podcasts

“Making Magic” is Nominated for an Award!!! (& You Can Help!)

Kate Sloan

For the year that I spent working on my podcast miniseries about the Magic Wand vibrator, Making Magic, I assumed that it would be meaningful to a small but passionate audience. I certainly never dreamed it would be nominated for awards.

And yet, that is exactly what has happened!! Can you believe?!

Making Magic is nominated for two different Signal Awards. It’s a top-3 finalist in the Limited Series – Health & Wellness category, and it’s also one of the nominees for the Signal People’s Choice award in the same category.

Here’s where you come in: it would mean a lot to me if you could click here and vote for Making Magic, which should take you 15 seconds or less.

Ever since being banned from Instagram and Facebook a couple months ago due to their sex-negative policies, it’s been harder than ever for me to promote my work and earn a living. So I’d really appreciate any help you can give in getting the word out to your networks, online and off, both about the podcast itself and about voting for it.

I want as many people to hear this show as possible, not just because I poured my whole soul into it for a year of my life, but because it conveys a message that our world sorely needs right now – about sexual freedom, equality, and the importance of pleasure. So I’d appreciate it to the depths of my soul if you could throw a vote my way, to help more people hear about this series!

Thanks, as ever, to the dream team who partnered with me on Making Magic, without whom this achievement would have been impossible: my editor extraordinaire, Jamie Pityinger; the folks at Vibratex, who believed in and funded this strange passion project of mine; and Addison Finch, who did the stunning album art. I am so lucky that I got to make this show, especially with such awesome people in my corner. 💖

Thanks, and keep on making magic! 🪄

Announcing the Secret Project I’ve Been Working On For a YEAR…!

Kate Sloan
Art by Addison Finch

About a year and a half ago, I met via Zoom with some folks at Vibratex, the current distributor of the famed Magic Wand (sometimes known more colloquially as “the Hitachi Magic Wand” or just “the Hitachi,” although Hitachi’s name is no longer on the toy). The company had seen my tattoo of their product, and the many GQ articles in which I declare my love for the Wand, and they wanted to chat about how we could collaborate. Needless to say, I was intrigued!

See, back when I was in journalism school in 2015, I spent a whole semester researching and writing a longform feature article on the Magic Wand. I had been reviewing sex toys on this blog for about three years at that point – not long, but long enough to know that the Magic Wand was probably the best-known vibrator in the world, and was certainly the vibrator with the longest and richest history, having been around since 1968.

I don’t recall what grade I got on that article, but I do recall that at one point, one of my interviewees said to me, “There could be a whole book about this – and you should be the person to write it!” At that time, I hadn’t seriously considered writing a book on anything, but the Magic Wand seemed as good a subject as any. I filed away that idea for the future, hoping it’d come to fruition someday.

When I connected with Vibratex eight years later, that’s what I pitched them as our potential collaboration: a book about the history and impact of the Wand. And while I definitely still think there’s a book’s worth of stories to tell about it, we tweaked the idea during our discussions, and landed on doing it as a podcast miniseries instead. That way, I could incorporate the voices of many different experts and laypeople, telling their Wand stories in their own words.

Sipping a Magic Wand-themed cocktail at last night’s Magic Wand-themed event at the Museum of Sex

So, for about a year now, I’ve been interviewing people about the Magic Wand, researching its history, thinking deeply about it, combing through interview transcripts, and piecing them together into episodes. The result is my new podcast miniseries, Making Magic: How the Magic Wand Became the World’s Most Famous Vibrator, which is launching wherever you get your podcasts on May 30th, 2024. There’s a trailer available now, if you’d like a little taste of what’s to come!

I’m so, so excited for people to hear this series. There’s an episode about the legendary sex educator who made the Magic Wand famous in her all-nude masturbation workshops; there’s an episode about the trailblazers who started the first feminist sex shops and kicked off a movement of women reclaiming their own bodies and pleasure; there are episodes about why the Wand is so important to so many queer people, trans people, and people with disabilities or mental illness; there are episodes about its ubiquity in porn, kink, and art.

