But the second thing I say, is that it helped me get over insecurity about my dick.

Guys care about how big our dicks are. This starts as a latent frustration. Cos a big dick is a trump card. For some women, having a big cock is enough. And so when I want sex, it’s easy to think ‘if only I had a big dick’ then I’d be able to get sex tonight.

And this isn’t just my idle musings. I sometimes set up my friends and I know how they respond when I say “I hear he has a big dick”. I see the dating profiles of ‘size queens’. I have seen the data. Women may not want a huge dick for life, but they want one for Christmas.

Nor is this the only thing. There are many other such trump cards. Being tall, being funny, being wealthy, giving great head. A wealthy guy knows, at the core of his being, that if all else fails he can take her out for a great dinner, a hotel, perhaps on a boat. And that counts for something. A guy who has a big dick knows it. He has big dick energy.

But what starts as frustration can build into general insecurity. Not only does one not have a big dick, but perhaps one has a small one. And perhaps one isn’t going to be able to please the women one wants to.

I started having sex in my mid 20s with a fair amount of religious guilt. Often I struggled to get hard. One ex sweetly said that she liked that my cock wasn’t that hard because often the firmer ones hurt her1. And while I was genuinely grateful for that, it is not my favourite compliment. And so, at times I have worried about my penis. Is it not big enough? Is it not hard enough? Can it stand and be counted? Will it fill the unforgiving minute?

But strangely, the Gangbang was really helpful.

For an hour, I stood in a large AirBnB bedroom, with 20 men and 6 women, clipboard in hand, with Aella getting railed to my right, with one job. Source the next hard dick for 3 minutes of service.

“Any hard dicks? Can we have a hard dick?”

And I expected the long, thick, instantly-hard phalluses of pornographic legend.

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But instead, mine was.. normal. I saw a lot of erections—in hands, in mouths, being idly stroked—and mine could have fit amongst them. I saw a few enormous sausages, which elicited a low laughter from myself, and the three men holding Aella down (”What? What is it?” for she wasn’t able to see who was next). I saw a few small dicks oh, huh, they can look like that. Not micro-penises as such, but just.. smaller than mine. But mine was middle of the pack.

Aella’s subsequent writing helped too. She writes “In general, I realize I’d rather take a 100% hard, 40th percentile sized dick over a 90% hard, 80th percentile dick. This is a big update for me!”. And sure, my penis is not 80th percentile large. But these days, I am pretty good at knowing when it is at its hardest and so thrusting while the iron is hot.

Ultimately, I think it was about being in the room and seeing these dicks at once. Somehow when I start to worry about the size of my dick, something takes me back there and the matter is settled. I saw them, did I not? A whole room full, often at their throbbing best. And it was fine. Now sure, some people’s dicks are small, to which I guess.. get good at fingering and oral? Frankly do that anyway. But rather than telling yourself you have a normal dick, perhaps go where the dicks are and have a look around2.

Me: “I figured this would happen at some point”

“Wait what?” She was shocked.

“I’ve been trying to find a way to hit on you that works for both of us”

See, I struggle with these subby women. They want to be ravished. But I tend to fear that either a ravished woman will feel bad afterwards or too good—that there will be some expectation that I don’t want.

This isn’t without precedent. Several times I have tried to be straightforward and women have either been unimpressed “Is that it?” or have fallen for me, with tears and phone calls. And both feel pretty shit.

Cleo likes to be groped and fucked, and I figure ideally with less anxiety or pussy-footing around, but I usually can’t bring that energy. She asked for some photos of nice boobs before her boob job (”woah those are way too big”) and I’ll squeeze her tits sometimes, but I usually can’t find a connection that feels good between us.

But here it felt better.

Somehow the whole ‘take her to a room, grind up against her’ felt like a thing that it was easy for me to want to do and probably dommy enough that she would be into it.

Her: “I’m sorry I don’t really understand what’s going on”

I paused on top of her1.

“Oh, sorry we can stop”

“No, I mean, there are conversations we should have before we fuck”

“Oh I don’t expect us to fuck. Can I grind up against you?”

She was wearing a tight dress and has big fake tits. She was lying on her side and I straddled her, hovvering above her slightly.

“Sure! But I didn’t think you wanted to”

I typically like connection. Strong desire. Anxiety. Some kind of bit. And she and I are good friends, we don’t have much that is unsaid or some place we are trying to get to. And somehow that means I have not been that interested in fucking her, even when it would have been exceedingly easy. Perhaps because of that.

And now we had some energy, and a bit. I find her attractive. She is laid back, fun, has big boobs and is very competent. And she didn’t expect it, which I enjoyed. I could absolutely have fucked her by now, at a party if no other time, so the evening was not a clear precursor to sex. We had a walk, chatted about our jobs and partners. She was surprised.

Me: “Uh sure, but I want this. A bit. I don’t care much, but I want to grind against you and I figure you’ll enjoy it.”

I do not recommend saying this to someone who doesn’t know that you deeply care for them. Frankly many women in general wouldn’t, I guess, want to be talked to like this2.

Cleo: “I dunno, I think I want to be wanted.”

I was slightly put out by this. “Oh”. A pause. “I do want you. This is as much as I want.” A pause. “Is that okay with you?”

She brightened, “Sure”.

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I rolled her onto her back, freed her boobs and began to nuzzle the left one3. They are large and full. I’ve liked Cleo’s tits for years, both pre- and post-op.

She flinched. Me: “Are you okay?”

Her: “Oh, they are just a bit painful, but I like it”. I was not sure how I felt about that.

I kissed her for a couple more minutes, nuzzling around her face and neck. I was in a good mood. It all felt pretty easy.

She looked at me gravely, “I want to understand what you want”

I rose back up, my weight on her hip, and rolled my eyes, “You and me both.” Me, dramatic? “I want things I want, in ways that the other person wants.”

Her: “You’re kind of subby right?”

“In ways. This has been my idea, we’ve done what I wanted, is that subby? But I would switch. You want to be on top?”

“Uhh sure”

She straddled me. I am of the opinion that boobs look the best from this angle. Either propped up or hanging down. Cleo’s look great, full and large, pushed out of her top. And because she’s a clever woman who gave herself massive fake tits. Oyyyyyy.

Her: “Can I slap you?”

“Uh I guess so, not too hard,” I said, grimacing slightly. “Things can be too much. I’m not wild about being spat on”

“So I can’t spit on you?” She pouted.

“Maybe, but I think you have to make me beg for it.” This is my current stance on spitting, that I have to actually get the parts of me in alignment, not just be pushed to a yes. Enthusiastic positive consent and all that.

She sat on top of me, her full breasts visible. I tried to paw at them. She pushed my hand down. I broke her grip and squeezed again. She slapped me. Oh.

She scratched me along my arms.

“You can go harder.” She did, but not enough. It felt nice.

She scratched at my head. This is, frankly, way too much in a good way. Almost total sensory overload. I writhe underneath her, the colour bleeding out of the world to just that sensation. I always forget how much I love head scratches.

Pleasure ripples over my body, across my shoulders and arms. Opening my eyes gives too much information, so I screw them shut.

After a couple of minutes I held up a hand.

“I think I might like to deescalate a bit”

“Sure.”

She got off me and lay to my side, “Are you okay?”

Me: “Yeah, it’s just.. that was really good. It built up. It sat for a time. It ended when I wanted it to. It was, for me, a really good sexual experience.” I continued, “Sex for me is a lot of things. Sex as an experience, sex as obligation, sex as training. But somehow it’s quite rarely just.. nice.”

She looked at me.

Me: “I enjoyed that, thank you.”

We lay in silence for a bit, then got up and sat together while I processed. I felt aligned somehow. I felt so light without the obligation to get her off or the exhaustion of being present more than I wanted to.

Fifteen minutes later she called a cab.

It was a good night for me.

Much has been said about Consensual Non-Consent. About parties where people give consent for a range of sexual acts and then take/resist in the moment. About how the momentary struggle is masking a deep connection of two people getting what they want. But what about the opposite?

I have paid for sex. But it was with someone I am friends with and who has reasons to be honest with me. As I say in the article “I wanted to buy a level of desire I didn’t think she had for me.” But she did have some feelings for me, I hope1. What about when I think of paying a random sex worker? Somehow it feels utterly dead.

I know sex workers and they talk about faking intimacy. About faking attraction and orgasms. About faking connection and making the client believe what the client wants to believe. This seems to be a norm in the industry, a bit like journalists quoting everything or lawyers arguing things they don’t believe in order to win. Oh it’s just what you do.

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I guess the steelman here is that no-one really wants to do their job. Does the barista really want me to have a lovely day? Are Stripe payment systems coded with deep connection? And sure, a bit, but first, this seems such a dead view of the world. I expect many people do actually like their jobs and want to do them well. And secondly, here, intimacy is the whole thing. For me, it’s the point of romance, whether that’s on a date or with a sex worker.

And I find the notion that someone might not actually want something deeply unsexy. If I wanted experience, I could find porn. If I wanted sensation, I could use my hand. What I want is connection with another being. And I don’t mind paying or pretending to ease the process, but the notion that actually they don’t want it is inimical to that. During even the sexiest encounters, the knowledge that my partner isn’t enjoying it would kill my desire stone dead.

I guess the worst form of this is a loveless marriage where the sex is still happening, not even out of some hope of rekindling the attraction but out of pure indifference. It’s easier to fuck than for him to keep bothering me. That makes my gorge rise.

And so it seems there is a kind of counterpoint to Consensual Non-Consent, which is non-consensual consent. Someone who in the moment seems to be totally consenting but with whom there is no emotional connection. Perhaps I’ve had sex like that before, but I don’t want to again. Why not just make out, or dance, or talk, or leave?

Increasingly, I want encounters with people were we engage, connect, disengage. That might be for an evening or a compliment on the street. We meet, have a time of two (or more) people sharing and bouncing off one another, then a mutual separation. And sex often is formed of multiple of these, even in a single evening—moments of heightened flirtation and then reduced, the restaurant, the journey home, the sex.

Often the issue is a bad engagement—a clumsy line or a misunderstood look—or bad disengagement—someone staying too long and damaging the whole memory—but I think that when connection itself is fake, the whole thing is poisoned.

Which is a long way of saying that much of what I find tiresome about sex work, porn and erotica (and perhaps content in general) is a lack of attempt at genuine connection. Just write another piece of erotica like the last one. Produce some more OnlyFans messages. They are just a client. What seems like genuine connections is a mirage, it’s me playing with myself. You can kiss yourself in the mirror, but only on the lips.

I don’t know how we get to better sex work, but there do seem some porn and erotica where a creator isn’t just churning stuff out. I love ’s work for how she seems to want a genuinely different story each time. I feel like I am engaging with a person, even as I stroke my cock. And I think I can get better sex and dating by pushing here too, by developing a taste for genuinely meeting another consciousness in this strange world and attemping to share something real.

An orgy where people I want to fuck are present. Obvious, but worth saying. And the opposite is revealing too. I am not that excited by just “an orgy”. Orgies can have a wide spread of fuck rates, from a high chance of boredom, to a near guarantee of several rounds of sex. There is no magical reason why an orgy is going to be hot or fun, in and of itself.

Workshop → orgy. Some of the best orgies I’ve been to in the UK were like this. One was a play fighting workshop. It was a physical activity that grounded us and gave space for tension and desire. By the time the actual orgy started, I had several people that I wanted to fuck, who I’m not sure I would have before. I think a dance class could work for this and has suggested a yoga class.

Vibecoding orgy. Okay but what if the activity was not physical and grounding? I mused upon a vibecoding sex hackathon. Maybe like 1 hour of coding, then 5 hours of coding/fucking where you’re always allowed to grope someone on a laptop. I would love to be fondled while I work on some kind of little sex app1.

A game show. A campy host. Get up two members of the crowd at a time. Perhaps general knowledge, perhaps strategy, perhaps physical tests. Forfeits for losers. Take off items of clothing, oral, get fucked. Ideally it would be an -style wet and messy game show, with pies and custard, but that would take loads more work. I would prefer generally straight energy, but with that, I wouldn’t mind if I were watching women doing forfeits or doing forfeits myself, my cock straining with embarrassment.

Boob job explainer. A serious evening of talks about getting boob jobs — surgeon shopping, recovery, regrets, wins, financing — and then we fuck. Perhaps some kind of auction or raffle to pay for people’s boob jobs.

Quickfire round. A few others that I thought of:

• Big boob orgy. Padded bras, fake tits, breast plates. Breast maximalism.

• Debate. Get put into pairs discuss issues and then you can break out of the debate at any point to fuck the other person.

• Murder mystery. Standard murder mystery party, but people can kiss/fuck.

• Casino. Everyone has prices and then gambles for currency to pay for sex acts.

• Sex technique orgy. Voyeurism for the improvoooor. Ability to ask any couple why they are doing what they are doing.

One I can leave. Attending an orgy is a whole day, sometimes two. I want to be groomed, in the right headspace, well-rested. Most run 6–12 hours, often late enough that the next day gets eaten too. That’s expensive. The orgies I’d actually go to are the ones where I am confident I’ll have a good time. And that’s much easier if I can leave if it’s mediocre. That does harsh the vibe, so I think it’s better to create an event I’m excited about.

Quick thoughts

There isn’t some magical reason why orgies mean that people have sex. They are still people, with inhibitions. ’s CNC orgies create an equilibrium where much more sex happens. There are many other ways of doing this. But if someone just says, “we’re having an orgy” then it might be a set of people (more men than women) sitting half naked in a room. I don’t want to go to that.

I enjoy playing with tension and embarrassment more than force. My preferred orgies skew slow burn, surreal, connecting on other levels. If that sounds interesting to you, DM me or write in this form. With enough women I fancy/men I like pushing for it, I imagine I’ll organise one.

In England, the Puritans helped depose Charles I in 1649, ran the country for eleven years under Cromwell, banned theatre and Christmas, and were so hated by the end that the monarchy was invited back within two years of Cromwell’s death. In America, they founded the New England towns, Harvard (1636), Yale (1701), and their habits—literacy, self-government, journaling, work ethic—bear a strong resemblance to durable features of American culture.

So what were their key characteristics:

• They lived out their values

• They were passionate in stamping out what they saw as evil even at great personal cost

• Their culture was unsustainable

• They had outsized influence on what came after them

Puritans desired to move steadily closer to some perfect view of living, of God, of holiness — to slowly prune everything bad. It didn’t matter how important the thing was, “if your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out2“. Dancing, drinking, Christmas. Everything must go. I used to be a Christian and I behaved this way too. Swearing, drinking, sexual temptation. Afuera!3 I still see the same impulse in myself as an atheist: a desire to move toward a more perfect version of myself, slowly clipping branches.

The trouble is, it stops being healthy pruning and starts being the eyebrow thing—the one where you pluck just one more hair, and one more, and one more, and eventually you have no eyebrows.

So I try to leave unruly bits in my life, to ensure that it is sustainable.

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Some things that look Puritan in me

When I was a Christian, I was afraid of sinning sexually. Hell was a reasonable thing to avoid. So I built safeguards—passwords on the browser, avoiding fantasy novels, eventually not kissing the people I dated. Looking back this didn’t lead to a healthy relationship with sexuality. It perhaps led to me leaving. And on some deeper level, it was maybe about control.

The same shape shows up in the rest of my life today. In media, the temptation never to consume anything bad—to always be learning, always be improving, never just watch. I feel an urge whenever watching YouTube to be watching ‘good’ content. To be watching chess videos, not standup comedy. To be watching political explainers. But this isn’t actual work or actual rest. It’s the beginning of a media eating disorder.

