12 Days of Girly Juice 2021: 8 Brilliant Books

At time of writing, I’ve read 44 books this year – yay! Reading has given me so much pleasure during the pandemic, with its ability to sweep me away into worlds that aren’t wracked by quick-spreading illness and quicker-spreading fascism. (Well, sometimes I do read books where those things are happening, but not typically ones set in our world.) It’s been a much-needed respite from the grind of life.

Here are 8 of the books I loved best this year. You can check out the full list of books I read in 2021 here. Would love to hear from you in the comments if you’ve read any of these, or if you have others to recommend!

 

Torrey Peters – Detransition, Baby

She decides for the ten thousandth time that heterosexual cis people, while willfully ignoring it, have staked their whole sexuality on a bet that each other’s genders are real. If only cis heterosexuals would realize that, like trans women, the activity in which they are indulging is a big self-pleasuring lie that has little to do with their actual personhood, they’d be free to indulge in a whole new flexible suite of hot ways to lie to each other.

This book absolutely exploded this year. It became a national bestseller. The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly called it one of the best books of the year. It got longlisted for the Women’s Prize (to the chagrin of transphobic bigots). And the praise is well-deserved, if you ask me.

Trans writer Torrey Peters’ debut novel is a witty, dishy tale of three people with vastly different relationships to womanhood, who ultimately discover their similarities and find some common ground. Reese is a brassy, world-hardened trans woman who desperately yearns to be a mother; Reese’s morose ex Ames was once a trans woman, but has since detransitioned for reasons that become clear later in the book; and Katrina is a no-nonsense cis woman who Ames accidentally gets pregnant, which is the catalyst that kickstarts the events of the story.

It’s a blazingly funny novel about womanhood, motherhood, the absurdity of gender, the mutability of family, and so much more. I loved it.

 

Leigh Cowart – Hurts So Good: The Science & Culture of Pain on Purpose

I have come to think of my experiences with masochism as a kind of biohacking: a way to use the electrochemistry of my body in a deliberate way for the purpose of curating a specific experience. Something about my response to pain is different, be it inborn or learned (or both, I suspect). It’s something that allows me to craft a little pocket of joy for myself, an engineered release, be it through running a few miles uphill, getting a tattoo, or getting slapped in the face for fun until I cry.

I’ve read a fair number of books that explore sadomasochism through various sexual and romantic lenses, but Hurts So Good is a different kind of book. It investigates a much broader range of masochisms, from kinksters getting whipped in dungeons, to ultramarathon runners exhausting their bodies for the fun of it, to competitive hot pepper eaters scorching their mouths to get an endorphin rush. This is a book about “pain on purpose,” in all the various ways humans seek it out.

I’ve been more and more interested in reading about pain since it became an everyday part of my life due to fibromyalgia, and there’s a fair bit of nerdy pain science in here that scratched that itch for me. But it’s also so much deeper than just brain imaging and neurotransmitters: Cowart examines the psychological, social, and even spiritual reasons that humans have pursued pain through the ages. It’s a fascinating read, whether sadomasochism is a part of your sex life or just a topic you find intriguing.

 

Hanne Blank – Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality

Historically, what heterosexuality “is” has been a synonym for “sexually normal.” Early in the history of the term, it was even used interchangeably with the term “normal-sexual.” And there, as they say, is the rub. “Normal” is not a mode of eternal truth; it’s a way to describe commonness and conformity with expectations. But what is most common and expected, in terms of our sexual lives or any other aspect of the human condition, does not always remain the same. Sexual expectations and behaviors, like all other social expectations and behaviors, change over time.

It’s always good to re-examine the things you think you know, to figure out whether they are actually true. More often than not, you’ll realize you’ve gotten it at least partially wrong all along.

Astute scholar Hanne Blank examines heterosexuality that way in her excellent book Straight. Our current society takes for granted that straightness has always existed, because it is the natural order of the species and a procreative imperative, blah blah blah – but has straightness always existed? Blank argues, quite convincingly, that it is a relatively new construct we created for ourselves, and that sexuality is now and has always been much more fluid and vague than the strict category of “heterosexual” would lead us to believe.

