When you come back from the dark,
I’ll take off your boots
slowly,
breaking the habit of distance.

I’ll set them aside
and let the road fall silent.

I’ll lay your body down.
We needed this place to stand.

I will walk on you.
Not to diminish—
to feel where you hold.

Walk on you.
Walk with me.

Let my wear carry you.
The daily weight of thresholds.
The quiet miles between rooms.
The friction that turns use into belonging.

Let me remember you
in your threads with every step.
In thinning fabric.
In pressure that leaves a record.

You will not vanish under me.
You will be what makes standing possible.

Resources discussed today include:
Canes made by Lumbersnackster, fetlife: @lumbersnackster
The English Governess by John Glassco.

Producers: Maypop, Siren, Sunflower, Zinnia, Poppy, Dahlia, Wisteria, and Lavender; Sound Editor: Primrose; Music Creators: Nick Ruiz and Dawson Kroeger

Besa.

She said it like an invocation, low and full-chested, the word still warm from the cave of her mouth, exhaled from somewhere deeper than lungs, forged in the back of her throat and kissed into the hollow of my clavicle—the sound trembles, solemn, deliberate. I can feel her mouth near my skin, hovering—heat without touch. Besa, she says again, and this time it’s a promise placed wet and heavy on my body like an offering.

She dips her body low, spine still straight, head bowed, and kneels, not just in posture, but in presence. A masc lesbian dom, all broad shoulders and slow power, surrendering to serve—not lessened by it, but made more. There’s a stillness in her now, but I know the storm she could unleash. The restraint itself is a kind of dominance. And devotion.

“I give you my vow, the promise of my honor,” she breathes, her voice rough silk on my inner thigh. “To make you come. To make you come. To bring you to that trembling edge and hold you there like a jewel balanced on my tongue. To bring you to the place where your body forgets the past and remembers only this.” Her voice, all gravel and gravity, filled the space like candle-smoke, thick, slow, lingering.

She had stripped herself bare for this—not her clothes, but something deeper. That cool, controlled masculinity she wore so well as armor had been loosened at the edges. It wasn’t gone, no. But at this moment, she wasn’t performing masculinity. She was offering it: her strength, her presence, her command—given over in service, to me.

There is something reverent about a dominant who kneels with purpose, not because she is broken or unsure, but because she understands the holiness in devotion. When her knees kissed the stone floor beneath us with the same quiet resolve I imagined generations before her had shown when giving their word to protect a guest, a family, a lover. That’s what besa meant—it meant I could walk through fire, and she would cup the flames with her palms to shield me. It meant if I surrendered to her, she would rise to meet that surrender with sacred precision.

I cupped her cheek, thumb dragging gently over her sharp-edged jawline. “You understand what you’re offering?”

“I do,” she said. Her dark eyes held mine, unflinching. “I am at your pleasure tonight. Your protector in the valley of ache. Your guide through the forest of want. Your hands don’t need to beg. Your eyes don’t need to plead. I see you. I promise you—I will not fail.” She kissed my inner thigh. Pressing the promise into my softness. What should be silly or absurd becomes a love poem traced onto my skin by her slender fingers. She isn’t hasty because she doesn’t need to be. Because she knows. This wasn’t the fumbling urgency of conquest; this was craftsmanship, the slow etching of promise into skin. Her fingers glide over me as though every part of my body was named in her mother tongue. She calls each nerve ending by its true name and waits until it answers.

And I—moaning, writhing, craving—am not a supplicant here.

I am an altar.

I whispered her name, not in command but in disbelief that I was being held in this way. That someone had knelt, not just with desire but with honor, and made it her life’s purpose for the next hours to guide me to joy: and not just joy, but something earned, sacred, trembling in its truth.

The first time she brought me to the edge, she paused.

“Why?” I gasped, hips lifting of their own accord.

She rose on her knees until we were face to face again. “Because the oath must be kept with reverence. I will not rush your ruin. Your undoing is holy.”

It undid me more than any orgasm might have.

Her fingers draw me back to the edge, her tongue coaxing like a secret. I come undone slowly, trembling as she whispers Albanian oaths between my legs.