In friendship, plenty of people curate their group so nobody disagrees with them on Palestine, or AI safety. I chat to women on dating apps who think I am part of the extractive landlord class if I don’t agree with every part of their beliefs. But with each small purity test, the space of possible views gets smaller. You have to believe the right thing on many different topics. Does this lead to more virtue? Or a kind of self-imposed police state.

Some unruly bits I keep

I sometimes watch Below Deck, a show about luxury yachts that takes a set of dysfunctional people and puts them on a boat. It is not a moral show. The boat staff are hot, horny and stressed, though they are paid a lot of money. Watching it is not clearly improving anything in me. I think that’s fine.

Within my sex life I cultivate a little chaos too. I am tempted to ensure every relationship I have is pure and edifying for everyone involved. But sometimes I want to fuck an old friend after a boozy dinner. Or, when invited back, ask “will you blow me” before agreeing.

I am often thinking a bit about how to flirt with women while talking to them. In ways, this isn’t great. I try to tone it down in work contexts. But I can’t say it disappears entirely. I am not sure I want it to. It feels like an important part of me. And maybe if I suppressed it, it would poke its head up elsewhere.

I enjoy some interracial erotica. I like some scenes where a woman is blackmailed4 into sex. Over Christmas, a woman brought up the idea of me fucking her in front of her family. This spiralled into some fairly depraved discussion. The next day she ghosted me, I guess ashamed of herself. But I’m not, it was a discussion of sexual fantasy, shit happens. I don’t deeply endorse all these desires and it could get out of hand, but I don’t seek to crush them into the dust either.

Two thoughts

This is a personal essay. I am not saying it’s for everyone. But a couple of things that stand out to me.

There is a pattern of control. Is it about improvement or my desire to get a grip on something, anything? Many of the changes I want to make don’t actually improve the relevant thing I cared about. Did personal rules make me a more functional Christian?5 Does cutting my media make me work more? But when I am ashamed and stressed, it’s good to do something.

Secondly, maximisation is perilous. If you choose the wrong metric it can be fine at first but eventually mess everything up. If you optimise hours worked then initially you might get more work done. But eventually you log your lunch as work, and from there anything you do at your desk, and slowly the things you actually wanted—output, money, good work-life balance—collapse while the metric soars. “a dash of moderation makes you much more robust to uncertainty and error”6.

If you have a bundle of related variables, initially maximising one probably helps the others, but later it may trash them. Dr. Ord, please delete as appropriate, [I’m sorry you are reading this] [you dog]

Go three quarters towards Puritanism, then stop

The funny thing is that the Puritans weren’t actually Puritanical about sex. Within marriage they were enthusiastically pro7. And in terms of their work ethic and love of literature and ideas, there is much I admire about them.

But in my experience, it hasn’t been healthy for me to ever go full Puritan. I am not wise enough about my choice of rules (and I think, neither were they). So I keep things a bit shaggy around the edges.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted... A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing.

What is Glosso?

Glosso is a social media site has been building (I assume while she’s been at InkHaven, the rationalist organised writing month).

Among my friends, there’s been a trend over the past couple of years for personal Slacks — a place where you and your friends can talk about whatever you want outside of the auspices of social media companies. I think for many these are personal discord, but I am not 12, or however old all of those of you born in 2001 are, so I have never liked Discord.

Glosso is the a micro social media site, which I guess will become a thing as it becomes vastly cheaper to create them. Public figures with taste will be able to create personal sites that do the thing they want them to.

(I write this not because I predict blue failure but because this feels a very alive time to write it. I have said I’ll post whatever I have at 1am1.)

Glosso has features a normal social media site lacks. A chart of the sexual connections of all members. Constant surveys. A “wars” feature which lets participants opt into being ranked on who would win in cancellation, murder, and “mommy”.

But all this has come to a screeching halt with the red/blue button discourse. Tim Urban this week posted the notorious button question.

It is well-known, but worth saying, that this originally came from Lisatomic’s kid. So a now-15-year-old is responsible for like 200m views and the possible collapse of one micro social media site.

So let’s do the discourse:

1. Pick blue!

“It’s the prosocial thing to do. It’s the one that saves lives. Red kills them. Pick blue.”

2. Pick red!

“Red is a more stable equilibrium. If everyone picks it, everyone survives. Picking blue means that at some point people might get scared and pick red, and then all the blues will die. (This will be important later.) So everyone pick red and avoid this.” Many analogies using other things than buttons — e.g. blenders which people have to step into and clog up to save themselves — give a sense of the red point of view.

3. Pick blue, for the children

Unlike Lisatomic, Urban’s question says “everyone”. This suggests that children might pick. Or the mentally ill. Or people who have just been woken up in the middle of the night, or who are illiterate. In this case, there are a load of people who are kind of ransom to fortune. No longer is there a case that blues were silly to get themselves into this mess. “Many were not capable of making good choices. It isn’t weak to get involved in saving them.”

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4. The polling

People came up with neat alternative versions (including Aella herself), and David Shor did some polling. The public strongly picks blue. Blue is correlated with nice traits, red anti-correlated. Blue strategies vary in success with different framings/success thresholds, red strategies work everywhere.

That’s nice. And we could have ended there.

5. Glosso

Aella ran the experiment live on Glosso. With permabans as the punishment. And if you don’t vote, you also get permabanned. Big mood.

So now we get the whole discourse again, but this time:

6. Pick blue

“It has good vibes.”

7. Pick red

“It’s the obviously stable thing to do.” Rationalists do not let themselves get blackmailed in predictable ways. There is sooooooooooooooooooo much writing about this. It is really tremendously important to many of them. And a chunk of them think it’s pretty obvious to vote red here. Don’t risk oneself in the big blender merely cos others chose to. They shouldn’t have chosen to!

Also many people have said that it’s pretty funny to pick red and kick a load of people off a social media site.

And probably many other reasons besides.

8. Pick blue

“Many people will have picked without thinking, or because it sounded good. If we want a fun social media site, we don’t want to kick all those people off. Consider them people worth saving, consider the utilitarian calculation, whatever, but people are in trouble, help them out, even at personal cost.”

9. The slutcloud

This has caused quite a lot of content on Glosso, a site built primarily around the rationalist-adjacent slutcloud, which therefore adores game theory and thought experiments.

10. It isn’t clear Aella thought this through

Were I to guess, I’d note that Aella’s close friends really like commitments. Aella has committed to permaban people if red wins. And that will probably be a significant chunk of the power users of her little social media site. And she can’t even renege, because then her friends will lose a lot of respect for her. I haven’t seen a person create a problem this thorny for themselves in a while2.

11. The prediction market

There is a prediction market on it.

12. Where I stand

I have friends who chose blue, and friends who I predicted would (and I was right). So I don’t want to be on a social media site without them. So I chose blue. I may soon be exglossed.

Perhaps if we’d had time to discuss beforehand we could have voted and then agreed to all vote red, but I had thought that if it were close, I would vote blue. And so that is what I did. 😘

13. Rationality is systematised winning

The whole point of rationality is to get the big things right. And getting permabanned from a site I like doesn’t feel like winning. One might say that the optimal choice is to predict how others are gonna vote, then vote blue if there is a blue equilibrium and red if there is a red one. And it’s pretty possible that I’m gonna have failed at that. And that would be a loss. And if many rationalists do that, we will all have lost together. I think we should feel (a bit) bad3.

14. Death row

The whole site has a sort of death-row feel to it right now, and several friends are pretty stressed. Personally, I’m wired. I really like Glosso. It’s one of the places I can be my sexual self with a moderate amount of privacy. It has many of my close friends on it. It has Arabella on it, which was no small amount of work on my part. I don’t want to remake my account, answer all the polls again. I have it set up how I want it.

I think it’s rad that Aella did this. I love the chaos and the finality. It is fundamentally alive — but I really wish she’d thought about the consequences. It’s cool to be on a social media site that takes risks, that runs consequential experiments, but I am less tempted to invest if this might happen again. But maybe that’s out of my hands.

I’m off to bed. By the time you read this, you may already know4.

I laughed.

“Why are you laughing?”

“It’s an excellent bit.”

“No, I’m serious.”

“I know you’re serious but it’s still an excellent bit.”

Many people assume I was upset. In their minds, paying for sex is low-status, so the proposition was insulting. Far from it.

Let me back up.

It was our second date. The first had gone badly—I’d offered to buy her a drink, she’d asked why I thought I should pay, and we’d argued for an hour, walking round a park. She’d made her case well and with each minute I’d got more flustered and fancied her more. I did not think my feelings were mutual. I didn’t expect another date.

Months later we met at an event. I asked if she wanted to hang out, she said no.

But then she messaged, asking to meet up. We went on another walk. She’d known I fancied her and had been seeing how I would respond. And while she hadn’t enjoyed my crashing and burning, I had held some interest. We ended up in a dinky tap room—frosted glass above the bar, children in the corner, a dog. As she was making a move to leave, she told me about the bet, and the proposition.

Afterwards it was like my body was covered in warm fire. Giggly, effusive. Just the hottest thing.

If this doesn’t appeal to you, I don’t know how to explain it. It was an outrageous request, but she was entirely correct. I would pay her. And she had known that. Even before I did. I felt played with. Outmatched. She had known I fancied her from the start and watched with distasteful fondness as I’d gone off the rails the first time. Then she’d come up with something that fit perfectly, like a noose around my neck.

I don’t get got often. I like getting got.

Then came the planning.

Most of the negotiation took place over the phone, in my friends’ spare room, before Sunday dinner.

We settled on dinner plus £500 for 90 minutes in a hotel room. My friends thought that was far too much given London sex-worker rates. Hers thought she was undercharging given what good dommes go for. Some said I could’ve paid her £5, to complete her bet. But that disrespects the bit. Not everything needs to be consumer surplus. I was happy to pay to fuck this goddess, I was intensely glad she’d chosen to share this experience with me.

I didn’t have ethical concerns. It’s legal. She doesn’t need the money. Most of our discussion was about what specifically would happen and how we’d discuss it afterwards.

She asked what I’d want. This surprised me; I wanted her to run the show. She later said I might just think I was buying her time. That seemed a waste. I wanted to buy a level of desire I didn’t think she had for me. I didn’t want to buy compliance.

I had Claude draft us a contract. Turns out it’ll just do that. It thought the contract was probably unenforceable but that an NDA likely would be—so it wrote me a sex NDA too. Thanks Anthropic.

We talked about safewords and sexual health. She could just leave with the £500 at any point. I would prefer that to her gritting her teeth if she was having a bad time. “Amber” meant we’d pause and talk about it, “Red” meant at least a 10 minute pause from that activity.

A key thing on top of this was that she could actually decide not to have sex with me. Not in a safeword way, but in a domme way. If she wanted to tease me all evening and send me home, that was her call. Claude’s contract reads “likely but not guaranteed” which. turns. me. on.

The big day arrived.

I arrived at the restaurant twenty-five minutes early. I went in and handed my (heavy) backpack to the maitre de, whose arm visibly jerked as he took it. I caught a grimace.

The restaurant was exactly what I wanted. A deep green with a huge circular organic chandelier. Every aspect of it looked chosen. The tables were tastefully far apart and the playlist included many songs that I like, but no modern pop1.

Then Arabella arrived.

Gosh she looked beautiful. Tall, elegant. Long black dress. Eye shadow. The waitress pushed her chair in. I sort of wanted to, but couldn’t quite read Arabella’s preferences, and she was in charge tonight.

We got drinks. It took us a while to warm up. She was a little late and I wondered if her authority had been dented. She later told me she thought I was deliberately playing it cool so as not to set expectations too high. That’s a fair read. I’d had sexual experiences built up so much that they had come crashing down under their own weight.

We talked about what the evening would hold. I said I was mainly concerned about her being happy. She said she was concerned about me, given how I’d “spun out” after our first date. In my defence that was a few hours of flustered and a couple of messages. But she’d had subby men obsess over her before, making her the centre of their lives after rejection.

Here we had a kind of Mutually Assured Destruction. I could out her as a sex worker for the rest of her life. Should she tell the story, many would assume I’d pressured her. If I breached first, I’d lose a lot of friends’ respect.

Deeper than MAD, I hoped we shared a self-image: of being people capable of doing deals who’d been hurt by others. Her with men who made their emotional immaturity her problem; me with women who said they’d keep their word and didn’t. A betrayal here would hurt both of us deeply. And I knew, if either of us could deceive the other, it would be her. In that vulnerability lies my hunger.

We got a taxi back to the hotel.

I’d realised a couple of weeks earlier that I’m just terrible at spotting trans women. Arabella is tall with a husky voice, and I’d briefly panicked before this evening that this might become relevant. I said something to that effect.

Her: “But it would have been fine though.”

Me: “I think it could have been an awkward moment.”

Her: “Only if you made it so.”

Me: “No.. even if it was fine, this whole thing is kind of fraught.”

Her: “You might enjoy it.”

Me: “Oh I’ve sucked cock.”

Her: “Really?”

Me: “Yeah. Too much teeth.”

Her: “Teeth.”

Me: “Yeah it was a whole thing.”

Her: “Go on.”

Me: “I’ll tell you when we get to the hotel.”

And so, finally, we were in the room.

Arabella: “I was surprised you were so explicit in the taxi.”

“That is the edge of what I can bear.”

“Yeah I saw you were uncomfortable.”

This is the heart of my connection to Arabella. She’s beautiful, clever, lawful — but more than that, she cuts through me like a rolling pin through bubbles. My attempts at bluff, sophistication and equivocation2 are like a child whispering their plans on the other side of the room because they think you can’t hear. She is, in some important sense, stronger than me. It’s so hot. I want her hands around my neck.

She pushes me onto my knees.

Arabella slowly takes off my jacket from behind, kissing the back of my neck, pushing her tongue into my ears. My skin is electric3.

I ask if I can turn around. I kiss her knees and thighs.

She keeps undressing me — waistcoat, shirt. She pulls my sleeves off without undoing the cuffs so my hands get trapped. She binds my arms behind me and lets me stew, grazing fingers over my cock every so often.

She undoes my trousers, has me step out of them, pushes me onto the bed, and straddles me. She’s still mostly clothed. I haven’t kissed her. I am having an excellent time.

I ask if I can suck on one of her breasts. She acquiesces. I suck, kiss, bite ever so slightly. She moves in a way that suggests she enjoys it. I really have little idea if she does. On the one hand she’s a very honest person, I doubt she usually fakes pleasure. On the other, her bluff skill is higher than mine and she enjoys fucking with me. If she’s faking I hope she is enjoying that.

I continue kissing between her breasts and ask if I might kiss lower.

She agrees.

She lifts her black dress and reveals a pair of Calvin Klein panties. I’m not sure I’ve ever noticed the brand of a woman’s underwear before, but this evening Mr Klein has earned his fee. She takes them off.

I begin to eat her out. First with my tongue, building a slow rhythm. Then one finger, then two. She seems to enjoy it.

I place my hand on her side, pinning her. I reach up and twist her breast until she shudders, slightly. I speed up my fingers — not as much as if I were wanking myself4, but enough to give some urgency. I crook them against the top of her vagina. Swirl. Eventually she squeezes her thighs either side of my head, asking me to stop.

She pulls me back onto the bed and straddles me. She finally leans down, hovers her lips over mine, and kisses me. It makes my eardrums shake just to think of it. She takes off her dress. She’s slim, hourglass-waisted, pert-breasted. She towers above me.

We walk over to the window. It turns out she’s an exhibitionist—she had a boyfriend with a penthouse, and they used to fuck in front of one of the windows. We’re on the fourth floor of a hotel in central London. A few people are still on the street below.

“Don’t worry, they can’t see us.”

I nuzzle her from behind. About a minute later a man looks up at us, eyes tracking as he walks past.

She runs back to the bed.

I ask if we can have music. I put on the playlist I use for times like this, not a sex playlist exactly, just songs that make me feel good and alive. I start it on “Dressed In Dresden,”. I could die to that song.

