depends on the attitudes he holds about the garment, its place in society, and its relation (or lack thereof) to his gender identity. But certainly, putting panties on a man is one classic way to cut him down to size, in a kink scene involving feminization, humiliation, or both. If you want to tiptoe into this type of fun, try wearing super girly underwear under a more masculine outfit while you go out on the town.

Leave them as a souvenir

If you know your partner loves getting a noseful of your bits, you could leave a pair of your underwear in their bed for them to discover once you’re gone. This could be a particularly sweet gesture in a long-distance relationship – it’s something to tide your partner over until the next time they can bury their face in you. Pro tip: keep the panties in a sealed Ziploc bag when not “in use” if you want them to retain their scent for longer!

What do you like to do with used panties?

 

This post was sponsored by the folks at Sofia Gray, where you can buy and sell underwear aplenty! As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

Review: Rock Candy Suga Daddy 8″

Kate Sloan

When Rock Candy reached out to me offering me a toy to review, I was immediately entranced by their toys’ aesthetic. They’re all pink or blue, look vaguely like candy, and made to satisfy size queens (and other size royalty). These things are very up my alley. And now a Rock Candy dildo was gonna go up my “alley” as well. *rimshot*

They sent me the 8″ Suga Daddy, a big blue dildo with a suction cup base. I thought it would be good for pegging, but when it arrived on my doorstep, I immediately realized it was probably too big for my partner’s ass to take. My vag, however, is a different story.

This dildo, as its name implies, is 8″ long, though the insertable length is only 7.25″. This makes it long enough to hit my A-spot with some room to spare – yay! It doesn’t hit the spot with any particular intensity, being flexible and curveless, but it does nudge it gently, which is sometimes enough for me. The diameter of the toy tops out at 1.875″ – pretty big, but not unmanageable for most vaginas and some butts. I feel nice and filled up when this toy is inside me.

The best thing about this toy, IMO, is the ridges along its shaft. It has a glans and coronal ridge, much like a flesh-and-blood penis, but those ridges/bloops/bumps continue down the length of the toy and feel like one coronal ridge after another, popping pleasantly over my pubic bone one by one with each thrust. This can be intense but sometimes that’s exactly what I want.

The silicone, I should note, is fairly firm and unyielding. This means that the Suga Daddy will stand up well in a strap-on, jutting out merrily from the body. However, for my purposes, it’s firmer than I prefer a silicone toy to be. It doesn’t bend to the will of my vagina, and often leaves me with a slightly bruised-feeling vag and urethra if I’ve been pounding away for a while. A good, thick water-based lube helps with this issue, but doesn’t solve it entirely, especially since the texture of the silicone is a little draggy.

I wish the 8″ Suga Daddy had a slight upward curve for targeting erogenous zones with more precision, and that its base was thicker and heftier so I could thrust quickly with it more easily. But it’s a really good dildo for when you just want to be stuffed full of whimsically-colored silicone. It’s firm and formidable, and if you enjoy the sensation of being gently and slowly stretched open, you’ll love the girthy and gradually-widening shaft of this toy. Its ridges are like a roller coaster for the vagina, and while sometimes I want my A-spot or G-spot targeted more directly, sometimes a resolute massage of my vaginal walls is exactly what I want, and the Suga Daddy can certainly do that.

 

Thanks to Rock Candy for sending me this toy to review!

Intimate Intercourse: Dating a Sex Writer (Part 3)

Kate Sloan

Hello again! Welcome back to Intimate Intercourse, a series where I interview my boyfriend/Sir/daddy, who goes by Super Sleepy Dude, about various topics related to sex and kink. This week we’re discussing hypnokink! This is the final part of a 3-part interview; you can read part 1 here and part 2 here. In this instalment, we discuss the upsides and downsides of dating a sex writer, and his advice for anyone considering it.

KS: What are some of the things about dating a sex writer that are hard or weird?