There is no question of whether I will come. That would be like doubting gravity. The only mystery is how many times and whether I will still remember my name by the end. My pleasure is the liturgy she recites with her hands, her mouth, her grit-polished voice.

She speaks low into my belly, her breath hot and deliberate. “You are not just desired, you are kept. You are seen. All of you—flawed, hungry, radiant.”

And fuck help me, I believe her.

When she drinks, the flood between my world dissolves, and there are only sensations and promises, trembling together. My body arches into it, the heat of her tongue insistent and reverent.

I cry out her name again, this time only half-formed. My hands in her hair, unsure whether I want to pull her closer or beg her to stop before I dissolve entirely. My hips stutter.

I can’t speak. I just nod, tears already at the edge of my lashes.

And when she finally lets me fall, I shatter. It’s not released. It’s a revelation. My orgasm isn’t an end, but a recognition. She pulls the sound from my throat, raw and aching, my need vibrating through the room like the final note of a hymn.

“You meant it,” I whispered.

“Of course,” she said, voice barely there. “Besa is not decoration. It is law.”

I felt the warmth of her touch lingering throughout my body. Not just touched.

But kept.

And she waited, with her breath warm and heavy on my thighs.

And then began again.

Tableau

Plum-black, blush-white, red -

so much red, the gradient
of an apple’s first surrender
your back bent, shoulders melon and cream,
laid bare in the slow undoing,
the peel of you
by my damp and deliberate hands.

You brace, skin humid,
quick-palmed to help me strip the day away,
weekend’s ample failures stacked behind us
unopened letters to next week.

April slants cold,
half green, half dare,
the room still smelling of afternoon’s

sweat and spilled coffee.

Now dusk. Now the bite of metal on thigh.
Your breath at my knee,
your spine my table,
flat enough to hold what I need:
the belt, the page, the blunt-tipped pen
scratching out what I owe you,
what I take.

We count, not calories,

not time
but how many times I made you stay
just like this,
goose-neck lamp glaring down
on skin gone taut and striped
in little red ledger lines.

Every bite-mark, every small rebellion,
every yes you mouthed against the woodgrain floor
all aftertaste now.

Later, slipping coats on at the door,
envelopes in hand,
postmark queue waiting,
we joke

dry-mouthed, still sore
“Now we can die.”
And almost mean it.

Grief is a salt-bloom -

wounds you but feeds you too. It teaches you to mouth a storm,

to kneel beneath the sky and sip it. My friend calls it the beautiful terrible,

snarling but radiant, a beast that drags light behind it.

I don’t run anymore. I lie still and let it find me, wash me with my ache until I shine.

To submerge in grief is not to drown—

it is to be rivered, undone, made sediment, clay, bed.

She met me at the bend where water folds in shadow.

We unlaced our names, buried them beneath current.

And in silence, we learned each other by weight, not word.

She took my grief into her fire mouth hungry for fuel,

her howl opening like a wound to make room for mine.

I fed her everything—

the names I cannot say aloud, the prayers I choked on.

She didn’t flinch. She swallowed me clean.

We lay down in a field full of thistle and bees. Grief hummed

between our teeth and still, she held me.

We let the sun have our backs, the dirt our knees.

Our bodies fermented and bloomed. We did not rise. We rooted.

I did not offer her light—

only skin, a vessel for her heat and thunder.

Her ache made a map of me, and I let her ink me.

Now, when I am lost, I follow the river her sorrow left on me.

There is no cure for loving a woman who also grieves.

But there is rhythm, the kind that rocks you when words break.

This is not tragedy. This is a kind of blessing. Not from god,

but from the hunger in our mouths and the bruises we name “yes.”

I chant her name. A lucky thing. A holy collapse,

like a secret you rub instead of speak. She gave me the split.

The raw. The tooth and rust of having survived.

We touched there—

where she was not healed,

where I was still bleeding.

And it was good.

