voyeurism

Using a Sex Doll With a Partner is Underrated

Kate Sloan

It’s interesting, the narratives that evolve around particular sex toys. A woman who likes big realistic dildos, for instance, will often be assumed to like big dicks too, even if that’s not the case. A man who uses an anal vibrator can easily elicit comments about how he’s probably gay, even though anyone with a lick of sense knows that butts have no sexual orientation. And similarly, if you poll the public about what type of person owns a sex doll, odds are good that they’d tell you it’s single and (involuntarily?) celibate people who own them.

It’s true that sex dolls tend to be big investments – Best Real Doll has offerings ranging from $80 to $2,199 – and one could make the argument that a person is likelier to make that type of investment if they’re highly motivated by, say, horniness or loneliness or a combination thereof. But as anyone who’s ever been in a relationship can tell you, being coupled up is not an automatic or everlasting cure for horniness or loneliness!

Not to mention – and this is what I’d really like to talk about today – using a sex doll with a partner (or with multiple partners!) can be fun as hell. Let me count the ways…

 

Scenario 1: Long-distance play

Most applicably to my own life as a person in a long-distance marriage, adult sex dolls can be wonderful toys for couples who are separated by distance, whether for the long-term or the short-term.

Masturbating for each other over FaceTime or Zoom is fun, but it doesn’t necessarily help you feel like you’re there in the room with your sweetheart, because, well… if you were, you’d probably be touching them, rather than them touching themself. Watching them use a sex doll, on the other hand? *chef’s kiss*

Seeing my partner do things like go down on their sex doll, or get on top of it and fuck it, is like seeing my own sex life with them represented from a different angle. It’s also a bit like watching amateur porn the two of us have made together, except I’m not even there. It’s great! Highly recommend!

Scenario 2: Cuckolding

Cuckold kink is having a bit of a moment in the popular consciousness right now. (There’s even a whole book about the history of cuckolding, called Insatiable Wives. The more you know!)

However, even people who fetishize being cucked (or doing the cucking) may not want to actually go through with it in real life, for various reasons. Maybe they’re worried about STIs or COVID safety; maybe they work in childcare, education or politics and are concerned about being outed if they scout for a third on the apps; maybe they just prefer to be monogamous IRL despite their profoundly non-monogamous fantasies. That’s all valid, and cuck fans in those situations deserve to be able to explore their kink nonetheless!

That’s where sex dolls come in. They pose way fewer problems than a human stranger in your bed, and they also conveniently can be stored under said bed when you’re done, which… is generally inadvisable with real-life people. (Unless they’re into that, in which case, mazel tov.)

 

Scenario 3: Voyeurism, exhibitionism and/or denial

Chastity play is a part of my dynamic with my partner, and I could see it being fun to ride a sex doll in front of them while they’re locked up, as a way of teasing them with what they can’t have.

But even if denial isn’t explicitly part of your play, it can be hot to give your partner a show. They can “look but don’t touch,” like at a strip club, or they can get involved after a while if the spirit moves them. Sex-doll three-way, anyone?

 

Have you ever used a sex doll with a partner? Is it something you’d consider?

 

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

5 Pandemic-Friendly Kinks to Play With While Quarantining

Kate Sloan

I don’t know about you, but watching a dramatic worldwide crescendo of racism and transphobia play out against the backdrop of a global pandemic doesn’t exactly make me horny. I’m sure that’s quadruply true for the people of color and trans people directly affected by the tidal wave of bullshit enveloping the world right now.

And yet… particularly for those of us who are highly sexual people and/or sex nerds, pursuing pleasure through sex can be one of our major methods of escapism, right alongside Netflix marathons and Animal Crossing sessions. I’ve been lucky enough to have my partner quarantined with me for the past 3 months, but they can’t and won’t stay forever, so I’m mentally preparing myself for the need to take my sexuality into my own hands once again. In stressful times such as these, getting creative can be an important component of that.

The good news is that even solo sexual creativity is easier than ever in the internet age. Online, we can theoretically order sex toys and sex furniture to satisfy our every kinky whim – and we can also learn about proclivities we may never have otherwise heard about, and start incorporating them into our fantasy lives. Here are some suggestions that work surprisingly well in a COVID-wracked world…

Mask Up

As a recent NYC Health brief on safer sex in the time of coronavirus helpfully noted, wearing a face covering or mask during sex is one way to practice harm reduction when hooking up these days. However, even if you’re rollin’ solo, a mask could be an interesting addition to your kinky imaginings. As you’ve probably already noticed while walking around with a mask on, these useful pieces of fabric make it slightly difficult to breathe… kinda like a lover’s hand clamped over your mouth and nose in a breath-play scene. This effect could make a mask a hot addition to your next masturbation session – just be safe, okay? Take the mask off if you start to experience any genuine discomfort or difficulty breathing. And wash that thing before you wear it out into the world again, incase you got any, uh, droplets on it.

Undercover Ballgag

Speaking of masks, it occurs to me that these days you could potentially wear a ballgag outdoors completely unnoticed under your mask, particularly with the creative usage of a hat or somesuch to cover any telltale straps. Only do this if you know you won’t need to interact with anyone at any point – maybe on a meandering walk on side-streets while listening to a kinky podcast. I’d suggest the type of ballgag that has holes in it for easier breathing, since – as we’ve discussed – masks already make that difficult. Don’t overdo this one, because you don’t want to injure your jaw, but if you’re craving some public humiliation/submission, this could be a cool way to make that happen without necessarily involving any non-consenting third parties.