I push her onto the bed. Now I’m fingering in anger. A subtle shift has taken place. I’m no longer entirely submissive. My dominance isn’t cruelty or control — it’s agency, or uncaring. I dom either because I want something, or because I don’t care what they do. My desires are clear to me. And in this moment I want to please her.

I tell her this. I can sense, even in this moment of triumph, her rolling her eyes at my insecure masculinity. This turns me on more as I pin her down. She groans slightly.

I eat her out to the music. My tongue flicks up and down, occasionally across.

Time passes.

I ask if she wants to dance. She says yes. I swing her to the music. I feel deeply alive. She is radiant.

She says I’m a good dancer. I am. She is too, picking up the moves quickly in what many would consider an inopportune environment for learning dance.

We spin and laugh.

One of us moves back to the bed. I forget who.

I ask how much time we have left. If she’s going to blueball me, I want her to know she’s doing it. I feel the exquisite agony imagining her leaving me like this. Twenty minutes.

She straddles me to the music. We talk. I love this playlist, each song makes me smile.

She takes off my boxers.

I’ve been moving between hard and not, largely based on focus. There’s only enough blood for one of my major organs to work, perhaps. She tells me not to be anxious. Surprisingly, I’m not.

She wanks me. Slow, long strokes. Some women aren’t strong enough to do this well. She is. She tells me about a circumcised guy she’d done this to, how she’d worried about hurting him, how she wasn’t sure how to do it right. She hates circumcision. I say I generally agree but reckon we should survey circumcised adults before declaring a verdict.

I remember a conversation with a posh guy just after I left Christianity. He told me I’d be fine—I just needed to know when to tone it down. I didn’t take that advice then and I still don’t. No. I think I’m capable of a bizarre and beautiful life. And that involves paying friends for sex, telling them I’m not sure I’d know if they were trans, and discussing circumcision while we fuck.

I forget the order, but at some point she blows me. It’s hard to fit everything in.

“Do you have a condom?”

“Sure, in my rucksack.”

“Stay there. Keep wanking.”

She rummages through, finds one. I tell her the coloured side of the packet always points towards the cock, and that knowing this saves time.

“The coloured side of the packet always points towards the cock. It saves time”

She puts it on me. She rubs my cock against her pussy, and pushes me inside.

We fuck.

She’s on top, moving her hips. I take slow, predictable moves, jerking into her. I try to give her space to choose how she wants, while giving power for thrusts.

I’d move if she asked—this isn’t my favourite position—but I’m having a wonderful time. She leans forward, we kiss, I suck on her nipples.

She braces herself on the headboard and moves more quickly. I try to match her, thrusting hard. At some point there’s that moment beyond time where I lose control and cum.

I thrust a few more times.

“I came.”

“I know.”

She smiles and lies beside me.

The alarm goes off.

We dress, chat. We go down to the lobby, chat a little more. I order her an uber to her boyfriend’s house.

Afterwards I went to the bathroom. I wondered whether I’d been in control for the parts I thought I had. Whether she’d had as good a time as she’d seemed to. Then I decided I’d had a nice time and got what I paid for. I’m an overthinker, but I try not to let myself ruin nice things with it.

While dressing she’d asked if I had other friends who might want this. I felt a rare spike of jealousy. I don’t tend to mind who my partners fuck, so this surprised me.

Something about good chaos is knowing when it ends. Being a lawful agent means being able to end a wonderful dance with decorum. Being such a person predictably, so you get asked for the dance in the first place.

I called some friends in the US. Left voice notes to various curious friends. Had a bath. Wrote flashcards about things I’d thought about. Went to sleep.

Should one pay for sex? I don’t know.

A friend once told me that paying for sex is a lot less hassle. And I can think of several sexual encounters that would have been much cheaper had I paid for them in money.

I struggle to see a case for significant harms. We talked about the risks carefully. We discussed how we might feel afterwards. We were each concerned it might hurt the other and we each assured the other that that wouldn’t be the case.

I could make an argument that money is for buying things, and that sex is a thing, but I don’t care to. I respect sex and I respect the dollar. Money is a unit of care. There are others, but it’s a central one. We pay more for what matters more to us. And if I worked for hours in order to have sex with Arabella, does that really mean I care about her less?

Nor can I pretend this was purely transactional: I’ve not paid for sex before, and I still think most sex-workers are expensive for the connection they offer. There was an energy in the proposal. The framing of the bet5. Ultimately I wanted to be involved with Arabella. If money was what it took, so be it.

And I revel in my ability to do such trades. To build an elaborate contract and execute it. To have a great story to tell about a beautiful woman. Perhaps this is my real kink. Deals.

So I paid for sex. And I’m alive and well. I expect Arabella is too. I expect we’ll occasionally chat and behave kindly towards one another. She has had a veto over this piece. I care about her deeply and am glad I got to be part of this story. One can have good relationships with contractors. One can pay for sex with friends.

The next day I cycled to a partner’s house and told her, gingerly. We don’t always talk about our other dates. I wasn’t sure how she’d react.

She was deeply turned on.

We discussed it at length while we fucked, much in the way of this account—though I actually managed to get her off with my tongue, building to the climax by putting her in my preferred position (legs over my shoulders) and railing her through the telling.

She said I was glowing.

I still am.

Music. The music was bad. It was a mix of 00’s tracks, cheesy tunes and some modern pop. ABBA into Taylor Swift into Robbie Williams. This seemed schizophrenic to me, lurching from banger to banger. The DJ kept yelling “Come on down to the dance floor”, “show us what you’ve got” and other awkward middle-aged DJ1 stock phrases.

Lighting. Bad. The light level was low but not dark enough. Perhaps the level of a dinner party. But with red, green and white lights the vibe was more Christmas pub quiz than night out. I could see most of the way across the large room at any time and was able to see the clientele in startling detail.

Gender ratio. I think it was about 3:1, men:women. I spoke to some zoomers and after assuring them that I wasn’t hitting on them and that no, I didn’t work there, this was their top concern. I went with two women and both were set upon almost any moment they were free.

It sounds terrible, probably, but I like to take joy where I can. People paid to be there, they were laughing and chatting. I guess numbers were exchanged. I enjoyed it as an anthropological experience. I wrote the first draft of this piece in the back corner at about midnight2.

How would I have made it better? Turn the lights down. Kill the DJ. Feed his body to pigs. Let the pigs die of natural causes. Burn their bodies. A dance event isn’t meant to have music so loud and “well-known” that everyone is constantly alert. It should create a journey3.

But I have a deeper theory on what makes a good dating event:

Playtime is over

The whole evening conspired to make it hard to be sensual and playful, pushing towards bluntness and dominance.

The music didn’t encourage sensuality. Or plausible deniability. I want to be lost in the music and then to meet eyes with someone across the room. “Oh, you like this song too?”. Or at least to be able to pretend to be. Common knowledge is the enemy of flirtation, like our touching fingers being shown on the superbowl jumbotron. “WILL HE?!” “WILL SHE?!” The crowd bays in anticipation. Deeply un-sensual. Romantic music should turn our attention away from ourselves, so we can stumble into the other.

The lighting too. The whole vibe of the event seemed to be “Have you considered that you might date someone?”. Notice that you are dancing to music. Notice that you are single and desperate, you schmuck. The women are over there. Go scream and beat your chests. Perhaps one of you will get lucky. It all doesn’t have to be so explicit. Sensuality needs the dark earth to grow.

And the gender ratio killed any budding playfulness dead. No chance of a woman dancing by herself, lit by flashes of strobe lighting. Because she’d instantly be surrounded by four guys. The place smelled of desperation and male confusion. My female friends felt very put upon and bothered. One guy even used the same chat up line on both of them. Urrrrghhh.

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A theory

For me, the issue was that the whole event encouraged zero sum behaviour. Lots of guys who were trying to date. The only way to interact with women was to go up, bother them until they got their number then move on to the next one.

My sense is that:

• There wasn’t an easy non-romantic way to enjoy time with these women

• The optimal time length of an interaction was always longer, so that is what men pushed for.

Let’s go through these one by one.

If there is an easy playful way to interact with people, then you might interact with a lot of people, people you fancy, people you don’t fancy. And this will be clear to them too. If you’re interacting with someone, it’s not necessarily a come on. This creates deniability. Maybe I just wanted a chat. They don’t have to immediately decide if I am a romantic prospect, no need for immediate “shields up”. We can interact as one person to another.

Think about a dance club. When I go dancing I dance with many people — some are people I’m attracted to, some aren’t. I’m having a good time because it’s fun to dance with people. In turn, women don’t know if I am attracted to them. They can be playful without worrying I’ll immediately say “can I have your number then?” What would a dating event look like if it was focused on this?

Next one’s a bit more technical.

If it isn’t fun to interact with people, the main end of this event is getting contact details. So men, who generally start conversations, will optimise for this. Pushing for women’s numbers or instagram, then moving on. Or trying to make out with someone, or have sex with them.

And so on the margin any conversation is about pushing more, trying to get a number, even if a woman is kind of tired, because that’s the only thing that is there to do. “We could go back to my place”.

But again to consider dancing: in dance it’s a compliment to offer somebody a second dance but it’s always slightly rude to offer them a third and a fourth is basically beyond the pale. I wouldn’t offer a friend a fourth dance because I’d be monopolising their time. At some point on the margin, it’s better to push less. And I know that.

Let’s try and graph this out somehow.

In a dating night the incentive for men is just to push for as long as possible with any woman, then move on to the next. With a bad gender ratio, this is what that looks like at scale: women being constantly bothered, with no space to breathe. The dance event inverts this. The social cost of a third or fourth dance means men leave of their own accord, not because it takes the stress off women, but because it isn’t in their own interest.

How could a dating event be better?

While I was dancing I noticed a couple watching me. Later I saw them by the bar. I wandered up to them. “So did you come here just to watch people?” They laughed. They had been to a couple of events before though this one was a stinker. I asked the woman why the guy was still single. I might have introduced my friends to him later. It was one of the better interactions across the evening.

How could the whole event be more like that?

Don’t have cheesy dopamine-obsessed music in a venue that is like a carnival at twilight. Probably my preferred dating event would teach a style of dance in one room and have another room where people could dance. At some point one room would blend into a standard club night.

The aim of the music would be to make it easy to dance to, easy to connect and joke with people, even if you don’t really fancy them. As it moved into a more standard club night, it would take people on a journey, moving through sad or slow moments as well as exultant ones.

The teaching room would have a tutorial lesson followed by non-stop teaching for the first couple of hours. Everyone would be suggested (but not forced) to attend the tutorial lesson and then able to either dance in the other room or learn additional moves. Teaching would involve learning part of a move, then moving onto a new partner. The vibe would be a little silly, but encourage people to learn names as they went round.

The event would have an app for matching. When you chatted to someone the suggestion would be to show QR code and connect with them. You could (secretly) mark each person as either a match or not. We would ask people to use the app, not their phones so it was easier to say no to someone. Tell people it’s very reasonable to ask to connect with someone, because you can always mark them no. We would send out the matches after 24 hours.

Gender balance matters more than gender-balanced ticket sales. The event I went to had sold roughly equal numbers but far more men turned up. So next time: sell more female tickets, knowing they’ll no-show at a higher rate.

Round up

The event was bad. It felt desperate and zero sum. Most times I saw a woman she’d either be with a guy or there would be a man nearby with a hungry look. I can’t recall any women with open body language. So approaching any single woman felt like intruding on one of the few moments of breathing space she had. And I find that a little bit revolting. I’d like to feel a moment of connection, our eyes meeting. The whole thing reminded me of uni, not really knowing how to engage with women, feeling like they were tired, or closed, me desiring connection but not wanting to continue playing this awful game.

I won’t be back.

“Hi, may I ask a question?” I said to the tall leather-clad woman with a thin black band across her chest

“As long as it’s short.” I guess that’s in character.

“How does one talk to doms at one of these things?”

“Well they certainly don’t interrupt when they’re with someone.”

Oh how boring.

Dominance as high status

This domme, like many people, saw being a dom as being high status, higher status than her sub, higher status than me. That her whole role is to be high status and imperious and that to interact with her one must take on the submissive role. In this case she already had a sub, ergo no free space, ergo rejection

But I think that doesn’t make sense in lots of ways. This wasn’t just for the two of the. She wasn’t having sex with her sub in a private booth. They were wandering back and forth at the front of a crowded room. Later they were both part of one of the on-stage acts. There was little private or inconspicuous about it. Weren’t they inviting discussion, engagement?

And if I am to be responded to rudely, isn’t she domming me a bit? Like isn’t she forcing me into the role even as she rejects me from it? Mixed signals!

Dominance as a scene/relationship

I prefer to see dominance as a thing that one enters into. One can be dominant to somebody, be submissive to somebody else. One can be dominant and submissive to the same person on different occasions. Dominance is a scene that begins and ends, and it might encompass some people and not others.

And to me, this makes more sense being a dom at an event. You are acting out your scene with your sub in front of other people.

And in this way, other people can choose to enter or not into the scene. As the dom, the person leading the scene, you can choose whether to accept them into your scene or reject them. People can come in acting as subs if they wish, but they can enter as adults, interacting with the dom, and their sub, with the dom’s permission.

It doesn’t have to be boring

To me, being a dom is about playing with boundaries, playing with what people do and don’t want to do, playing with status, and just sort of endlessly being high status seems to me to be a bit boring. Managing space and status seems to have more room for content.

What’s more, in the former case I am sucked into the scene whether I want to be or not. I am unable just to be an adult interacting with another adult. Sure I found this woman attractive, but I was also curious about how she dominated, what she got out of it. Initially I wanted just a conversation, and that wasn’t permitted by how she saw domming work.

How it might have gone

“Hi, may I ask a question”

“As long as it’s short” This is fine, being half-in-character is fine.

“How does one talk to doms at one of these things?”

“That depends, are you auditioning?”

“I wouldn’t say no”

“I wouldn’t say no, Mistress. Well rule one is not to bother a domme while she’s occupied”

Or alternatively.

“That depends, are you auditioning?”

“No, not really. Just seems like an interesting vibe”

“I’m pretty busy thanks”

I’ve painted her as disinterested in both of these. She clearly didn’t want to talk to me and I’m not gonna change that. But I wasn’t in her scene, so she was just.. rude. And she closed down any chance of a conversation between two adults.

“That depends, are you auditioning?”

“No, not really. Just seems like an interesting vibe”

“It is. This is Laura, say hello Laura” The woman behind her with the chain waves. I wave back.

“So what drove you to become a domme?”

“Catholic school”

“And her” I say pointing to Laura.

“Management consultancy”

Boundaries are the whole point

My point is that being a domme doesn’t mean you are free from social norms of the event you’re at. Or in my view it shouldn’t. I think it’s unhelpful for everyone to be opted into your kink scene even, at a sex party. And yeah, I think it’s boring.

Many people seem to have a view that being dominant is being high status or rude. To me that seems such a narrowing of the possible concept.

I’m no expert but in my view, being a dom is about being somehow in control. Whether that’s physically, sensually, psychologically. But only with those in the scene. And knowing allows safety - has this person consented? - and also play with the concept: How does your sub fit into an otherwise standard conversation. What does your control look like when interacting in normal or strange situations? What about multiple subs? Multiple doms? Confused non-combatants? Anything other than the most basic braindead version of the domming - I walk around looking hot, she is chained.

If that’s all you have to offer, I was wrong to want the conversation.

That said, this is not going to be a set of pictures of hot MPs. I expect many wouldn’t appreciate that.

Whenever I watch political dramas, there are women—particularly on the stern side—who I find very attractive. A kind of bolshy but middle class woman with a slutty edge. Think Emma Messinger (Ollie’s one time girlfriend) or Ainsley Hayes from The West Wing. In media, these women often tend to be conservatives, take from that what you will1.

