selfies

12 Days of Girly Juice 2018: 7 Bangin’ Selfies

Kate Sloan

Today’s 12 Days of Girly Juice post highlights the 7 selfies I took this year that really tell the story of my 2018, which was… a difficult call, to say the least. Also, yeesh, it was hard not to make these just 7 great pictures of me with my boyfriend, BUT I REFRAINED. (Partially.) Enjoy…

I spent many, many hours on the phone with my Sir this year. If we conservatively guesstimate 2.5 hours a night, every night – keeping in mind that most of our phone calls last about 4 hours, but we skip nights here and there – that adds up to over 900 hours on the phone. But, as I reasoned to myself every time I wondered if this is excessive: if we weren’t a long-distance couple, it’s likely we would have spent at least that many hours together over the course of the year. So. Maybe it’s slightly less ridiculous viewed through that lens.

In any case, this is a photo I took while on the phone with Matt, and it captures a joy I rarely manage to depict in my selfies. I’m relaxed, I’m subby, I’m collared, I’m little, and I’m talking to someone I love. Last year’s selfies roundup also included a gleeful moment on the phone; I guess long, intimate, giggly calls with beaux have brought out some of my happiest times in the past year. And I’m fine with that. Some naysayers criticize technology for encouraging social detachment and isolation, but for me this year, technology – like FaceTime and Apple Calendar and Google Docs – served mostly to make me feel closer to my loved ones, not further away from them. Any technology that brings forth a smile this gleeful can’t be all bad.

The most important aesthetic decision I made this year was getting a new tattoo. Big, beautiful flowers framed by a bold, unmissable message. Shout-outs once again to Tender Ghost for the original idea and to Laura Blaney for bringing my vision to life in her signature gorgeous style; I’m happy with this beaut every time I look at it.

I took lots of selfies in the days and weeks after getting this image inked on me. Like all the best tattoos, it helped me feel more connected to my appearance, like I had more of a stake in it and more control over it. Even on days when I otherwise felt unattractive, seeing this art on my arm made me feel like I was, myself, a work of art. So I took selfie after selfie, showing myself – proving to myself – just how deeply pretty I really am.

Another moment of unadulterated glee. We snapped this on a sunny day in July, during one of Matt’s many visits to me in Toronto. We had just done an impromptu hypno scene in a nearby parkette, hence the mutual post-kink glow. I love looking for hints of our D/s dynamic in photos of us: the shyness of my submissive smile, the “watchful proud daddy” vibes in his face and his posture.

Also notable: our matching outfits. A mantra in our relationship is “We match”; I like to say it when one or the other of us is worried that our feelings are excessive, unprecedented. If one of us is feeling “too” in love and panicking about it, or missing the other “too” much and feeling guilty about it, it’s helpful to be reminded that we’re almost always on the same page, feelings-wise. We love each other a lot. We have no chill. We match. It’s for this reason that Matt started choosing coordinating ensembles for us when possible, and I love it. Especially when we’re both in blue, because, well… we have a history with that color.

It’s impossible to write about my 2018 without writing about travel, since I did so much of it – and it’s impossible for me to write about travel without complaining about it, because travel stresses me the fuck out. (Extremely #FirstWorldProblems, I am well aware.)

This is one of those photos taken automatically by a machine in the customs area of an airport – “Remove your hat and sunglasses; look at the camera; we are now taking your picture” – and, while they’re never very flattering, this one takes the cake. I had never before seen a photo of me that so perfectly captures how I feel about traveling.

It’s strange that someone with so many airport-related anxieties, someone prone to fainting on buses and crying on trains, would end up in a long-distance relationship. But maybe it’s actually perfect. Maybe being reunited once again with my beloved is one of the only things capable of pushing me through those fears to the other side.

That said, I definitely prefer when he comes to visit me and I can just meet him in the arrivals area and then go home. There are, after all, no TSA agents or grumpy entitled men or bureaucratic nightmares in my home – and there is a comfy bed where I get to kiss my boyfriend and don’t even have to show anyone my passport in order to be admitted.