If you’re scoffing as you read this (“How could that possibly be true?! Straightness is real! Science says so!”) then I think you are the type of person who mosts needs to read this book. It is my view that some of our most significant growth as humans happens when we’re able to soften our rigidities, blur the boundaries we’ve drawn, and apply a lens of nuance to the world – and this book is a challenge to do exactly that.

 

Kai Cheng Thom – Fierce Femmes & Notorious Liars

I wanted to protect you, but I’m starting to think that the best thing you can do for people is teach them how to protect themselves. Every girl needs to be at least a little dangerous.

Kai Cheng Thom is a transcendently brilliant writer, whose work I first read in her advice column for Xtra. This book is a bit of a departure from her typical style: it’s a surrealist novel and a “biomythography” of Thom’s life, meaning that it draws elements from her own life story but is vastly more magical and absurd.

It’s the tale of a young trans girl coming out, moving across the country, finding community, and fighting back against the transphobic powers that be. It has a lot to say about how we grow and change as people, the transformative power of good friendships, and the beauty of stepping into your true self.

 

Allison Moon – Getting It: A Guide to Hot, Healthy Hookups & Shame-Free Sex

What makes casual sex casual? What makes sex sex? It’s a fraught subject, raising issues of morality, pleasure, risk, trauma, and choice. My job is not to convince you one way or another, but rather to give you good information to use to make up your own mind. I promise I won’t shame you for your choices, and I hope you don’t shame other people for theirs.

Gift this book to any young person you know who is interested in, or is pursuing, casual sex for the first time. Gift it to your recently divorced friend who hasn’t dated since the pre-Tinder era. Gift it to anyone whose relationship to casual sex seems tricky, confused, or painful. I really think it’ll help.

Everything that sex educator Allison Moon writes is delightful, but this book is really indispensable. It’s a guide to just about everything you need to know to have satisfying and healthy casual sex, from figuring out what you want, to finding dates, to setting boundaries, to navigating consent, to dealing with tricky feelings that come up. It’s a blueprint for the best sex of your life, whether casual or not.

I deeply wish I’d had this book when I was 22; I could have spared myself a lot of bad sex and broken hearts. But at least it’s out in the world now, and can help a whole new generation of sex-positive cuties.

 

Casey McQuiston – One Last Stop

The first time August met Jane, she fell in love with her for a few minutes, and then stepped off the train. That’s the way it happens on the subway—you lock eyes with someone, you imagine a life from one stop to the next, and you go back to your day as if the person you loved in between doesn’t exist anywhere but on that train. As if they never could be anywhere else.

Wanna read a quirky butch/femme romance novel that takes place primarily on a subway train, weaves in true queer history, features time travel as a prominent plot point, depicts rich and realistic queer friendships, and contains countless LOL-worthy jokes? This is the one.

I got somewhat obsessed with Casey McQuiston’s writing this year, devouring this novel and their other one, and starting to read an advance copy of their next one (being a member of the press has its perks sometimes!). Their work is sharp, full of heart, and shot through with a deep reverence for queerness and queer communities. I laughed and cried my way through this novel and almost wish I could erase it from my memory just so I could experience it for the first time again. It’s a beautiful love story for the ages.

 

Aubrey Gordon – What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat

I describe mine as work for fat justice. Body positivity has shown me that our work for liberation must explicitly name fatness as its battleground—because when we don’t, each of us are likely to fall back on our deep-seated, faulty cultural beliefs about fatness and fat people, claiming to stand for “all bodies” while we implicitly and explicitly exclude the fattest among us. I yearn for more than neutrality, acceptance, and tolerance—all of which strike me as meek pleas to simply stop harming us, rather than asking for help in healing that harm or requesting that each of us unearth and examine our existing biases against fat people.

As a massive fan of Aubrey Gordon’s podcast with Michael Hobbes, Maintenance Phase, I don’t know why it took me so long to get around to reading her book, but I’m very glad I finally did. It’s a thorough skewering of our society’s rampant anti-fat bias and all the various ways it manifests. It’s compelling and impeccably well-researched, and it should be a required text for anyone studying to become a doctor, therapist, social worker, or policymaker.