I interviewed sex-positive superheroes like Carol Queen and Tristan Taormino, porn dynamos like Stoya and Ava LaPrima, sex history buffs like Hallie Lieberman and Lynn Comella, industry icons like Shay Martin and Andy Duran, kink geniuses like Danarama and Billy Lore, pervy intellectuals like Tina Horn and Sinclair Sexsmith, and badass academics like Laurie Mintz and Debby Herbenick, just to name a few. It’s been a hell of a process, and I’ve been so lucky to get to have so many fascinating conversations with such clever and wise folks.

Making Magic is edited and co-produced by Jamie Pityinger, and made possible by the generous support of Vibratex, with art by Addison Finch. I really hope you’ll tune in when the first episode launches on May 30th. If we’re not available in your podcast app of choice just yet, you can paste this RSS feed into your app and subscribe that way:

https://feeds.captivate.fm/making-magic/

It’s an honor to have gotten to work on this project, and I can’t wait for y’all to hear it!

Self-Isolating and Bored? Here’s 15 Pieces of Media to Entertain You…

Kate Sloan

Dear friends: This is a hard time. I’m proud of you for wherever you’re at, whether you can’t stop crying in bed or you’re doing pretty okay actually (or something else entirely). Whatever reaction you’re having is valid – as long as you’re not one of those “This virus is cleansing the planet!!” ecofascists or a “But people should still pay their rent somehow!!” capitalist.

My friend JoEllen recently published a list of “comfort media” to consume in These Trying Times. I wanted to do something similar, although I will say that not all of these works are necessarily comforting. Some of them are just cathartic, or absorbing, or all of the above. When I’m sad or anxious, sometimes I don’t want to turn away from those feelings – sometimes I want to walk right into them, revel in them, exorcize them from my body.

In that spirit, here are 15 pieces of media, across various genres and formats, that I think you might find helpful right now in one way or another. (A note: all the links to books in this post go to the Powell’s website. Powell’s is a great indie bookstore that you should absolutely support in these tough times if you can, instead of lining Bezos’s already-overstuffed pockets.)

Stephen King, it must be said, is a problematic fave. However, he has written some of the best apocalyptic fiction in the biz. I often find it useful to focus on his terrifying stories in times that are, themselves, also terrifying – because, I reason, I may be having a tough time but at least I’m not handcuffed to a dead man’s bed (Gerald’s Game) or running away from my axe-wielding husband (The Shining).

There are three King novels that feel particularly salient to me in These Times, and they are as follows. Under the Dome is one of my all-time favorite books – it’s a hefty 1,000 pages but the pace is snappy enough to make that seem reasonable, as is often the case with King. In this story, an invisible but impenetrable “dome” descends on a small town in Maine called Chester’s Mill, cutting off its residents from the outside world and plunging the population into a panic. You’ll see familiar moments in this story – grocery store riots, lying politicians – but also moments of hope, triumph, and the goodness of humanity. (P.S. If you like audio formats, you honestly owe it to yourself to read Under the Dome as an audiobook – it’s read by the ever-wonderful Raúl Esparza and is beyond compare in its genre, IMO.)

The King novel most prescient of our current situation is, of course, The Stand, his epic novel about a flu strain engineered by the army as a biological weapon which then gets leaked into the world by accident. It quickly infects and kills over 99% of Earth’s population, and the survivors are left to cobble together some semblance of a new society in the wreckage. There’s lots of good stuff in here about friendship, grit, and goodness – all balanced with plenty of that signature King darkness and evil. This book shows a version of pandemic response that’s far more drastic than anything our world will likely face due to COVID-19, so it’s escapist in the sense that it allows you to think, “Well, things are bad, but at least they’re not this bad.”

I also gotta shout out my favorite lesser-known King novel, the relatively recent Sleeping Beauties, which he co-wrote with his son Owen. This one’s also about an apocalyptic scenario of sorts: all the women on Earth start contracting a mysterious illness where, when they fall asleep, they essentially go into a coma and cannot be awakened. Hilariously, we then get to see what happens when the men of the world are left to fend for themselves. Chaos ensues, obviously. This one isn’t as well-reviewed as some other King novels, but I wonder how much of that is due to its vaguely feminist themes!

