new girl

Monthly Faves: Sparkles, Silk, & Cinnamon

Kate Sloan

 

Media

• Some sexual misconduct scandals broke at my old high school recently (more on that soon, I think), so I’ve definitely been Processing Some Difficult Feelings. When that’s the case, sometimes it helps me to consume media where characters experience problems similar to my own – so this month I enjoyed watching Notes on a Scandal, a 2006 thriller where Cate Blanchett plays a teacher who gets caught having an affair with a student, and reading Being Lolita, Alisson Wood’s striking memoir about a predatory creative writing teacher who viewed Lolita as a blueprint for life rather than as a shocking character study about a pedophile.

• My old friend Kathleen Gros wrote a graphic novel loosely based on Little Women, updated for a modern (and queer!) audience. I flew through it soon after it arrived in my mailbox, and loved its depiction of a positive queer coming-of-age.

• My long-time guitarist crush Nathan Stocker (of my favorite band, Hippo Campus) has a new album out under his solo project name, Brotherkenzie. It’s called Big What and it’s been haunting my days lately with its moody/contemplative lyrics and its sweetly sad instrumentations. If the idea of a bluesier Phoebe Bridgers or Elliott Smith sounds divine to you, I think you’d dig this album.

• Watching speed-builds of houses in The Sims 4 has been oddly soothing to me lately. It’s just so satisfying to watch someone build an entire home from scratch. I particularly like LukeyDean’s videos.

• It’s been a few years since my last New Girl re-watch, but this month I revisited season 2 and was struck anew by the sense that it’s probably one of the funniest TV shows that’s ever been made (at least, for my weird sense of humor!). The writing, the acting, the ad-libbing… These chaotic thirtysomethings are always a delight to watch.

 

Products

• As I’ve mentioned, the Magic Wand Plus is rocking my world lately – and my internal clitoral network!

• A few weeks ago I tried to go to Northwood to sit on their patio and sip a cocktail, because I was craving one particular item from their house menu, a rum-based sour called the Black Walnut – but when I got there, they were closed, even though they said they’d be open! Disappointed, I later made it my mission to learn to make a passable substitute for this drink at home – and with the help of my cocktail-genius partner, I learned how to do it. It involved infusing a bottle of white rum with walnut tea and making cinnamon demerara syrup in a sauce pan, so it was definitely the most labor-intensive cocktail I’ve ever made, but damn, it is delicious.

• I don’t often paint my nails, but when I do, I want ’em colorful and glittery as fuck. To that end, I firmly believe that Essie’s “Set in Stones” is the best thing to layer over just about any base color. Seeing silver sparkles splashed across my nails every day is almost enough to make me want to stop biting them forever…!

• As part of a financial domination scene recently, my partner sent me some royal blue lingerie from Agent Provocateur. It is incredibly sexy and pairs very well with my beloved pink silk robe.

• My brother recently started a clothing line called Pop Star Dress-Up, and I have to say that their hoodie (coming soon to the shop) is one of the coziest I’ve ever owned. I’m definitely gonna need something like that as the colder months start creeping up on us!

 

Work & Appearances

• This month on the Dildorks, Bex and I talked about subspace and topspace, crying as kinky catharsis, and vetting potential partners. We also interviewed psychotherapist Jessica Fern about her new polyamory book Polysecure, and I interviewed my partner Matt about our recent forays into chastity play.

• In my newsletter, I wrote about the quiet desperation of long-distance relationships, answered some questions from the AskWomen subreddit, recounted some of my relationship rituals and routines, and explored some feelings about nail polish, gender, sexuality, and identity.

 

Good Causes

• The news this month about the lack of accountability for Breonna Taylor’s murderers was heartbreaking and disheartening. You can donate to her family’s GoFundMe if you like; the money is now being routed to the Breonna Taylor Foundation, which is working to empower women, encourage more people to get their EMT training, and advocate for police reform. This “Justice for Breonna” T-shirt is also donating its proceeds to the foundation.