This photo was taken impulsively during a jaunt to a local sex shop with a few other sex-blogger babes, just after the Playground Conference here in Toronto. I was, and am, stunned that this career and this community have enabled me to make friends from literally all around the world: the ladies pictured here come from areas as wide-reaching as Hamilton, New England, and (wait for it) FINLAND. Amazing!

When I was a baby sex nerd reading erotica anthologies in my childhood bedroom and illicitly listening to sex podcasts in math class, I never dreamed that one day my sex-nerdiness would lead me not only to an incredible career but also to friendships that cross national borders and lift me up every day. What a beautiful life I’ve carved out for myself, and what wonderful people I’ve found to share it with.

No post like this would be complete without a selfie taken with Bex, my best friend. We didn’t take many this year, but hopefully that just means we’ll take more next year.

This smiley selfie was snapped at a sexual science symposium. (I like alliteration!) We got together with my ex-sugar daddy and his wife – quite an odd crew, to say the least – and went to this big gorgeous science center in New York to chat with dildo-makers, sexual psychologists, strap-on experts, and more.

When this photo was taken, Bex and I were extremely high from some pre-event tokin’ and smokin’. It was around Valentine’s Day so the whole joint was littered with little heart-shaped candies, which we kept munching because weed. With Bex giggling next to me, asking the speakers pertinent questions, and occasionally producing candy from their jacket pocket to appease me, I knew that he was truly the best friend I need and deserve.

I’ll close on another happy note. Matt took this picture of us in our hotel bathroom on our first night at the Woodhull Sexual Freedom Summit – one of the first events we’d ever attended together as a couple, and the first time I was introducing him to many of my friends in the blogging community. I’m visibly proud to be at an industry event, representing my business and my brand, with someone I love so much.

And once again, we match. Blue and pink: my blog-branding colors, my two favorite colors, and also two of the bi pride colors (we’re both queerdos!). Someone noticed our coordinating outfits, and asked Matt, gesturing at his shirt, “Did you do that on purpose?” He smiled a proud-daddy smile and replied, “Of course.” I felt as brightly happy as the pink flowers bursting open on my dress.

5 Tools I Use to Write About Past Experiences

Kate Sloan

You may have noticed that I write a lot of personal stuff. Stuff about my sex life. Stuff about my relationships. Even stuff about my childhood.

Friends reading my work often remark that I “must have a good memory” because I’m able to recall surprisingly specific details – like the exact wording of something a partner said to me, the exact outfit I wore to a particular event, or the exact number of seconds that elapsed between text messages.

It is probably true that I have a better-than-average memory for romantic and sexual events, developed due to a combination of obsessive anxiety, an intense passion for this subject matter, and plain ol’ practice. But I also have plenty of tricks up my sleeve that help me remember details when my brain didn’t cling onto them to begin with. Here are a few resources I rely on, that you might also find useful for your personal writing…

Journal entries. I’ve journaled regularly for over 10 years, as a means of coping with feelings, processing events, and identifying patterns. My journals aren’t exhaustive – I don’t write down every single thing I did on a given day, just what felt emotionally significant to me that day – so they’re not always good for cross-referencing minute details, but they are a good record of big emotional arcs in my life.

For example, the last time I thought I might be falling in love, I went back and looked at old journal entries from previous times I’d fallen in love. I wanted to check if the “symptoms” were similar, if the timelines matched up, etc. to see if my present-day feelings were really love or more like infatuation. Nerdy, right?

My journal entries tend to contain the details that really stood out to me about a particular event – so, maybe I don’t write down the name of the specific cocktail I drank on a great date, but I am likely to record stuff like how nervous I felt, what my date’s eyes looked like, and what they wore (if I liked their outfit!). These are all useful pieces of information for a blog post or essay later on.