If you like podcasts and/or roleplaying games and haven’t yet dove into the amazingness that is The Adventure Zone, you’re in for a treat. It’s my favorite podcast of all time – maybe even my favorite piece of narrative media ever? It has made me laugh and cry more than any other podcast, certainly.

TAZ is the three McElroy brothers (of My Brother, My Brother and Me and Polygon fame) playing tabletop RPGs with their dad. The first campaign, Balance, follows a flamboyant wizard named Taako, a wholesome carpenter named Magnus, and a goofy cleric named Merle as they work to collect 7 dangerous relics from all over their magical world. Start with episode 1; after that, there’s still SEVENTY-SIX more episodes for you to listen to in the first campaign alone. (Yeah, it’s a hugely epic story.) One of the later campaigns, Amnesty, is also a gorgeous blend of comedy, camaraderie, and magical realism.

While we’re talking about immersive fantasy podcasts: have you heard of Hello from the Magic Tavern? It’s an almost entirely improvised narrative fiction podcast about a guy named Arnie who accidentally falls through a magic portal into a faraway fantasy land called Foon. Looking to understand the planet he’s landed on, Arnie sets up his podcast recording equipment at a nearby tavern and begins weekly interviews with various guests from around Foon – swordsmen, shopkeeps, goblins, and royalty – all while backed up by his two faithful cohosts, a self-aggrandizing wizard named Usidore and a horny shapeshifter called Chunt. Start with episode 1 and get lost in Foon – it definitely seems better than Earth right now!

Brilliant comedian and musician Lane Moore wrote a book called How to Be Alone which feels particularly needed at this time. It’s full of thoughts about anxiety, attachment, and the longing for intimacy, but its tone is ultimately hopeful – by the time I finished this book, I felt much better about the idea that I might not always have a partner, or tons of close friends, and that might be okay. If you’re struggling with feelings of loneliness and isolation, pick this one up; reading it is like having a profound chat with a good, smart pal.

Lane is also doing a nightly Twitch show (last I checked, anyway) at 8 p.m. Eastern time, also called How to Be Alone, that you can watch right here. She describes it as being like Pee-Wee’s Playhouse for lonely adults – and don’t we all need that right now?!

Looking for something uplifting to read? You really can’t do much better than Alexandra Franzen’s You’re Going to Survive, for which she interviewed professionals across multiple fields (cuisine! music! fashion! non-profits!) about the hardest moments of their careers and how they got to the other side. I’ve never seen a more striking illustration of the notion that “this too shall pass,” always.

If you’re less about distraction and more the type of person who likes to dive directly into your feelings and face them head-on, I highly recommend the movie Contagion (2011), a fast-paced thriller about a high-mortality virus that originates in bats and pigs and quickly spreads around the world. It’s topping the charts right now on streaming sites and whatnot; evidently a lot of people are turning to it, for one reason or another.

The main thing I found comforting about this film is that the scientific and medical professionals in it are incredibly competent and smart (and are, notably, mostly women). The science presented in the movie was thoroughly researched and the moviemakers consulted professionals in the relevant fields, so one could even say Contagion is educational. On an emotional level, watching the brilliantly-acted suffering of Matt Damon’s character – who (mild spoilers here) loses his wife and son within the first few minutes of the movie – is cathartic in the most ineffable of ways. He is us and we are him. Hang in there, Matt Damon.

If you like fanfiction – and even if you don’t – the novel-length Sherlock stories written by Katie Forsythe (a.k.a. Wordstrings) are worth looking into. She’s a brilliant writer who explores themes of mental illness through the familiar characters of the Holmes universe. I find it’s very hard to worry about my own problems (or even my own planet’s problems) when I’m tracking Sherlock and John’s journeys through crime scenes, drug hazes, and sexual tension.

All the Best and Brightest Creatures might be my fave. An asexual (but not sex-repulsed) Sherlock gets together with a bewildered-yet-horny John, all while they try to solve mysteries set in place by one Jim Moriarty. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a fanfic story so gripping. And conveniently, Archive of Our Own lets you export fanfic in formats that’ll work on your e-reader, so you can lounge in bed or in the tub with Sherlock and John to keep you company.