Producers Maypop, Siren, Sunflower, Zinnia, Poppy, Dahlia, Wisteria and Lavender; Sound Editor Primrose; Music Creators Nick Ruiz and Dawson Kroeger

Posting an essay on Substack feels like flashing your tits to your neighbour because it is a consensual, intentional violation of the imagined boundary between inside and outside. Because you are not naked by accident. Because you stood in your own kitchen, looked out the window, and decided that the point was to be seen.

Let’s get something straight, philosophically and otherwise: you are not exposing your body. You are exposing your interiority. Your thinking voice. Your unfinished conclusions. Your appetites. Your sense of humor. Your sharp little ethical knives. Recognizing this can help your audience feel empowered and proud of their vulnerability.

A nipple is just flesh. An essay is a claim.

When you post on Substack, you are saying: This is how I see the world. This is what I think matters. This is how I touch an idea. You are not whispering it at a dinner party. You are not waiting to be invited onto a panel. You are not softening it with “just my opinion.” You hit publish. You are reinforcing your sense of agency and control.

That’s the flashing part.

The neighbour isn’t just shocked because breasts are shocking. The neighbour is shocked because you didn’t ask permission.

We pretend that writing is safer than sex. We pretend that ideas are polite things that arrive fully clothed, credentialed, and properly chaperoned by footnotes. But anyone who has actually written something that matters knows better. Writing is exposure. Writing is arousal. Writing is the moment you realize your voice has weight and could be used against you or desired by someone you didn’t expect.

Substack strips away the institutional lingerie. No editor smoothing your seams. No publication laundering your intent. No academic distance. It’s just you, your words, and a button that says publish like a safe word you’re daring yourself not to use.

And if you write the way I do, philosophically, erotically, with your boots on and your spine straight, then yes. It feels obscene. Not sexual, but in a way that refuses to be modest.

That’s because modesty is comforting. It is a social tool that keeps desire manageable while holding power deniable. It allows everyone to pretend that nobody is looking too closely.

But Substack, when done correctly, is a close look, an invitation to a strange intimacy.

Strangers reading you in bed. Former lovers recognize themselves between the lines. Colleagues quietly recalibrate their respect for you. Family members pretending they haven’t seen it while absolutely having seen it. The gaze is diffuse, uncontrollable, and asymmetrical. You don’t know who is watching. You only see that you are visible.

Which is why it feels like flashing.

But here’s the dominatrix philosopher part, so pay attention.

Flashing is only humiliating if you believe your body or your mind belongs to the public to regulate. If you feel exposure is something that happens to you, rather than something you wield.

When I publish an essay, I am not begging to be seen. I am choosing who must look away if they can’t handle it.

That’s power.

There is a long tradition of policing women’s expression by calling it indecent. Too emotional. Too sexual. Too much. Too confident. Too direct. The accusation is always the same: cover yourself. And what they mean is: dull your edges, soften your claims, stop making me feel implicated. Substack bypasses the gatekeepers who once decided whose ideas were “appropriate.” That freedom comes with a cost. You absorb the gaze directly. Praise feels intimate. Criticism feels personal. Silence feels like standing naked in a window after everyone has gone back inside.

But this is also why it’s addictive.

Because once you realize that exposure doesn’t kill you, something in you relaxes. Once you know that being seen doesn’t actually strip you of dignity, unless you hand it over, you start to enjoy the heat of it. The danger. The clarity.

You learn which readers lean in and which ones avert their eyes. You discover that the neighbour’s shock is not your problem. You learn that visibility is not the same thing as availability. You can be fully seen and still untouchable.

That’s not exhibitionism. That’s authorship.

So yes. Posting an essay on Substack feels like flashing your tits to your neighbour.

Not because it’s crude.

But because it’s bold, unmediated, and unapologetically yours.

And because somewhere deep down, you know exactly why you did it.

You wanted to see who could handle the view.

What we take from tide takes root in the throat—
a mineral ache, a wanting that learns to breathe.
Long nights stretch their blue spines along the shore,
each hour rinsed and returned, rinsed and returned.
The moon salts everything it touches: skin, thought,
the small vows we pretend we did not make.

Her hips arrive like a hush you can feel—
not silence, but the held note before the choir opens.
I lose my names there. I lose my angles.
The body remembers a grammar older than speech,
how to lean, how to open, how to listen
for the pulse beneath the waterline.

