Hippo Campus

12 Days of Girly Juice 2022: 10 Perfect Songs

Kate Sloan

I love music, as you know if you read this blog regularly. The soundtrack of my year is almost as important to me as the events of that year; the two can even shape each other at times.

So, in no particular order, here are 10 songs that made me happy this year, or helped me revel in my sadness or rage or horniness. Good music has a way of making even the hardest feelings seem not only manageable but vital to the human experience, something that links us inextricably to other people, reminding us we are never alone even when we feel like we are.

(The best way to read this post is to click “play” on each song while you read about it, so you get a sense of the vibe.)

 

“2Drunk” by Nick Jonas (buy/stream on Apple Music)

“What would mama say?/ She’d say ‘Oh, you never know when to stop/ Like every day’s Friday night’/ I’m too drunk and I’m all in my feelings/ Oh well; now I’m high as the ceiling”

This song is the perfect musical embodiment of that moment when you realize you are, in fact, too drunk but in a way that feels like joyful surrender, like embracing the uncertainty of life, like letting the chips fall where they may.

There were many depressed days in January where this song was the only thing that could get me out of bed, so I played it on loop a lot. Nick Jonas has taken on this role in my life in several previous years too. There is something about his voice – smooth, warm, inviting – and his music – catchy, fun, effortless – that translates directly into dopamine for me. I don’t question it anymore; I just use his music as fuel, and love him for it.

One of the things I love most about this song is that it’s both happy and wistful, the way a drunken evening can feel when you’re drinking to distract yourself from heartbreak. (I even covered it as a slow waltz on the ukulele to emphasize its sadder qualities.) While I’ve quoted some lyrics above that I think are most emblematic of the song, I also want to shout out the poignant second verse, which goes, “Should I send that text? Maybe not/ But I miss that sex, quite a lot/ It’s five o’clock somewhere/ Maybe you’re somewhere/ Thinking ’bout me.” These lyrics are, as the kids are saying, a relatable mood.

 

“Daddy” by Brotherkenzie (buy on Bandcamp)

“Nobody calls me daddy, sadly/ And nobody sends me nudes anymore/ But I saw your ass last night when you hung up/ And I wondered what you did that for”

I screamed when I heard this song for the first time.

I’ve written before about the low-key sexuality that occasionally oozes from the music of Brotherkenzie, the solo project of my long-time guitarist crush Nathan Stocker. Not to psychoanalyze a total stranger, but I’ve often thought his most romantic and/or sexy songs seemed to point out his daddy-esque qualities: wanting to nurture, to take care of, to treasure and spoil his loves. So, when I first heard the opening lyrics of this song (quoted above), I screeched: my suspicions had been confirmed, and it felt good to know that my “daddy-dar” is still on point even though I haven’t had to sleuth out a new daddy for several years at this point.

As with all Brotherkenzie songs, there are some parts of this song that I find lyrically inscrutable, but at its core I think it’s a song about feeling romantically bored in singledom, wondering what’s next, and hoping for exciting adventures to arise and distract you from yourself. Again: a relatable fucking mood. And I still love Nathan’s voice, guitar playing, and songwriting in a way that feels visceral and inherent.

 

“Someone to Watch Over Me” by Sarah Vaughan (buy/stream on Apple Music)

“There’s a somebody I’m longing to see/ I hope that he turns out to be/ Someone who’ll watch over me/ I’m a little lamb who’s lost in the wood/ I know I could always be good/ To one who’ll watch over me”

I went through a phase this year where this song was basically all I wanted to listen to for a few weeks. It’s an especially gorgeous rendition of a favorite jazz standard of mine. Sarah Vaughan’s vocal control, power, and range were such that she could easily have focused her career on styles of music that many people consider technically “harder” than jazz, like opera or musical theatre – but instead she mostly focused on jazz, which can be every bit as complex and virtuosic as those other genres, and that prowess is on full display here. Her vibrato is masterful and emotive, her phrasing is exquisite, her range is unbelievable, and she brings warmth and wistfulness galore to the song. It’s a stunning recording.

I find it interesting to listen to these old love songs of yore (this one was composed by the Gershwin brothers in 1926, though this particular recording of it is from the late ’50s), because they lean so hard into old-fashioned gender norms that it almost seems kinky to a modern ear. A lot of the lyrics of this song sound to me more like a D/s relationship (in particular, a DD/lg relationship) than anything vanilla or conventional. I like that this style of helpless femininity is something many of us can deliberately opt into now, instead of being forced into that role by an oppressive society.

 

“I Want to Be Your Boyfriend” by Hot Freaks (buy/stream on Apple Music)

“I wanna be your boyfriend/ I wanna go on walks with you/ I wanna have long talks with you/ You can be my girlfriend/ I’ll compliment you frequently/ I wanna treat you decently”

I stumbled across this song by total coincidence. Several years ago, a boy I was dating sent me the Ramones song “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” as a sweet way of communicating his intentions toward me. (We didn’t end up dating for very long but are still on good terms.) At some point this year I wanted to hear that song but couldn’t remember what band performs it, so I asked Siri to play “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend,” and she played me this strange, delightful track instead.