It’s all too easy to fall into a YouTube rabbit hole these days, consuming news videos and conspiracy videos galore about the current situation. But why not make your YouTube gallivanting into a more pleasant, educational, and uplifting endeavor? I can’t recommend Philosophy Tube highly enough – it’s a campy-yet-esoteric video series in which the dazzling Olly Thorn presents his ideas on topics as wide-ranging as sex work, witchcraft, and Jordan Peterson. He takes an honest look at the world as it is, and theorizes on ways it could be better, kinder, stronger. His videos are also plenty theatrical and silly at times – this isn’t some dry philosophy lecture!

While I’m talking about YouTube, I would be remiss not to mention the Bon Appetit channel, which is basically porn if you enjoy food, competence, and kindness. Our mess of a planet kind of fades into the background while you’re watching, for example, Claire Saffitz trying to make KitKat bars from scratch, or Amiel Stanek sampling every way to cook an egg. I wish the channel would start putting out videos of the BA chefs making quarantine-appropriate dishes from their own separate homes!

If you are a video game person, you’ve probably already been turning to your games of choice for entertainment and comfort. But if you’re looking for recommendations specific to this moment, I’ve gotta say that the immersive, competitive, and plot-driven nature of the Pokémon games has made them invaluable to me through all of this. You add “pocket monsters” to your team, train them, and battle with them, all while traversing strange lands and meeting interesting people. I would suggest starting with HeartGold or SoulSilver if you’re new to the series – they’re both fairly accessible and they also take longer to get through than most (if not all) of the other main-series games. If visuals are important to you, the X/Y and Sun/Moon versions look much nicer, though they are definitely less challenging than previous iterations.

There’s also the game everyone is talking about right now, Animal Crossing. A new version is out for the Switch but I’m also quite partial to the 3DS version, New Leaf. Animal Crossing is essentially the Seinfeld of games, in that it’s a game about nothing: you have a house in a small idyllic town, and you can make friends with your neighbors, decorate your home, go fishing, buy cute clothes, and just generally lead a low-stakes fantasy existence. If you need a whole other life to distract you from your real life, Animal Crossing is definitely a good option.

Along similar lines, it’s very easy to get absorbed in any Harvest Moon game. The focus of these is farming, which doesn’t seem like it would be that interesting – and indeed, sometimes isn’t – but it has clear goals, and sometimes you need that. You can also befriend (and even marry) other villagers, mine for valuable ores, upgrade your home, take care of livestock, and cook from recipes. My favorite in the series is the very simple and straightforward Friends of Mineral Town.

What media are you turning to these days?

Monthly Faves: Weddings & Wisecracks

Kate Sloan

Sex toys

• An ice cube barely counts as a sex toy, but nonetheless: temperatures soared in Toronto this month and I enjoyed trying some temperature play with my partner. While this activity is often included in “Spice things up!” articles for vanilla people, for me it was a distinctly kinky experience that resulted in a lot of screaming and a deep, disorienting subspace. Pro tip: Tovolo King Cube ice trays create extra-large ice cubes that work better (and longer) for this purpose than the standard size.

• Tweezers aren’t really a sex toy either, but I enjoy using them as a sadomasochistic tool in scenes where I’m playing a dominant role, with partners who don’t mind getting groomed by a mean brat. Mine are Sephora-brand but maybe one day I’ll update to a fancy pair of Tweezermans.

Fantasy fodder

• I wrote something in my newsletter this month about the ethical minefield that is fantasizing about incels (“involuntary celibates”). Much like a related fantasy of mine – taking a young man’s virginity – this one is mostly about the utter delight and surprise that the other person would radiate at me. It’s still weird to have sexual fantasies about people I consider ethically abhorrent like incels (and Chuck Bass), but hey, your fantasy life is your fantasy life.