Waves practice their red hunger song,
a low anthem licking the ankles of the world.
It is not blood but heat, not fire but brightness,
a calling that stains the mouth with yes.
The sea keeps teaching us the same lesson
until we stop calling it longing and call it tide.

Trigger Warning: blood play

The resources discussed today are Lumbersnackster’s personal designs. You can find them on Fetlife @lumbersnackster

Producers: Maypop, Siren, Sunflower, Zinnia, Poppy, Dahlia, Wisteria and Lavender; Sound Editor: Primrose; Music Creators: Nick Ruiz and Dawson Kroeger

“Yes, And...” in Chains: Improv as Kink’s Favorite Secret. Why your bedroom needs less script, more spontaneity, and a dash of theatrical risk

Great roleplay doesn’t start with a script.

It starts with an inhale, a look, a gesture. A challenge half-whispered in the back of the throat. A command you didn’t expect to say. A confession you didn’t expect to hear. It begins in the moment, alive, specific, and unrepeatable. You’re not reading your lines. You’re reading your scene partner. And they’re reading you.

That mutual attention is the core of what makes a roleplay scene thrilling, not just for your partner, not just for the audience (if there is one), but for you. And Improv is my favorite tool in the kink toolbox. It’s not just for theater nerds and comedy kids (though the Venn diagram of participants in both theater and kink looks like a circle on most days). It’s for every Dom who’s ever gotten flustered mid-interrogation, for every brat who lost the plot two lines into their resistance, for every submissive who wants to respond more naturally but freezes when the fantasy starts. It’s for the scared, the silly, the sincere, and the deeply horny.

Improv is not “winging it.” It’s not chaos. It’s connection.

Let’s Start With a Dirty Truth. Kinksters love structure. We have safe words, contracts, protocols, symbols of status, and service. Some of us color-code collars. Some of us chart reward/punishment matrices. Some of us draw spreadsheets to organize our degradation plans. Structure gives us safety. But mistaken rigidity for structure?

It turns roleplay into theater, not intimacy. The plot becomes a checklist. The players become stiff. And suddenly, nobody’s turned on—they’re just trying to remember their following line. The worst roleplay is the one that feels like roleplay. You know, flat dialogue, no real stakes, all bark and no bite. You say your line, they say theirs, and it’s like two parallel monologues instead of a conversation. You’re not reacting to each other. You’re just waiting for your cue.

Kink deserves better than that. It deserves to breathe. It deserves to move. It deserves to surprise you. And if that sounds soft or silly to you, good. Let’s disarm the myth that dominance needs to be rigid or that submission needs to be mindless. The best scenes come from creative intelligence—yours and your partner’s. And intelligence loves spontaneity. Improvisation isn’t the opposite of structure. It’s what makes the structure dynamic. It’s the muscle under the protocol. The heat under the ritual. The laughter under the obedience. When we treat roleplay like a live conversation instead of a memorized script, we give our scenes room to become alive. Breathing, shifting, growing with us—not in spite of us, but because of us.

Let’s get specific. Here are some core improv principles that change the way we play:

1. Active Listening

Most people think they listen. They’re just waiting for their turn to speak.

Active listening in a scene means paying attention to what’s happening—not just the words, but the tone, the breath, the hesitations, the blinks. It means responding to the energy, not the script. It’s knowing that the next words your partners say reshape reality.

If your brat just said, “I bet you don’t even have the guts to punish me,” you could repeat the punishment you planned—or you could respond to their exact wording. Are they bluffing? Teasing? Testing? Terrified? You can only know if you’re listening.

2. Yes, And

This is the holy grail of improv. It’s about accepting the reality your scene partner offers and adding to it and not correcting and not contradicting. Building. You don’t need to be funny. You don’t need to be clever. You just need to stay present and let the moment evolve with both of your energies inside it. It enables you to respond instead of reacting. It teaches you to trust your instincts, to stay true to your character under pressure, and to co-create rather than control.