The “advanced search” functions on Twitter and Flickr. Searching your tweets or your backlog of images is a breeze with these two services. I tweet and take photos far more often and more exhaustively than I journal, so I’ll often search my tweets or photos if I need a small, specific piece of information.

For example, if I know I tweeted 5 minutes before a date started and then again as I was leaving the date’s house later that night, I can check the timestamps on the tweets to figure out how long we were together. I often refer to Flickr if I need to know what I was wearing on a particular day, or other visual details like what a place looked like or what lipstick I wore.

If you use Google Chrome, you can set up custom search engines to make this process even quicker. I have the short-codes “TWT” and “FLI” set up in my Chrome for Twitter and Flickr, respectively. So if I want to find a tweet of mine containing the word “party,” say, I can just type “twt party” into my address bar and hit enter – or if I want to find a Flickr photo where I was carrying my Kate Spade purse, I can type “fli Kate Spade.” It makes information-hunting much more efficient, so I don’t lose the momentum of my writing!

Text message histories. The availability of this technique depends largely on your texting medium of choice. For example, Facebook Messenger’s search function is pretty good, while the Signal app doesn’t have a search function at all (and you lose all your texts if you delete the app!). iMessage’s built-in search function is pretty terrible – it’ll only show you one result for whatever word or phrase you enter – but can work if your search term is specific and unique enough. (e.g. I had no trouble finding the conversation I wanted to find when it contained the phrase “Daddy, per se.”)

If you are the type of person who texts a close friend (or a partner) immediately after anything notable happens, texts can be a great source for your initial impressions of events. For example, when I journaled about my first time having sex with a new partner in summer 2017, I wrote at length about how romantic and beautiful the encounter was… but my texts to Bex immediately upon leaving that date tell a slightly different story: “HE IS SUCH A DOMLY SERVICE TOP AND HIS DICK IS ASTONISHINGLY GOOD!!”

Selfies. Like many millennials, I take a lot of selfies. The timestamps on them can often provide useful information if I’m writing about a particular day/event, and I also like to check what I was wearing incase that’s a detail I want to mention.

Occasionally I plumb the depths of my selfies folder when I need more subtle info, like “How long did that boob bruise last?” or “How much did that blowjob smear my lipstick?”

My sex spreadsheet. Every year since 2016, I’ve debated whether I really need to keep a sex spreadsheet for another year, and I always come to the same conclusion: yes I do, because it’s indispensable when I’m writing about sexual encounters.

My journals, texts, and tweets only contain what felt significant to me at the time; they don’t always contain the logistical facts I might need when writing about a sexual interlude down the line, like “How many orgasms did I have on May 8th, 2017?” or “How many blowjobs did I give in October of last year?” or “What sex toys did I use most with partners last summer?” You never know what kinds of details you might want to reference in a piece of writing, so I like having the flat facts at my fingertips incase I need ’em.

What do you refer to when you’re writing about the past?

Sexy Snaps & Photo Booth Flirtations

Kate Sloan

Being in a new long-distance relationship has me pondering ways to create intimacy across vast expanses.

I know it’s possible because I’ve felt it. Sometimes partners who lived just a quick streetcar ride from me made me feel distanced, shut out, because their hearts were walled off to me; comparatively, my darling in New York pulls me close to him via texts, images, and filthy phone-sex soliloquies. Intimacy can exist wherever you make space for it, wherever you fight for it.

We’ve been playing with digital intimacy in many forms – salacious sexts, obscene FaceTime calls, adventures with app-controlled vibrators – but I’m also drawn, lately, to combining analog romance with the digital. Photo booths are a prime example of our cultural hearkening-back to the analog: like gifting your partner a vinyl LP or sending them a handwritten love letter, snapping instant photos together in a darkened booth is a hot hit of vintage romance.