Creepin’ and Cammin’

We’ve already talked about exhibitionism vis-à-vis quarantine, but my friend Bex had such a great idea about this on a recent episode of our podcast that I wanted to share it here too. With the proliferation of Zoom calls and FaceTime chats these days, it’s easy to imagine a roleplay scenario with a partner in which you “accidentally” forget to disconnect at the end of a call, and the person on the other end is able to creepily watch while you get undressed, or jerk off, or fellate a sex toy, or… whatever else you like to do to decompress after a draining video call. This is a cool way to play with the idea of a “peeping tom” without either of you having to leave your homes.

Hygiene Humiliation

In just the few months since COVID popped off, I’ve noticed it’s shifted the way I view media. I’ll be watching a party scene from a 1960s sex comedy, or a friend-hang at a crowded bar in a ’90s sitcom, and I’ll feel myself momentarily overcome with medical anxiety – “Aaahh, get away from each other, you’re not standing 6 feet apart, you fools!!” It occurs to me, though, that this same impulse could be harnessed for all sorts of humiliation-based fantasies. Maybe your domme orders you to give yourself a harsh spanking for only washing your hands for one Happy Birthday, not two… or you have to scour every doorknob and cabinet handle with Lysol and an old toothbrush… or you get your mouth rinsed out with soap for breaking one too many public health guidelines. (Listen to the recent episode of the Off the Cuffs podcast entitled “Rub A Dub Dub” for tips on mouth-soaping!) Whatever you do, make sure all your “violations” occur only in your own home, or even just within your fantasies – humiliation is hot but it’s not worth spreading disease for, obvi.

Ghostly ‘Gasms

Have you ever heard of spectrophilia? It’s a fetishistic interest in spirits or ghosts (or the idea of them, anyway). Some folks in this community claim to have actually hooked up with a ghost, or perhaps several; I’ll let the Mythbusters handle that one, but even if you don’t believe in the paranormal, it could be fun to do a spectrophilic scene with your socially-distanced sweetie. If you put them on speakerphone and position your phone such that your lover’s voice seems to be emanating from the walls or from the depths of your closet, you can create the illusion that there’s a pervy, voyeuristic ghost creeping on you while you masturbate. Fear play isn’t everyone’s jam, but it could be a nice make-believe counteragent to the very real fears pervading the globe right now!

 

What COVID-appropriate kinks have you been playing with lately, if any? (“None” is a completely valid answer… Reading the news these days isn’t exactly an aphrodisiac, to say the least.)

 

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

Love Through a Voyeuristic Lens

Kate Sloan

In the age of the internet, it’s normal for our private lives to play out in public. In just a few clicks, you can peek into a beauty influencer’s medicine cabinet, peruse a sex toy blogger’s prized collection (hi), or visit voyeur house private cams where you can watch the life of real people. Not everyone is thrilled about all this openness and exhibitionism, but it’s undeniably part of our culture now.

So, as a sex writer and certifiable member of the Oversharers Club, it surprised me how private I was about my current relationship in its infancy. I talked about it in oblique terms on Twitter, and mentioned to a few friends that I’d been texting with a promising new dude who lived in New York, but for the most part, I wanted to hold those cards close to my chest. Our courtship happened primarily late at night via FaceTime and iMessage, encrypted end-to-end, cordoned off from the rest of our lives. It felt weird to bring it out into the open by talking about it too much – like someone throwing open the door of a darkened closet during a heated game of Seven Minutes in Heaven.

But because this private intimacy was shared between only me and my new crush, it felt almost like it didn’t really exist – like it could be a mirage, a hallucination, a midnight fever-dream. It brought me back to my early days on the internet, when I’d build elaborate romances with strangers in IRC chats and then just go to school the next day like nothing had happened, like nothing had changed. Even as we escalated to using weightier words for each other – partner, boyfriend and girlfriend – still, part of me felt like: here is my “real life,” and here is this relationship, and scarcely the twain shall meet.

So it was quite a jolt the first time my new love – Matt – came to visit me in Toronto. Seeing him in familiar locales, like my bedroom, my parents’ living room, and the coffee shop I go to every week, was as jarring as a bad green-screen sequence in a low-budget movie. How could such a cute, sweet person, who had taken on an almost mythical quality in my mind, exist in the world at all, let alone in my life? I felt like Rob Gordon, the antihero of High Fidelity, when he looks up his long-lost college girlfriend: “She’s in the fucking phone book! She should be living on Neptune. She’s an extraterrestrial, a ghost, a myth, not a person in a phone book!”

He met my family. He met my friends. I took him to my birthday party. But none of it quite felt real – until, shortly after leaving the party, I got a text from my friend Suz, who had left at the same time as us. “Okay, so, creepiest thing I have ever done,” she wrote, “but when we departed at the subway, I could see y’all from the other side. You both looked so in love, so I took some creepy stealth pics for you.”

Matt and I giggled over the photos, crowing “We’re so cute!” and zooming in to examine our amorous body language. Something clicked. Seeing my relationship from the outside allowed me to believe in it from the inside. I felt validated: Yes, he really exists; yes, he really is that cute; yes, he really loves me! Some part of me had been continually nervous that he would evaporate somehow, that I would wake up from the dream or forget to save my game, and he would be gone. But there he was, in a handful of .jpegs, flirting with me on a Toronto subway platform, irrefutable.

Feeling observed in a feeling can make that feeling all the more palpable. Maggie Nelson writes about it in Bluets: “We sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair.” Beauty vloggers know this, as do reality TV stars, theatre actors, Instagram influencers, exhibitionists and voyeurs. Like Schrodinger’s cat, sometimes it is the very act of seeing that heralds the seen object into existence. My relationship would have been real with or without spectators, of course – but my rock-solid, comfortable, life-affirming belief in that relationship? Maybe not so much.

 

This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own. Thank you to Suz for the photos; we love them!