I wanted to write about James from the moment we met. In him, I found the equal and opposite to so many of my desires - someone fluent in the same erotic language and just as concerned with the sweet spot between love and sadism. There’s so much more to come in this series, including (but not limited to) almond milk, gang bangs, messy polyamory, fisting, tarpaulins, wedding rings, red meat, jealousy, and the mortifying ordeal of being known. Most of this will be paywalled on account of being explicit. But the first one’s on me.

I found him on Feeld, in a fit of distracted swiping. I’d just had my heart broken by a three month situationship and had gone in search of relief. I’d wanted to substitute one type of mortification with another, assuming it would be a simple, albeit temporary, swap: The emotional for the physical. The break for the bruise. It was not to be that straightforward.

What happened between us made more sense when I considered that my foundation with James was an exposed nerve. I was in retreat from love, freshly horrified by its brute force and cowering like a kicked dog. James promised some respite: the safety of rules; an entirely pre-negotiated form of intimacy. I planned to give him nothing of myself beyond the outer limits of my body and he’d ask for nothing in return. But all boundaries - especially the strict ones - contain within them the fantasy of their transgression.

I’d used Feeld for long enough to remember when the freaks outweighed the normals, a claim which made me sound resentful and old (which I was). Feeld had not been perfect in its previous form, but it had contained vestiges of that ‘old internet’ horniness that echoed around relics such as Fetlife, Tumblr and Livejournal. In the before time, within a landscape of anonymous, disembodied genitals, we had all been simply fuckers, loosed from the firm grasp of identify and collectivised in our grubby desire. The app glitched constantly, like an volatile erection that threatened to wilt under pressure. You had to jump on it whilst you still could. Later was not guaranteed.

Old Feeld had facilitated some of my more memorable hook ups. A handful of chem-fuelled orgies; a domme who had made me play strip ping pong with in the freezing cold; getting pissed on and fucked by two guys who claimed to be step brothers in a basement car park in Edmonton (they weren’t). These days it was hard to find anything of that calibre. As the app sought to raise capital, it positioned itself as more than just a home for freaky sex. Its marketing strategy pushed “personal growth, fluidity and discovery”, designed to lure in regular straights for dating, or perhaps fully optimised ethical non monogamy. The men that remained interested in hooking up all wrote that they were kinky, but now identified as ‘pleasure doms’, as if wanting to go down on your partner was BDSM, actually. These labels, along with terms like ‘heteroflexible’ and ‘gynosexual’ felt like the concession of the liberal centre that their sexual preferences ought to match their politics, without committing them to anything too edgy. “Hinge got too boring” these profiles complained, as if they themselves weren’t the tedious element.

As with so many of the other spaces in which we organised our intimacies, Feeld was now fixated on identity over practice, so these otherwise-pretty-vanilla guys had embarked on a rebrand. The soft boi had evolved into the soft dom, his focus squarely on pleasure. For him, kink needed to be entirely safe and contained, rendering the symbolic engine of BDSM - objectification, exploitation, torture, obliteration, death - abstracted to vanishing point.

Because of all this, Feeld was infused with a pervasive sense of anxious political performativity instead of horniness. One saw the phrase ‘consent is key’ so often that you had to marvel at the statistical impossibility of none of these men being rapists. People stuffed their profiles with their politics, as if sexual chemistry was guaranteed by you both having the same set of copypaste opinions.

And then, against the tide of gentrification, there was James. On first glance, his profile skewed unremarkable: 32, into greyhounds, European cinema, cacio e pepe, and with the standard issue moustache and little earring. I was neither attracted nor unattracted to him, but that’s normal with men, I find. It was a brief reference to sadism at the end of his profile that caught my attention. It was not a word one saw much on this platform.

In my experience, when men on Feeld spoke of dominance what they meant was that they liked rough sex — the frenetic extravaganza of hair pulling and face slapping they saw in mainstream porn. This is an unthinking, boring type of force to me, one lacking in any real imagination or context. The younger men I hooked up with did it to me by rote, their hands floating wordlessly up to my neck mid-fuck. ‘Please ask before you choke me’, I’d say, and they’d stop instantly, the glazed-over reverie of a doom scroller broken by the intrusion of my subjectivity. I don’t think they even really wanted to do it. They simply assumed they should.

This generic violence is a different beast to sadism. A skilled sadist will pay very close attention to you, each grimace, each sharp intake of breath a step towards figuring you out completely. What’s more, the people who name themselves as sexual sadists have, by definition, recognised what they’re into as unusually violent, in a way that the consumers of bog standard rough porn often haven’t. This doesn’t necessarily mean that all sadists are ethical - as anyone on a regional kink scene will tell you, it is eminently possible to understand you like hurting people without then critiquing how to do so responsibly - but a little self awareness goes a long way in developing a politic of inflicting harm responsibly.