While I’m happy to be in control (and know my own desires very well) I love to imagine a woman who can run rings around me and tolerates me anyway2. There is a wifeguy in all of us. For me, the Westminster Mummy is just close enough that I can enjoy this fantasy and just far away enough that reality hasn’t intruded on it. Maybe I’ll meet her at a party and she’ll say something charming and disarming3. She’ll be like one of the women on TV. She’ll wear a suit.

If one is at all close to Westminster, one hears about politicians’ sexual antics. There were loads about Liz Truss, about whether her necklace, which looked like a kink necklace, was a kink necklace. Stories about various foreign politicians she’d hooked up with and indeed whether she was having an affair with Kwasi Kwarteng, her Chancellor. I’ve heard stories about others as gossip.

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The difficulty, of course, is that first of all, these women are no-doubt extremely circumspect. A man who sleeps around is desirable and charming. A woman who sleeps around is, if not a slut, seen to be using her time badly. I guess, they often handle this by hooking up with other politicians who have as much to lose as they do4.

Second of all, I don’t have an easy way to distinguish between the minority of MPs I fancy who would probably appreciate this and the majority who would find it disgusting5. A tricky thing about fancying women is that some really like you and many really don’t. If you can find a safe, chill environment, then you can feel that out. Many men just wish to jump straight to the chase, but that can involve really upsetting the former category.

In some sense, I think the maximal example of this is the dick pic, which a tiny minority of women appreciate and most women hate6. In some way, making a small flirtatious comment is some tiny fraction of the implication of a dick pic, some women slightly like it, many slightly dislike it. But many men who send dick pics don’t wish to do the work of slowly escalating and causing someone to feel safe. They just want instant gratification or instant falsification of that.

So how does one build connection with the politicians who would appreciate it without taxing the others that much? I have no idea what the tiny escalation is towards a woman who I don’t share social connections with. Well, other than writing this article7. A long and slow build up of twitter replies? I guess I could try and enter the political sphere, go to their parties and slowly chat and chow with them, but ideally, there would be a quicker way. Maybe politicians have their own small sex parties? Maybe they’re very exclusive parties which famous people go to? Is there an app? I don’t know, let me know.

I sent this to a friend who works in government, and she opened it in a meeting with a minister by accident. So maybe there’s hope. And if by some miracle you’re a middle-aged female politician or SpAd8 who likes an (ethical9) roll in the hay, my form is here. Don’t access it on your work computer.

The (regulated) market1 offers two separate mainstream solutions: sex workers who provide pleasure, and sex therapists who provide talk therapy. But there’s a missing middle: instructors who would physically guide you through improving your technique, the way a driving instructor sits beside you and occasionally grabs the wheel.

What this would look like

Imagine paying $50-150/hour for someone who:

• Coaches you during partnered sex, offering real-time feedback (”slow down,” “try this angle”)

• Sits in the room while you and a partner have sex, providing suggestions

• Handles awkwardness or failure without judgment

• (Perhaps) demonstrates techniques on you or with you

This person would be a driving instructor for sex. They would be in the situation, able to give advice and avoid bad outcomes. When I learned to drive, we spent a while juddering around a housing estate before we got onto the road. The first time I had sex, we just went for it.

It already exists (sort of)

This does sort of exist. There is both surrogate partner therapy and sexological bodywork (sometimes called somatic sex education2).

Surrogate partner therapy involves a three-person team: a licensed sex therapist, a surrogate partner, and the client. The surrogate works under the therapist’s supervision to provide hands-on learning experiences. However today, fewer than 50 surrogate partners practice in the United States, primarily in California. While the price point seems reasonable ($75 - $200 per session), 50 people is very few practitioners.

Somatic sex education is an educational form where practitioners use one-way touch. Practitioners remain clothed, wear gloves for genital touch, and work within an explicit educational framework. Again the price point might be about $100/hour. I can’t find good numbers, but they don’t seem to be common.

So why aren’t these practitioners more common?

Three barriers prevent this from emerging:

Low supply, perhaps driven by stigma

Current sex work pricing ($200-2000+/hour) reflects stigma, risk, and a focus on wealthy clients seeking pleasure. Educational sex work, or adjacent therapy, has many of the same costs but seems to provide about 10x less income. It would be one thing if this was a respected profession, but in the UK, it’s not something I’d expect people to be open about, except in very left-wing spaces.

We don’t treat sex as a learnable skill

As I’ve written before, we treat sex as something to be good at but never have to work at. People don’t seem to discuss the gory details of how to improve at sex, which in my view is a shame3.

Paying an instructor is at the opposite end of that spectrum. Acknowledging that one wants to learn, being willing to take instruction and involving another person in it. I think my partners are pretty liberal and even they would probably baulk at another person entering the picture for this purpose. If I were a typical person, I think I’d be embarrassed to even bring this up.

Cultural taboos about privacy

People claim they couldn’t have someone else in the room during sex, yet we accept observers during childbirth, medical procedures, even massages. The taboo seems cultural rather than fundamental. We’ve normalized third-party presence in other intimate situations; we could here too. But the taboo is real and means demand is lower than it would otherwise be.

Lack of frameworks and norms

Any hands-on sexual instruction would have consent frameworks, codes of ethical practice, registered bodies and more. California seems to have these, but that generally suggests the rest of the world is a little behind. These frameworks would need to be built and tested. If this were to be training offered to young adults then this would likely be even more fraught.

There would be a normal process for sexual education, but currently we are far away from that.

The Path Forward

I don’t expect to become a legal advocate for this. But were I to, then here would be the next steps.

Legal clarity: Laws distinguishing education from prostitution, similar to how massage therapy laws distinguish therapeutic from sexual massage. California’s recognition of somatic sex education offers a potential model.

Professional standards: Training requirements, certification, codes of ethics, and professional oversight bodies—the infrastructure that exists for other hands-on professions.

Cultural shift: Treating sex as a skill that can be taught and learned, not something shameful or purely instinctive.

Gradual expansion: Starting with clear therapeutic applications (perhaps people with sexual dysfunction4) and expanding to general skill-building as the profession gains legitimacy.

Evidence base: Research demonstrating outcomes—both to establish effectiveness and to refine best practices5.

The first movers might be existing sex therapists and educators who are already pushing boundaries: surrogate partners, somatic sex educators, sex coaches. The profession would need champions willing to navigate legal ambiguity and social judgment to establish precedents.

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Objections Considered

“People will just abuse this as legal prostitution”: Yes, some will try. This happens with massage therapy too—some people seek massage for sexual gratification. The profession manages this through clear boundaries, refusal of service, and professional consequences for providers who blur lines. The more difficult question comes if the lines really did become blurred, does the ideal sexual educator sometimes have sex with people, or not?

“Sex should be private and special”: So should childbirth, but we have midwives and doulas6. Personal vulnerability should surely be private, but we have therapists. The presence of a professional doesn’t eliminate value. And I think it’s up to adults to decide who they let into their sex lives.

“This is too weird”: Most useful innovations seem weird until they’re normalized. In vitro fertilization seemed weird. Planes seemed weird. Probably trousers did at one point. Personally, I think this one would hold a lot of weight with people.

Conclusion

The absence of hands-on sexual skills instruction represents a genuine gap in how we help people develop competence in an important area of life. The existence of adjacent professions—surrogate partner therapy, somatic sex work—demonstrates both the demand and the feasibility.

While it’s possible that few people want to do this work, we are missing the social and legal framework that would allow this to exist at scale. We’ve developed such frameworks for other intimate services: therapy, medicine, massage, personal training. Until we’ve done so here, it’s hard to know if that’s holding things back.

The question is whether we value sexual competence enough to overcome our discomfort. Were we to treat sexuality as a practical skill—something to be taught openly and well—surely that would have better outcomes than leaving people to figure it out through trial and error? Hands-on instruction would be a logical extension of that principle.

For now, this remains mostly hypothetical. Surrogate partners serve dozens of clients; somatic sex educators serve hundreds. The vast majority of people who struggle with sex have no access to this kind of support. That seems like a solvable problem—if we decide it’s worth solving.

Addendum:

This piece was written with the help of an AI tool. I wrote an article then asked Claude for an edit, then I edited that. What do you think? It took me about three hours in total, which is a lot less than this usually does.

I take full responsibility for this piece, so imagine I wrote every word of it. But also imagine that the choice is between getting pieces like this and nothing. I still intend to write on my usual schedule, but this allows me to run out a piece in a morning when I wouldn’t otherwise.

Here is the link.

Do you recall the Man Show? And its Wheel of Destiny. Men come up, spin the wheel and get a random prize or forfeit. But on one show they invite women to do so.

A woman from the audience volunteers and then is given the option of a lap dance, a free bag, about 8 other things or the “caramel dip”. She gets caramel dip. And she has to dip her breasts in caramel.

The whole sequence is pretty exquisite to me.

What do I like it?

First it seems real. I think the spin is real. Or at least it probably is the other 50 times since they always have all the prizes and for the men there isn’t an obvious money shot. I don’t get why they’d fake it just this once. Her and the hosts seem shocked at this outcome. And yes, it’s possible that she is a porn star, but my suspension of disbelief doesn’t care.

For some reason I find reality really hot. It’s nice to see a woman put her tits into caramel sauce. But it’s much better if she’s embarrassed. I don’t know why, but it is. And a pornstar can’t credibly be that embarrassed. She does this all the time. But if I think it might be a typical woman. Forced, through the vagaries of chance to do something embarrassing… Wow.

I don’t know if I would endorse there being sex lotteries, where women could sometimes win lots of money and sometimes get fucked (perhaps both), but the idea excites me.

Finally it’s the boobs in goop. I love boobs, I love goop. And so this clip for me is a heady mix of all my favourite things. A girl next door gets embarrassingly but consentingly covered in confectionery. She chose this1. And she’s paying the price. Gosh I find that hot.

Our next reading comes from Angela White.

This is a more straightforward porn video.A busy maid is angry that the young man of the house is wanking and forcing her to do extra work. Angrily, she gets him off to speed up the process so she can finish cleaning.

This is very different from the above. It is a porn video with no sense of realism at all. It’s over the top, camp even. So why do I like it?

Well first, Angela White has massive knockers. And as we know, I like big boobs. But she has many videos, why do I prefer this to the others?

I enjoy the over-the-top energy of it. I find many porn videos to be so telegraphed as to be boring. Hot woman and small man with surprisingly large penis end up fucking. Maternal woman meets large-cocked black man. Yawn. I don’t buy it. But angry cleaner has to titwank2 layabout, wait what? There is some drama there. Me being propositioned by a random woman seems unlikely, so porn should be unlikely too.

I have never really liked watching porn. I’m a bit grossed out by sex. But also there is something so boring about most porn to me. Oh the two of them fucked. Quelle suprise. The main thing that gets me is the moment of common knowledge. When two characters who have tension dispel that tension. And so many pornos are uninterested in this moment; they just want to put sausages in holes. Sometimes they literally skip the specific moment of realisation. Are they uninterested? Incapable? I don’t know. It’s a shame. I find that moment so hot. And in this video, the anger and confusion really sells it for me. She just wants to clean. And he’s making a mess. Better make him cum quick!

Finally, I like the anger. I have subby parts of me. Parts that want a busty angry lady to tell me what to do. And this really scratches that. Again, it’s not Oscar-worthy, but it is done with feeling. She sells the bit and I’m into that. I think that often porn stars are more interested in looking enraptured than they are at acting like real people. Why is this step-mother interested in this young man? I guess we’ll never know.

Next, Anything by Awesome Kate

This one isn’t that deep. I think Kate is, is some sense, the most beautiful woman in the world. Big perky tits, a pretty, approachable face. The sense that we could have a nice conversation.

Which is all the more surreal because it actually happened. I went to a party once and she was just there. I initially didn’t want to bother her because you know, she’s a porn star at a party, she doesn’t want guys bothering her. But about 30 minutes later she came and took my arm and asked if I would show her around the party.

I don’t know that I’d believe this if I read it on some anonymous page, though hopefully my blog contains enough unbelievable negative stuff that you can believe this unbelievable positive one.

We have chatted a little and I think the strange thing is, I’ve never really watched her porn since. I wouldn’t have minded if she sent it to me, but searching it myself felt ick. I think perhaps I imagine that a woman might fuck me. But here I don’t have to imagine—I met her. Somehow I can’t resuspend my disbelief. This might be kind of dumb but I let my sexual self do what it wants, so yeah. Similarly I have never really looked at Aella’s porn, though I know she wouldn’t care. If I want to see her naked, I want to earn it.

I’m not giving you a link you pervert. Google it.

Last but not least, fake taxi.

Probably the porn I go back to most often are fake taxi clips. A Cockney3 taxi driver flirts with and then fucks women in the back of his taxi. Here I’m not thinking of some specific clip, but just the genre in general.

Here are some I like:

https://www.pornhub.com/view_video.php?viewkey=6644707c5fe48

https://m1lfs.com/video/265526/milf-with-massive-natural-tits-licks-my-arsehole-like-a-pro-fake-taxi/?utm_campaign=tf

https://www.momvids.com/videos/25764/fake-taxi-driver-fucks-a-gorgeous-milf-antonia-deona-on-the-back-seat/?utm_source=PBWeb&utm_medium=PBWeb&sub=100001

https://www.analdin.xxx/videos/523297/giant-breasted-shannon-blue-got-naughty-in-cab/

https://www.momvids.com/videos/2184/fake-taxi-massive-boobs-titwank-and-hard-fuck-with-british-milf/?utm_source=PBWeb&utm_medium=PBWeb&sub=100001

https://www.xtits.xxx/videos/109454/bosomed-female-taxi-driver-sucks-bbc-before-fucking/

https://slutr.com/video/248440/ride-leads-to-nasty-facial-when-tit-bust-pops-out-of-fake-cab/?utm_campaign=tf

Putting the boobs aside, a big part here is the banter between the woman and the taxi driver, often some kind of cockney. Again, I think it’s the moment of common knowledge that’s the best. The part where he first makes clear that he’s interested and she makes clear that she might be interested too. I could watch it all day. I don’t know whether you’ll believe me but here are some of the hottest moments for me.

As with Angela White, I like taken aback. I like embarrassed. I like transactional. I like cringily up-for-it. Anything other than the beige, potato salad, ‘robotically horny’. If a woman is up for it the exact amount that the man in the story needs, I’m turned off. I find goldilocks zones suspicious, I want to fuck momma bear.

Also, it’s that it’s in a taxi. I’ve been in a black cab. It’s a familiar place, with familiar British accents. I don’t want to get fucked in these open-plan houses, I want to imagine turning my head over my shoulder and saying “cor, love, you nearly made me crash”.

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How I find new porn?

For me, a lot of the joy of porn is finding it. It’s like Netflix. Part of the fun is scrolling with your friends (who in this case are my penis) until you find something you like.

I’ve tried looking for porn using the features I particularly like—sarcasm, mockery, games4—but I don’t tend to have loads of luck in any particularly good stuff. There are some erotica producers who I’ve found who regularly write stuff that scratches my itch5. But I have never found a vein of sarcastic porn. There is a good amount of mockery in CFNM (Clothed Female Naked Man) but somehow once I’d seen one from the site I found it was all pretty samey. Similarly with girls getting gunged, it was a neat thing for a time but I’ve never had a regular supplier.

I sense that I want a director who wants to tell a different story each time (which is possible with erotica) but tends not to happen with porn, where the temptation is to run a similar playbook with different porn stars. Another stepmom, another young man.