Fatphobia and diet culture are horrendously potent forces in our world right now, affecting how fat people are treated on both macro and micro levels every day. What this book points out, using evidence collected from a staggering amount of different reputable sources, is that anti-fat bias is largely predicated on the false notion that significant, sustained weight loss is possible for the majority of people. In reality, being fat isn’t all that different from being tall, in terms of how genetics create that condition and what can be done about it – but the discrimination and harassment fat people face is obviously far worse. If you’ve ever fat-shamed anyone for any reason, you should read this. If you’ve ever stayed silent while someone else was being fat-shamed in your presence, you should read this. If you’re feeling resistant to reading this because you disagree with its argument, you should read this.

It’s 2021. There’s no excuse whatsoever for being a bigot anymore, and that includes being a fatphobic bigot.

 

Jeremy O. Harris – Slave Play

For almost a decade I’ve given myself over to someone who doesn’t dignify me who acts like he’s the prize and I’m the lucky recipient. No motherfucker I’m the prize. Always have been, always will be. Somehow I forgot that. Or I never knew that. How could I? Got so wrapped in you so wrapped up in your presentation. That I forgot myself because when someone presents themselves as a prize you receive them as one.

I was lucky enough to see this play twice on Broadway, and also decided to read the script so I could absorb the words more deeply. It is a truly unique piece of theatre.

At the centre of this story is “race play,” an edgy and controversial kink in which racial differences and/or tropes are eroticized. I first learned about this style of play from Mollena Williams-Haas, a submissive Black woman who identifies as a slave in her D/s dynamic with her partner. (She has a new podcast, by the way – it’s amazing.)

Accomplished playwright Jeremy O. Harris (who also produced the terrific virtual theatre put on by Fake Friends during the pandemic) has weaved a story wherein race play becomes an element of a radical new therapy, aimed at helping the Black partners in interracial relationships experience more comfort, pleasure, and safety with their non-Black partners. It’s a raw exploration of race, class, kink, consent, privilege, power, and so much more. In my mind, the primary message of this play is that self-awareness, and awareness of one’s ancestral history, is crucial if we are to move through the world in ethical and progressive ways. This is a deliberately challenging play – the stage directions on the opening pages counsel the director and performers to avoid any attempt to make the audience feel more comfortable with what they are seeing – and it feels very needed at this time in history. I very much look forward to seeing whatever Jeremy O. Harris does next.

The Fine Art of the Romantic Bruise Selfie

Content note: this post discusses, and contains photos of, bruising – only the happy, consensual kind, but bruising nonetheless. I encourage you to take care of yourself and skip this one if that’s tough subject matter for you.

 

“Aftercare” in kink is a somewhat nebulous concept, deliberately so: its definition varies from kinkster to kinkster, as do its purpose and scope. I know people for whom aftercare is, by necessity, a lengthy cuddling session filled with kisses and compliments – and I also know people for whom it is “Thanks for the good time; see ya!” followed by street meat and a volley of texts to a friend. It can be whatever you want it to be, as long as it works for everyone involved.

It’s important to remember, too, that aftercare can be an immediately-afterwards thing, or it can be a quite-a-while-afterwards thing, or both. The blissed-out cuddle sesh after a kink scene might satisfy your body and your snuggly neurotransmitters, but your rational brain might want additional aftercare a few days later in the form of, say, a text dissecting what went right and what went wrong. Sometimes those texts contain pictures of bruises.

It’s been said (I think by Jillian Keenan?) that bruises are to kinksters what hickeys are to vanilla people: tangible proof that a particular encounter happened, that someone likes you enough to have marked you in this very romantic and/or erotic way, that you are desired and desirable. Sending “bruise selfies” the day after a scene – like sending “hickey selfies” the day after a makeout session – can convey a flirty message: I like you and I like what we did together.

But bruise pics also serve another, more kink-specific function: they’re a way that a submissive or bottom can communicate more info, post-scene, to their dominant or top. “Even though what you did to me probably would’ve looked scary, dangerous, or even abusive to an uninformed outsider,” these photographic missives seem to say, “I loved it, I’m glad we did it, and I love the results.” Tops are being immensely vulnerable and brave when they communicate their desires and then act on them; sending bruise pictures is one way of showing them that their bravery was well-received and was worth it. This can teach them, over time, that it’s okay to be even more brave, even more often.