SS: Okay, this answer is sort of like answering the “What is your biggest weakness?” job interview question, because it’s a problem that isn’t really a problem, but – if you’re dating a sex blogger that’s reviewed a lot of toys, and they have, like, 200, 300 sex toys, deciding what toy to use is actually kind of hard! There’s a lot of choices. There’s a lot of things to fuck you with, a lot of things to hit you with, and also stuff you haven’t reviewed yet that you might wanna use, even if you don’t like it or know you might not like it, because you have to. So that decision is a very frequent decision that I have to make, especially ‘cause I’m your dominant, and also there’s so many options. It’s a “paradox of choice” type of thing sometimes.

KS: [giggling] We mostly stay within a relatively small group of things, because it makes it easier to make those decisions.

SS: Exactly. I don’t have to, like, go pull up your toybox page every time we have phone sex, to be like, “Okay, let’s see here…”

KS: But I do think, like, I say a relatively small group but it actually isn’t that small, all things considered.

SS: No. It’s bigger than most people’s entire collection!

KS: Right. And you have an impressive grasp of not only the toys that I have but also kind of the function of each one and when it would be right for any particular moment, which I find really impressive.

SS: Yeah. What else is hard about it? There’s a difficult-to-ignore extra layer of minor anxiety about something going wrong. Stuff goes wrong in sex all the time – you’re tired, there’s boner issues, there’s whatever – and there’s a part of me that’s like, “I don’t really want to fuck this up.” But it’s not rational. I don’t think you’re trying to write about a particular person’s one-off boner issue. That’s not interesting.

KS: No.

SS: So I don’t know. It’s just a thing. I don’t know, is there anything else that I’ve said was hard in the past, or that you think makes it hard for you, as a sex blogger, to date people?

KS: I mean, it pisses us off when people try to involve themselves…

SS: Oh, yeah, it really does. When people are sort of trying to insert themselves or make non-complimentary comments about us, that is kind of rough.

KS: The problem with that is that, yes, I’m a sex writer, yes, part of my skillset is making private, intimate experiences palatable and comprehensible for outsiders, but inherently, I’m not writing about every detail of everything that happens, and my readers don’t have all the context of our relationship because they aren’t in it, and so you can’t assume that you know everything about somebody just because they write about their sex life. And likewise, you can’t assume they’re going to be willing to open up about everything. We’ve had people ask us really inappropriate questions and just be gross about it, and it’s like, “Guys. Just be chill.”

SS: How do you feel about the thing where people say, like, “I love him,” or “I’m so into your partner,” or whatever?

KS: I mean, I am only made uncomfortable by it to the extent that you are – except when people are, like, hitting on you, which is kind of rude, to me.

SS: Yeah, it is kind of weird. I’m very flirty, so it doesn’t usually register as weird to me; it usually registers as like, “Oh, yeah. Okay, cool.” But sometimes it crosses that line.

KS: I just get very protective and very, almost like, “mama lion energy” around that, because I feel this sense of responsibility for what happens to you in my spaces, because I brought you into this…

SS: Totally. That makes complete sense.

KS: Yeah, I’m just like, please stop. Because my worry – not just with you, but with past partners when this has happened also – is that someone will experience too much of that and will decide it’s too much and will have to end the relationship. So that’s always kind of where my mind goes.

SS: Oh, how has that happened?

KS: None of my other partners have really been out as my partner who weren’t in the sex industry already, but if I wrote something about someone that was very flattering or complimentary and people were saying gross, objectifying things about the person based on that, then I would try to keep those people from seeing those comments sometimes, or just try to protect them from that, because I didn’t want them to feel like dating me was a liability.

SS: Yeah. Makes sense.

KS: Yeah. What are some of the best or most fun things about dating a sex writer?

SS: Seeing yourself from another angle, especially an angle of somebody who’s really into you or in love with you, is a gigantic self-confidence boost. I’d recommend it to anyone! Even if it’s private, even if you can just get your partner to write a thing that is never published that they can share with you, or vice-versa, I think it’s great. Hell of a drug! What else? Being able to meet tons of other people in this industry, that I really enjoy their work and think they’re making a big difference in terms of sex-positivity and stuff, is really cool.

KS: Were you starstruck when you met Epiphora and Lilly?

SS: Yeaaaah. A little bit.

KS: [laughing]

SS: Also, getting to see you do your thing. I’ve been in relationships with people where I can’t see them doing their work and being really competent at the thing, and that is a huge turn-on, I think, for both of us, so being able to watch you do panels and listen to your podcast and read your writing, being able to consume all of that competence is also great. And the toys. Yeah. Yes.