James sent a ‘ping’ when he matched with me, one that responded to my profile’s stated ambition for the year ahead.

‘I can’t tell you how much I’d like to get my fist inside your arsehole’

I went back to his photos to try and see how big his hands were but I couldn’t get a sense. Regardless, it was nice to have a shared goal. I matched.

I wasn’t to know then, but what followed would change my life. I think he would say it changed his, too. James would touch parts of me (both figurative and literal) that no one else had before. He would go on to lead me back to myself, or at least serve as an encouraging companion as I picked my way through a new internal landscape of desire. Even now, nearly a year later, I’m still unsure of what to call it. It was never a normal relationship. It was fucking. It was a dynamic. It was an extended roleplay. It was an exchange of commitments. It was a set of conditions.

But also it was a love affair.

August, 2024. I had attended a sex party thrown by a friend at a warehouse in Hackney. It was a public event, on the smaller side of things for these parties, probably about 150 people. Unlike a lot of other parties, this one was focused primarily on play (people rarely describe what happens at these events as ‘fucking’ or ‘sex’). There was no separate dance floor or larger social areas. In the centre of the room was an assortment of kink furniture: spanking benches, a St Andrew’s cross, a DIY glory hole cut into a bit of scenery flattage on wheels. There were mattresses too, and one of those Swinging Sixties-looking padded chaises that you could fuck on. I couldn’t even look at them without wanting to do an Austin Powers impression, so fucking on one was out of the question.

The middle of the room was where all the action was. If you wanted to chat (or rather, if you didn’t want to play), you simply stood at the edges, looking on like an unwanted debutante. This party was marketed as queer, in the way they all are, but a glance around indicated that this was of the ‘bisexual girls with fruity boyfriends’ side of things, by which I mean, it didn’t feel super queer at all.

The crowd was attractive and cool, wearing a mix of latex, harnesses and leather. People attending had a range of body types, too. Unlike, say, swingers events, which remain doggedly fixated on thin, gym-hardened bodies, queer play parties lean into body positivity. Everyone was faultlessly polite and smiled a lot. They asked for your permission before hugging you. Despite all this, shortly after arriving, I found myself pinned against a perimeter wall, feeling like matter out of place.

This wasn’t a new sensation. Lately, something had been happening every time I was in sex spaces like this one. To describe it as a crisis of desire gave it more affective heft than it elicited. Really, it was a total blankness, an absence. I let the spectacle of bodies wash over me, attempting to turn over the engine of my wanting. Nothing.

‘I just don’t find any of this horny, ‘ I complained to my friend Simon. ‘Does it turn you on?’

‘Yes’, he replied, with a certainty that made me instantly resentful

‘It’s all too OK somehow. Too straightforward. This whole wide open space. Do you know what I mean?’

‘Would kissing help?’ Simon asked.

I left soon after. On the bus home, I contemplated what, exactly, was wrong with me. I’d been on (or at least around) the London sex party world for 12+ years, and had worked in sex for most of that time. Perhaps this onset of sexual apathy was the inevitable result? But this malaise had become more intense over the last few years, in tandem with what I noticed in the culture more broadly as the margins were pulled into the centre. The kink scene had expanded to accommodate far more straight (in both senses of the word) people. Hinge was empty: The soft bois had rebranded to soft doms and migrated to Feeld. Plus, everyone (including those people who definitely shouldn’t be) was poly.

We were all so modern now. We experienced the kind of sexual freedom Philip Larkin dreamt of in High Windows:

Bonds and gestures pushed to one side

Like an outdated combine harvester,

And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly.

And yet. Amidst all the supposed mechanisms for connection — the conscientiousness and respect, the enthusiastic consent and the policing of sexual wellbeing — why did I feel so intensely alienated? Back then, I was convinced this was a singular experience, rather than a collective one. But now I understand perfectly what the problem is: A spectre is haunting our erotic lives — the spectre of literalism.

I think we meant well, we really did. The discursive shifts that led us here were rooted in good intentions. In the face of so much trauma and risk, of the systemic oppression of so many, ambiguity became a site of danger. Post #MeToo, when the scale of exploitation across our workplaces and institutions was laid bare, new frameworks for protection came to the fore. New laws and titles followed. Anything other than a clear, affirmative yes became a no. Men were forced to reckon with the (unintended, they’d all argue) consequences of their power. For a time, the only culturally permissible depictions of women’s sexuality — and of the sexuality of more vulnerable people — framed us exclusively as traumatised. All this sought to reduce harm by removing the shadowy spaces (and language) in which abuse had flourished. Sunlight would be the best disinfectant.