Here are 5 sexy, kinky, and/or sweet things I’d like to do involving photo booths…

“Strip” tease. I could be ordered to get as naked as I feasibly could in a photo booth, showing off first my lingerie and then my skin. I’d be respectful, making sure no one walked in or got close enough to see – but I’d have to do it, some way and somehow, because my beau’d told me to. I’d grab the strip from its slot surreptitiously on my way out, and slide it into my purse before anyone could see. Four little naked Kates, arranged so neatly for a suitor’s later consumption.

Bruise archive. In many of my past kinky relationships, part of our protocol – whether informal or more official – was the taking and sending of bruise photos in the days after particularly intense scenes. It’s a way to stretch out the sadomasochistic intimacy of those encounters for days or weeks after they occur. For dominants, I hear it can also be nice to receive confirmation that your submissive not only likes their bruises but is proud of them, wants to show them off, wants to make them last. If I had a photo booth in my neighborhood, perhaps I’d instate a tradition of heading there the day after a good beating – and the week after that, and so on, until the marks had faded – to capture my bruises blooming into glory. What a charming album that’d make.

Cuteness quartet. It’s nice to receive a “traditional” gift, like a DVD I’ve been wanting, a gift certificate to my favorite store, or a soft sweater in my power colors. But I’m even more thrilled by personalized and offbeat gifts. I could see a partner snapping a few photo booth strips of himself for me, making all my fave faces and wearing that shirt that makes his eyes look extra blue. Maybe he’d slide it between the pages of a book he thought I’d like and mail it to me, like the photos were an afterthought, a mere bookmark – but I’d know better. I’d see in the shots how much effort had gone into them, and I’d know that meant he cared. A lot.

Date documentation. I love romantic traditions: these little touchstones we return to again and again, simply because they bring us so much joy. That diner you always go to after all-night fuck-fests; that movie you watch together every year around the holidays; that one alley you can’t walk past without making out in it for old times’ sake. I like the idea of taking photo booth pictures together at meted milestones in your relationship. I’m a sap, so I’d probably tape them into my journal, or have them framed.

Phone sex. A photo booth would be an interesting place to call up a beau and have them breathe hot and heavy in your ear. You could capture your authentic reactions to their words – gasps, blushes, moans – and snap your lapful of photo strips on your smartphone to send them. And hey, not to get crass, but I wonder what happens to photo booth ink when the strips get splattered in cum…!

What sexy/kinky/sweet things would you like to do in a photo booth?

 

This post was sponsored by the lovely folks at Ninja Photo, who will rent you photo booths across Canada and so many other places!

12 Days of Girly Juice 2017: 7 Bangin’ Selfies

Kate Sloan

It’s hard to pick selfies that sum up your whole year, but these are some strong contenders! (Content note: there are boobs in this post!)

Femme friends were so important to me this year, and every year. One such pal is Rosaline, a pink-haired pixie who’s always around to cheer me on and pump me up over a bottle of white wine.

We had lots of goofy adventures together this year, mostly involving pre-drinking for various parties, doing our makeup together, and then marching into said parties all flirty and long-lashed like queens. I love how my femme friends remind me of immutable truths: being a femme person in this world is hard but it is also wonderful, and femmes are even more brave and powerful than the misogynist cultural forces that aim to keep us down. I hope to continue to foster my femme friendships in 2018 and beyond.

Speaking of good friends… I didn’t get to spend as much time with Brent this year as I have in previous years, because he wasn’t in Toronto as much. But when we did hang out, we made it count: we laughed a lot over beers, played a ton of Use Your Words, and on one memorable occasion, he saved me from a bunch of pill bugs I accidentally sat on. Our friendship is strange and lovely.

The night this photo was taken, I attended Use Your Words’ Toronto launch party because I was a staff writer on the game (fancy!). Between talking, schmoozing, and playing the game, Brent and I decided to order a couple of corndogs from the bar kitchen. “Can I take a selfie of us eating these?” I asked him, to which he replied, “Only if we both put ’em in our mouths like we’re fellating them.” Stuff like this is why we’re friends.