KS: Yeah, it is a fun perk that I am able to acquire toys for you to use and for us to review.

SS: Yeah.

KS: And I appreciate that you take that task so seriously, ‘cause I’ve had partners in the past who just sort of would give me very vague, brief thoughts on the toy, and I would always be like, “Hey, I need more than that.” So you’re a good partner for me in that respect as well.

SS: Mhm.

KS: One more thing… What would you tell someone who was thinking about dating a sex writer but was kind of unsure about it or scared about it?

SS: A couple things. The first thing is, I think that a lot of people who’d be thinking about dating a sex writer are thinking about dating a sex writer’s public persona. They don’t actually know that person… yet. So, don’t assume that they’re gonna be having sex all the time, or that they’ll be exactly who they are in their sex writing. That’s just one side of them.

KS: Yeah, I’m frequently depressed or giggly. I’m not always a Sex Person.

SS: [laughing] Yes. And then, maybe you’re flirting with that person or you’ve met them at an event or whatever, and you think it’s more of a real possibility, not just a thing that you’re fantasizing about, like, you might actually get to go on a date with them – don’t make it entirely about that, either. If I was a sex writer, I wouldn’t want to be dated for my job, or for the clout or whatever. I’d want to be dated for who I am. So it’s just, again, it’s just one facet of this person’s life. And for some people, it’s just a job, it’s just an income source. So, be aware of that. And then, the last thing I would say is, think past just the next week or the next month about whether you are okay being public. Don’t be like, “Oh, that’s a problem for later,” or, “I don’t have to worry about that,” because if you can’t [be public], you really need to be upfront that it’s not going to happen. And if you think it’s a possibility, discuss that with the person that you’re dating as you’re working through that process. I would say that if you have worries about coming out and you want to talk about it ever, DM me, because I could talk about that forever. And I will try to convince you to do it.

KS: [giggling] That’s so cute. You’re an evangelist.

SS: Yeah.

KS: Okay. Thank you, I love you, I’m very glad we’re dating.

SS: I love you too, little one. You’re a very good sex blogger and I am glad we’re dating.

Intimate Intercourse: Dating a Sex Writer (Part 2)

Kate Sloan

Hi again! Welcome back to Intimate Intercourse, a series where I interview my boyfriend/Sir/daddy, who goes by Super Sleepy Dude, about various topics related to sex and kink. This week we’re discussing what it’s like to date a sex writer! This is part 2 of a 3-part interview; you can read part 1 here. In this instalment, we discuss his decision to “come out” as my partner last October, why he made that decision, how he did it, and what’s happened since.

KS: So you were anonymous to my readers and followers for the first several months that we were dating…

SS: Yeah.

KS: How did you start to feel that you didn’t want to be anonymous anymore?

SS: I started to feel like I didn’t want to be anonymous anymore over a period of a few months. It was like, mostly me thinking about how it would feel if we were in the reversed positions – if I was a sex writer and the long-distance partner of somebody who couldn’t be out about dating me. I think that that would hurt me, and even though you said that it was okay, and that it wouldn’t necessarily hurt you, I felt like it might start to. And it was starting to. So, even before I had made the decision to definitely do it, I was talking to people about it from a risk-assessment perspective, of like: “I’m feeling [like I want to come out], I don’t know if this feeling will grow or shrink or what, or if it’s New Relationship Energy, or what direction it’s gonna go, but if I did this, how would you feel about it? Would you support me doing this? Does this seem like a dumb idea to you?” And people were really supportive of it.

KS: Yeah. I had thought I was okay with it for several months, and I think it was just that New Relationship Energy thing where everything seems perfect and great – and then when that starts to dissipate a little bit, you have to start thinking about real-world, real-life things. And I was noticing that there were a number of different ways that I was feeling like a secondary partner, one of which is the distance, one of which is being a fairly new relationship, and a major one was being a secret. Or feeling like I was being kept a secret, in that you weren’t talking about me publicly anywhere.