Simultaneously, we became culturally obsessed with identity. The focus on lived experience was intended to amplify the voices of the structurally excluded, but the pendulum swung too far in favour of the personal over the political. Identity began to distract from the structural, economic foundations of inequality. This suited us, as we were all increasingly fixated on ourselves and fully committed to turning our subjectivities into brands. The packaging of our selfhood on social media and dating apps continued apace. We applied the correct labels to our profiles and sorted the others according to theirs. Capitalism compelled us to become self-disciplined, self-managing, self-obsessed, autonomous subjects, and we took this very seriously.

As all these changes in how we thought about bodies and desire and self dovetailed, a new language took hold. It was one of negotiation, risk management, brand strategy, commercialised intimacy and of litigation, and it was intent on specificity. As it filtered into the darker corners of the playroom and the dungeon and the hookup app, a suspicion of slow, uncertain revelation developed. There was a need to nail down a singular meaning to all sexual experiences, and for sex and kink to exist only in plain sight.

Historically, eroticism’s charge has been found in the uncertain and the partially concealed, the interpretive and the implied. It’s why, as Roland Barthes articulates it, a woman performing a striptease is “desexualized at the very moment when she is stripped naked”. It’s the obstruction to seeing her entirely revealed which we find pleasure in, in the way that all desire is about the unattained object. In contrast to this, literalism fixates on clarity and certainty. It is the intellectual equivalent of The Big Light, whilst the symbolic requires you to descend into the basement and peer through some gloom. Under the harsh glare of literalism’s strip lighting, plurality is foreclosed and the complex interplay of meaning that happens when we desire is hollowed out.

The turn towards the literal demands that we code sexuality (whether real or fictional) as definitively good or bad, right or wrong. It is presented as vital that we know exactly what we want from dating and fucking; we demand to negotiate all sexual encounters in full, in advance, so as to decide if we want them. To be a slut is fine, but only insofar as the sex you’re having is easily understood as positively good for you, and in being so, morally good. We are compelled to decide definitively if sex is empowering vs traumatic, with little regard for the vast ‘man, i think it depends’ in between.

In the search for a type of sex that felt safe and ‘fair’ (by which I mean one in which power is distributed entirely equitably, as if desire could be siphoned off from structural forces that undergird the rest of our lives), it feels as if we have forgotten that desire is a symbolic force, and that the literal is profoundly unhorny. I’d argue that all this literalism is why people (especially younger people, who grew up drenched in this stuff) have much less sex or opt for celibacy and why eroticism is increasingly frightening to so many of us — representing, as it does, something risky and unwieldy; something chaotically slippery.

Ambiguity has become too unsettling for many of us to tolerate, despite the fact that the “blindspot of understanding” as Georges Bataille described it, is integral to our experience of eroticism. If we cannot know precisely the contours of an experience in advance, we daren’t risk it, recognising desire’s capacity to undo us at the edges.

As anyone that’s worked in the sex industry will tell you, this anxiety is the elephant in the room. When booking an escort, clients are really paying to avoid uncertainty, whilst retaining some of the charge. The escort is a sure thing, but if she’s good at her job, she maintains the illusion of ambiguity within the encounter. She builds tension through frisson, the sense of ‘will they/won’t they’, even though both parties know, deep down, she will. This allows her client to enjoy an entirely de-risked experience: literalism lite

We see literalism at work in the resurgence of body count discourse, where one’s social value is flatly reducible to a number, but that number relies on a static definition of what sex ‘is’ (only a dick fucking a pussy counts in this schema). It’s there in the ways that dating and hook-up apps prompt you to spell out your sexual identity in taxonomical terms, proscribing your desires in what Foucault would call the ‘putting into discourse of sex’, In which sex is ‘incessantly solicited to reveal its truth—to speak, to display, to explain itself.’ And of course, it finds its zenith in that “orgy of realism” hardcore porn. Pornography is the cultural expression of late capitalism’s pessimistic transparency, which Mark Fisher described as trading “on a kind of earnest literalism”. Porn, he writes, is coded as “the reality of sex, and sex is the reality of everything else”. Saturated in so much of this material from such a young age, younger people’s fixation on the literal seems almost inevitable.

In Tomorrow Sex Will be Good Again, Katherine Angel wrote that good sex is apparently held hostage by the requirements of ‘consent and self knowledge” but by whose metric is the sex good? The enthusiastic consent schema that we’ve all been taught stresses the need for ongoing, affirmative checking in, before, during and after an encounter. Naturally, this requires everyone involved to know exactly what they want from the experience in advance, along with a clearly charted route from beginning to end. You have to know your likes and dislikes very clearly, as well as your hard and soft Nos.