• On that note, donating to the Louisville Community Bail Fund would be a great move right now, as protests continue (and police continue to crack down on them) where Breonna lived.

• Since this is such an especially hard time for Black women and girls, you could donate to the Loveland Foundation’s therapy fund, which provides financial assistance to Black women seeking therapy services.

Monthly Favorites: Grey Glass & Fingerfucking

Kate Sloan

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You guys, August was such a weird/exciting month for me sexually. It was a bit of a whirlwind. Let’s identify some highlights…

Toys

• Surprise, surprise: my most-used toy of the month was the Fucking Sculptures G-Spoon. Or, as Luthvian aptly calls it, the “G-Swoon.” Nothing else feels quite like it, except maybe the fingers of a partner who knows exactly where my A-spot is and how to stimulate it. Holy fuck.

• Peepshow Toys sent me the Jimmyjane Iconic Wand this month and I have been diggin’ it. It has its problems (hang tight for my review) but it feels Hitachi-esque without the Hitachi’s excess bulk or noise. A surprise smash!

• The Eroscillator could be on this list for literally any month of my sex toy reviewing career, because I got it when I started my blog and it’s been my right-hand man ever since. But I felt a renewed appreciation for it this month, when I used it in a partnered-sex situation for the first time in a long while. It still works really well in that context. (And, to the immense credit of the dude I was using it with: he already knew what it was, and was interested to feel how oscillations differ from vibrations. ♥)

 

Fantasy fodder

• In mid-August, I got finger-fucked so excellently that the memory proceeded to make me blush and giggle daily for the rest of the month. I had never really thought of finger-fucking as a particularly nuanced skill before, but hooooly shit, some people are ridiculously, brain-warpingly good at it.

• This Jake Peralta/Nick Miller crossover fanfic hasn’t even gotten sexy yet, but the very idea of that pairing entertained me in my carnal moments after reading it. (Let the record show that Bisexual Jake Peralta is canon, now and forever, amen.)

• I experimented this month with jerking off to non-sexual recordings of people who have attractive voices. (Mostly Benedict Cumberbatch reading poetry.) It didn’t really work. My mind got too wrapped up in the subject matter and I couldn’t focus enough to get off. Does this mean I don’t have a voice kink?

 

Sexcetera

• hahahaaaa I got laid for the first time in ~16 months. It was both a totally big deal and not a big deal at all, if you know what I mean, which is nice. (Just in time for my breakupiversary, too!)

• I attempted Tinder this month. It is kind of awful (for me, anyway). I have feelings about it. You will get to read ’em soon.

 

Femme stuff

• I am in talks with an Etsy seller to order a piece of vulva art-jewelry custom-made to look like my actual vulva. Obviously I am going to write all about it when the deal is done and the vulva-ring is on my finger!

• My new signature scent is Elizabeth & James Nirvana White. It is summery, feminine, and a little bit sexy (much like my previous, much-beloved, tragically-discontinued signature scent, Kate by Kate Moss). My bestie says it smells a bit like white wine, which might explain why I’m drawn to it…

• NARS Audacious lipstick in “Charlotte” is the ideal cranberry red and you can’t convince me otherwise.

 

What were you obsessed with over the past month, my loves?

What I’m Into: Explicit Fanfiction

Kate Sloan

For as long as I can remember being on the internet, I’ve been a fanfiction reader.

It has a reputation as a genre that’s both trivial and terrible, especially now that the Fifty Shades of Grey origin story as a piece of Twilight fanfic is so widely known. But if you’ve spent any time at all in fanfic communities, you know that the stories can sometimes be brilliantly written, absolutely gripping, and – in some cases – smokin’ hot.