I love how this song buzzes with the energy of a new relationship, the perhaps-foolish optimism you feel at that time (“I’m not gonna make the same mistakes/ I’m not gonna run”), and the self-doubt that can also creep in when your emotions are heightened like that (“All the guys are crowded around/ They’re telling you the same things that I planned to say/ I thought I was unique/ Maybe I’m not that way”). It’s also just got one of the all-time most fun choruses to sing and dance along to, if you ask me.

 

“Rocket Science” by Vaultboy (buy/stream on Apple Music)

“Baby, it isn’t rocket science/ Why are we complicating it?/ We’ve got a chemistry I’m liking/ And I’m feeling good ’bout giving in/ ‘Cause baby, it isn’t rocket science/ Even when it feels like it is/ I know your heart’s beating like mine is/ We don’t gotta hide it/ Baby, it’s not rocket science”

Vaultboy was one of my major musical discoveries this year; I sought out other people who’ve done songwriting challenges, as inspiration while doing my own, and stumbled across his “77-minute songwriting challenge” videos, which are incredible.

I was immediately enthralled by his ability to churn out hooky hits that get stuck in your head for days and punch you right in the heart. “Rocket Science” is one of his best, if you ask me: it’s romantic, fun, and (as with literally every Vaultboy song) criminally catchy.

The gorgeous second verse goes, “You’re telling me secrets nobody else knows/ ‘Cause I wanna know, I wanna know/ Where you might see yourself way down the road/ I wanna know, ’cause I wanna go,” and it feels like falling in love, and wanting more more more of the person you’re falling in love with. But the refrain of the song – “Baby, it’s not rocket science!” – resonates with me because I am so prone to overcomplicating love, psychoanalyzing myself and my partners to try to understand what’s happening, when instead I could (and should) just enjoy what’s happening while it’s happening. “Baby, it isn’t rocket science, even when it feels like it is.”

 

“About Damn Time” by Lizzo (buy/stream on Apple Music)

“I’ve been so down and under pressure/ I’m way too fine to be this stressed, yeah/ I’m not the girl I was or used to be/ Bitch, I might be better”

I love to listen to Lizzo to on days when I feel gloomy and self-critical. So much of her music is about self-love, self-acceptance, and confidence; these things come through not only lyrically but sonically too (not to mention visually in her magnificent music videos). It’s super refreshing, in a world where so much of the capitalistic machine still works daily to make us feel bad about ourselves.

I love how this song points out not just Lizzo’s current confidence and happiness, but also the journey that got her there, and the fact that it’s not always easy or instant. As with so many great songs, I deeply related to this one, especially the idea of rising from the ashes of stress and trauma, transformed into a stronger, brighter and louder version of myself, one who can strap on her “Balenciussys” and strut out into a new adventure.

 

“Cbat” by Hudson Mohawke (buy/stream on Apple Music)

This instrumental track rose to fame this year when a guy on Reddit wrote a thread about how much he likes to fuck to this song, and how much his girlfriend does not like it. Luckily for us, he identified the song in the thread so readers could listen to it – which led to it going viral and being widely mocked and revered – and it’s cringe in a way that makes the girlfriend’s position understandable.

After a lush chordal intro that makes you think the song will actually be pretty, it breaks out into a distinctively grating melody played on a high-pitched electronic instrument of some kind, and sounds a bit like a ghost climaxing, or a creaky door that someone has autotuned.

But I’ve listened to Cbat several times at this point, and weirdly, it has grown on me. Its rhythm does indeed feel appropriately paced for sex, as the original thread-writer argued, and the story behind the song’s sudden viral popularity makes it all the more amusing to listen to. I’m not sure I’ll ever have sex to this song, because I’d probably be laughing too hard to focus if I did, but I’m glad it exists and that I got to hear about it.

 

“Anybody But You” by Malia Civetz (buy/stream on Apple Music)

“I might invite you to my party/ So you can watch me dancing on somebody new/ You probably know who/ Come enjoy the view of me/ Happy with anybody but you”

Being petty after a breakup can feel like kind of a shameful thing, a conversation topic with girlfriends over martinis and fuel for pithy tweets but not something you’d proudly admit to. I love that this song makes post-breakup pettiness into something powerful, a way of reclaiming strength and agency after having it squashed out of you by a shitty partner. Golden-voiced Malia sings about inviting her ex to a party just so they can see how happy she is now, while also acknowledging that she’s not actually happy now, as evidenced by how hard she’s working to create that image.

“Anybody else will do/ Anybody but you/ I would rather spend the night with anybody in this room,” she sings, over a pop beat that makes you want to stand up, dance, and sing along. It’s a perfect post-breakup anthem and I love that it acknowledges the ways recovery from heartbreak can sometimes look like causing more heartbreak – it’s not nice, it’s not ethically good, certainly, but it’s messy and gratifying and real, and I love her for it.