This approach requires us to take our interlocutors extremely literally, assuming that their desire (and their speech) is completely apolitical. Yet the idea that our desire can be so honestly captured seems to miss something crucial about the individual subconscious, namely that, as philosopher Jonathan Lear puts it, “a person is, by his nature, out of touch with his own subjectivity”. Absolute personal clarity is a fiction. Just ask anyone who’s said yes to something they thought they wanted, only to realise, maybe even years after, that they didn’t.

This is not to say that you don’t need someone’s consent before you fuck them. Of course you do. But through our adherence to the belief that self knowledge is a precondition to consent— that we need to know every single thing about what we want, what might happen and how we will feel about it prior to its occurrence — we are missing something central to eroticism: that it concerns something unknowable, and therefore something risky.

This approach is dialled up to 11 within (primarily straight) BDSM settings, seemingly in direct relation to the perception of greater danger. Here, you’ll find kink as risk management, with even the faintest whiff of harm preemptively foreclosed. People routinely ask if you want to share GDocs full of predetermined likes and dislikes, or complete online quizzes to find out their kinky personality type (32% Brat Tamer!). Play parties come with comprehensive pre-attendance rules (yes, there is a test on the door), a dungeon monitor (there is another test before you enter the playroom) and a wellbeing team. If you’re thinking all this sounds a bit like, oh, I dunno, being at work, I refer you to London’s most recent kink scene addition: The co-working & dungeon hybrid. Accordingly, it becomes increasingly difficult to find real perversion in this scene. There are far fewer dark little nooks and crannies, or deep psychological depths to plumb. Everyone is deeply concerned with preventing ambiguity and with doing things right. Consent becomes more pivotal than trust. Today, the kink scene seems to me like a space of mastery - of self, of skill, of other - rather than the powerfully-charged environment in which people might experience a brief but extraordinary form of unravelling at the limits of self-understanding.1

For anyone who gets off on wrongness, it’s all just a little too safe. My fantasies all revolve around exploitation and manipulation - whether that’s coercion or cruelty or just good old-fashioned misogyny or classism. They are fantasies of entitlement, in which someone takes what they want and cares little about what they do to someone else in the process. And beyond fantasy, the encounters still scorched into my memory are full of this. Of slightly toxic but totally intoxicating fucks, where the scripts of uneven power become overwhelmingly magnified. Sometimes that’s in unknown places with unknown, unfamiliar partners. Sometimes it looks like intox, incest, non-consent, cuckolding, breeding and degradation. Other times, it’s just the feeling of being an object someone picks up and then puts down on a whim. But whatever it is, the feeling of risk and overwhelm burns brightly, and threatens to exceed the limits of ‘sex as good, clean, kinky fun’. This form of power exists precisely because it is larger than language and more complex than a simple yes-or-no. It tugs at my sense of who I am and exposes it, momentarily, as a fiction.

As the explicit and the implicit have collapsed in on each other entirely, our recognition that sex isn’t always completely ‘real’ has suffered. We are rapidly losing the ability to distinguish between the real and the representational. Within an economy of eyeballs, we demand that media’s utility be instantly decipherable, at the expense of more confusing or abstracted feelings. This leaves us paddling in the shallows of legible meaning, smoothly communicated ideas and superficial emotionality.

Younger audiences claim to see little point in sex scenes in film and TV, feeling they provide no narrative value and serve only as titillation. It’s an opinion which makes sense if one believes that sex is devoid of complex symbolic meaning. This intellectual shortfall is also being exploited in the UK’s recent incest porn ban, which criminalises adults pretending to be children, along with the fictional depiction of incest between step relations (despite the fact it is completely legal for step relations to fuck). The argument behind the ban — that depictions of incest risks normalising child sexual abuse — is essentially unprovable, and a perfect test case for anti-porn campaigners to introduce greater levels of censorship and regulation.

Let us, for the sake of argument, set aside the fact that there are actual material things the state could do to better support children in reporting CSA (and being believed when they do); or that the state and its institutions are deeply complicit with pedophilic culture, whilst continuing to scapegoat trans people, migrants and South Asian communities within a moral panic. If you take this legislation on face value, it’s clearly absurd. Anyone who has ever watched ‘step’ porn will tell you that the vast majority of it is not pitched at verisimilitude. Instead, it is an obvious pantomime of inequality, full of dialogue like “mom no we can’t I’m your step son! And dad will be home soon!”