They say, “Please don’t make me wear that in front of your friends.” You say, “Of course not, pet. In fact, I won’t let you wear anything at all.” That’s yes, and.

They say, “You’re not my real owner.” You say, “No, but your real owner sent me to discipline you properly.” That’s yes, and.

“Yes, and,” isn’t literal agreement. It’s affirming the emotional truth of the moment and then adding heat.

3. Stay in Character—Especially When You’re Flustered

Scenes go sideways. They always do. Somebody forgets the plot. Somebody giggles. Somebody accidentally steps on a plug. Improvisation gives you the power to absorb chaos and make it part of the show.

The brat knocks over a water bottle mid-punishment? “Oh, you think messes clean themselves now?”

Your submissive calls you by your real name instead of “Mistress”? “Do I look like [Name] to you, worm?”

Every mistake is an invitation. Say yes, and.

Let’s start at the very beginning: fantasy.

You’re a divine seductress. Your play partner is a skeptical priest or a recruit to your temple. You don’t need a script. You need a premise. You tempt. They resist. You press. They falter. You punish. They moan. Every choice they make feeds your next one. You respond to their resistance with sharper enticements. They reveal fear? You promise mercy, just before you deny it.

Or maybe you’re a stern interrogator. They’re spies with secrets. You don’t need ten planned questions. You need one line: “We have ways of making you talk.” Then you see what they give you. Do they mouth off? Play dumb? Break immediately? Your next move depends on theirs.

You’re not reading a story. You’re writing one together, moment by moment, bound wrist by gasping breath by slurred words.

Let’s kill the myth that eroticism has to be serious. Laughter Isn’t the Enemy of Lust.

Yes, high protocol and strict roles can be hot as hell. Yes, composure can be delicious. But laughter doesn’t ruin a scene. Disconnection ruins a scene.

If someone slips and says something goofy, laugh with them. Stay in character and incorporate it. That kind of warmth makes your scenes richer. It creates psychological safety. It tells your partner, “We are in this together, even if it’s silly. Especially if it’s silly.” Nothing kills chemistry faster than panic over breaking character. Improv gives you the tools to bend without breaking.

You don’t have to be perfect. You just have to be present.

Improv builds better chemistry because something magical happens—you don’t know what will happen next. That’s the secret to genuine eroticism—not just friction or protocol, but suspense. —Surprise. Risk.

Improv scenes don’t have predictable beats. They evolve. That evolution creates emotional investment. You both care more, because it isn’t predetermined. It’s happening right now, under your hands, between your eyes, through your voice. The chemistry that emerges in those moments is deep. It’s not just attraction. It’s trust. Creativity. Reciprocity.

Want to practice this? Here’s your bedroom warm-up set:

· Character hot-seat: Take turns asking each other questions in character. You can’t break. Try answering as a demon queen, a war criminal, a hypnotic android. It’s ridiculous. It’s revealing. It’s hot.

· Scene freeze: Mid-scene, freeze and switch the premise. What happens if the servant becomes the Empress? What happens if the brat becomes the teacher? Can you keep playing?

These games aren’t just silly. They make your mind flexible. They teach you to think while aroused, to play while vulnerable, to stay connected when things change. We’ve all had scenes that veered off the rails. A missed cue. A sudden wave of emotion. A safeworded surprise. Improv doesn’t stop those moments—it prepares you for them. Instead of panic, you pivot. Instead of shutting down, you redirect. That emotional agility is invaluable in kink.

Even in high-intensity scenes, improv gives you a way to recover grace. You’re not stuck fumbling or apologizing or resetting. You can weave the rupture into the story. You can make the repair part of the arc. And when you do that skillfully, your partner trusts you more, not less.

Improvisation doesn’t just make your play smoother. It makes it safer.

So, the next time you step into character, take a breath. Forget the script. Lock eyes. Say something you didn’t plan. Wait for their reply. Say yes, and... both of you will remember.

The First Time I Tasted Her Color

She told me her favorite color was a bruise—
the kind that purples over bone but never hurts.
I met her at dusk, and her dress was soaked in it.
She asked if I wanted to taste it.
I said yes before I knew how.