SS: And we’re both people that talk about a lot of things publicly. Maybe if I didn’t use social media at all, or that wasn’t as important a thing to both of us as it is, it might’ve felt different, but me being able to talk about other things, and wanting to talk about other things, and [being unable to] talk about you publicly, or even post a photo of you, or anything, was really bizarre, in terms of my life. That’s not a thing that I’m used to having.

KS: Yeah, and I would try to CBT myself out of feeling that way. I would go, well, look at all this evidence, privately, of you loving me and valuing our relationship. But it was this cognitive dissonance that I found really difficult to overcome, because I’ve been in so many relationships where people would say, “Yeah, I love you, I value you, you’re very important to me,” and then their behavior was just very different from that, because I think it wasn’t actually true.

SS: Yeah.

KS: And so I started to react with this sort of anxiety and fear that you were lying about it, in some sense, because you hadn’t made yourself vulnerable enough to go public with it. Some part of me felt like, if you really, truly loved me and cared about me, you would do that – which I recognize is shitty if it were an ultimatum, because not everybody is able to do that.

SS: Yes. Right.

KS: But I did get to a point where… I don’t think I would’ve broken up with you over it, at least not right away, but I was kind of like… This is important to me. I need you to at least start thinking about this.

SS: Yeah. What strikes me is that we were both kind of wrestling with that question in our own ways, and it only got better and easier when we started talking about it more, instead of just trying to deal with this in our own brains. That’s how we were able to solve it.

KS: Yeah. It was weird because it hit me kind of all at once, very quickly. I remember someone asked me on Instagram, I think a month or two before we started talking about this, “Will we ever see your boyfriend? I’m so curious about him!” and I wrote, at the time, what I honestly felt, which was: “No. He’s anonymous and I choose to respect that, and I hope that you all will too.” At the time, I remember feeling really confident, like I really believed what I was writing – and then, only a month or two later, I started to feel like, “Actually, this is like, ‘emergency’ levels of distress. I don’t actually think I can do this.” Because I also had the realization, around the same time, that this had been a recurring pattern in my relationships, and that it was just sort of slowly eroding my sense of self-worth, and my sense of deserving to have a partner who was proud of me.

SS: Yeah. It also makes me think back on some of the other sex bloggers that I’ve read for a long time, or read a long time ago, where they had many many many anonymous partners in a row – you know, ten, twenty anonymous partners that their audience never really got to know – and how they must have felt, or how they could’ve felt about that. I haven’t really read a lot of writing about that, about the feeling of not being able to talk about who your partners are.

KS: Yeah, because I think the assumption is that that’s just how you do it, that that’s just how sex writing works.

SS: Right, it’s a convention of the genre.

KS: And a lot of sex writers themselves are anonymous, so maybe they have less of a problem with it, because they understand it directly. But I have been not-anonymous for… almost 4 years now? So I’m just not in that world anymore, and I’m kind of past wanting my partners to be in that world too.

SS: Mhm.

KS: I remember being in the NoMad with you and we were waiting for an Uber that was gonna take us wherever we were going next… Oh, we were going to the Hippo Campus concert. And you were like, “Should I just do this now?” and you took out your phone and you had written this tweet draft where you called me your girlfriend. And we chose a photo to go with the tweet, and you sent it out, and then I had this intense sense of exhilaration, like: we just did this really important thing together.

SS: Yeah. Yeah, I remember that moment too, and I remember pulling to refresh a lot of times.

KS: [laughing]

SS: …Because, even after talking to my other partner, and my friends, and my business partners, and random people in my industry, and my family, I still had this sense that at least one person was gonna be really mean.

KS: Yeah.

SS: I didn’t think it was gonna be the primary reaction; I didn’t think it was gonna be a big deal, and I knew how I wanted to handle it. But I was like, “Okay, where is the mean person? Where is the troll?” And they just never showed up.

KS: Yeah, that was kind of how it was for me too, when I came out and started showing my face and using my name. For a short period of time, I lived in terror. I was like, “When’s the other shoe gonna drop? What’s gonna happen?”

SS: Exactly.

KS: And nothing happened. Everybody was perfectly lovely. It was more surprising than it would’ve been if people were awful.

SS: It’s super surprising, because we see so much negativity online and sex-negativity in culture, and it’s just expected that if you’re admitting to being a sexual person, having a bunch of stuff about your sex life online, that something bad is going to happen, but it doesn’t necessarily happen.