“It makes me proud of our time together and I love knowing they’re thinking of me.” -@stryker_von

“When topping, it’s an affirmation that they had a Really Good Time and are still thinking about it. That’s a great feeling! As a bottom, it feels like a little wink to our complicity in a scene – “Look at what we did to my body, together. Isn’t it pretty?” -@tinygorgon

“I sometimes get self-conscious and worry that I have hurt them too much. My other reaction is wow, they endured that much for me and were so wonderful 😍” -@cewa1308

Once you go out into “the real world” with your bruises, you’re apt to encounter all kinds of pushback – family might scoff or stare if they spot the damage, doctors might pry or even assume you’re in an abusive relationship, and your other partners (if you have any) might wonder why you didn’t leave them more real estate on your skin for marks of their own! But in those first, pure moments of mutual bruise enjoyment that ensue when you snap a pic the morning after and send it to the bruise’s creator, you don’t have to feel guilty or self-conscious about the perverted masterpiece that has bloomed on your body – you can just bask in its beauty together.

Taking pictures of your bruises is also a gift to your future self, because – if you’re anything like me – someday you’ll love having a record of your kinky journey over the years. I’m less prone to bruising now than I was in my early twenties, in part because I simply don’t play as hard as I used to, so I love paging through my old bruise shots as a reminder of how strong I am and how much I am capable of enduring. The people who gave me those marks have mostly disappeared from my life, but the memories, and the photographic evidence, remain – allowing me to celebrate my own resilience whenever I revisit them.

I’m insecure and perpetually unsure if I’m actually a “good submissive.” But in those photos, I can see evidence that I am, in stark black and white. (Or black and blue, as the case may be.)

 

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

5 Useful Insights on Chronic Pain and BDSM

I’ve been living with chronic joint pain for about 4 years now – so, roughly as long as I’ve identified as kinky. I wonder often if there’s a correlation there…

Different doctors in different areas of medicine have variously diagnosed me with patellofemoral syndrome, gout, the ever-vague “depression-related pain,” and (newest and so far unconfirmed) fibromyalgia. Whatever my mysterious pain stems from, it seems to be here to stay, and I have to figure out how to live with it. That includes finding ways to keep it from hindering my sex life.

I’ve been doing lots of reading lately on the intersections of chronic pain and BDSM – most notably Raven Kaldera’s excellent anthology Kneeling in Spirit, which is about submissives with disabilities. Between that book, Ignixia’s workshop on pain and kink at last year’s Woodhull Sexual Freedom Summit, and my own firsthand experiences, I’ve pulled together this list of insights you might find useful if you’re a kinkster who suffers from chronic pain, or if you play with people who do.

A pain scale is an invaluable communication tool.

I often advocate a 1-to-10 pain scale for use during any sadomasochistic scene, because it makes it easy for the bottom to communicate how much pain they’re currently feeling and/or how much pain they’d like to be feeling. But this scale isn’t just for paddle smacks and nipple pinches – you can use it to quantify your regular ol’ chronic pain, too.

I can say, for example, that my elbows are at a 5 right now, while my hands and ankles are at a 3 – and this might affect what my dominant chooses to have me do. If a particular activity mid-scene causes a sudden flare-up, it’s easier for me to spit out “My knees are at an 8” than it would be to construct a request for mercy in my subspacey haze.

As kinksters, we already have language for discussing and measuring pain; we might as well use it in positive ways outside of the dungeon, too.

Some chronic pain can be eroticized.

Please don’t assume this is true of everyone, or every type of pain – I know people who developed chronic conditions and immediately gave up all sadomasochistic activities, because they were experiencing enough discomfort in their regular lives and didn’t want to bring it into their sex lives, too, if they could help it. But for me, some of my joint pain can be made into a sexy thing if my partner and I recontextualize it together.

For example, while it’s agonizing for me to kneel for more than a few minutes due to my shitty knees, I can often get through it if I know my dominant wants me to and I would please him by sticking it out. I’ve knelt for long periods during human furniture scenes, bootblacking scenes, and oral service scenes, and while I can’t sustain that position for as long as a spryer submissive could, I’m able to enjoy my pain more when I feel like it has a purpose (i.e. making my partner happy).