• I’ve long had an uneasy fascination with wedding culture and this month I started thinking a lot about the absurd tradition that is wedding-night sex. I asked for stories from my Twitter followers about this particular rite of passage and got some interesting replies. I’m not much for “romantic sex,” so if I was getting married, probably that night would involve impact play and a collar and leash… or just, y’know, sleep. (P.S. I have a truly ridiculous “wedding” Pinterest board from when I was in university and fantasized about this type of thing to calm myself down at times of high anxiety, incase you’re into that.)

• Sir and I did a roleplay this month of their devising, in which I was starring in a high school production of Into the Woods (a mutual fave show) and they were in the tech crew. They came to my dressing room to compliment me on my singing and… things escalated. It reminded me of how much fun high-school roleplays can be: the excitement, the novelty, the hormones, oh my!

Sexcetera

• Very excited to announce that my new podcast collaboration with the incomparable Brent Black is live! It’s called Question Box and you should be able to find it on most podcast providers. It’s a game show where guests and hosts compete to see who can answer the most shockingly personal questions on air. Give it a listen – and pledge to our Patreon if you like supporting weird comedy!

• Sextistics: This month I had in-person sex 21 times, which is a frankly wacky amount of sex for a person in a long-distance relationship to be able to have. (We spent two weekends together instead of just one like we usually do.) I had phone sex 20 times, totaling 41 sex sessions – a record high for the year so far!

Femme stuff

• One of my most gleeful fashion/beauty moments of the month was when Matt and I wore matching outfits – their tie was almost the exact same print as my dress – and matching lipstick (Fire & Ice by Revlon, a classic).

• I got a lot of opportunities to do Matt’s makeup this month and it was so fun. This coppery smoky eye was maybe my fave. I haven’t done many people’s makeup in my life, which makes it feel extra intimate and special to do it on my partner.

• My friend and roommate Sarah gave me a pink and blue scarf that is soooo my style. Trust a femme to get you the exact right thing for your look!

Media

• I enjoyed Dear Edward, a forthcoming novel by Ann Napolitano about a 12-year-old boy who is the sole survivor of a plane crash that kills his family. It sounds sad, and it is, but it’s also incredibly hopeful and sweet and charming.

• Everyone on my Twitter timeline was freaking out about an essay called “The Crane Wife,” and I read it and it was as good as expected. It has a lot to say about the ways our patriarchal culture is set up to make women squash their own needs in order to “get” and “keep” a man.

• One of my fave outings this month was seeing Some Like It Hot on a giant outdoor movie screen at the Corktown Common with my mom. It’s a fave movie for both of us so it was fun to share the experience of watching it with a bunch of strangers under the stars!

Little things

Catsitting Sarah’s cats and talking out loud to them constantly. Veggies with hummus. Going to the art gallery with Matt to languish in air conditioning on a really hot day. Drunkenly playing the piano at Civil Liberties (Nick, the bartender that night, sent over a glass of amaro to me for “classing up the joint” – best). Pasta salad. Hanging out with Rey in their last month in Toronto (for the time being, anyway). Birthday cake donuts at Bloomer’s, spinach-feta croissants at Jimmy’s Coffee, and maple glazed donuts at Krispy Kreme. Karaoke nights at the Fox. Playing Use Your Words over whiskey shots with friends. Lying on my childhood bedroom floor to soak it in for the last time, before we sold the house. My room at my parents’ new house. Cooking at home. Phone sex until 3 a.m. Dancing my ass off at a wedding.

Strange Self-Care in a Time of Terror

Kate Sloan

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The day after the election, like many of you, I couldn’t get out of bed. I couldn’t wash the previous night’s tear-streaked eyeliner off my face, or brush my teeth, or get dressed.

What I could do, and what I did do, was as follows: I put on some lipstick, watched YouTube videos and blowjob porn, and cried.

Self-care – or coping, because sometimes they are one and the same – is so unique from person to person. What’s comforting to you might be scary or weird to me, and vice versa. But with that caveat, here are some things I’ve been doing to take care of myself during what feels like a global depressive spell. I hope some of these suggestions help you, or at least inspire you to do what you can do for yourself.

img_5056Lipstick. If you ever see me wearing just lipstick and no other makeup, you’ll know I’m either feeling minimalistic in a French-starlet kind of way, or I’m depressed. It’s the easiest cosmetic to slick on when I barely have the emotional energy to look in a mirror. It doesn’t require the patience of liquid eyeliner, the precision of eyebrow pencil, the fastidiousness of foundation. It’s a simple, quick burst of color. It signals to my body and my brain that I am beginning my day, even if my pajamas and unbrushed hair say otherwise.