 

“Pink Moon” by Nick Drake (buy/stream on Apple Music)

“Saw it written and I saw it say/ Pink moon is on its way/ None of you stand so tall/ Pink moon is gonna get ye all”

Content note: Discussion of a possible suicide in this one.

So much has been written about this song, and the album of the same name. There’s even an entire book about it, which I read this year. Famously, the album Pink Moon (of which this song is the first track) was the last album ever completed by English singer-songwriter Nick Drake before he died of an antidepressant overdose (accidental or on purpose, we don’t know) at the age of 26. He’d previously recorded a couple of albums which hadn’t sold well at all, on which his intricate fingerpicked guitar parts and ethereal melodies had been backed up by strings, guitars, drums, and various other accompaniments. He evidently wanted to try something different on his third album, and recorded it in its entirety in late-night studio sessions on two consecutive days, just him and his guitar. This title track is the only one on which any other instruments appear at all – Nick added a sweet, spare piano overdub, and that’s all.

While there are hints, in Nick’s earlier records, of romance, optimism, and joy, this last one was recorded after severe depression got its claws into him, and it shows. The album is full of bleak themes like despair, regret, rejection, and isolation – which aligns exactly with what Nick was going through at the time, a gradual-and-then-all-at-once descent into a depression so profound that he could barely speak. Friends and colleagues have suggested that at this time in his life, listening to his songs was likely the only way you could experience Nick’s inner workings: he was monosyllabic or silent most of the time and looked catatonic with bone-heavy depression. But he was still playing guitar like a virtuoso, albeit with fingernails grown long and dirty from depressive neglect.

The song “Pink Moon” alludes mysteriously to the imminent arrival of the pink moon, which no one can run from or escape; his lyrics never make it clear whether the moon symbolizes something we should dread and fear, or something we should rejoice and wait for, vibrating with excitement. Many commentators have argued that the “pink moon” represents Nick’s depression or his ultimate demise. I don’t know the answers to these interpretive questions, and I don’t think anyone ever will, now that Nick’s been gone for nearly fifty years; all I know is that this song is so hauntingly beautiful that it transports you to an alternate reality for a couple short minutes, and that listening to a lot of Nick Drake this year made me feel less alone.

 

“Boys” by Hippo Campus (buy/stream on Apple Music)

“Take off my shirt at your girlfriend’s party/ What’s it to ya?/ Nobody cares about your music/ They see right through ya/ Kissing boys, missing work/ Got hungover from your words/ Same New York, it’s the worst/ All these nights are a blur”

Jake Luppen, the lead singer of my favorite band Hippo Campus, publicly came out as queer late last year, and has spoken about how “Boys” is a song about (among other things) his queer awakening. It captures so well the flavor of excitement you feel when you’re figuring yourself out in real-time at a messy drunken party in your early twenties. To me it sounds like dancing in clubs, my sweaty body so close to some other girl’s glitter-streaked body, and learning to tolerate or satiate the intense tension between our shimmering shapes.

So much of feeling sexy is about feeling comfortable with who you are, and this song feels like the encapsulation of a moment when you get a glimpse of the “you” you want to be. Maybe it’s in a conversation with a stranger who knows nothing about your career or your past (“Nobody cares about your music/ they see right through ya“) and who therefore can serve as a blank canvas onto which you project the version of yourself you hope to become. And you see that projection, stark and inevitable, and want to dive into it the way you’d want to dive into a lake in a Bob Ross painting.

 

What songs did you love most this year?

Monthly Faves: Squishy Silicone & Lipsticked Loves

Kate Sloan

Whoa, I haven’t done one of these in a while! Happy new year, babes. Here’s what was thrillin’ me, sexually and otherwise, in January…

Sex toys

• SheVibe sent me the Uberrime Jellyfish (full review forthcoming) and I’m really enjoying the squishiness of the silicone, the thrillingly exaggerated head, and the lovely texture along the shaft. Between this dildo, the Uberrime Night King, and the VixSkin Bandit, I’m suddenly more into silicone toys than I’ve been in years…

• For our anniversary, my boyfriend gave me possibly the most beautiful impact toy I’ve ever owned: a bespoke mallet from Weal & Breech. It is stunning, and is also so remarkably thuddy that getting hit with it feels like getting a deep tissue massage on my ass. Ideal. (Full disclosure: I’m doing some copywriting for Weal & Breech at the moment. That doesn’t affect my fondness for their company, which long predates this current project, but I thought you should know, nonetheless!)

• Not technically a toy so much as a sex product, but: I acquired a bottle of Slippery Stuff’s silicone lube and I’m surprised by how much I love it. Normally silicone lubes aren’t my fave, but this one is thick and gel-like, making it a great choice for a wide variety of applications. Yay!

Fantasy fodder

• I’ve thought for a while that I might have a premature ejaculation kink. All those late-night porn searches for “surprise orgasm” and “he comes too quick” were hard to ignore after a while… Something really turns me on about the idea of a dude struggling not to come because the person he’s fucking is just too hot and whatever thing they’re doing to him just feels too good. My partner is remarkably good at pinging this kink, often telling me during phone sex that he’s close to coming but will hold back for me, and variations thereof. What a prince. (P.S. Did you know there’s a “premature cumshots” subreddit? You’re welcome.)