Angela White (and to some extent Codi Vore) mess with their audience’s expectations in a surreal way, which gives them some directorial vision. Take White’s angry cleaner above. Or the time Vore fucks her step-ladder. As has pointed out, men want someone hot and funny so they think they are sophisticated in choosing a funny woman when they really want a hot one6. This feels the same. I’ve found some success with Ersties, though at times I find the niceness/ female centricity/ camera angles a bit of a boner killer7. Perhaps it’s cos I don’t actually think these women would fancy me.

The other angle is that I am thinking of a thing and wonder “I wonder if there is boobs of that”. This has moments of brilliance.

Lego boobs:

Knitted boobs:

Balatro boobs (???):

Sometimes I come up with an idea for a thing that can be boobified and I just can’t get it out of my head. I just want to find it and wank. I reckon that’s because I have previously allowed myself to do so and the mix of the forbidden and permitted is a heady mix. That I tell myself I’ll forget it if I wait so I’ve got to look now.

But this requires actual inspiration, which doesn’t happen all that often. One can’t just sit down, get one’s cock out and be struck by it. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t.

In some ultimate sense, my favourite kind of porn is sex. I find real life women much more interesting than porn. They are alive and unpredictable in the way the best porn is and also are entire people alongside that. I hear about guys who waste their lives on porn and video games, but that’s not me. I get bored quite quickly. Whereas every woman is like her own entire genre of porn8. And they are also fun to talk to.

Though if you do know of any busty auteur-driven pornography, let me know in the replies.

This is advice on how I improve at things.

Why is improving hard?

For me, improving is hard in three ways:

• It involves effort, which is sometimes wasted

• The rest of my life doesn’t stop while I’m trying to improve

• There are many ways to try and improve

It’s tiring to try and fail. And sure, (Master Wayne) we pick ourselves back up again, but that isn’t to say there aren’t costs. It can be pretty soul destroying to fail. And it really is much easier for me once I start to see some improvement, rather than feeling like I’m throwing away effort each day.

Next, life has a way of keeping on going. Let’s imagine I want to learn to write better. We might suggest I try and write a little each day. Perhaps that I publish a set of blogs and each time try to improve only one thing. Seems straightforward right?

Well sadly, the rest of my life might not play ball. What if I’m struggling to sleep, or work starts to ramp up. Real story, a few weeks back, my friends’ cat got fleas. I got bites all over me. Sometimes life is like that. It doesn’t stop. And it doesn’t helpfully pause while I’m trying to focus on a new area1.

Finally, there are many ways to try and improve. If I want to get better at dating, I can improve:

• My dating profile

• My general fitness

• How many dates I go on

• Who I tend to try and date

• Any habits which tend to turn people off

• How good at I am at having sex

And many more.

It’s easy then to get overwhelmed with the notion of improving, to somehow hold in one’s head all the things one wants to be improving on at once. I have some sense that the people who are very good at improving are good at choosing the one thing they are currently working on. Often it seems their bodies are good at tracking how they can move differently, how they can hold their hands differently, while I have to think carefully about these things2.

How I improve

First, give up (on some stuff)

I can’t improve at everything. And often, a focused effort to improve on one thing involves deciding that I won’t improve on everything else. It is hard to improve at things. It does take effort, and I can’t apply that to all things or all aspects of all things.

Often when I embark on some kind of improvement in my head, I wish to improve on 5-10 things. A good first step is to drop almost all of them.

Have a list, sort it

The notion here is to create some sort of roughly ordered list. Talk to friend who are good at the thing in question, ask them what things you could improve on, and then you have some rough list of things to do. As I say in this article, I think your friends probably know pretty well what things you ought to improve upon romantically, so start there. Create a list of such things. Sort them by recommendations (or whatever you want). Here is how I tend to do it. Things recommended once, twice, three times, four times, etc3.

Choose a thing, choose a way to improve on it.

Then, start with a thing that the most people have said4.

If it’s to improve your dating profile. Perhaps make a google doc and share it with friends who you are attracted to. What do they think of your photos or your prompts?

Write out some different ways you can improve that thing. You can repeat the above process, but I might just look through them and see which seems most reasonable. Consider also asking an LLM.

Note how we’ve moved from many things that can be improved in many ways, to one thing, in one way. For me, that’s much easier to focus on.

Don’t just “work harder.”

If your choice is “work harder,” can you please pick something else? I’m not saying “work hard” is never an option, but if improving has been hard fo you, then it probably hasn’t been working5.

I’ve got a friend who wants to lose weight. She’s been dieting for years. It’s never worked. I wish she’d just try one of those weight loss drugs, but I reckon she thinks that would be giving up. She wants to deserve the weight loss. Look, sometimes you get the win, and sometimes you deserve the win, but not always both. People love to make life morality play about hard work, where the only right way is to dig your heels in, to trust the force. Real life isn’t like this. The main lens for improvement isn’t moral, it’s functional, so do whatever gets you where you want to be (without doing something awful).

If you want to go on better dates, sure you can try harder, and that might help, but you also might be dating the wrong people. If you tend to like dating people who play board games, make sure that your dating profile says so.

Seek accountability

I’ve come to find it really valuable to have weekly or monthly meetings with people when they want to improve things.

It’s great to be like, “OK, what did you try?” I think it can provide encouragement. There’s a reason that this is a pretty standard management practise to have regular meetings, to have what are called KPIs, Key Performance Indicators.

I recommend finding a friend, having a meeting at some regular time interval, and having at least one thing that you say you’re going to do in that gap and that they’re going to ask you whether you’ve done it.

If you can actually track your skill via a number, even better! Meet up, talk about the number, decide what you’re gonna do next time.

Rinse and repeat

If the improvement works, great job! You’ve improved at the thing. Please celebrate your success. Find a friend and tell them. I really hope that they are supportive of you. It’s really good to improve at things. If we could all improve at things a bit, then the world would be much better.

If you haven’t succeeded, then consider whether you want to keep trying the specific strategy you’ve been doing or perhaps try to improve a different thing or the same thing in a different way. If you want to do a different thing, then just move to the next thing on your list.

This is how I improve. I keep bashing against ways to improve, either succeeding or trying different strategies. Eventually, it has worked. But you gotta keep trying.

So that’s the basic strategy.

To find out how it applies to sex, cross the paywall.

Sex is a hard thing to improve at for all the reasons above:

• Failure is disheartening.

• It happens alongside normal life.

• There are many different ways that one might want to improve at sex.

But additionally, sex is often taboo. If I am playing tennis, my partners will probably tell me if I’m getting better or not. With sex, it can sometimes be socially unacceptable to ask if I am getting better at it6.

Also, people are very different in what they like from sex, so for me it’s hard to build a sense of what is good and what is bad in general. What one woman considers a hot abrupt shift to horniness another will find offputting. I kind of like toothy blow jobs, the first person I gave a blow job to.. she did not7.

I am not surprised that I’ve found this hard to improve at.

So let’s run through the steps above, with one extra initial step

Step 0: Is there a way that failure can be cheap?

It is easier to learn if the costs of failure are lower. Sadly with sex, they can be pretty high. I have upset people I really care about. And so these days I’m pretty cautious, which doesn’t leave a lot of space for focusing on improvement.

I think the following steps will be much easier if you are having sex in a low stakes way where there is lots of feedback. For me, it took a long time to have partners I felt safe enough around to explore the anxiety I feel around sex. I’d probably had 20 or 30 sexual partners before I found a few who I could work things through with.

Friends with benefits, long term partner, sex worker, it’s up to you. If it were outside of a long term relationship I would ask if it were okay being a space where I could learn. I’ve recently had a friends-with-benefits arrangement where I’ve been trying to have better sex. I’m confident she enjoys this, but it’s important to me that she understands that I’m trying to learn. I wouldn’t want her to be hurt by that somehow and feel used8.

The process from the first part, applied to sex

Let’s go through the above.

First, giving up. I think it’s easy to miss this. But I don’t think you can have that many goals. If you are trying to improve your job, your fitness, your relationship and your sex life in the next three months.. probably give up one. Sex is not some throwaway extra. It has taken me ages to improve. And if you’re reading this, consider whether you overcommit at things to work on9.

Next let’s consider ways you can improve. I’ll give you a starting tier list. I’d recommend you write your own and then combine them and ask a few close friends (ideally some of the gender you like to fuck). As I’ve said before, LLMs are good here. They are non-judgemental and well-read.

Recommended 3 times

• Be clean

• Be well groomed

• Be well dressed

• Have a tidy bedroom

• Read “She Comes First” (I’m writing a blog about it next)

• If single, improve your dating profile in an honest way

• If partnered, talk to your partner about what you could improve on10

Recommended twice

• General sexual technique

• Learn your own boundaries

Recommended once

• Get fitter

• Become less anxious

• Learn more sexual techniques

• Go to sex parties

• Earn more

• Read my blogs on how to improve at sex

• Read Aella’s blogs

• Read the book “Mate”

• Read Jacob’s “Second Person” blog

Choose one of these to work on. Eg, if you want to work on personal grooming, consider ways you might do that. And actually sit down for 5 minutes and think about it. Set a stop watch and do nothing else. And because I lead by example I shall do that now.

5 minutes of personal grooming thoughts:

• Ask my friends if they think I am well groomed

• Get a more regular haircut

• Have a more regular return to whatever facial hair I like to have. Eg do I shave daily or twice a week or whatever, do that more regularly

• While washing, rub my hands over my butt and armpits to check they don’t smell. If they do, wash again. Wash hands afterwards

• Ask an LLM for grooming advice

I also asked Claude11 with the following prompt:

I’m trying to be more sexually desirable can you give me some solid suggestions to be better groomed. Please give solid, if possible, statistical advice such as Aella or Jacob Falkovich would give.

Here is Claude’s response (full response in footnotes12):

Choose one of these things.

Ask if you can check in with a close friend about this regularly. If you don’t have such a friend, set a calendar notification13.

Let’s imagine we decide to wash every day for the next month. We tell our friend that that’s the strategy and then we do it.

Is that all?

Standard, we started at “improving sex” and now we’ve said we’re gonna make sure we have a shower every day? What’s going on?

Well no, in actuality you do whatever you choose to do. But if this was the thing you wanted to do, it might look a little anticlimactic. But if I talked to friends and they said my personal grooming could use work and I decided to shower every day.. that actually might help. And it would be good to bed that practice in rather than doing it for a week while trying three other strategies. So yeah, I would recommend doing a small thing for a couple of weeks or a month. And if it’s easy, then adding on something else. But do the easy thing for a bit first.

Actually do it

I have written quite a few articles about improving at sex and dating. This is my attempt at an even more ground truth one. But ultimately advice doesn’t work unless you do it. Whether you make one change a week or one change a year, if you want to see non-luck based improvement, you have to choose a thing to try, try it and then repeat.

At some point, I can’t help you. Five minutes a day is much better than an hour once off. Sometimes I go to the gym and then I leave without doing anything, but a habit of getting to the gym is much more likely to cause me to workout than not going. Choose a small thing and actually do it.

Improvement is underrated

I am sometimes surprised how little standard improvements are discussed in anything other than weightlifting14. But we can work a bit to become better parents, better friends, better lovers, but I can’t think that I see a lot of group strategies for that.

The aim of this is a general rule to help you improve at things, including sex. Talk to friends, choose a strategy, work on it, be accountable, repeat. If you actually have a call every 2 weeks with a friend, then over time I think most people can make big strides towards things they want. Life doesn’t have to be a thing that happens to us. Sex can be a thing that does.

Appendix: If you are overwhelmed, stop reading now

The next sections have some extra thoughts, but if your brain is full, stop here. You can come back to it. I think it’s easy to come up with too many new things and then not do the main point of this article, which is the flow I’ve already described.

Consider what part of the process is going wrong

To me, sex involves meeting someone who might want to have sex, connecting with them, having sex and disengaging.

So if you’re honest with yourself, which of these steps are you struggling with most?

• Do you struggle to go on dates with people?

• Do you struggle to make connections on or before dates?

• Do you tend to regret the people you have sex with?

• Do you struggle to have sex with people you connect well with?

• Do you have good sexual experiences that turn bad afterwards

If it were me I would think about what is the biggest thing I was struggling with. Is it meeting enough people, figuring out if we are sexually compatible, avoiding upset (perhaps by avoiding sex). This would suggest to me what thing to work on.

Though honestly, anything is better than nothing. If you try asking friends, LLMs and thinking about it and still don’t know.. then roll a die.

Be someone they should bet on.

I’m sure there are many shortcuts to sex, but when giving advice, I tend to avoid shortcuts.

If no shortcuts were available, what would cause us to have more sex? It would be that we regularly gave high-benefit, low-cost sexual experiences (or were great partners in other ways).

If we’re struggling for which thing to improve, Just imagine that every person you slept with would have full knowledge of the whole encounter beforehand. What would they like you to change? Would they like you to be more honest about your intentions? To do different sexual activities? To spend more time cuddling with them afterwards?

Every time we engage sexually with people, they’re taking a risk on us and a vulnerable activity. One key way to make that more likely is to honestly have it be a better experience. And if we’re confident of that, then we can be justifiably confident when flirting.

If I had to recommend improving at one thing..

My general advice is my general advice for a reason—ask your friends, be clean and non-smelly—but I do think cunnilingus is underrated. An easy way to have more sex is to have people enjoy it and for you to be confident about your sexual skills. If you sleep with women, cunnilingus can check both boxes at once.

Aella did some research on what women want vs. the amount men do it for them. I’m not going to show the graph because it’s paywalled, but “long enthusiastic oral” is in the upper left-hand corner in what she labels the “land of unfulfilled feminine”15.

I am currently writing an article about it, but has just published one too. Here is a quote:

Moreover, I can’t prove this scientifically, but of all the straight women who have talked to me about “great sex” they’ve had, the one common theme seems to be frequent and enthusiastic cunnilingus.

This seems a serious contender for your effort.

Improvement compounds

I’ve written about “having sex when your dick is hard”. This was a valuable maxim that helped me feel more confident about my ability to have sex. But after a time, I didn’t need it. I guess that the real thing that was hurting my erections was anxiety. And once I became more confident then the problem itself went away.

Improving is the same. When I’m worried about how to improve, anxiety uses some of my focus, giving me even less space to actually focusing on improvement. If I know I can succeed at something, I am probably more relaxed about doing other steps badly.

In this way, sometimes improvement can lift loads you didn’t know you had. Perhaps you’re struggling with general confidence around sex and even a few small victories will give you a burst of confidence. My aim here is to help you achieve those.

One final time

I have no substitute for sustained effort at improving. If you can’t focus on this then give up on some things until you can or maybe give up on improving at sex and try and improve the amount of slack you have.

Let me know how you get on. Was this advice useful?

Finally, how was the paywall?

I’ve never paywalled an article on here before. How was it for you?

Shane Gillis’ hapless co-star Steve Gerben was on his podcast this week. Gillis mocks him about sexual topics. Now the two are close friends, Gerben is fine here, but here are the exchanges:

Gillis: God, he has a book about how to go down on women.

Phil (Shane Gillis’ dad): What?

Gillis: Yeah, he reads it.

Phil: Jesus. Why do you need instructions?

…

Gillis: Now the worst is the red lighting.

Gerben: Hold on a second.

Gillis: His lighting, Phil. He changes his bedroom lighting to red. On his phone, he goes, “Alexa, make it Chinatown.”

…

Gerben: Hold on a second. The red lights is a real thing. However, they’re not like auxiliary lights that I’m setting up … You could literally Google it, that it’s a thing.

Gillis: And plays techno.

Gerben: No, I don’t play techno.

Gillis: You told me you played techno.

Gerbe I said I tried it once. It doesn’t work. Hold on.

Gillis: It probably scares the fuck out of them. That’s a fucking hinge date and you go, “Alexa make it Chinatown.”

Gerben: I don’t do that.