She pressed me to the garden wall.
Jasmine and rust, plum and breath.
Her mouth found mine, and I swear—
the color stained my tongue.
I couldn’t speak for three days.
I only moaned in gradients.

I want every gasp to be a swallowed fuck me harder

in the hallowed curve of a confessional for those fingers edged in ice flurry bruised greed under nails along the audacity of this offering, this musk bravura - take it in as an order, a charge against senses and sense now rare, this trust - a cracked leather treaty - a defense to the righteous archetype of rough debt - a hungry gift on this bed or chaise lounge or sofa or pinned on the edge of this overpriced credenza, and balance penance and breath, anchor your gaze, disentangle a body of its potential, of what we applied, of energy bound and kinetic exhausted in gusts through this slivering of a mirror or margin of skin between subject and object of velvet-wood active-life to be a

Yes, and yes.

Resources Discussed During This Episode:

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk

Unfuck Your Kink by Faith G. Harper

Producers Maypop, Siren, Sunflower, Zinnia, Poppy, Dahlia, Wisteria and Lavender; Sound Editor Primrose; Music Creators Nick Ruiz and Dawson Kroeger

There is a lie we tell ourselves about purification.
It goes like this: if you stand still long enough in the rain, if you confess properly, if you scrub hard enough, the desire will rinse off you. You will emerge clean. Innocent. Redeemed. As if wanting were a stain instead of a force.

That lie is very attractive to people who are afraid of their own hunger.

I keep thinking about Béla Tarr and his dry, merciless observation: “In his films, rain purifies people. In mine, it just makes mud.” He’s talking about Andrei Tarkovsky, of course—about cinema, about metaphysics—but he might as well be talking about lust, morality, and the fantasy of being washed clean without being changed.

Because lust doesn’t want to purify you.
Lust wants to grow something.

Tarkovsky’s rain falls like absolution. You suffer, you endure, and then—cinematically, spiritually—you are lighter. Elevated. Cleansed. It’s a beautiful idea. It’s also a very disciplined one. Rain as baptism. Rain as forgiveness. Rain as a moral solvent.

But Tarr’s rain? Tarr’s rain falls on the same bodies, the same streets, the same stubborn earth, and all it does is make everything heavier. Stickier. More difficult to walk through without getting marked.

Mud is what happens when water meets life.

And here’s where I stop being polite and start being a dominatrix philosopher.

Mud is not failure. Mud is evidence.

Good soil is not clean. Good soil is rich with rot, bacteria, decay, old roots, and things that died so other things could grow. Anyone who has ever actually planted anything knows this. Anyone who has ever touched a body honestly knows this, too.

Lust is not rain that falls from the heavens to save you. Lust is rain that hits the ground and refuses to stay separate.

We want purification because we want distance. We want to believe there is a version of desire that does not implicate us. A wanting that leaves no residue. A craving that doesn’t smear itself across our identity, our ethics, our sense of self.

But lust doesn’t work like that. Lust is contact. Lust is friction. Lust is what happens when your clean narrative about who you are meets the reality of what you want.

And what you get is mud.

People ask—often with a nervous little laugh—whether there is a way to be “pure” and still want intensely. Whether there is a desire that doesn’t degrade, contaminate, or compromise. Whether there is a way to kneel without getting dirty.

I always wonder who taught them that dirt was the enemy.

Purity culture—sexual, moral, intellectual—depends on the fantasy that growth can happen without mess. That transformation can occur without discomfort. That you can remain intact while becoming something else.

But nothing grows in sterile conditions.

Mud is where things take root. Mud is where seeds crack open. Mud is where the boundary between what was and what will be dissolves just enough for change to happen.

Lust is mud because lust is creative. It creates bonds, fantasies, power dynamics, risks, art, mistakes, children, philosophies, scars, rituals. It creates selves you would never meet if you stayed dry.

And yes—mud stains. It clings. It leaves marks that don’t rinse off easily. That’s the part everyone wants to skip. The evidence that you were here. That you wanted. That you touched something and were touched back.

When I write about desire, power, grief, or submission, people sometimes ask whether it’s meant to be cathartic. Purifying. Healing.