In March, my local community discovered someone we thought we could trust was actually a misogynist shitbag, and it shook the foundations of what we thought we knew. For weeks, I felt unable to trust any men (moreso even than usual). What was the point, if any so-called feminist man could turn out to be a total garbage fire?

I had coincidentally been invited to a party later that week whose theme was “femme witch power.” We were encouraged to wear whatever made us feel feminine and powerful. I slung on a navy skater dress, rimmed my eyes in dark eyeshadow, and painted on a deep maroon liquid lipstick. At the last minute before leaving the house, I added my glass eyeball necklace, pulled my tits out of my dress, and took some fierce-faced selfies on my laptop webcam.

I didn’t feel like smiling that day. I wanted to wield my femininity and sexuality like a weapon. So I resisted the urge to pull a smile or make a “pretty” face, and just stared down the camera, fierce and unforgiving. I felt beautiful, but in a way that was just for me – not for the consumption of the abusive fuckfaces who think they can just take and take and take.

I took this while out getting ice cream with Suz and Bex before a jaunt to Tell Me Something Good, our local sexy storytelling night. It was a lovely evening out with friends, and equally wonderful was that sometime either before or after this photo was taken, someone came up to us on the street to tell us they read and loved all three of our blogs. Getting recognized in public is a special kind of thrill, and the more it happens, the more my impostor syndrome melts away and I feel like a Real Writer doing Real, Important Things!

This was taken on one of the first days I actually felt slightly cute, competent, and coherent after a breakup that totally devastated me. I like how you can see in my facial expression that I’m still kind of a mess: I’ve heard fellow depressed people describe feeling “like an alien” who can’t even tell whether their face is forming appropriate and normal facial expressions, because they’re so numb and blunted, and that’s how I felt on this day. Unsure how all my different components hung together, but attempting to make a good show of myself nonetheless. Like Tony Kushner wrote on heartbreak in his magnum opus Angels in America: “Just mangled guts, pretending.”

It’s telling that I’m wearing short shorts and have tied my shirt into a crop top. Depression makes me want to hide, but as I surface from that cave, I begin to want to show off again. Maybe just a little. Maybe still from the safety of monochromes and familiar fabrics. Bit by bit, I always come crawling back to my joy, even if it takes all the strength I can summon.

(Content note for suicidal ideations in this one, folks.) One of the most exciting events of my year was going to a My Brother, My Brother and Me live podcast recording at the Kings Theatre in Brooklyn. I first started listening to MBMBaM almost three years ago, and in that time, these boys have literally saved my life on countless occasions. When I’m too mind-numbingly depressed to be trusted with my sad thoughts in solitude, let alone to get out of bed and rejoin society, I put on a McElroy podcast. They keep me occupied until I can get back to living without wanting to die.

I went to this show by myself, because I didn’t know anyone else who was both as McElroy-obsessed as me and financially and temporally able to get to the venue. I snapped this photo quickly, self-consciously, as I stood in line amongst throngs of other fans. Moments later, when the line moved ahead and I walked into the theatre, tears burned down my cheeks. I couldn’t believe I was so physically close to these boys who had saved my life, walked me through dark days, made me laugh when nothing else could. Thankfully, no one seemed to think my weeping was weird. I bought a poster, waited in line for a radioactively green cocktail, settled into my seat surrounded by jovial strangers, and laughed the night away.

I’ll close here with a moment of genuine joy; it’s a good note to go out on.

One night earlier this month, I was on the phone with someone who makes my heart feel all fuzzy and stupid. We exchanged goofy selfies while we talked, trying to disarm each other, to feel physically close though we were not.

He had asked me about the way my hair was cut, so I shook it out to its full glory so I could capture it in a selfie. Just as I went to hit the shutter, he made some dumb joke that set off sparks in my heart, and I burst into giggles and snapped this shot. “Aw, you made me laugh mid-selfie,” I commented, looking at the result on my phone screen and trying to decide if it was too silly to send.

No, I thought. This is how I wish I looked all the time. Lost in giggly reverie.