• Recently my Sir and I were showing each other old selfies from high school (would recommend; seeing your partner in an earlier, dorkier chapter of their life can be incredibly endearing) and he mentioned he would’ve wanted to date me if we knew each other back then. I don’t know if that really would have worked out – I was pretty gay in high school, and he claims to have been pretty obnoxious – but it’s fun to fantasize about and do roleplays of!

Sexcetera

• A New Year’s sex tale: I have a long-standing tradition of wearing red underwear on New Year’s Day, because I read somewhere, long ago, that this practice is supposed to bring you good luck in love and sex for the coming year. (I don’t know if I strictly believe this, but I’m a bit superstitious and “woo” and also I like tradition. Fight me.) I was in New York over New Year’s and forgot to pack red underwear, however, so my boyfriend – a gem, a saint – accompanied me to H&M to pick some out. Once we had what we were after, he asked me, “What do you wanna do now?” and I sheepishly replied, “I know I ‘should’ want to do touristy things or whatever, but I really just wanna go back to our hotel and make out with you in our bed. Sorry if that’s boring.” He said, “That’s what I want too, but I didn’t want you to think I was boring either.” Man, I love dating fellow earth signs…

• Wax play is a new fave activity for me and my partner. We both weren’t really expecting to like it that much but we really do. We’ve done two wax scenes now; both times, he strapped me down with my under-the-bed restraints, put on relaxing music, and slowly and methodically dripped hot red wax all over my body. It puts me into a different type of masochistic subspace than I’ve experienced before with anything else; probably the closest thing I can compare it to is E-stim. Gosh, I love trying new pervy shit with people I trust.

• Sextistics: this month my partner and I had in-person sex 11 times and phone sex 25 times. So… 36 sexual encounters in 31 days. Absurd, as per usual.

Femme stuff

• So I’m not really sure where to put this and this section seems as good a place as any: my partner and I did a feminization scene this month! He sat patiently while I did his makeup, and I chose an outfit for him from my wardrobe (I found it inordinately hilarious to put my daddy dom in my super-femme “daddy” tank top). Then we went out to our fave local cocktail bar and had a few drinks. It was fascinating to observe how his body language, mannerisms, and even voice changed when attired femininely! Then we went back home and I gave him a dommy handjob and we fell asleep both still wearing our eyeliner. Aww.

• Sir got me a pink Hippo Campus hoodie and it’s sooo cozy and cute. I own more Hippo Campus merch than… anyone I’ve ever heard of. Girl, stahhhhp.

Media

• My BF and I watched the entirety of Netflix’s new show You this month and we loved it. Penn Badgley is brilliant as a creepy-yet-deceptively-charming stalker, the storytelling is well-paced and compelling, and uhhh can we talk about how Peach Salinger is obviously a femme daddy? (Spoilers at that link.) I’ve started reading the book it was adapted from, and it’s great, too!

• This month I devoured the new short story collection from Kristen Roupenian (of “Cat Person” fame), You Know You Want This. As its title would indicate, one of its major themes is consent; Roupenian seems especially interested in areas where consent is ambiguous or questionable, an important topic to delve into in this #MeToo era. I’m still haunted by a lot of these stories; the weird situations and quirky characters therein keep bouncing around in my brain.

Little things

Awesome clients who know what they want. Returning to the scene of our second date. My mom somehow getting our theatre seats upgraded from row S to row E just by being charming and persistent. Carly‘s suicide intervention workshop (life-changing, honestly). Introvert-friendly spaces. Getting dolled up as a form of self-care. Making new friends at Comedy Bar. Weird conversations about consent ethics in the sex club swimming pool. Trekking through snow and ice with my beloved. Eccentric Uber drivers (“Just so you guys know, this car is only 3 months old!”). Nerding out with sex toy makers. Rooftop restaurants and raspberry brambles. The best pancakes in Toronto.

12 Days of Girly Juice 2018: 10 Perfect Sex Songs

Kate Sloan

Welcome back to 12 Days of Girly Juice, my year-end celebration of all things sexy and beloved! Today I’m writing about 10 of the best songs I enjoyed for sensual (and adjacent) purposes this year… (As ever, you can listen to all these songs – and most of my picks from previous years – in my 12 Days of Girly Juice playlist!)

Cruisr – Kidnap Me

So, uh, as you might have intuited from the title of this song, it’s kinda kinky. I don’t know if that was the band’s intention – to write a love song that is at once adorably sweet and ruthlessly perverted – but that is what they have done. “Shackle me up and lock it; I can live in your pocket. When you gonna kidnap me?” the lead singer chirps. “Tie me up to a chair; I could live in your hair. When you gonna kidnap me?”

I’m sure a vanilla person would listen to this song and think it satirical, like montages in horror movies where a killer dismembers somebody to the stylings of ’80s pop. But when I listen to it, I just hear pure, deep, perverse romance.