No.

It’s meant to be fertile.

I am not interested in washing readers clean. I am interested in handing them a shovel and asking what they’re willing to plant in the mess they already live in.

Because the question is not whether there is a version of purification that avoids mud. There isn’t. The question is whether you are willing to stop mistaking cleanliness for virtue.

Tarr understands this. His worlds are slow, bleak, repetitive—not because he hates humanity, but because he refuses to lie about it. Rain does not save his characters. It reveals the conditions they are already in. It makes the ground honest.

Lust does the same thing.

It shows you where you are soft. Where you are starving. Where you are alive enough to risk being seen wanting something you cannot control into neat lines.

Mud is not a punishment.
Mud is a medium.

And if you are brave—if you are serious—you will stop asking how to stay clean and start asking what you are capable of growing once you accept that your hands will never be spotless again.

Come closer.
Step off the pavement.
Feel how the ground gives under your weight.

That isn’t corruption.

That’s life.

One by one, like pomegranate seeds.
Sweet, bitter, staining.
Each name she whispered,
then pressed to my lips.

I swallowed jealousy
like wine.
It ran down my throat
and bloomed into fire.

When I begged for my name,
she said:
You’re not done eating.

Referenced in the episode:

NCSF – National Coalition of Sexual Freedom

The Invitation to a Brave Space by Mickey ScottBey Jones

You can find the Authentically Kinky podcast at:

Credits: Producers Maypop, Siren, Sunflower, Zinnia, Poppy, Dahlia, Wisteria and Lavender; Sound Editor Primrose; Music Creators Nick Ruiz and Dawson Kroeger

I still date.

I know, it’s fucking wild. Some days I don’t know why either. Being on dating apps as someone who works ethically in sex work is its own series of landmines. While I don’t intentionally use these sites for marketing my business, I do try to be incredibly forthright about what I do professionally. I’m quite proud of the unique business I have created. Most small business owners are. Landmine #1: Dating apps do not allow for the solicitation of sex work of any kind, even the legal versions. Because they cannot, and often just will not, dedicate any resources to determining the difference between listing my job and an actual job listing, I have to come up with clever workarounds to say it without completely saying it. Meaning, in my efforts to be forthright, I must be vague, bordering on enigmatic. Landmine # 2: So does everybody who is using the same sites to market or worse, scam. I am still being lumped together with them. Landmine #3: Some guys retaliate against rejection by reporting every account. These digital temper tantrums are more common than most people know. And I came up against it even when dating online “normally”. It becomes more difficult for me to clarify the difference between stating my job and scrolling for clients in that context.

So why do I include all that information upfront? After all that, it seems like it would be easier to get to know someone first and just tell them later. Landmine #4: The reaction. Between the microaggressions (well, I’m looking for a real domme, girl, relationship) to the macroaggressions (*unprintable*), I’d rather know now. Before I learn your dog’s name, get used to the way you message hahaha, and never lol, before I get excited every time the notification chimes on my phone. Tell me now if you think part of me is fake. If what I give freely is worth less than what I sell. That I am worth less. Why bother proving my value to someone who is never going to see me as a person anyway? Landmine #5: I date as a Domme. It is my personal joy to do what I love, and it is a big part of my private life. I like what I call “negotiated equity” in a relationship. But that doesn’t mean that I want to “teach” every person I meet. This is often pushed by the newb that introduces themselves as a complete blank slate with no boundaries and often doesn’t want to tell me anything about themselves or their interests. Suddenly, I am the spokesperson for the whole community, and none of this feels like dating. Landmine #6: The opposite angle but the same expectation. Much like an artist, people will demand to know why I don’t provide it for them automatically, often to their very demanding criteria, just for “the love of it.” What I do in my specific business model requires a long-term commitment upfront. Because I advise on the totality of a person’s life while integrating kink in order to sculpt behaviour, we both have to be all into the ownership process from the beginning. It is the only way to support them ethically. While there are testing conversations and phone calls, these are dedicated to a specific goal. We are looking for compatibility, but it is more intense than casual dating. When I try to explain that I don’t have a casual way of playing at consensual behavioural modification and ownership, I’m often met with sullenness. Which follows into Landmine #7: “the kink dispenser.” This is not a unique experience for professionals, but it is a serious issue in the community as a whole that gets magnified when you add the presumption of disposability. And it’s not specific to dominatrixes, or even women. Men, non-binary, we all seem to get to experience the amazing joy of having a near stranger connect with us solely on their kinks with no reciprocity.