Mundane activities. If I can manage to get out of bed when depressed, I may be able to (slowly) work up to cleaning, doing laundry, or other boring day-to-day tasks. They are small and not terribly significant in the grand scheme of things, but they are something I can do, and it feels good to be able to do something when you’re depressed. My friend Sarah likes to bake, for similar reasons; she says doing something with her hands feels useful when depression makes it hard for her to move her body a lot. The other day I went to the mall with a friend because he needed to return a shirt he’d bought, and it was the sweetest banal respite. Sometimes going grocery shopping or stepping out for a coffee feels oddly affirming when I’m depressed. It’s okay to do small things when you can’t manage the big ones.

lBlowjob porn. I’m aware that this is unconventional, but that’s the point of this post, after all. While watching Heather Harmon porn in a weed-induced stupor the other day, I became aware that it was calming me down and comforting me. Part of that is simply that her porn is familiar to me; I know the rhythms and features of it, the noises I can expect from her husband Jim, the predictable cumshot at the end. And blowjobs are, historically, a calming activity for me. The love between Heather and Jim really comes through (no pun intended!) in their videos, and that helps, too. There is something so sweet and simple about a loving blowjob. When Heather does it, it is a gift without expectations of reciprocation. It is a pure expression of affection. In a world that feels cold and heartless, it can be nice to remember that there are still people who love each other that selflessly, somewhere; that there are still people who want to see their loved ones experience pleasure for pleasure’s sake.

Funny podcasts. I sing the praises of the McElroy brothers at any given opportunity. Their humor is goofy, fresh, and relentlessly kind. Whether I’m puzzling through advice questions with the brothers on MBMBaM, immersing myself in the fantasy world they’ve built in The Adventure Zone, or laughing til I cry at the weird creations of Monster Factory, I’m hardly thinking about my problems or worries when I’m mired in a McElroy show. It’s not hyperbole to say that these boys may have saved my life on many occasions.

3647718646_7d503c3a99_oMaking music. My songs are predominantly about romantic rejections and unrequited love – phenomena that feel huge when they’re happening to you, but pale in comparison to, say, the impending threat of a global economic collapse and the xenophobic mass ejection of immigrants. When the big things feel too scary to contemplate, it can help to whine about the small things for a while. And if perfectionism doesn’t make your anxiety worse, it can give you a concrete task to work on when the world’s issues feel unsolvable. I showed my friend Brent a song I wrote recently, and he – a seasoned songwriting teacher – gave me detailed notes about structure, syllables, melody and arrangement. Working toward perfection, even within the small world of a single song, felt fuelling when I would’ve otherwise been crushed by the weight of the global problems I cannot solve.

Scary media. Stephen King novels, American Horror Story, bad slasher films on Netflix – whatever works. There is some evidence that horror movies alleviate anxiety for some of us, and I’ve definitely experienced that. It’s comforting to feel that there is an actual, concrete reason for your fear, instead of just letting your nonspecific dread run rampant. And when the story resolves, some of your terror might, too. For similar reasons, my friend Sarah says reading erotica helps her anxiety. Don’t judge yourself for the seemingly strange self-care strategies you employ. If it works, it’s worth doing.

Marijuana. Some would say it’s not healthy to rely on substances to get you through tough times. I say that sometimes substances are the only things that can get you through and that may not be ideal but it’s still okay. Weed blurs my brain a little, forcing me to think one thought at a time instead of losing myself in worry. And it also reawakens my libido even at the unsexiest of times (more on that in a post coming out on Monday), enabling me to masturbate when I otherwise would’ve been too depressed to do so. Masturbation can be, for me, an important medicine, flooding my body with uplifting neurotransmitters and re-affirming my love for myself, so any impetus to do it more often is a good thing.

What are your unconventional self-care methods?

 

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