Say Anything – Wow, I Can Get Sexual Too

Making playlists for each other (or perhaps mix tapes, depending on your era and your level of dedication to the analog arts) is sort of a millennial-romance rite of passage. It’s a way to show your beloved both how you feel about them and how brilliant you are. A double-whammy of confessional hotness.

My Sir and I engaged in this time-honored ritual way back in February. I remember I was running around the Playground Conference, ducking in and out of panels and workshops and podcast recordings, while receiving many a text from this new beau about the epic playlist he was making me. I listened to it on my way home from the conference and cried… a lot. It had Imogen Heap and Feist and the Beach Boys and the Beatles, musical theatre and bubblegum pop, classically millennial love anthems like “Such Great Heights” and “I Really Like You.” It made me feel cradled and appreciated and seen.

One of my faves in the playlist, though, was this Say Anything song, which is about phone sex – something my Sir and I had done a lot of at that point and would continue to do a lot of. “I called her on the phone and she touched herself,” the lead singer whines in the chorus, and maybe it doesn’t sound especially romantic, but to me, it was.

Hippo Campus – Warm Glow

After my first-ever knifeplay scene, Dick asked me what I wanted to listen to during aftercare, and I told him to play some Hippo Campus. They’re my favorite band, so I didn’t even really care which songs we listened to – I know all of them practically by heart. But when he hit shuffle on their discography, this song, “Warm Glow,” was the first one that played, and it was absolutely perfect.

Longer and slower than the Hippo boys’ usual fare, “Warm Glow” has been called “a perennial anthem of positivity,” and that’s part of why I love it as an aftercare song. But I also love that it’s comfortingly repetitive, full of beautifully soothing sounds, and takes its sweet time to build up to an emotional climax. It’s exactly what I need from an aftercare song. (Want more like this? Check out my Aftercare playlist.)

The Japanese House – Saw You in a Dream

This came up in one of my Spotify Discover Weekly playlists and I was immediately hooked. Dream-pop is my jam (thanks, Spotify, you know me all too well) and this song epitomizes my favorite qualities of that genre. It’s loopy and lazy and hauntingly beautiful and sweetly wistful.

I think most of us have had the experience described in this song, of seeing an ex-lover in a dream and feeling shaken up beyond reason by seeing them again, even just in unreality. People can seem so much lovelier in retrospect than they did when they were in your life, and sometimes it’s painful. “You were the sweetest apparition, such a pretty vision,” the Japanese House’s lead singer Amber Bain croons in verse 2. “There was no reason, no explanation: the perfect hallucination.” Sometimes reminiscing about an ex can be too agonizing to bear, but other times it can be a mollifying meander down Memory Lane. Maybe it can even turn you on.

P.S. If you can’t get enough of this song – and I can’t blame you – listen to this a cappella rendition. Ideally while blazed.

Ought – Beautiful Blue Sky

This song is sexy in the way that it’s sexy to fuck someone who is almost robotically dominant: “We do this my way, we do it efficiently, and we do it now.” The driving drums and mechanical guitars forge a rhythm that builds and builds, and then there’s Tim Darcy shouting erratically on top of it all. At times, he seems to be making fun of the whole concept of small talk – “How’s the family? How’s your health been? Fancy seeing you here! Beautiful weather today!” – and the effect is of someone who desperately wants to fuck you, and will do a good job if he does, but doesn’t quite know how to get there from here.

I want my G-spot pounded to the beat of this song. It just feels right.

Ben Rector – Paris

This song is the purest distillation I’ve found of what it feels like to be in New Relationship Energy – or to be in an established relationship that still lapses back into an NRE-esque mode, raw and fresh and sweet. “I haven’t seen her for a month or so,” Ben sings; “Young love feels like finding buried gold.”

I listened to this a lot while falling in love with my Sir. Ben sings in the second verse, “I feel sixteen while we are making love,” and that’s how I felt, too: transported back to a youthful mood where everything was warm and hopeful, and nothing could touch me because I was in love! That’s not always an explicitly sexy feeling – I could write a whole essay about how NRE makes me feel a bit like a haggard zombie running on endorphin fumes – but sometimes it is, and that’s what this song feels like to me. Lust, love, and silly optimism.

John Mayer – Love on the Weekend

My brother showed me this one first. We share a long-standing love of John Mayer – his problematic qualities notwithstanding – and when this song dropped, Max said, “You’ve gotta listen to this one.” Max is usually right about such things, so I did, and damn, the boy knows me: this track is very up my alley.

Like “Paris,” “Love on the Weekend” is definitely an NRE anthem. John sings, “I’ll be dreaming of the next time we can go into another serotonin overflow,” capturing the clinical reality of love’s early days without diminishing its effects. I found this song relatable as my Sir and I fell into a more-or-less monthly routine of one of us visiting the other for a long, luxurious weekend. “It’s a Friday; we finally made it. I can’t believe I get to see your face. You’ve been working, and I’ve been waiting to pick you up and take you from this place.” Oh, John. I’ve loved you for almost two decades and you still manage to sing what my heart is thinking.