In this, incest porn is demonstrably concerned with a hyperbolic representation of power, rather than something ‘real’. What people are searching for in ‘step’ porn is an instantly legible power dynamic, arguably the power dynamic that all of us stage and restage throughout our adult lives — parent and child. This is true of great swathes of stalwart porn settings (schools, hospitals, offices, therapists’ couches), because despite our attempts to banish them from our erotic landscapes, power dynamics remain pretty sexy. These are the spaces in which we see power differentials writ large. As porn tube sites have evolved into the fast-paced, frenzied visual economies they are today, porn producers and creators are drawing on shared cultural imaginaries that are already deeply imbued with symbolic meaning. But when we confuse the spectacular staging of power with literal abuse - when we collapse the symbolic with the real, we wilfully ignore the erotic relationship between desire, power and vulnerability.2

Because if we acknowledge that sex and sexuality aren’t literal, that they can mean many different things all at the same time to anyone involved in the encounter, we’re left with a mode of sexuality that is alarmingly unmanageable. This is a way of fucking that destabilises, rather than reinforces, categories of identity and which challenges notions of what the body is and what the body can do. It compels us to feel confused, unsettling things, and acknowledges that all that meaning could be entirely misunderstood by someone else. Literalism forces us to skate on the surface of legibility and certainty, of gesture and repetition. Without ethical and hermeneutic ambiguity, we lose a sense of fluid possibility. Only when sex retains its unknowable, uncontainable-ness, can it accommodate some of the more complex and violent aspects of the human experience, and with this, our capacity to transform them. To play with the meaning of bodies, action and power is to reflect on their instability, and therefore, the mechanics of how they’re produced.

What’s more, you do not need to know what you want to be allowed to desire. The belief that you can ever be fully knowable to yourself in this way is a convenient fantasy. To be alive is to take risks, and to take a risk is to not know. If, like me, you find your desire stalling, it may be a crisis of the literal. Seek out opacity and uncertainty. Desire prefers truth over reality.

If you’re a lover of limited edition risograph zines, you probably already know about Scary Boots. If not, meet your new crush.

Inspired by the little magazine movement that flourished in the 60s and 70s, Scary Boots is a print only arts and literature journal that’s focused on work too unknown or too weird for mainstream publication. Each quarterly issue feels distinctly DIY, part collage, part love note, part scribbled poem on the back of a napkin.

Issue 4, on the subject of ritual, was launched last week, and it’s an absolute treasure. Inside you’ll find a preview of Katherine Faw’s latest novel alongside new work by geline pioneer Sienna Murdoch . There’s also some personals-inspired reader submissions about everyday rituals from cats with OCD to Christmas magazines, which have a peculiar sort of intimacy to them.

Looking back into the archive, I have a story called Bresaola in the desire-themed second issue, which is below. However, if you prefer a more physical artefact (or you understand that supporting independent print media makes you hot and smart) you can find all back issues of Scary Boots here.

Steven was 12 years younger than her, which was a first. In the lift up to a high floor, she’d begun picturing the rugby boys she’d doggedly avoided at university, a bulletproof hybrid of youthful swagger and ancient entitlement. But when he opened the hotel room door, she almost flinched. He was 22, but with such soft, babyish features and patchy wisps of facial hair, he could have been a teenager.

Quite the puppy dog, she said, softly, to hide her alarm, and wondered how awkward it would be to ask to see his ID.

With older clients, she understood her advantage. Beauty and charm, sure, but more crucially, youth, her body a wormhole through which they could slip back a full blooded, virile past. To a middle-aged man, 34 was still a novelty. When she unbuttoned their shirts or caught sight of them fucking her in a mirror, she was dazzled by the casual firmness of her body next to theirs, their buttocks and knees slowly collapsing downwards. Her body was still more akin to a daughter’s than a wife’s, and both of them knew it.

Steven had also booked her for an overnight for their first meeting, which was unusual. Most people preferred a shorter date to begin with, to check she justified the financial outlay and the inescapable intimacy of sharing a bed. But Steven had gone all in: A room at a fancy hotel and references from other girls that charged similar rates, all of which suggested that she had hooked a bored nepobaby with money to burn.

But now, backdropped by the suite’s panoramic view, she took in his badly fitting blazer and Topman brogues. As he began to unfold his life for her—a graduate accountant outside Guildford, a room in a house share, still holidaying with his parents—she realised she’d misunderstood. He had none of old money’s comfort with service, nor new money’s delight in being flashy. Over dinner, he asked her what bresaola was and clumsily deferred when she suggested, as she always did, that he order the wine.

I’m happy to, she said, breezily. It makes a nice change.

Out of compassion she chose a mid priced bottle.