Books, movies, TV shows – these things all have limitations, in terms of the level of sexiness they’re allowed to portray. Sure, you’ll occasionally see full-on sex in the more risqué ones, but it’s rare. Romantic storylines in popular media are heavy on chemistry and light on action. And that can sometimes be frustrating.

So we, as fans, turn to each other for support in this regard. We write and/or read fan-generated stories about pairings both “canon” (i.e. sanctioned in the source material) and “non-canon.” When done well, erotic fanfiction picks up the ball right where the original media dropped it, giving closure and satisfaction to fans who just wanted to see those two characters get together, for fuck’s sake.

Here are some of my all-time favorite fanfiction pairings (all of which are heterosexual and most of which are canon, because I’m boring):

• Chuck Bass and Blair Waldorf from Gossip Girl. These two had a scintillating on-again-off-again thing on the actual show, complete with screen chemistry out the wazoo. But, being that GG was essentially a show for teenagers, we rarely got to see them fuck. There were constant hints that they experimented with kink and roleplaying, and those few scraps of information fanned the flames of fans’ writing. I’m particularly partial to stories where Chuck plays dom to Blair’s sub (even though these tales just make me even madder that Ed Westwick didn’t get cast as Christian Grey in the Fifty Shades movie). Try these: “Rules,” in which Chuck bosses Blair around, spanks her, etc. “Schadenfreude,” which is all about hate-fucking and has adequate anatomical understanding re: stuff like clits and G-spots (very important!). “Dirty Games,” in which Blair is the bossy one.

• Jessica Day and Nick Miller from New Girl. These two are such quirky goofballs and yet their chemistry is off the charts. Nick has the personality of a disgruntled old man and Jess is a sunny, bubbly optimist; their mutual attraction initially caught me off guard but now seems like the most natural thing in the world. It’s quite a feat when a fanfic writer can get these characters’ voices just right, but it does happen once in a while and it’s glorious when it does. Try these: “The First of Three Conversations,” in which Schmidt helps Jess peg Nick (which sounds weird but is instead weirdly hot). “You’re Gonna Lose Control,” in which Jess discovers her inner domme via her teaching skills. “Mistakes We Knew We Were Making,” which features laundry-room finger-fucking, among other things.

• Sheldon Cooper and Penny from The Big Bang Theory. (Penny has no last name…) Okay, I KNOW this is super weird, and I was just as surprised as you probably are when I first noticed how much Sheldon/Penny smut there is to be found online. But… there is something oddly enticing about it. He’s so awkward and inexperienced; she is so, well, the total opposite of that. The power dynamic is interesting, there’s often some sexual instructing in the stories (which totally fucking gets me going), and when the characters’ voices are right, it’s often funny as hell. Try these: “The Pickle Jar Experiment,” in which Penny awkwardly tries to teach Sheldon how to jerk off. “The Bathtub Interaction,” in which Penny comforts Sheldon while he’s sick and things get sexy. “The Sweet Vibrations Discovery,” in which Sheldon is “inspired” by the sex toys he finds under Penny’s bed.

• Jake Peralta and Amy Santiago from Brooklyn Nine-Nine. My current obsession, y’all. You would think that the “opposites attract” trope would have lost its charm by now, but nope – it still works. Peralta and Santiago are polar opposites: he’s goofy, immature, irresponsible, and rebellious, while she is buttoned-up, reliable, and does everything by the book. What they have in common is that they’re both NYPD detectives, courageous, strong-willed, and attracted to each other. What more do you need? Try these: “One Big Cliché,” in which Amy has a sex dream about Jake and it leads to real-life sex. “Clutching Your Pillow and Writhing in a Naked Sweat,” in which Jake and Amy have sneaky sex in the captain’s office. And… drumroll, please… “Jake Peralta, Master Cunnilinguist-Slash-Genius,” which I WROTE (!!) with the help of some Twitter hooligans who contributed language suggestions and moral support while I live-tweeted the writing process.

Who are your favorite fanfiction couples, and what would you like to see them do in a story?