Sufjan Stevens – Movement II: Sleeping Invader

This is a standout track on Stevens’ gorgeous instrumental album The BQE, which I’ve loved for years and listened to most memorably through noise-canceling headphones during a sensory deprivation scene with my Sir this year.

Sensory deprivation – like some drugs – can have the effect of amplifying the sensations you can feel. Listening to music while high or sensory-deprived (or both) can cause my brain to organize the input it’s receiving into a narrative that fits with the music I’m hearing. So as my Sir did painful/pleasurable things to my restrained, blindfolded, high little body, I found that those sensations mapped themselves onto the orchestral swells and pulses and pings of The BQE. The album wasn’t just background noise for the scene; to me, it guided the scene, echoed it, co-created it, fused with it.

This felt like a natural continuation of my relationship with this album, which I had once listened to while high and gotten so turned on from the beauty of it that I almost came, untouched. Music is strange like that.

Alina Baraz – Yours

Alina is on this list every year, and not just because it’s tradition at this point: she creates some of the sexiest music I’ve ever heard.

I got a little misty-eyed the first time I heard this song, because in the chorus, Alina sings: “Love me like I’m never gonna leave. Love me like I’m yours.” It reminded me so much of my Sir’s dependable assurances that he has no plans to break up with me, despite my anxious brain always fearing I’m about to lose him. There is something so sexy about simply feeling safe, especially when you go through your day-to-day life never being entirely convinced of your safety. I am skeptical of the whole concept of “lovemaking” – that ooey-gooey brand of hyper-vanilla sex that’s overrepresented in mainstream media and makes my skin crawl – but the arguably romantic act of my Sir murmuring “You’re safe” while he spanks me and steps on me and fucks me is nonetheless as hot and rejuvenating to me as a shot of cinnamon whiskey. It warms me from the inside out. So does this song.

The Esbjörn Svensson Trio – Eighty-Eight Days in My Veins

I can’t believe this song hasn’t made it onto this list before! I’ve loved it for at least ten years, since the days when I’d listen to JazzFM when I couldn’t sleep and take diligent notes on my favorite tracks if the announcers remembered to mention their names (this was pre-Shazam!). I remember hearing the intense, complex lead piano part on this track and feeling transported to another dimension, somewhere icy and angry and full of longing. (My love for this song, and this trio, deepened even further when I found out years later that Esbjörn Svensson had tragically died in a scuba-diving accident at age 44, with decades of beautiful piano-playing still left in him. Rest in power, you Swedish god.)

This song’s been in my aftercare playlist for a while, because it’s so familiar to me as to be soothing – I can sing along with the piano part as it skips erratically all over the musical map (what a nerd). But it’s a sexy song in its own right. One memorable evening this year, my Sir connected my phone to the Bluetooth speakers in the hotel we were staying at so I could pipe my aftercare playlist throughout our room after sex, but by the time we got to this song, we were already fucking again. He came in my throat sometime around the intense, syncopated climax of “Eighty-Eight Days.” It was for that reason that I texted him gleefully to announce when our relationship turned 88 days old. We are nerds and we are in love.

What sexy songs did you love this year?

Monthly Faves: Steel Wands & Sweet Words

Kate Sloan

Hope you had a pleasantly scary Halloween! Here are some things I enjoyed in October…

Sex toys

• We-Vibe sent me their Anniversary Collection and I adore it. It contains updated (and sparkly!) versions of two of their best vibes, the Tango and the Sync. The included case works for both storage and charging, and makes this duo super travel-friendly – always an important consideration for someone in a long-distance relationship like me.

• I’ve owned my Njoy Pure Wand for years but it deserves just as much revere now as it did when I first bought it. Truly, if you like intense G-spot or prostate stimulation, there is nothing better. Also, adorably, my partner bought his own recently, so sometimes we each separately use ours while having phone sex. Aww.

• Speaking of Njoy: I feel like I mention the Eleven every five seconds on this blog, but like… seeeeriously… it is quite good. It’s also integral to the story of how my Sir and I met (our first contact of any kind was him tweeting a link to my own Eleven review at me) so it’s, um, very romantic when he pounds me with it.

Fantasy fodder

• At one point this month, my partner – an actual living kink genius – sent me the following text: “What if the We-Vibe Anniversary Collection was actually sent to you as a medical device to treat your obvious hysteria symptoms, and you have to call in and speak to a doctor over the phone who can supervise your treatment by controlling the device and monitoring your progress?” We did a “hysteria hotline” roleplay over the phone that night – not a new thing for us, but the inclusion of the remotely controllable We-Vibe Sync was a new element of it – and it was so hottttt, helpppp.

• My monthly writing assignment for my Sir involved making some recommendations of porn and erotica for him, and one of my selections was a Sherlock fanfiction story where John has a hypnosis kink and Sherlock takes it upon himself to play with this newfound knowledge. I have a long-standing weakness for subby-John/dommy-Sherlock stories, and this one paints a particularly excellent picture of what trance feels like and why it can be so hot.