Back at the hotel, a sense of pressure settled over the room, a kind that always arose when clients over-invested in a date. The ones that scrimped and saved to see her wanted their money’s worth, and the inevitability of falling short of their impossible expectations was paralysing. If the booking was to be salvaged (although what was the point, surely he didn’t have the money to see her again), she had to run towards the pressure rather than shy away from it. She lay down on the bed and beckoned him towards her. Beside her, she told him to close his eyes.

What do you like, she asked. What do you fantasise about?

I..I like to be dominated. Quite hard.

Oh really?

Yeah. I used to see dommes for a while. But I didn’t like how clinical it all was.

You need something a little sweeter?

I think so. I want to be touched as well as hit, if that makes sense?

Perfect sense, she cooed. I know exactly what you mean.

This was what a lot of men wanted; a form of domination that smothered them in compassion and affirmation. They wanted to be corrected and then held; their badness transformed through devotion. They wanted clear boundaries and to be tucked into bed. They wanted to be loved unconditionally and made to suffer a little as a result.

She told him to stand up and take off his clothes so she could look at him. He was ghostly pale and devoid of body hair, with a little bulge of stomach fat she found endearing. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen someone this young naked. She contemplated all the older men who’d booked her when she first started working at 24. Had she seemed like he did now, nervous and new? Had they felt a similar compulsion to ruin her?

She appraised him wordlessly, stretching out the silence between them. He cringed under her gaze but his cock sprung hard against the soft folds of his torso.

Kneel down, she instructed. Open your mouth.

His lips fell open.

Wider.

Slowly, she pushed two fingers into the wet pink of his mouth.

Are you my good, obedient boy?

He moaned into her hand, she felt something in his demeanour give way.

Suck, she said, and look at me while you do it.

His wide eyes found hers in some overly-earnest imitation of porny eye contact.

Don’t do that, she said. Look at me properly.

She hated when they over-egged it, hiding behind a performance that they weren’t skilled enough to make natural. She knew he didn’t understand what she wanted from him, but it didn’t stop her feeling somehow annoyed by it all. She felt an urge for something uncontrolled from him, for a flash of honesty amongst all this cosplay. Her fingers snaked further inside him until she found the back of his throat, pushed his tongue down until he gagged. She kept them there, even as his body begin to protest.

Stay Still, Steven, she murmured, recalling suddenly the now-useless terminology she’d been taught at school to describe poetry: sibilance; assonance; consonance.

Back then, as a sexually precocious teenager, she’d had a sustained fascination with medieval torture devices. This included the scold’s bridle, an iron cage forced onto disobedient women’s heads with a plate that forced their tongue down. In some accounts, the women were then led around town on a leash to complete their humiliation. She had found it all frighteningly sexual, along with those lurid illustrations of hunger striking suffragettes strapped down to chairs with long pipes forced down their throats. This was what it all was, really, despite the insistence on positivity and safety that dogged everything now. The echo of all the windowless rooms that people disappeared into, subjected to the types of violence artfully crafted to keep you alive as long as possible. Our great shames and our morbid curiosities.

He was uncomfortable now, his retching stronger and more panicky and his dick gone soft. She wanted to push him further, to see how far he’d let her go. Then, as she began contemplating whether the hotel would charge him extra if he threw up all over the carpet, she pulled back, aware that her own interests risked overtaking his. She withdrew, let him catch his breath, told him what a good boy he’d been.

You’ve pleased me, she said, taking his dick in her hand. Do you think you deserve something pleasing in return?

If it’s what you want.

They always said that, washing their hands of responsibility for their desire. What she wanted was to be at home. She smiled coyly and reached down to jerk him off, feeling his eyes fixed on her as she did.

What did she look like to him? Did she look how he’d imagined, or worse? Had he noticed the crop of grey hairs that now sprouted abundantly above her ears, or the small bruise on her forehead from yesterday’s botox? Here, closer to the MILF end of the spectrum than the barely legal one, she wasn’t sure if he’d seen enough adult women naked to know that her body was normal, if not better than normal. Should she tell him? She thought of something a man had told her once. ‘As you age’, he’d said, ‘you can either look old or you can look weird. There isn’t a third option’.

Close your eyes, she said, no longer able to tolerate the scrutiny. Steven barely made a sound as he came.

They lay in silence for a long while after. She was loath to break it, to make more work for herself through engagement, but she couldn’t help it. The unsayable thing could not be kept down.

You seem quite young for this.

Do I?

Yeah. This isn’t something people normally do until they’re out of options, so to speak. Not when they’re just getting started.

It’s just hard to find people that are my type. That like the same stuff.

The things you like aren’t that weird. I promise.