And I do know where a lot of this comes from. There are a lot of, well, men out there that look to a woman as if she is supposed to accept him fully and thus validate him. When you add the isolating aspect of having a hyper-specific, often judged sexual special interest, the idea of being accepted for that alone feels like enough. When a woman doesn’t balk at receiving that detail, it can feel like a full-bodied invitation. So, when they find out what I do, it can be translated as a rejection. Believing that I must have been comfortable with them to use them for financial reasons, ignoring the idea that if all they wanted was to have their fantasies fulfilled, they were already using me. In the end, many men never saw me as a person anyway; they just changed what category of non-person they put me in.

“To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.”
― Martha Nussbaum

And I don’t have an answer to any of this. That is not really what this post is about. I am just a person on the other side of this screen, trying to stay open and hoping to be seen.

When She Painted My Mouth Closed

She said she liked me best
when I was quiet and open.
So she dipped a brush in melted beeswax
and traced it along my lips,
sealing the noise in.

The wax hardened,
and I could only hum—
low, guttural notes
that turned her hips molten.
She opened me with her fingers,
not for words,
but to scoop out the silence
and taste what I meant instead.

In 1602, the Italian master painter

Caravaggio completed his Saint Matthew and the Angel on a commission from the Contarelli Chapel. They rejected it immediately. In the painting, the Saint is just a man. His broad, bald head picks up the golden candlelight in the room. The chair beneath him is grounded with the weight of a stocky worker’s body. His feet, unshod and coarse, jut out at the viewer, demanding the humanness of the apostle be acknowledged. Around Matthew, a cupid-lipped Angel curves patiently, kindly guiding his rough hands across the page of the gospels. He stares, wide-eyed. Perhaps the glory of the message is being spread across the velum, perhaps in a trance, only as a conduit for the Angel’s pen. The church demanded a new painting, arguing that the Saint’s physicality did not match the depictions of Matthew already created by Caravaggio and hanging in the church. He capitulated and rendered a different painting. This time the Angel’s swooping form soared overhead, far from the narrow frame of the scholarly Saint Matthew. In truth, Caravaggio was a tempestuous man. And his dynamic, often brutal art showed the eye of someone who could see dramatic beauty in violence. He lived an untempered life, full of fighting, and ultimately ended with the aggression he lived with. In the oils he left behind, his colors pull realism out of the shadows of the canvases. The paintings placed transfixed subjects in the path of great shafts of light splitting the darkness. In this moment, captured mid-flight, fight, or religious ecstasy, the subjects are intensely human. Even Jesus twisted his hands and furrowed his brow for Caravaggio’s brush. Three and a half centuries later, rejected from the sanctuary of the church building it was designed for, Saint Matthew and the Angel found itself hanging in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum with thousands of other pieces of art seized by the Nazis. It never made it out of Berlin. After being moved to an anti-aircraft tower to protect it from looting or the bombs of the advancing Soviet Army, Saint Matthew, his Angel, and 700 other pieces of art were burnt or went missing in May of 1945. Very occasionally a missing sculpture will appear, popping up in a private collection. But to date, only one of the 434 paintings has been rediscovered. Saint Matthew and the Angel are presumed to have burned, rendered to ash and melted oil paint. Today, the only images of this painting and about 100 others from the museum tragedy exist in painstakingly preserved black-and-white photographs. You can see images that historians have digitally altered to attempt to reclaim Caravaggio’s lost colors. But someday, soon, the last eyes that have truly seen Caravaggio’s beautiful, blasphemous masterpiece will close for their final time. That moment may have already happened, without us knowing. And ultimately this intensely human painting will die with the human mind it lives in.