Gillis: Hey Siri, could you play 9 inch nails? Fucking crazy.

Gerben: All right, hang on. I don’t do.

Gillis: Just because you’re like a sweater golf guy. There’s a little freak in there. And you like that. You think that’s sexy. You like 50 Shades of Grey.

I know this is just banter between guys, but it sparks something in me. What do I think is going on?

It seems like the underlying fault line is that it’s creepy to read books choose lighting and music. Why?

Trying is a signal of badness

Let’s imagine someone you know starts reading a pickup artistry book. Is it more likely to be the handsome guy or an ugly incel guy? Its the latter, right? There is actually some truth her. People who try at things are the people who have to try. If you are reading books and having a “sex playlist” you’re probably either very good or very bad, and the bad far outnumber the good.

But if we remember our XCKD, causation and correlation are different. Just because trying hard is correlated with badness doesn’t mean that trying hard will make me bad. If I am mediocre then something that will likely improve me, will likely improve me. I like that Gerben is trying.

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Female pleasure surely can’t improve much

Can men actually get better here? It’s fine for men to try at the gym. We all know we can get much bigger muscles. But sex? How much ground can actually be covered?

Well, actually, I think quite a lot. Later in the podcast they discuss some of the books Gerben is reading about female pleasure. One is She Comes First. I’m reading that too. And it implies that there really is quite a lot of room for men to improve at giving women pleasure. And taking it seriously, I gave a woman about two additional orgasms the other day1.

I guess there really is a lot of ground in cultivating a sexual space, learning how to have sex well and being more genuine. Do men generally act as if it’s a way to improve? Or do we make jokes and hold each other back?

Standard, it was a joke

I often feel very serious when making these kinds of points. I don’t know these guys and they are probably fine. But it reminds me of a more general situation.

One guy is being mocked for learning about sex and taking slightly odd strategies. I suggest it’s because there is something intrinsically cringe about improving at lovemaking.

And the notion that this is “50 Shades of Grey”. Like do we really need the meme that putting on some coloured lights, music and eating a woman out is deeply kinky? Ooooh don’t want to do that, you might be a weirdo.

Imagine if rather than being weird, this behaviour was normal. That your ingroup was known as a group of men who were great at sex. Who had fantastic technique, were great at setting the mood, wonderful at head. “Oh he’s an _____ist, they are great in bed” wouldn’t that be better, if it were possible?

And sometimes it just gets to me. Why do we hamstring ourselves like this?

In defence of improvement

It is good to improve at things. Especially if improvement leads to better outcomes for other people as well as myself. It is harder to bring a woman to orgasm than a man, and so historically that has been an excuse not to really try. But I could have been born a woman and then I’d want men to try to please me, so I want to do the same.

I am taking this too seriously, but it is a kind of offhand comment that annoys me. Oh you freak, you read books about sex. Yeah sex is a thing that is a big deal to billions of people. How dare I try and get better at it?! I’m tired of it. I wish that sex was treated like going to the gym.

“Hell yeah dude, let me know how it goes”.

Addendum: What might men get better at, sexually:

• Giving head

• Sex positions

• Consent/deescalation

• Slowness and desire

• Having a hard dick2

• Creating a comfortable environment

• Spanking

Imagine a world in which the median man was solid about all these things. Would women have more sex? Probably. Which means we’d have more sex too.

“Fuck,” I muttered under my breath as I pulled over to the side of the road.

The cop car pulled in behind me and a slightly overweight police officer walked up to my window.

“License and registration, please,” he said gruffly. I rooted around in my bag.

“Do you know why I pulled you over?” he asked, glancing down at me with an appraising look. I could feel his eyes on my chest.

“No officer,” I replied, having been told never to admit anything in situations like this.

“You were going 80 in a 55,”

I looked up at him, he wasn’t even trying to hide his interest, looking directly at my bikini-clad breasts.

“I’m going to need you to step out of the car,”

Of course he did. I got out of the car and he fully checked me out, his eyes roaming down and then slowly back up my body.

“If you could walk down and back for me,” he suggested, gesturing to the far side of my car.

“And what would that achieve?” I asked warily, noticing a distinct bulge in his trousers.

“I have my reasons,” I wonder if he thinks he’s being mysterious.

I walked around the car slowly, feeling very exposed in bikini on the side of the road. Dressing like this for a beach trip had felt an excellent idea this morning. Less so now.

The weather was still warm, but my belly and thighs felt very exposed. I was starting to feel stupid. Sure, a little horny too.

As I turned back towards him, a car beeped at us. The officer had an obvious erection straining against his pants now.

I was getting tired of this. “Can we skip to the bit where you offer something?”

The police officer paused and then spoke: “Are you trying to bribe an officer of the law?”

I rolled my eyes. “No. But you say I was speeding. That’s a ticket. This is more than that. You’re stalling. Why?”

He cleared his throat nervously. “Well, I figured you might want to get off that ticket.”

“How much is the fine for?” I asked, walking towards him slowly and pushing my chest out just slightly.

“$150,” he replied.

I thought for a moment. “And you figure there might be... other ways to settle the debt?” I don’t want to be the one that says it, I don’t like him enough for that.

He smiled knowingly. “You’re getting it girl.”

“Like what?” I asked curiously, looking him up and down. His cock was still clearly hard under his pants and he met my eyes with a calm intensity.

“I want to push a cheesecake into your tits.”

“Wha-?” A laugh burst out of me. I crunched over, no doubt giving him an even better view of my rack. “I wasn’t... what?” I asked in disbelief, staring at him.

I paused, then said, “May I be honest? The balls on you! Were you always planning to ask me that?”

“Nah, but you seemed like you might be up for it,” he replied with a shrug.

I looked inside myself and was surprised to find that I actually might be game. “And what is a little corruption on a Friday afternoon?” I asked. Did I mean to be that sharp?

He looked almost hurt at my implication. “Well you can take the fine if you want. I didn’t mean anything by it,”

“No, you can do it,” I decided, not wanting to look chickenshit.

Now it was his turn to look shocked. His face lit up. “Really?”

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My acceptance had kind of slipped out but now I didn’t want to back down. “Yeah, go get it,” I told him firmly.

“What here?” his voice had gone up slightly..

“This was your idea. Yeah here. I’m not gonna drive to some strange location. You might not even be a police officer for all I know. If you want cheesecake boobs, it happens on the side of the road.”

My nipples were hard now. I wondered if he could see them.

He went to the trunk of his car and pulled out a fancy-looking cheesecake from one of those cake shops.

“Oh wait, is your wife gonna be okay with this?” I asked, realizing this was all getting pretty complicated.

“Yeah, we’ve been open for years,” he assured me.

“Okay well you have to go buy her another cheesecake. My momma didn’t raise no cheesecake thief.”

He acquiesced and walked back over, taking the cake out of its box, which he tossed aside. He held the cheesecake balanced on one hand as he looked me in the eyes intently. He wasn’t that handsome but there was a confident charm about him. And his boner was raging now. I was almost willing to... no.

He looked up and down the road waiting until there were no cars in sight.

He looked me in the face, “Ask me to push this cake into your tits”

I realized I didn’t even know his name.

“Officer, please push that cheesecake into my fat, heavy tits,” I’d meant it partly as a joke, but somehow I’d said it seriously.

He lifted the cake and flipped it, plunging it right into my substantial cleavage. The feeling was crisp and squishy. My eyes went wide as I looked away from him, suddenly very aware of how wet I had become.

“Mmmm,” he said appreciatively. “They look even better with the cake in there.”

He was practically buzzing with anticipation in front of me now.

I met his intense gaze, my hard nipples surely visible now. I breathed out a long breath. “Thank you officer. Will that be all?”

He held my gaze. I expected indecision, but didn’t see it. “Drive carefully next time, ma’am.”

I dipped two fingers down into my cleavage and pulled them away, coated in sticky purple mush. My lips closed around my top knuckle and slowly licked the cake away. Blackcurrant. Excellent.

I walked back to my car slowly, feeling extremely alive. I couldn’t have said if any cars passed us. I turned and waved to him.

I got in, I put on my seatbelt and pulled away.

I’d planned to clean off in the ocean but now the walk to the water seemed a little more daring. I’d figure something out.

This piece was inspired by the images from this article by :

Boobs and Badges

Traffic stop pie fuck (2 stories)

I probably shouldn’t even be writing this…

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a year ago · 18 likes · Boobs and Badges

And could I ask a few questions:

At this point I have matched with a woman on a dating app1 and she has come to my house.

23. Take her coat, offer her a drink.

Last time we talked about the contrast between hungry and safe. I want to push women up against the wall and fuck them in the hallway. But I don’t want them to worry that I won’t let them stop if they aren’t into it.

So two of her failure modes here are unsafe and bored. Navigating these is a chunk of what I think about during sex. We’ll get to three more axes later on.

For an app hookup, I generally offer water rather than ravishing her.

24. Go up to my room.

The first time I ever had sex I spent too much time before going up to my room. She said “Until we got to the door of your house I thought you did this all the time, once we were inside I was like, this guy doesn’t know what on earth he’s doing.”

25. Take a moment.

She might want to discuss something first and it’s sometimes nice to create a breath.

Look at her face, does she seem chill? I know that I am not escaping the autism allegations, but people’s faces look different when they are relaxed vs. stressed..

26. Kiss, part I.

Again there are risks to being too chaste or too hungry. Small pecks I find boring. Straight to tongue can be too much.

Generally I mix up the following:

• Slow kissing on the lips

• Hungrily kissing on the lips

• Kissing her neck

• Kissing around her ears

If these are the specific actions, the general rule is more as follows:

Kissing is a dance. And dance is a conversation.

Many partner dances involve a leader and a follower—somebody who is choosing the move and somebody who is flowing with that—and we don’t need to assign masculine or feminine roles here, but it’s important that somebody is in charge.

But dance itself is a conversation. It involves talking and listening. One is not a good dancer if one forces the other person just to do whatever one wants. And one is not a good follower if one gives no response, even to the most generous of leads.

Kissing is similar. It involves somebody suggesting we’re going to kiss on the lips, perhaps we’re going to kiss across your chin or down the side of your neck. And it involves somebody else responding positively or negatively to that with their hands, with moving their face closer or not, with kissing back, with using tongues.

I generally lead, and vary the places I’m kissing, the ways I’m kissing, and am watchful if the person I’m kissing isn’t really enjoying it. l also give room for them to lead, which I really enjoy.

27. Kiss more hungrily.

Elsewhere I talk about the flirting escalation ladder. Kissing has one too. Probably don’t do the later things until you’ve done the earlier ones:

1. Kiss once on the lips.

2. Snog on the lips.

3. Kiss around the lips, like along the edge of the chin.

4. Extended kissing of the neck.

5. Extended stocking with tongues.

6. Pushing the kissing towards her nipples

And at some point, Toto, we aren’t kissing anymore.

28. RBDSM

This is an initialism2 which stands for:

• Relationships

• Boundaries

• Desires

• Sexual health

• Meaning

In other words, before I have sex with someone, especially for the first time, I try to check that we both understand where we are in regard to:

• Relationships - are there other people who might care about us having sex

• Boundaries - are there things we definitely don’t want to do?

• Desires - are there things we really do want to do?

• Sexual health - are we going to use protection? When were we last tested?

• Meaning - what does this sex mean to us?

If these questions feel unacceptably awkward to ask or there are upsetting answers… red flag! If I can’t ask someone a question like this I likely shouldn’t fuck them.

A rough order of possible sexual activities

It is escalation ladders all the way up. “The important thing isn’t to rush up the escalator but to move together in synchrony whether you’re taking a step up or a step down”3.

29. Pull her hair slightly

In my experience, women either really like having their hair pulled or are pretty ambivalent towards it. So do it sort of lightly and maybe look at her while you’re doing it, perhaps even say “Do you like that?” Either she’ll say yes, then you can do it more, or she’ll say “eh” and then don’t do it.

(A SlutCon girl suggested that the right way to do this is to put your hand on her scalp and make a fist, but again I’d start lightly)

In general, it’s worth tracking which things she responds positively to and which things she doesn’t, and then do more of the things she responds positively to. I try to not let my own desires bias this reading.

In particular, let’s consider choking. I don’t really care about it, but some women love it. So I ask, or move my hand slowly telegraphing want I’m about to do “do you like that?” A big problem is that they sometimes think I like it and I think they do, but neither of us really do. A lot of room for bad equilibria.

30. If I don’t like the position, I move her around.

My most dominant trait is that on some level, I know exactly what I want. And on another level, it’s quite easy for me to be distant. If I didn’t like her, this would be possibly disastrous. But being large, distant and caring is a vibe that many women seem to like. I’m going to get you off, whether you like it or not.

So if I don’t like the position, I’ll just move them. I don’t ask, I just sort of push or twist lightly so they know it’s coming. If she’s being dominant, then I would use my strength much less, because it undermines her dominance and I like women being dominant.

31. Kiss some more.

32. Suck on her tits.

I love boobs4. I could sit kissing someone’s breasts for ages, so that’s often the first thing I move on to. Perhaps kiss along her collarbone, squeezing her ass, and then at some point, perhaps we’re kissing, and I’ll start to grope her tits, or perhaps I’ll get her tits out of her bra and then suck on them.

Does she have very sensitive nipples? Or does she prefer biting? Does it do anything for her? What about moving my tongue slowly around them?

33. Perhaps take a moment to look at her “how are you doing?”

It might seem like I’m saying this a lot but this is all taking place over 30 minutes, so I’m not sure two or three pauses is that much.

34. Kiss and disrobe.

For the next part, you need to be able to at least see her panties.

After we’ve kissed for a bit, I might start kissing across the stomach and then down one leg, perhaps kiss next to and hover over her pussy for a bit. I want her to know that I’m focused on her vagina. I want her to be wet and turned on.

35. Move my hand slowly towards her pussy, perhaps looking questioningly.

I think with escalations with a new person it’s good to get assent, if not explicit consent. Perhaps she doesn’t like her pussy being touched (in which case the odds of sex fall precipitously, but I’m okay with that)

36. Finger

And then, at some point, I’ll start fingering her.

I find this all a bit hard to write about because it feels like at some point someone’s gonna cite it and be like, “Oh, this autistic man is describing in gross detail...” but nobody writes about this stuff. I could write a whole article about my feelings when I’m fingering, but anyway, we must continue.

I generally finger by rubbing up the side slowly over the top of her clitoris and then down5. I do it regularly with slight irregularity, so generally following some pattern, then occasionally there’s something different (eg. up, over, down, up, over, down, up, down, up, over, down6).

At this point I have been requested to put a diagram. Note how far the clitoris is above the vaginal opening. There is a lot of space to play with here.

Again, I watch her reactions7. I know I’m mentioning this a lot, but a lot of sex for me has been generating and testing theories for when women are having a good time. That involves both theories (she’s probably enjoying this) and observations (listening to the noises she’s making, “is this good for you?”)

At some point I might move quickly up and down/across on her clit. And if she begs I might (will) put my fingers inside her.

37. Spanking

A bit like hair-pulling. It’s sometimes nice to spank someone once and see how they respond.

38. Eat her out

Only if I’m in a good mood and she tastes good. Yes, it’s a double standard but dicks are cleaner than pussies and I am a fussy eater at the best of times. Girls with dicks are welcome to get blow jobs from me.

I think there is a lot of fun to be had in kissing down and around the vagina before actually doing the dirty. Also this gives her time to say “No thanks” which some women do—I find people not enjoying being eaten out is relatively common.

39. Blow jobs

Blow jobs are often merely fine8, but I’ll take ‘em.

40. How is my energy doing? Am I close or distant?

At this point I am perhaps thinking about a few things:

• Is she happy or getting tired?

• Am I feeling close or distant? (see below)

• Am I tired or energetic?