With visible awkwardness, he asked her if they could cuddle before they fell asleep, a request she had never figured out how to say no to. She curled her naked body around his. Early on in their relationship, she and her partner had begun jokily referring to being spooned as ‘going in the chair’. Now, years later, ‘chair’ had evolved into a simple one word invocation that they would sleepily call to each other in the night; a summoning charm that entwined their bodies together perfectly. What would it be like if no one came when she called?

The bed was expansive, and the sheets impossibly soft but she didn’t get any sleep.

In her Uber home the next morning he messaged her.

I had such an amazing time with you. Thank you. I’ll think about it forever.

She blocked him.

After a few false starts, crush season begins in earnest with Michael, an Irish filmmaker with wild, curly hair. I show my partner a picture of him and he observes, with a smirk, that I always go feral for boys that look like my brother.

It’s mortifying to be this known. Right on cue, my obsession with Michael takes hold. I’m drawn in by his ‘I want to but I shouldn’t’ kink, specifically around cheating. He tells me stories from his early twenties of a fraught, all consuming affair with an unavailable actor he was working with. Of long nights talking and never touching, that gave way to furtive meetings when his girlfriend was at work. It’s a big roiling mess of mutual anguish, shame and desire, so naturally, I’m into it. I tell him all the ways my own adolescent sexuality was constructed around being so desirable that seemingly older and wiser men would risk blowing up their relationship to fuck me. When you’re non-monogamous, the symbolic thrill of an affair gets completely kneecapped by all that openness. Where’s the excitement in a sordid little indiscretion if no one actually minds who you fuck?

But it doesn’t mean you can’t pretend. Soon, we’re roleplaying these shared scripts, historically reenacting our younger selves. We build the lore – fake partners (we give them names), raised stakes. We spend afternoons pretending to be just friends, holding our bodies unnaturally apart in space. I stay over and he says he can sleep on the sofa but I tell him no, it’s fine, we can share his bed. I lie next to him wearing a borrowed t-shirt and boxers and he thinks we should probably go to sleep. I feel the slightest press of his leg against mine and hold my breath, filled with the type of longing I vibrated with back then.

“Is it bad that I think about kissing you? I whisper innocently into the dark

“I can’t” he mutters. “We can’t”

“So you do, too?”

We fuck furiously and quietly, so as not to wake his hypothetical parents.

Perhaps it’s the potency of nostalgia or the fact Michael really understands dramatic tension, but the more we re-stage the cheating fantasy, the more I slide into a state of erotic fixation. I can’t focus on work; I cancel plans to meet a friend’s new baby. The time between his messages stretches out unbearably, so I post pictures online to bait him. He sends me voice notes of him jerking off over them, mumuring my name as he comes.

When we’re together, I’m gripped by his oddness. The little patches of eczema on his shins; the way he licks his lips when he concentrates; his teeth. He doesn’t want me to touch his hair, because he feels self-conscious about the curls going frizzy or losing their shape. ‘Please’ I beg him, ‘I’ll be gentle’. He concedes, so I straddle his lap and pull them delicately with my fingers. Pout for me, baby, I command. He obliges and my cunt tenses. Later he sends me a mirror selfie where he’s shirtless, staring down the lens with his hair all springy and his tongue slightly out. It feels so indecent I instinctively snap my phone shut.

After, as I look again at the photo I wonder: do these boys – the slightly queer, once-bullied ones, with their soft-edged masculinity – know how perfect they are? Do they not feel the pull to perform their boyish beauty? To play the role of some horny little cherub wearing nothing but a bashful half blush, their cock hardening in their hand for me? I fantasise about their embarrassment, their pliancy. Their willingness to degrade themselves in stupid ways for the mere possibility I might touch them. Really, I want them to play some stylised version of me when I was younger, back when I was more desperate for my lovers’ approval. Prove it, I want to say to them. Perform for me. But they never get it right.

Sometimes, when I’m feeling more dominant, I ask men to undress slowly and seductively for me. It’s intended to remind them I’m calling the shots, and perhaps also faintly embarrass them through exposure. Except it never works, because men are almost entirely at a loss at the difference between stripping and getting undressed. All they know is a quick scramble to be naked, punctuated by the jangle of change in their pocket as they drop their trousers on the floor. They remain stubbornly impervious to my gaze, leaving me fascinated by those sexualities constructed only from inside out. What must it be like to not derive some pleasure from your own performance? To fuck as if you are unobserved?

Cast always as perceiver rather than perceived, straight men rarely comprehend the erotic possibility inherent within that performance. They would like it, I think, if only they could pin themselves down. To put on is also to take off, to become something entirely of your own fashioning. There is an alchemy in producing another’s desire through your body, a making (or unmaking) that proves Lacan’s assertion that “desire is the desire of the other”. Desire compels us to become, not to be.