Along similar lines, being taken care of when my pain is especially bad can be sexy in and of itself for me, because I’m into nurturing D/s dynamics. There are lots of ways to reframe pain into a hotter thing than it is on its own.

Communication protocols can set both partners at ease.

The dominants in Kneeling in Spirit emphasize again and again that they need their submissives to be honest with them about their bodies’ current status. This is difficult for me in more vanilla relationships – I feel like I am whining or bumming my partner out – but in D/s, it can be redefined as a mandated part of your dynamic. A dominant can, for example, require their submissive to text them a report on their current pain levels at the start or end of every day, or can choose a particular word or phrase that means, “Tell me how your body feels right now.” A couple could agree on an emoji code (e.g. black dot for “okay,” red dot for “bad,” double exclamation points for “too bad to do kink tonight”) or could share an online calendar where the submissive has to record certain health information daily. You get the idea.

If you’re a submissive and you have trouble communicating this stuff without feeling guilty or whiny, just remember that part of how you serve your dominant is by taking care of the things they love – and that includes you. Keep in mind Mollena Williams-Haas’ “prime directive” for submissives: “It is the primary responsibility of the slave to protect the master’s property at all times, up to and including protecting the property from their master.”

A variety of pain produces a better endorphin rush.

That is to say: if someone already has an achy back, maybe flogging their back isn’t the best way to go. Or, if their pain manifests as surface-level skin irritation, maybe they don’t want to be scratched or slapped, but would instead prefer a deeper, thuddier sensation.

When a body gets accustomed to a certain type of pain, it can stop sending out endorphins in response to that pain – so it might take a different type of pain altogether to get those endorphins flowing again. Consider what tools you have at your disposal that could achieve that.

Pain can be an opportunity for creativity, rather than a limitation.

I once had a friend-with-benefits with whom the “benefits” were primarily rope bondage, which he loved (so do I). He told me once that I’m very fun to tie up, and I scoffed. “You have to be joking,” I said. “My joints are so bad that there are tons of ties you can never do with me.”

He furrowed his brow. “That’s exactly why you’re a fun rope bottom for me,” he replied. “It’s an interesting challenge, figuring out which ties are going to work for your body.”

It had literally never occurred to me to think of my condition that way before. I’m no longer regularly in touch with that dude but his words have stuck with me. I think of them every time I feel like a useless submissive, a broken toy, for being unable to sustain certain positions. Many doms and tops love an opportunity to be crafty and clever – and that includes being in charge of a body that works a little differently than most.

 

Is chronic pain a part of your sex life? How do you like to deal with it?

Intimate Intercourse: Phone Sex (Part 2)

Welcome back to Intimate Intercourse, a series where I interview my boyfriend/Sir/Daddy, Super Sleepy Dude, about topics relating to sex and kink. This is part 2 of a 3-part interview about phone sex; you can read part 1 here. In this instalment, we’re talking about how we handle impact play during phone sex, logistically and emotionally. Enjoy! (Content note: we touch on self-harm in this interview, so if that’s triggering for you, definitely feel free to skip this post.)


Kate Sloan: Okay, I wanna talk about sadomasochistic things. Is that as gratifying for you over the phone as doing in-person sadistic things?

Super Sleepy: No, but only shades less. It’s better when it’s on video, in that case, I think, because a lot of the feedback of hitting someone is visual feedback, so seeing skin getting redder, seeing the actual thud or slap or whatever, is more satisfying than just hearing it. But, in the context of a full phone-sex scene, switching between audio and video is kind of distracting, and the audio is disinhibiting because you don’t have to look at video of yourself. Looking at video of yourself is inhibiting on both sides, I think. It’s like you’re forced to have sex in front of a mirror. So I tend to usually just go with the audio, because there’s less of the technical switching and there’s less of that inhibition.

KS: Yeah. I kinda would like to develop that skill of getting over that inhibition, so that’s something to think about. ‘Cause I agree that it totally makes sense, the visual feedback thing.

SS: What about for you, receiving impact via verbal commands over the phone? How does it compare?

KS: It’s very close. I think that the main difference is, there is some element of, like, I’m just not gonna hit myself as hard as a person would who can’t feel what I’m feeling, even if I’m trying really hard…

SS: Right. Because your body just won’t let you do that.