KS: Yeah. So you’ve been out now as my partner for five-ish months. What has the reaction been like?

SS: Let’s see. We went to a party together with a bunch of my friends, and apparently, before we arrived, people had been reading and discussing a bunch of your posts about me, and saying stuff like, “Oh, I could never do that sex act,” or whatever, and then when we got there, it kind of just vanished. I only heard about it later. [laughing] So I think there’s probably a decent amount of that going on – people just reading stuff quietly, not saying anything to me about it. Or waiting for me to bring things up, instead of bringing them up, which I think is a really respectful way to approach that.

KS: Yeah.

SS: There’s no way to prevent people from reading this stuff. You can say, “Hey, I’d prefer if you don’t read it,” or you can say, “I’ll send you the stuff that I want you to read,” but that’s really not workable. People are curious, especially about the sex lives of people they know, even if they don’t admit it publicly, and so I’ve kind of just said, “Hey, if you want to read it, read it. If you want to talk about it, talk about it.” But people have been pretty reluctant to do that, I think. What else? People were really excited to meet you. My sister, when I told her about it, I was like, “[Kate’s] a writer, she writes about sex,” and she asked, “Where does she write? What’s her site?” and I was like, “Well, I could tell you that, but I don’t know that you necessarily want to read it.” And she was like, “Oh, yeah, I just realized after I said that that I probably don’t wanna read it.”

KS: [laughing] My brother doesn’t follow me on Snapchat, for the same reason.

SS: Yeah. What else? I have gotten, lately, one or two kind of “off” comments about it. Just things that struck me. Not from friends, but… I’m thinking of one comment from somebody who said, “On Twitter, it seems like your life is pretty complicated.” And like, that just strikes me as either someone who’s uncomfortable with polyamory or someone who’s uncomfortable with being public about sex, or whatever, but who doesn’t want to go so far as to say what makes them uncomfortable – and that’s kinda sad.

KS: Yeah, that sounds like it’s probably a poly thing.

SS: It could be, yeah.

KS: What about your own feelings on it? How has it felt to be out as my partner?

SS: Great! It feels great. It’s just a thing that I don’t have to worry about it anymore. I was talking about it in therapy most weeks, and it was causing me a decent amount of consternation internally, of like, “Can I like this Instagram photo? Will someone look at all the likes and figure out the New York app developer that is in there?” It was causing me to behave in ways that I don’t want to have to think about. I want to be able to just talk to my girlfriend online and post about my girlfriend if it’s our anniversary or whatever. So, it’s great!

KS: Did it feel different from how you were expecting?

SS: The major difference was just that people weren’t mean. The positives were as positive as I was expecting. It’s great. How did it feel for you? Not just the moment of it, but how has it felt since?

KS: It has made me feel like our relationship is a lot more real and important to you, and also to me, which is something that I was struggling with. It has made me really happy to be able to show you off, not only to people in person but also online. It raised a lot of questions for me about, is it shallow or shitty or wrong somehow to glean enjoyment from this sort of exhibitionistic mode of expressing my love externally? But I think the conclusion I’ve come to on that, ultimately, is that that’s the age we’re living in, and that is a way that people express their love now, and that is valid even if it maybe seems kind of weird or unnecessary to some folks.

SS: Yeah, I feel that way too. It’s just another one of the consequences of living in a super connected, very online world, is that ways you might’ve been seen with your partner before are augmented by seeing people with their partners online. And it generally makes me really happy to see people in love and enjoying each other online. The times that it doesn’t are when I’m going through really hard romantic stuff myself, and then I think it’s kind of on me to moderate that.

KS: Yeah. I also have found it really satisfying and uplifting to watch how you have become more confident and relaxed about your kinks and your kink orientations since coming out – which I didn’t anticipate because I already think of you as a very confident person and someone who is very relaxed about your own kinks. But I did notice a marked difference in your willingness to accept identities like “dominant” or “sadist” or “hypnokinkster” very casually, and in some cases publicly, and that’s been really nice to see.

Check back on Friday for the last instalment of this interview, in which we’ll be talking about the upsides and downsides of dating a sex writer, and his advice for anyone considering it.