• Still giggling over this story: in a cab ride back from a Halloween party, I told my Sir I desperately had to pee, and he (jokingly?) suggested we do a watersports scene upon arriving back at our hotel. I told him he wouldn’t be able to get all his clothes off fast enough to account for the urgency of the situation, and he was basically like, “Try me.” Once we were in our room, he shed his clothes faster than I’ve ever seen him do it, and laid down in the shower for me before I was even half out of my dress. While my emotions in the moment were a mix of anguish and amusement, in retrospect it was a surprisingly hot experience; unbridled enthusiasm from a sexual partner often is.

Sexcetera

• Some of my work elsewhere this month: I read my review of the teddy bear vibrator at the Bed Post variety show. I reviewed my favorite band’s new album, while meditating on depression, toxic masculinity, and men’s inner lives. (Please check out the album; it’s divine.) On our podcast, Bex and I discussed sex education, roleplay, polyamory myths, and fear play, and I interviewed my pal Dick Wound about knives, death, sweat, and all kinds of weird shit.

• Excited to announce I’ll be teaching/speaking/reading at this year’s Naked Heart festival! It’s coming up soon; grab your pass online, or you can get tickets to individual sessions at the door.

• Hey, thanks for the outpouring of love when my Sir decided to come out as my Sir! We were both thrilled and relieved that the reaction was so positive. Taking this risk together made me feel even more in love with him and even safer in this wonderful relationship, which was already one of the best ones I’ve ever been in.

Femme stuff

• I got my legs waxed for the first time this month! Actually, it was my first time getting anything waxed. My technician asked me if I had a decent pain tolerance, and I was like, “Uhhh… Yeah.” It wasn’t too bad at all, and I had silky-smooth legs for a little while. Would do again!

• If you’re in the centre of the Venn diagram composed of “people who like spooky things” and “people who live in Toronto or are familiar with historical Toronto landmarks,” you probably need this “Honest Dead’s” shirt. Every time I wear it (in Toronto, at least), I inevitably get asked multiple times where it’s from.

• As I told you on Monday, I have a new collar! I want to give an extra shout-out to Tal at L’Amour-Propre for being so accommodating of our special request vis-à-vis material. Tal is the actual best and I highly recommend their products!

Media

• Pinegrove’s new album Skylight is gorgeous (with caveats about the lead singer’s problematic behavior). The refrain of the title track – “Whatever you’re feeling is alright… Whatever you’re feeling is natural” – felt particularly needed.

• I read a lot of books this month, and their common theme seemed to be “shitty men interfering with brilliant women.” Sigh. What else is new. All of them were good, though: The Wife is about a woman who decides to stop giving her husband a free pass to be terrible after decades of marriage; The Real Lolita is the tale of the pedophilic kidnapping that supposedly inspired Nabokov’s masterpiece; Our Kind of Cruelty is about an obsessive love that turns into a sick delusion; and Gone Girl is about… well, if you’ve never heard of Gone Girl, you should really watch the movie and/or read the book, stat.

• My Sir recommended we watch some of James Acaster’s comedy specials together this month and we loved them. What a strange man with a strange sense of humor.

Little things

Eating chicken noodle soup while paging through The Science of Orgasm. Getting slightly better at rejecting creeps when necessary. Interviews with articulate, generous kinksters. Thigh bruises from sweet and loving impact scenes with my Sir over the phone. Seeing Dick get a lap dance at a sex club (OMG) and then hanging out in a hot tub with Lav. When autocorrect knows me too well. Max telling me stories from touring with his band (“I don’t feel too good…”). Kissing Sir in between songs at a Hippo Campus concert and keeping my hand in his hoodie pocket. Knowing he still loves me even though he made me laugh while I was eating a French fry and standing over him so I accidentally spat some potato onto his jeans (“CLOSE YOUR MOUTH, little one!!”). Autumn daiquiris. A literally perfect truffle risotto at the NoMad (and also truffle mac and cheese the night before; give me all the truffles). Boys in bowties. Phrenology skulls (the best creepy decor!). Watching horror movies with my family. Attending a Halloween party with some of my favorite goofs. Feeling like part of a community.

Monthly Faves: Boy Bands & Black Leather

Kate Sloan

Wow, what a month! Here are some sexy things that kept me smiling in September.

Sex toys

• My pals at Peepshow Toys sent me a new silicone dildo, the Uberrime Night King. They thought I’d like it for A-spot stimulation, and they were right! Full review to come once I’ve tested it some more.

• While I love being collared, I’ve never really had an interest in collaring anyone else. However, my boyf wanted to play with that in a scene this month, so I put my black Aslan Leather collar on him and enjoyed tugging on the O-ring from time to time while I did all kinds of evil dommy shit to him. I think I’m getting more comfortable being dominant!

• Shout-out to my leather bat for being menacing enough to leave wicked bruises but not so menacing as to be disallowed on planes by the TSA.

Fantasy fodder

• I’ve been having some feelings about interrogation scenes lately. I saw a Kink Academy video where Danarama was explaining interrogation tactics, and then I saw a truly excellent episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine that centered around an intense interrogation, shortly after my Sir and I had played with some mild interrogation in a hypno scene over the phone. Definitely pondering how to incorporate this kink into my sex life without tipping over into upsetting unpleasantness!