KS: Yeah. I do think that’s gotten better with practice, but yeah, it definitely was interesting to see how my body would start to respond without me even consciously being like, “Okay, time to hit myself.” It just became very ingrained.

SS: Yeah, the first few times that was happening were some highlights of our early phone-sex experiences together, when you were slapping yourself faster than you realized you could. I think, if you have somebody that you want to do sadomasochistic stuff on the phone with, and you’re topping them, one way to get them more comfortable hitting themselves harder than they think they might be able to initially is to do the same thing you would do in person, which is to walk them up an incline of that. Because if you just tell someone to hit themselves as hard as they can, how are they gonna process that? How are they gonna do that safely?

KS: Very few people like that, anyway.

SS: Right. So if you use the 1-to-10 scale, which you’ve written about a lot, and if you use dominance as part of it, if that’s part of your dynamic, to push past where it sounds like they’re really starting to feel pain, and… I ask a lot about, like, “Does that hurt, little one?” or what the pain feels like, then you can push a little bit past that, and that’s where it’s gonna start to feel, for them, I think, like they’re hitting themselves harder than they thought they could – which can be hot.

KS: Yeah. I get very nonverbal at that point, which I would imagine is hard to navigate in a phone setting.

SS: It is, yeah.

KS: How do you deal with that?

SS: In our case, the way I deal with that is gonna sound kind of silly, maybe, but a lot it is knowing what your sounds mean. It’s having hit you and fucked you and known you long enough to be able to interpret the nonverbal signals that I can still hear. I can hear the impact, I can hear the sounds that you’re making, and the other signal you can pay attention to is, how long does it take for the person to respond to the command? If they’re starting to get reluctant, that time will creep up, usually, at least in your case. And the other one is, you will start whining more when you are getting to the point of reluctance.

KS: What do you mean?! I always follow orders!

SS: Sure you do, little one. You’re very good.

KS: We had to kind of develop the system that we use for sadomasochistic stuff over the phone. Do you want to describe what we do?

SS: Sure, okay. So, when we start doing impact play over the phone, what that usually looks like is, we pick an implement – could be a hand, could be a paddle, could be a truncheon, whatever – and then we pick and agree on a spot on your body that you’re gonna hit yourself. Sometimes it’s your thighs – usually it’s your thighs – sometimes it’s your face, if it’s face-slapping… and then we pick an intensity. We used to always start at 1 out of 10 as the intensity; more recently, we’ve started at different spots, depending on the action before that in the scene, and stuff. And then we also developed a consistent word that we use to mean “you’re gonna hit yourself right now,” and that word is just “now,” because it is short, and it cuts through a lot of other sounds. It’s single-syllable and it tends to work well and it can be repeated quickly without getting kind of crunched together. Gotta hit the “N” pretty hard, but it’s doable.

KS: [giggling]

SS: It’s gonna sound like, “Alright, little one. Are you ready to hit yourself for me?” You’ll say, “Yes, Sir,” and then I’ll say, “Okay, you’re gonna start at a 1 for me, right?” and you’ll say, “Yes, Sir,” and then I’ll say, “Okay. Now.” And then there’ll probably be a bunch of “Nows” while I kind of calibrate what the implement is sounding like on that part of your body, because the distance of the microphone from that spot on your body changes, whether you’re using headphones or not changes, so I need to get a sense for what that “1” sounds like before I feel comfortable hitting you harder than that.

KS: Yeah.

SS: Then we’ve also developed a way to do more than one hit at once, so that I don’t have to say “Now” 15 times in a row if I want to hit you 15 times in a row. So I would just say, “Alright, I want you to hit yourself 15 times, at that intensity. Can you do that for me, little one?” You’d say, “Yes, Sir,” and then I would say “Now,” and you know that that means hit yourself that number of times. And then we use “Again” to do repeated commands. So there’s a whole kind of language or vocabulary that we’ve built together to simplify doing these scenes, so I don’t have to explain exactly what I want because we’ve done it a bunch.

KS: Yeah, I really like it. It feels very connective.

SS: Right. And then if you wanna go up in intensity, you can just say, “Alright, you’re gonna hit yourself at a 3 for me,” and then we’ve jumped up to a 3 and we can kind of keep going at that level with a bunch more “Nows.”