• Has she really enjoyed anything that I can return to as we get closer to her orgasm?

I think there is an entire blog here; for me, sex is a lot about managing energy levels and pleasure levels. There are lots of failure modes here, perhaps I come too quickly, perhaps I get grumpy, and tired, and my hand aches, perhaps she feels pressured. I can’t really track her energy, but I can track mine, and I can roughly track pleasure for both of us.

This can go in a number of directions.

If I am feeling tired and distant, I might do what I feel is a solid effort at getting her off. Honestly I might try to avoid getting off myself, so I don’t feel guilty afterwards. I try not to end up in hookups while feeling tired, but I don’t always know someone well enough to call it off—hookups can feel very stakesy and while I would absolutely stop if a woman wasn’t into it, women can be kind of cold about the reverse.

If I am feeling energetic and distant, I’ll tease and be dominant. The distance allows me to ignore her attractiveness a bit, which gives me more freedom to please her. I think in some sense I’m a much technically worse lover when I am into it so, I think this is a kind of scenario where a subby woman gets off the highest percentage of the time.

If I am energetic and close, I will try and tease, but honestly I am much less good at it. At this point, I want her. And somehow wanting makes being patient much harder for me, because she can be like “fuck me” and I’ll do it. I think here I want either someone I am close to, where it doesn’t really matter whether she comes every time, someone who manages their own pleasure, or someone to dom me, because I am exceedingly dommable when turned on.

So anyway. I lot of my practice is about trying not to be too burned out, which can leads to me feeling resentful. So when I start to feel that way, I do a bit less work or change the activity.

On a hookup, I probably aim for cold energetic. For someone I have hooked up with a lot, I’m much more relaxed about being warm. As I reflect on this, it seems a bit sad. I don’t necessarily endorse my views here.

41. Fuck/Don’t fuck

I sit in this cycle for a while. This tweet was a revelation for me:

Link: https://x.com/MasterTimBlais/status/1391809655152824322

The question often is, can I run a successful hill climb before I get tired and resentful, or so horny that I come?

42. She orgasms?

I would say the ideal place for the first female orgasm is before there is any chance I’ll come. There might be a second but if I’m attempting her coming it’s probably best to go early.

43. Say “wanna fuck?”

Not hard for this to be both fun and clear, so why not. If her answer is anything other than “yes”, be prepared to stop and talk.

44. Fuck

In other articles I recommend fucking when one’s dick is hard. I think that’s good advice if one is skittish or struggles getting hard (as I used to). Strangely that doesn’t really seem a problem any more.

But the time must come in any man’s life when he must fuck.

In some sense, fucking is just another part of the above. But I am terrible at not coming and have a long refractory period so unless I am okay with coming, I try not to.

Why do I come so quickly? I don’t know, but I find nothing sexier than a woman moaning. This is disastrous in trying to hold it together. I’m getting better though.

Personally I like a number of positions for different reasons:

• Standing up with her bending over - For getting power down.

• Doggystyle - For grabbing her tits while we fuck.

• Her legs over my shoulders - For pushing my cock deep.

• Missionary - For kissing and being chill.

I used to care more about thrusting and deepness but as I’ve had more sex I care about what I’m doing with my hands, new positions, being able to see her face. I haven’t really had many long term sexual partners (though I’ve had a lot of sexual partners)—I’m much better at getting dates that I am at delivering spectacular sex, I think.

45. Lie alongside

Many women seem to appreciate closeness after sex. It’s good to build this into my energy budget. This too is kindness.

46. Talk.

I think it’s good to have a little chat at some point. It’s not always easy, but I like to say “how was that for you?” or to spend a minute thinking what this other human might want, given we have shared something very vulnerable.

47. Fingering/vibrator

If she hasn’t orgasmed it’s good to offer the chance now, perhaps via fingering or with a vibrator. I don’t know why this seems better after, but it’s good to have a clean vibrator lying around, perhaps even a few options.

48. Shower

A very fastidious woman I dated thought this reduced STI risk. So I do it. Women should also go pee after sex to reduce infection risk.

49. Taxi home/ Stay over

If I would be actively happy with her staying over9, I’ll offer, but often I don’t want that. So I offer to pay for a taxi home. As before, maybe I’m embodying bad gender roles here, but also, this is a thing I want her to be glad happened for my own sake and this is part of it.

Reflections

These blogs show me things I didn’t realise until I write them out. While the first focused a lot on hunger vs. safety this one draws out closeness and distance. This won’t be for everyone, but that leaves the following.

The central green area is good sex—whether that’s more emotionally distant, dommy sex or warm, close, fun sex. Both can be good for me, and she’s neither bored nor uneasy, so it’s probably good for her. As we move towards her boredom or uneasiness, it becomes uncertain or maybe time to stop.

There is a third dimension here, and perhaps a fourth, around my and her tiredness. As I said at the top, I think if I’m feeling close to someone, tiredness is a bit easier. If I’m feeling distant, sometimes tiredness can be a reason to step away from the sexual encounter.

It’s important again to note that I am pretty good at finding hookups but still working on being good at sex, so take this blog with a pinch of salt. And if you think I’m doing something boneheaded then please tell me!

Another point is that sex isn’t just a thing to do. It’s something to do with another person. It’s a dance, a conversation. This article has focused on practical considerations, but I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that there is a living breathing woman who is taking a risk on me.

Finally, I hope in some ways I am more fun than these articles suggest. I am trying to be honest and vulnerable, not maximally winsome. But if you still think I sound fun, hit me up - https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1u7MgjFFPAqlPOCQ_-6TOJW9qp9SkiqwfFkrGQedJ_rU/edit

3

I’m quoting here, but he’s summarising me. So do with that what you will.

Second Person

What I Learned about Sex at the Rationalist Bloggers' Conference

LessOnline is a conference for rationalist-adjacent bloggers whose second iteration was held last weekend. The home page features a selection of notable writers who cover topics like AI, economics, psychology, AI, policy, AI, Effective Altruism, education, life extension, and AI…

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a year ago · 42 likes · 5 comments · Jacob Falkovich

This post is about how I do hookups. It says a bit about UK/anglophone hookup culture, but more about me

These days I tend to separate hookups from exploratory dating. In the latter case, I am trying to figure out whether I am a suitable match for someone. In the former I want to get my rocks off.1 But whatever people say I find that sex ups the ante in relationships.2 What was curious before is more serious now. So I try not to bring hookup energy to dating.3

So today we’ll talk using dating apps for hookups. Here we go.

1. Like women.

I think it’s underrated advice in the modern world to think that women are good and fun and, you know, conscious. So before we begin this process of a random hookup, pray a quick prayer to the great, pink lady in the sky. Thank you for women.

2. I go to my normal dating profiles. (I mainly use the apps for regular dating)

3. On Feeld (a kinky dating app), I hack off a few sentences from the front and add “looking for a hookup today”. On Hinge, I would leave things as they are. I don’t use Tinder.

My sense here is that it’s good to have a normal profile that a non-psychopath would use. Not like a topless fishing photo and “I want to be inside you”. I have pictures and prompts of me looking nice that sometimes get attention in normal times, to anchor my current hoe-isness.

4. I am up front, pretty quickly. On Feeld, I might message with “Want to hookup today?” On Hinge I might say “would you like drinks this afternoon” or match and then be slightly flirty.

Hinge is sort of a dangerous game. It’s quite easy to get blocked as a man and even being snap-ghosted4 doesn’t feel great—I assume someone only does that if they feel pretty repulsed. I aim to avoid people feeling repulsed. So on Hinge I tread lightly. I don’t use Tinder, since the accounts rarely seem like people I would have connection with.

5. On Feeld I might say “can I be a hoe for a second” “sure” “I want to hook up with someone today”. On Hinge I might imply that I wanted something, then if they ask say “I’m not sure this is a suitable ask for hinge” then if they ask, tell them.

I think this is sort of unmanly of me but I’m okay with that. Were I more competent I wouldn’t have to be coquettish about it—somehow women would smell what I want. But I’m not that competent, so I’m more careful.

Sorry, I don’t think I’m explaining this that well. There is a scene in Crazy Stupid Love where Ryan Gosling is hitting on Emma Stone. And he’s clearly in control, while being a bit dickish. I think this is much harder in real life, but I’ve seen some guys manage it.

It feels sort of intrinsically weaker to be like “ask me what I want”. Or to say things directly. But I’m not Ryan Gosling and I don’t have a screenwriter.

6. Joke around, leave space, don’t push.

Often a woman will be like “oh my housemate is in”. Previously I might have interpreted this as “no thanks”. Because I was so scared of upsetting her. But now I see it as a maybe. She’s unsure and perhaps she’s seeing if I’ll be a dick about it. I think this point is pretty easy to screw up in the other direction too, by demanding she do something or seeming uncaring.

It’s genuinely tricky, because I do care. And again, if you don’t, I can’t make you, but I recommend trying it. My life is better for being virtuous.

So here are some responses:

• “My housemates are in” -> “you’re welcome to come to mine”

• “We haven’t met yet” -> “want to have a drink first”

• “I am tired” -> “dw, I’ll do the work. Just stick your ass in the air” (this one is a hard one to pull off, but I can xxox)

I can’t really express the difference between slowly defanging questions and pushing her, but I think there is one. But also, it’s a dating app and she’s clever, if she doesn’t want to come over, she won’t. I wouldn’t say this to a woman at a party unless she were smiling and laughing a lot.

7. I offer to pay for a taxi.

Taxing someone and from my place is not that much money, especially compared to dinner etc. But I think it sets the expectation that I am not cheap/lazy.5

8. Leave space for a neutral location.

I am surprised if a woman wants to come directly to my house, without having met me. Not sure I would do that to a random man on a dating app if I were a woman.

9. Don’t make jokes about not being a murderer/rapist

A friend told me about a guy she matched with on a dating app. She was gonna take the train to see him. He wanted to pick her up in his car. He said “Don’t worry, I’m not going to rape you”. When she retold this, she put her hands in her lap and said sort of to mid air “well now we can’t go out”. She said she couldn’t see him at all because if he did rape her she’d feel so dumb given that he’d brought it up. He fumbled it.6

10. Be ready to move the conversation away. If she either didn’t respond positively initially or is a bit like “naaah actually I don’t think I want to” then I am like “don’t worry about it, what are you up to this evening”.

We’ve talked about pushing a little, but there really should be room for a no. If the excuses keep coming or she says no, I’ll probably leave it.

11. But if she’s into it, then..

12. Freshen up.

I don’t care if she turns up dragged through a hedge backwards. I am gonna be showered and shaved with a tidy room in a good mindset. That is the part I control, and so I shall control it.

Honestly, Jordan Peterson is right. Tidy my room! It is a good habit to get into to reset my space and life often. This is a random woman, she is much more at risk than I am and I don’t want her to see my space and go “oh no”.

13. Imagine what it’s like to be her.

I think taking time to imagine what someone’s experience is like is almost always good advice, but particularly before a hookup. Take a moment.

She is coming to a place to meet a person she’s never met before. In my case, I am a tall man, so I am almost certainly bigger and stronger than her. There will be some social pressure for us to hook up, which is riskier still. And should things go wrong, there is perhaps some social shame for her being the kind of woman who would go to have sex with a guy without even having dinner first.

I think it’s also kind of risky for me. We’re past full #metoo but if she claims I raped her, people will probably believe her. If she seems unstable, I should want to let my mind rather than my dick make decisions.

14. I look up her name.

Always a really good one to have hold of, especially if I intend to use it in sexy talk later. A very bad one to get wrong.

15. I’ll assume there is a third location that we are meeting at, if not, take a trip to step 22.

16. We meet at the pub or whatever.

17. I am polite and non-pushy.

If we think in escalation ladder (see link) terms we are some way up the ladder right now. It would be normal to say hi and chat, perhaps move quite quickly to deep topics, give a compliment. But I don’t think it’s normal to be like “god I want to fuck you” or “your tits look amazing”. If I were her I would see that as a signal that I don’t understand social norms and that might imply I don’t know other norms either.

18. I am sort of chaste, but hungry.

I want to leave space if she isn’t into it but to be clear that I want it. I think it’s possible to be too non-committal here.

19. After a drink, ask what she wants to do next.

20. If she wants another drink I’d be much more wary, perhaps it’s not gonna happen. (Which is fine).

At that point she clearly could have chosen to have gone back to mine but she hasn’t.

21. If she says she’s ready to head off, ask if she wants to come back to mine.

22. Walk to my house.

And that’s all for part 1! I don’t feel too bad because most of you don’t pay for these, but if you like them, please consider doing so. I’d write more often.

Some general thoughts:

Hooks can hold two difficult ideas in tension. On the one hand, I think many women like to see a man who seems confident and understands what's going on. Who can make this a fun, relaxed experience. On the other hand, they want him to seem safe, and if they wanted to stop, he would. There is such a thing as too confident.

This is a sort of central conflict that I’ll frame in several ways:

1. Being clear about what I want vs. leaving space for feedback

2. Defanging possible objections and just pushing somebody who is not remotely interested

3. Seeming hungry vs seeming safe.

I don’t think there is some magical advice here. I imagine that my male friends who are best at hookups (and dating) are making many small adjustments based on their partners words, actions, body language. But I’ve tried to show where I sit in some situations. If you don’t do this a lot it’s worth feeling the the failure modes—could she be deeply uncomfortable right now? Could she be bored?—because if you can avoid these you’re probably doing pretty well.

Till next time, when I’ll talk about the actually having sex.

Before you insult someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way they'll be a mile away and they'll have no shoes.

I don't imagine you know what it was like to be raised religious.

My earliest sexual memories are imagining fruit and breasts intermixed somehow. Grapes hanging in some sexual way. I remember thinking about this while going to bed many times as a child. For a long time I couldn’t bear to eat grapes, perhaps related to this, too juicy, too squelchy somehow.1

The first time I ejaculated was lying in bed perhaps thinking about the above. I used to have this poncho and I stuck my dick through the hole in it, just something to do, I suppose. Staring fascinatedly at my cock, and then suddenly cum coming out of it.

But these are all really memories of memories. I guess I was horrified. I didn't feel like the sort of thing that happened to me, and it wasn't acceptable to talk to my parents about it. I probably still have the poncho, though I have a mixed relationship with it given its history.

After that, masturbation began in earnest. I don't know how I had a sense that it was shameful, because probably it wasn't discussed. But somehow I did know.

It feels absurd to type, but I didn't masturbate touching my own penis until I guess my late teens. So I would always wrap it up in loo paper so I didn't have to touch it. I remember it being quite raw on the second or third wank of the day.

I guess the earliest place I found porn was in books. I remember being told to read Ilium by one of the older girls in the library at secondary school—the library prefects were the sexiest people in the world to 11 year old me2—and not understanding the word “come” (in the sexual sense) thinking that this talk of people coming in a sci fi novel was some kind of multiverse thing.

After that came looking at porn. Perhaps the earliest I can remember is line drawings of the Norse god freya. Then slowly onto the harder stuff. Though rarely ever people having sex3.

I guess these things coalesced into a deep shame of my own sexuality. I would masturbate once or twice a day and feel terrible about it every time. Every time resolve to not to do it again and do so. Masturbation is addictive and very hard to stop. Porn is not quite so bad, I have some recollection of managing once to avoid it for 3 months, but then I started again.

I remember talking to my dad about it once, putting a bookmark in a page of a Christian book which discussed it. We had one short awkward conversation, perhaps about it not being God’s best. And then basically never discussed it again.

I think this notion of “not God’s best” sticks with me. Many Christian men struggle with porn. This is not really discussed. And I think many people make peace somewhere. I think ideally I’d have known this, perhaps decided to masturbate but not look at porn. Have a more realistic goal.