• Sometimes a new kink just hits you out of nowhere… This month I thought a lot about being kicked, stood on, and stepped on. My Sir, ever a sex nerd, wanted to understand my motivations for this before we did it, and I’m glad we discussed it, because I didn’t want it for humiliation-y reasons like I think a lot of people would assume. I was more interested in the meditative, subspacey, powerless feeling I thought I could access through these acts. They were lots of fun and I want to try ’em more!

Sexcetera

• I was asked to fill in as co-host of Tell Me Something Good this month, and it was so much fun! The people who tell stories at this event are overwhelmingly open-hearted, kind, and sex-positive. It was a pleasure to share the stage with Samantha Fraser and help hold space for all these wonderful stories.

• The lovely Cy of Super Smash Cache invited me, my boyfriend, and my friends Rae and Epiphora to dinner while we were at Woodhull, and she wrote a blog post about the evening. Read this if you’re voyeuristically curious about any of us (or all of us), ’cause, uh, it gets juicy.

• Two exciting honors this month: the podcast I cohost with my friend Bex, The Dildorks, was named one of Uproxx’s 18 favorite sex podcasts, and I was nominated as Best Blogger in the NOW Readers’ Choice Awards. Thanks, babes!

Femme stuff

• My favorite jewelry designer, Tarina Tarantino, a.k.a. Our Lady of Extremely Extra Sparkly Hearts, restocked some colors of the big-ass heart necklaces I love so much, so I snapped up what may have been the last blue one. It is, to say the least, eyecatching as hell.

• Today in “strange and exciting femme news”: remember that custom perfume my boyfriend commissioned Stephen Dirkes to make me for my birthday? Well, Stephen loved it so much that he used it as a starting point for his latest fragrance, Flocked & Gilded. So, if you’ve ever wondered what I smell like 80% of the time, go get thee a sample! The initial reviewers have called it “velvety and delicious” and “a rich velvet and hypnotic dream,” which… yes.

• My brother’s band, Goodbye Honolulu, came out with some new merch recently, and my bro set aside a “Typical” T-shirt for me. It might be my fave song of theirs, so I love this tee and have been wearing it a lot!

Media

• I went to the Toronto launch of Clementine Morrigan’s new book, You Can’t Own the Fucking Stars, and loved what I heard from Clementine, as per usual. Their writing on mental illness, polyamory, kink, and femmeness always feels particularly salient to me. There is so much packed into this book and I think you will find it comforting if you are poly, femme, mentally ill, a recovering addict, spiritual-but-not-religious, and/or (to borrow Clementine’s terminology) a “trauma bb.”

• My fave band, Hippo Campus, has a new album out. It’s quite different from their usual style but I love it: the music is, by turns, lush, jarring, and eminently danceable, and the lyrics are much more personal and emotional than their previous works, touching on topics like mental illness (“I haven’t been much myself, and I feel like my friends are being put through this hell I’m feeling”) and what it means to be committed to a partner (“Love? Is it love? Who can say you’re the one and never doubt?”). I love these boys so much and I’m so excited to see their show in New York in a couple weeks!

• I’m not quite sure if theatre counts as media, and my cursory Google search on the subject turned up unclear results, but let’s talk about it anyway. I’ve been a Soulpepper subscriber for many years running, and this month they staged one of my favorite productions I’ve ever seen there, Bed and Breakfast. Real-life couple Gregory Prest and Paolo Santalucia played a gay couple navigating homophobia and family secrets in small-town Ontario – and they also played all of the other characters in the story, from an awkward closeted teen to an Irish butch lesbian to a gruff contractor. I took my Sir to see this show and giggled and wept all the way through it. I wish I’d had the time and funds to take all my queer friends (and some of my straight ones) to see this!

• I loved Cameron Esposito’s new special, Rape Jokes, which is “about sexual assault from a survivor’s perspective.” If you’re hurting right now from all the sexual violence in the news, a) I don’t fucking blame you and b) maybe this will help you laugh through the pain a little bit. It’s pay-what-you-want and all donations go to RAINN.

Little things

A waiter telling Sir his cocktail order was “very sensible.” Making photoshoot plans. Dorkily premature anniversary-planning. Karaoke and drinks with Dan, Lav, Sarah, and Jason. Big juicy writing assignments. Whiskey on the rocks. Stealing hotel pens. Trinity Bellwoods hangtime with my love. Glennon Doyle. Sir having access to my to-do list so he can keep an eye on me and keep me on task. The Black Walnut cocktail at Northwood (OMG, new fave). Trading tips with other submissives. Celebrating our nine-monthiversary with a thorough spanking. Writing drunk poems on the subway. Thoughtful and compassionate editors. New bedding. Commiserating about long-distance relationships with my cousins at Rosh Hashanah. The underground walkway to the Island airport (and getting excited about small things, like a little girl would). Limoncello and oysters. Being told I am safe, and knowing it’s true.