KS: You always wait for the “Yes, Sir.” Why’s that?

SS: Um, that’s consent. See everything ever written about it.

KS: [giggling] Yeah. True. We have another thing like that, though, which is “squeeze.”

SS: Uh-huh.

KS: I don’t even remember how that started, originally.

SS: How it started? I don’t know if I have the origin story of “squeeze” either. [both giggling a lot] I will say, it’s an incredibly useful thing to have. Not as useful as you, little one. It’s just up there. It’s in my toolbox. “Squeeze” is another agreed-upon trigger word that we use when I want you to squeeze your PC muscles. Right?

KS: [audibly blushing] Uh-huh.

SS: Uh-huh.

KS: I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m just giggling a lot. It’s fine.

SS: So, if you’re having phone sex with somebody, really regardless of parts, I think this would be useful. Just being able to tell them to tense up those muscles is really useful when you have something inside of them and you want them to squeeze around it, or you want to hear the sound that they would make if you were inside them and they were squeezing on you. And just like I repeat the “Now” trigger in impact-play scenarios, you can speed up those squeezes. If somebody’s getting close to coming, you can make them squeeze faster, and kind of tip them over that edge.

KS: [giggling] It’s very good. It’s very good for D/s things.

SS: Tell me more about that.

KS: Because it’s like, involuntary at this point.

SS: So what happens if I say it right now? Like this: Squeeze.

KS: [giggling a lot] Yeah. I mean, it works.

SS: Uh-huh.

KS: It’s like a hypnotic trigger, but I don’t think you actually set it up that way.

SS: No. I think it’s more just conditioning at this point.

KS: Yeah. ‘Cause usually there’s some kind of reward for that, even if it’s just the sensation of it.

SS: Yeah, there’s often a verbal reward, though, too.

KS: Yeah.

SS: Squeeze.

KS: Hey!

SS: Good girl. Like that! I’m just demoing.

KS: Okay… Okay, back to the hitting.

SS: Back to the hitting.

KS: Some people would say that it’s essentially self-harm, because I’m hitting myself. What do you think about that?

SS: I am not an expert on the topic, at all. I know that we’ve talked about that and both of us don’t consider it self-harm, because it’s collaborative, and we have safety measures in place, and it’s two consenting adults. I don’t think we’ve run into a scenario where there’s any lasting harm that’s been done by doing impact play over the phone. Correct me if I’m wrong.

KS: No, I don’t think so.

SS: Yeah. But there are risks. The things that make me nervous about stuff on the phone – hypnosis stuff, impact play stuff – are like, I can’t be there if something goes wrong. I think about that a lot. Some things that I’ve done to make myself feel better and you safer, hopefully, are having the closest hospital to your apartment in my phone…

KS: Aww, I didn’t know that!

SS: Right, I forgot to tell you that. Like, knowing your roommate’s phone number incase there was an emergency and you passed out or hit yourself too hard or something like that. Just something that I can do in the case where something goes wrong, because if I was just hung up on, after I told you to hit yourself at an 8 or a 9, I would be panicking. If I couldn’t immediately reach you again, I would want to escalate that, because that could be a safety issue.

KS: Right. Yeah. I also think there have been times when we have done it as a way of avoiding me self-harming. Which is kind of whack, because I’m essentially doing the same thing I would be doing, but psychologically it feels very different to me.

SS: Yeah. How does it feel different psychologically?

KS: When I used to do self-impact for self-harm, it was like I was trying to escape my feelings by giving myself something else to focus on. But I feel like when I do pain stuff with you, it’s like I’m very deliberately choosing to focus on the pain, and also on the emotions that it brings up. I’m deliberately going into them instead of trying to avoid them. And also it’s directed by someone else, so I’m not gonna escalate too quickly or do more than I can handle.

SS: Yeah. I would add that if you’re doing impact play with somebody that does use that for self-harm, and you feel like they’re in a place where they might want the pain for those types of reasons, definitely have these types of conversations – because if they’re asking you for more, you want to know what that “more” means, and that it’s not destructive.


The 3rd and final part of this interview will go up on Friday. In it, we discuss aftercare, debriefs, and the inherent silliness of phone sex. Thanks for reading!