Links & Hijinks: Selfies, Scents, & a Bag of Dicks

Kate Sloan

a dildo, a vibrator, and some red panties

Need some new media with which to populate your brain this weekend? Here’s some of my favorite stuff from around the internet as of late…

• I love to read about interesting kinks. Here’s a piece on a man with a smoking fetish and what appeal the act holds for him. “I’m also into specific rituals and mannerisms. For instance, I love when a woman is dangling a cigarette from her mouth while fishing through her purse for a lighter,” he says. “I love lighting women’s cigarettes, too; it’s an intimate moment that’s all about eye contact.” (My friend Caitlin also likes this moment.)

• The folks at xoVain wrote about how they take selfies and it’s fascinating (plus useful info for rabid selfie-takers comme moi).

• If you’re looking to shake up your music collection, I can’t recommend Said the Gramophone’s annual Best Songs of the Year list highly enough. Sean writes beautifully about each and every song on his list. I’ve already discovered a few new gems to obsess over.

• My friend Sarah wrote about the unpaid work sex bloggers are asked to do, although pretty much all creative types are asked to work for free all the damn time. “Paying people for their labor shouldn’t have to be a revolutionary thing,” she writes. “If you think bloggers’ work is good enough for you to want to partner with us, pay us. It’s truly that simple.” Yes girl yes!

• Even if you’re not all that interested in perfume, you might enjoy The Dry Down, a perfume-focused newsletter written by Rachel Syme and Helena Fitzgerald. The one sent in early January was a beautifully written treatise on how perfume interacts with gender and economic privilege, and what perfume can be when it’s not about “inaccessible, monied femininity.” Fragrances, Helena writes, are “a way to invite both other people and yourself to play, to explore whatever gender or expression thereof interests you, whatever memories you want to crawl into the warm burrow of and sleep pressed against through the winter, whatever dormant stories you want to unlock from your own closed archives.”

• Caitlin wrote about the difference between a vulva and a vagina. Messing up this distinction is the quickest way to piss off a sex blogger, FYI…

• After reading my piece about feeling addicted to love, a friend sent me this article about “the shadow side of alternative sexuality,” and how kink and polyamory can “[paint you] into a corner of identity politics that nobody will be able to rescue you from because it feels too much like sex-shaming.” It’s heavy stuff, and I don’t think it’s a perfect match with my own experiences by any means, but it’s definitely some food for thought.

• Brandon Taylor – who is fantastic – wrote a Twitter thread about lessons he’s learned. Some faves of mine:  “47. If you want to suck a dick, then suck one. Don’t take your sexual frustration and confusion out on others with oppressive legislation.” ✨”52. There is no making it. There is no line. There is no point at which you’ve achieved all your goals. Always be scheming and dreaming.”✨ “27. Gay men, LOL. Yikes.”

• This piece about the origins of the phrase “eat a bag of dicks” made me cry with laughter. “They say necessity is the mother of invention; at some point, it’s obvious that we as a society simply realized that telling someone to suck or eat one dick was no longer an adequate insult,” Tracy Moore writes. “We needed to go bigger.”

• Shon Faye’s “guide to everything you need to know about your twenties” is so, so good. Read it.

• “I have a depression and I always will,” writes my pal Sarah in this poignant, painful, but ultimately hopeful blog post.

• I’ve been swoonin’ over this Paul Cook song, “A Real Thunderbolt.” It’s such a lovely crystallization of what it feels like to be suddenly, profoundly attracted to someone. 🎵Someone who makes your heart jolt. Not some “okay” girl. A real thunderbolt.🎵

• Queer femmes’ online communities are super important, flying in the face of misogyny (both the sociocultural and internalized kinds), homophobia, femmephobia, and millennial-shaming. “Having queer femme friendships is essential. It’s non-negotiable,” says one interviewee in this article, and I am wont to agree.

• This poem on “how to make love to a trans person” is gorgeous.

What were your favorite things you read/wrote/listened to this month?