The next time I see Michael, he’s running late and asks to push our date back by an hour. I say of course, but truthfully, another hour feels impossible. I consider telling him to hurry up because I’ve already spent the entire morning studiously resisting masturbating for this, but I can’t quite face the indignity of it. Instead I arrive at his house 15 minutes early and wait on the doorstep like a horny Paddington Bear. It’s a muggy evening, and small trickles of sweat make their way down the backs of my thighs.

When he finally gets home and leaps off his bike, we’re kissing before he’s even got his keys out. Our pantomime of infidelity has created a frantic, furious energy between us, our wanting a runaway train. I slip my hands under his t-shirt, pulling him into me, collapsing any possible space between our bodies. He wants a shower, he’s cycled home, but I say no, now. No more waiting. I fear my body might collapse in on itself without him inside me.

We make it to his bedroom, just, and then he’s on top of me, pulling my legs over his shoulders, practically folding me in half. We fuck like our lives depend on it, like we’re being pursued. I barely have a sense of myself at this tempo, but as he moves deeper into me I notice an unfamiliar feeling unfurling inside me. It’s a quickening, a tightening, a pressure applied somewhere undiscovered. It’s as if I’m learning how to pronounce a new word.

I’m caught between naming the sensation or being carried away by it, before settling on surrender. I allow it to rise and roll through me, losing track of how I sound and what my face must look like. I get out of my own way.

It’s the noise I notice first: the slap of wet skin on skin. Looking down, I realise that we’re both soaked, the sheets clinging to my thighs. As he fucks me, liquid pours out of me. There is suddenly so much of it, a lush obscenity blooming around us.

‘Fuck’, Michael says. ‘Does this normally happen?’

‘No’, I say, incredulous. ‘I didn’t know I did this’

We slow down then, he wants to test what else I can do. He slides his fingers into me instead and curls them upwards. We watch as I pour down his wrist.

‘I’m so wet’, I tell him, although this feels instantly inadequate to describe what’s happening. My generic porn-y aphorism is washed away. I am a broken levee, a burst fire hydrant, a biblical fucking flood.

We finish, and lie, slick, amongst the mess, stunned at the absurdity of it all. Our skin smells sweet and brackish, the breeze from the open window glancing over our limbs. After decades of fucking and hundreds of partners, you start to believe that you know all there is to know about your body. But the body is an idea, not a static object, and its meaning is constantly up for grabs.

Later, Michael messes about as he dries his mattress with a hairdryer, pretending to be a feudal lord inspecting a newlywed’s sheets. I cannot stop laughing. I feel brand new.

It dawned on me slowly, and then all at once: I’d had enough. After nearly a decade, the time had come to leave the world of ‘high-class companionship’ behind.

It has been mostly good to me. This work has given me the kind of independence a woman like me was always going to need, allowing me to build a life that was weird, expansive, and entirely free of offices, parochialism and buggies. It’s provided me the freedom to pursue education and creativity, and the resources to support the people and causes I care about. It has introduced me to other workers, who became best friends and cherished lovers, and furnished me with enough wild stories to rescue even the most boring pub session, when required. I wouldn’t have stayed so long at this party if I wasn’t enjoying it, but the trick is knowing when to go home.

Because there is a fair bit I’ve grown tired of, with my frustrations calcifying into something more existentially troubling over time. I’ve had enough of being looked at for a living, of forever being an object. Even when you control your own image, it is inevitably alienating (and also very boring) to appraise yourself from the outside as much as I have. To know, very precisely and at all times, exactly how to compose yourself to appear not just pretty but unaffected, as if you do really recline on a bed with a natural arch in your back, or trace your finger around the rim of a wine glass when lost in thought, or allow the strap of your dress to fall delicately off your shoulder when you’re knelt in front of him. All women understand what it is to feel observed and scrutinised, but only those who go pro know how strange it is to pilot your own body like a coquettish marionette. I have reduced my personhood to a pantomime of femininity, performed in little outfits bought from sweatshops, and then wondered why I felt disassociated.

After spending so long naked on the internet, I’ve had enough of translating my body through analytics and engagement, searching the algorithm’s constant fluctuations for meaning like tea leaves at the bottom of a cup. Is this too much nipple? Will this word flag my account? I’m old enough to remember when being a slut on the internet was fun. Now it’s reduced to tricking a machine owned by the world’s cringiest billionaire into thinking you’re wearing clothes, and writing captions so bland that hopefully people won’t notice you’re a whore.

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