But this idea—“not God’s best”—that there was something that wasn’t God’s best annoyed me. Clearly this was a word for sin. A white lie. And I didn’t have time for those. And perhaps deep down I wanted to keep looking at porn. So in aiming for perfection, I constantly fell short, and then blamed myself for it.

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I have hated myself after masturbating each of 2000 - 5000 times. Still the majority of my sexual experiences have ended with self-hatred and repulsion.

Masturbate. Feel disgusted. Attempt not to. Hold out for a time. Get turned on by some image. Snap. Spend a hatred filled 15 minutes looking at porn. Cum. Hate myself. Repeat

Age 12, age 13, age 14, 15, 16, ages 17, 18, 19. Year after year. Each year 365.25 days. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. Twelve full years. Almost eternal, looking back.

I often think the problem with empathy is that a lot of it is about lengths of time. How do I convey what it is like to hate my own sexuality day in, day out for over a decade? I don’t think I can. Until we have matrix-style training machines, you can’t know what 12+ years is like in a single blog.

But I guess there seem some repeated motifs:

The mental clenching. The internal pressure while doing an activity not to look at porn. I guess many guys feel this, but I think eventually they can sneak to the loo and jack off. I tried to last as long as possible which drew this out as long as possible. Kinky? Perhaps.

The ‘idle’ searching. Seeing a busty or flirty woman and pretending to myself that I was interested for some other reason. Hmmm what are these “Carry On” films about? A sort of double-mindedness, pretending to myself that I didn’t have ulterior motives.

The tipping point. After some long stretch of standing on the edge, finally throwing myself over with abandon. My hand gripping my crotch as if controlled by someone else. My fingers stumbling over the keys so I can vomit the necessary keystrokes to fully sin and have done with it. Bashing in “busty” to google images and slamming enter, finally free from the temptation. Perhaps this was a failure of theology, but somehow once the first bit of sinning was done it was much easier to fail with abandon. To just throw myself into it.

Getting it over with. Sometimes I read about guys getting some lube and tissues and preparing for a night in. That has never chimed with me at all. My masturbation has been frenzied and shamed. What if I snap out of it, what if now is my only chance? God, make it stop!

The straitjacket and escape. The ever increasing set of rules, of fines, of computer applications to make it hard for myself to see porn. And the ever increasing lengths that I’d go to in order to outwit my previous self. Perhaps these eventually became the safeguards around sexual sin that I set for myself later when dating, the lack of kissing, the general puritanism that bound me so tightly that I desired to leave altogether.

Shame and pleasure. There was a unique cocktail of horror and ecstasy which makes a lot of sense within a kink framework. Each sexual experience was its own puzzle—how long was I going to last, how would I justify falling over the tipping point and sinning, how would I break past my own safeguards—that I was setting and solving with myself. I imagine affairs are similar, that much of the joy is in the illicit, in the wanting and waiting, and finally shamefully and exhaustedly, the taking.

Reflections

I wish I could hug my child self. Tell him that almost all men masturbate and that most look at porn. And that it doesn’t really make sense that a good God created rules and humans and then punished people for eternity for breaking them. That in the darkness of unbelief porn is fine; that becoming obsessed with porn is unhealthy only4 in as much as it causes one to not see women as thinking beings or just to waste one’s time. That his focus could go elsewhere.5 That even if he wants to remain a Christian, this is an absurd standard and that he needs to go ask for help from an adult and tell that adult not to be squeamish and to fricking help him.6

I am not deeply upset at my parents for this. They have done a good job and it seems that parenting is filled with many pitfalls. How were they meant to intuit this issue with the internet? I wish we had talked about it more. I feel sad, mainly. I think they’d be sad if they knew how sad I was, so often, and how alone. I guess if I am angry it’s that they had enough information to understand this was a problem. I tried to let them know I struggled. And I guess they got distracted or didn’t know what to do. But that was of little help to me. Sigh.

I am angry at Christianity. At times furiously so. Is this really God’s Plan? Either directly or via some strange societal equilibria. Was my young self just so much waste wood to be thrown on the fires of righteousness? Were those fires even burning to any purpose?

How does one respond to a religion capable of doing this? How do I engage with my family and friends while they condone this kind of behaviour? I think of my friends with young children. How many of them will be gay and shamed for it, or more precariously trans?7

I understand that human systems can’t be built to handle every edge case. That some people will not get the right benefit payments. But is that true of divine systems too? And this one, which meters out eternal threats and thousands of hours of shame. Am I just particularly unlucky or is the system deeply broken?

I find this hard to write about. Hard to go back to that place and think “what actually happened here”. Face the remembered shame. Reconstruct events. It feels almost surreal. Was it really plausibly every day for over a decade? Yes. Did I really not touch my penis out of shame for the first half of that, using toilet roll every time? I recall memories and memories of memories, so I think so yes.

In writing this, many people have offered deep sympathy, which I appreciate. But it's a bit destabilising to hear that experiences which seem quite normal to me have such an emotional resonance with other people. I'm not saying they are wrong, it's just hard to hear. Should I not be okay? Am I deeply traumatised? I often see women encouraged to re-evaluate old experiences and decide whether they were okay or not, but as a man, that's quite unusual for me. And I don't know what narrative, if any, I want to put over these events.

To be even spicier, I think I was getting something out of this. I could have asked for more help and I didn't. Was it pride? That I wanted to resolve the situation myself? Or desire? To keep masturbating and look at porn? I have a complex relationship with rules. I love to live by them, but I take a lot of pleasure in dancing around the edges. I created an exquisitely painful system for myself, and some of that was my choice, I think. I don’t think most Christian teens have this experience. I hope not.

In writing this, I have a new theory about why I tend to struggle with sex. Which is that, perhaps most relationships don't provide me this level of push-me-pull-you and intrigue that I want. Nobody is as good at setting delicious and painful sexual traps for me as I am. Once sex is normal and acceptable, perhaps I lose interest. Perhaps I always have.

I also owe an apology to some of my previous sexual partners for bringing this energy when they (and often I) weren’t expecting it. I feel a desire to be alone after sex which is probably connected to this. I still feel echoes of those years of self-recrimination. Several have had a painful time as I move from joyful sex to cold withdrawal, assuming that those feelings were their fault. It’s one thing to torture myself, another thing to bring someone else into it. I wasn’t aware of how this worked, but I am my responsibility, and I am sorry. It isn’t acceptable to wander around as an unexploded bomb.

No takeaways

Life is not a story book. There isn't always a single narrative that ties things together. This piece doesn’t have a core idea, or not one that I can see. But if I have to choose some takeaways they would be deeply practical.

If you have children, please help them to engage with their sexuality in a way they will later endorse. Even if you're squeamish about it. Even if you don't know the answers. They are children and don't know how to build a mental world that's kind to them. And the worlds they could accidentally build could be crueller than you can imagine.

If you resonate with this piece, feel free to get in touch. I have a lot of energy for people who have had these experiences. I think there is a way out of such places. I’m glad to have grown since. Anonymous feedback link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdF6lkA57_QnjNEj6Lg3uGoSzpWuEkHE2ChTlulEL4pXYQYUw/viewform?usp=header

The general response to this piece seems to be deep sadness. And if you feel that I appreciate it. After leaving Christianity I asked a counsellor if I was okay. Doesn’t religion screw people up? She said I seemed fine. And I tend to agree. x

It was a pretty great party. A friend reintroduced me to a pretty redhead I'd met a couple of years back and we hit it off. She'd just started working at Google DeepMind1, which I heard was a shit show, but whatever.

The party was still "fooming", but I was getting tired.

"Hey, you wanna get out of here?" We were standing at the edge of the main dance floor which was packed. Ellen was dressed as Sarah Connor. I could see a guy in a cardboard robot suit, and someone one of those fairly lifelike T-rex costumes.

She leaned closer, unable to hear me. I got distracted.

"I know it isn't, but the DJ really looks like Sam Altman*"

She turned for a moment, squinting across at the stage. "On priors, there is no way that is Sam Altman, but I agree, it looks a lot like him"

"Do you wanna get out of here?"

She thinks for a moment. "Sure"

We walk down the stairs. I ask "So where do you want to go?"

"Let's go back to my place"

Phew. I am staying at a group house, having purchased six nights via their auction platform, and I have the space between the top of the stairs and the wall, which has a mattress and is mostly blocked by curtains. Ellen might have been chill enough to fuck me there but I didn't want to chance it.

We grabbed our shoes and walked out into the slightly muggy San Francisco air.

"Shall I call a Waymo? What's your address?"

"Sure."

She really was very beautiful. And humming with that energy that pretty, clever girls have. I was surprised she wanted me to come home with her. I am always surprised by this.

"How did you find the party?" I asked.

The Sarah Connor sleeveless top had been a great look, but now that we were outside she’d put on a leather jacket. It fit the costume.

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"Yeah it was okay” she said “I don't really drink, but I thought the cocktail class was good."

In my class we'd made a Gradient Descent, which involved Blue curaçao and orange juice (among other things) and made a sort of colour transition up the glass.

"You really don't remember me do you"

"What?"

"We were at Jane Street together!"

"Wait, really?" My cheeks burned.

"We didn't work -"

"Nooo! But we chatted several times. James, come on!"

She poked one of the matrix multiplications on my arm (I was the transformer architecture, but I also transformed into a car2).

"I, uh, I"

I have never been so relieved to see a Waymo pull up.

"Thank god you don't work at xAI or we'd have to ride in one of those Robotaxis"

"I dunno, they seem fine" She’s too perfect. Maybe she was the terminator.

I got in and scooched over. She came in after me.

"Good morning James" the car cooed.

"Hello, car" I said.

"As we get going, just give us one minute to cover a few ridi-"

I noticed Ellen's hand on my crotch. She was squeezing it and looking at me enquiringly. I nodded.

"the need to buckle up is the same as always-" the car continued

I noticed that Ellen was not buckled up, instead she leaned over me. My cock was tenting the leggings I was wearing.

"If you're travelling with little ones-" it really said this.

She flipped it out.

"Ellen, we can't fuck here, there are cameras"

"How about if I put a jacket over my head?"

"Uhh, sure.3"

She shucked out of the jacket (faux leather or was second hand?) she'd been wearing and pulled it over her head. And started sucking my cock.

I could not believe this was happening. I could still see people on the streets as we passed. And here I was getting a blow job. It felt illicit. I could feel her clever mouth around my dick. Up and down, up and down.

I tried to relax and enjoy it.

But there was something so electric about the whole thing. Was this okay? I tried to consider the ethics before giving up. She began fondling my balls through my leggings. My hand rested on top of the jacket, just above her neck, not quite pushing. But tempted to.

"Oh my God Ellen"

At that she pushed her face down more strongly and I could feel my cock pushing into the roof of her mouth. I tend not to be wild about blow jobs, but this was spectacular. Tens of people would use this space tomorrow and none would know about us. My legs tensed. I could feel the seat beneath me and at my lower back. She did something with her tongue.

I looked at the little screen in front of us and somehow that pushed me towards my climax. "You're gonna need to swallow". This was ethical road head, we weren't gonna leave a mess.

She sped up, increasing the pressure on my balls with her hand. I groped her tits with my free hand and came. "Fucck" My cock pulsed and I held the urge to push her face further onto my cock.

I saw that we were nearly at her house. Lifting her head she grinned up at me. She sucked my cock once more and tucked it away. I pulled her head up and kissed her, feeling the old joy/revulsion of the taste of my own semen.

She got out and I followed.

She held her lips in a line, paused a moment and said, "I think I might want to get an early night for work tomorrow"

It was a Saturday. I sighed.

"Sure, that's chill. Maybe we can go out some time?"

"Yeah.. maybe. Is this still your number?" She flashed a phone at me showing my number. I felt embarrassed flash again.

I nodded.

She pulled my head down to kiss her again.

"Sleep tight!"

And she bounded up the stairs to her house.

With thanks to The Last Sexual Taboo

This might come as a surprise, given the subject of this blog, but nonetheless, I am not sure I do.

Bad answers

Once, when visiting my doctor for a bowel issue, he asked me how I poo.

“I dunno, how does anyone poo?”

“Well just use an adjective”, said the GP.

“I dunno, aggressively”

“See. That’s a bad adjective”.

I guess I should have seen that coming.

If I imagine that same south asian doctor discussing my sex life, I worry he might come to similar conclusions1:

• I rarely have sex with the same partner many times.

• I find sex stressful

• I find coming borderline embarrassing

• Even with my more serious partners often the sex dries up over time.

“These are bad answers.”

The situation

I find the chase of a new partner very exciting. But I find the idea of sex aversive or requiring me to build up to it. Even when I go to sex parties I more enjoy flirtation rather than having to have sex.

And the sex itself is often pretty stressful to me. I am worried I’ll come first (and often do, despite my best efforts). I find focusing for half an hour to an hour pretty tiring and sometimes the cuddling afterwards is a lot.

And worse, I know this is all a bit of a turn off. I have talked to enough women to know that that two desirable traits are being relaxed and being in control of the situation2. I have gotten better, but I find both fairly tiring3.

Sometimes I think about it like this:

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What is going on?

Here are some theories:

I am ashamed

Evidence for: I was very religious and was celibate until 25. Masturbation has been followed by self hatred 1000s of times4. I know that many people I respect would find my behaviour sinful and even repulsive.

Evidence against: I have quite a lot of extramarital sex. I dress up as a woman sometimes. And sure these things might also seem like the sort of things a person with hangups would do, but I think that surely an ashamed person would do them less often than an unashamed one?

I am not good at sex

Evidence for: As above, I didn’t have sex until I was a bit older. I have had several women say that the sex was worse than they expected it to be (which is always brutal to hear, but I like feedback).

Evidence against: I have had several long relationships with many opportunities for sex and learning to get better at it. I generally don’t take those opportunities. Sex often just feels like a thing I don’t want to do.

I have some other aversion to sex

Evidence for: I remember learning about sex for the first time and thinking “I am never going to put that part of me in a girl”. Perhaps a part of me still feels that? I do sort of find bodies a bit gross. I don’t like being touched when I am stressed.

Evidence against: I do have rather a lot of sex. Like, if left to my own devices, I would have sex perhaps once (or without the devices twice) a week with a rotating set of perhaps 3 to 5 people. It seems like I like, sex, just not repeated sex with the same person.

I don’t focus enough on solely sexual attraction

Evidence for: In hookups I look for a pretty broad range of features. Notably, whether I respect and trust them. But on occasion I date someone I maximally fancy, and we do tend to have a bit more sex.

Evidence against: I generally don’t date these people long enough to know if the trend sticks.

I don’t give sex enough time

Evidence for: I am a maximiser. I love to squeeze in just one more thing, try just one more project, just think for one more moment. Sex isn’t deeply a priority to me so if I’m in a relationship it generally gets pushed to just before bed.

Evidence against: Do other people really need to focus on giving sex time in relationships? I understand after 5 years, but after a month? Seems like for many it sort of works out. Which would suggest something else is going on.

Why does it matter?

I guess I’d like to have kids and not be in a deeply unstable relationship. Having regular sex with my partner seems stable. For one, it’s a very human thing, if you hear someone has stopped having sex with their partner; that's usually a bad sign. For another, I sense that I could enjoy sex much more than I do. If I were to be partnered with somebody and then meet somebody who I expected to have much better sex with (or being poly did have) I expect to be painful/frustrating.

And also, sex seems deeply satisfying for many people. But I struggle with it. And that’s sad. I feel a bit ridiculous being able to so regularly have sex with women I like but not find a satisfying sexual relationship.

So yeah

This one isn't necessarily like a fun or sexy one. I just would like your advice. What do you reckon?

Comments welcome.

If you want to comment privately/anonymously, here is a google form.

If you think you can give me worldshattering sex here is a dating form.