I got to the restaurant and she was standing outside—maybe 5’3”, intense-but-warm widely set (one wants to say felinely shaped) dark eyes, wearing a quite small but somehow modest and overall effortlessly and I want to say earthily chic red cotton dress that buttoned up the front with a high slit and a low cut, conventionally-attractively thin/lean (but with a really nice silhouette that made me think of a strangely evocative one-line drawing from a master’s hand in a sketchbook) in a way that often (including last night, at first) makes me a bit self-conscious about how my own body size will be received, dark skin (to my gringo eyes) and hair, very pretty, an affect that would move quickly between intense focus and a really welcoming smile, pretty dark and very smooth skin except for—as far as I could tell at the time—ungroomed armpit hair and thick scalp-hair and the littlest hint at the corners of her lips that I again want to describe as feline. Approaching, I had one brief flash of that anxiety: I don’t know this person at all, and so is this whole interaction going to feel artificial and disappointing and awkward and somehow humiliating? But she was immediately energetically open, which set me at ease. She hugged me hello. We exchanged our real names for the first time—Alicia and Steve (Paz and Lev on Field).
Inside, the air was low-key stifling. They also sat us next to rather than across from each other at a teeny little bistro table. The physical posturing and the air quality made it a bit uncomfortable. Not in terms of//obstructing the conversation, which was pretty immediately/relentlessly/naturally intimate, but it didn’t feel overtly/confidently/targetedly sexualized. From the beginning, she demonstrated the capacity for deep feeling and brave self-inquiry and sharp analysis that can spit out the strange directive to choose moderation and calm and peace, while honoring the shadows and extremes within. She had also clearly both sought wisdom and—even more impressive/uncommon—actually engaged with it critically inside herself, keeping what resonated, respectfully discarding what didn’t, and building an actually original view of world and self that was open to ongoing revision in(/because of the fluctuating conditions of) the present. I felt affinity with lots of her values, experiences, and meaning-making, and also more ineffable things like the shifting amount of seriousness with which she took herself. I also really appreciated her skills with language—I mean language generally but also English specifically. Sussing out someone’s facility with English is an important and maybe unskippable part of the romantic and erotic process for me, since I both need to build a model of someone else’s language model to work effectively with it, and I need to assess how much room I have to play and freely express in order to build a sense of how much I can be seen/understood and therefore intimately non-rejected and even valued (since being good at English is one of my main dimensions of value!).
After eating, I got us out of there as fast as I could. She wanted ice cream so I found a place (van Leeuwin’s; vegan sweet potato marshmallow) and we walked around eating it, eventually perching near the fountains by City Hall. As she was leaning back against a railing, I noticed quite by accident that the cut of her dress gave me a sidelong line-of-sight to one of her tits—they are small enough that (as she told me later) she has basically never worn a bra, and combined with her posture I guess that allowed the fabric to kind of blouse outward. I didn’t mention it to her, but that was the first little activation for me of erotic desire—I observed it but did not really go chasing after it. Though the greater comfort of moving around did make me looser and flirtier and funnier. After walking aimlessly for maybe half an hour, I started leading us south without really mentioning it—maybe a 50m walk. Shortly into it, she mentioned that she had soft-committed to going to someone’s house to jam with another musician she’d met on Feeld (I saw his pic and did not feel sexually threatened//competed with), who got a strong endorsement from Alicia’s host (who works in theater; Alicia is in cdmx to attend grad school for music composition and has recently started scoring plays). She said I was welcome to come. I felt like I did a good job not giving too much of myself away by saying, “Maybe!” At that point I was sort of presuming that the date was not going to be a sexual one. The talking was great but also I’m always pretty good at that part and (when sexually motivated) maybe eventually maladaptively so—I observe that sometimes I and the other can get too entrenched in the mode of rapt conversation, and it can be hard to transition that to erotic attention. (Noting what Esther Perel talks about, i.e. that security and eroticism are always in tension because security demands knowing whereas eroticism demands mystery; noting also the possibility that in those moments maybe I’m giving too much of myself away by over-attuning to the other to make good conversation *for them* rather than *for us* (which includes *for me*), but that’s really just a speculative hypothesis.) But then the talk for the rest of the walk toward my place was increasingly connective and loose and fun. I observed that, over the length of about 3 miles, our paths on the sidewalk very slowly converged, toward occasional glances of elbows…would be interesting to calculate the actual mathematical angle of our slowly collapsing parallels. About 15m from my place I mentioned we were heading that way and that she could at least stop in to pee and plan her next move. She seemed happy enough about that—I guess there was some possibility she might’ve felt manipulated to be steered away from her place and towards mine without my mentioning it—but she did seem to really have to pee.
When we got to my place, she volunteered two proposals, which to an autistic boi like your boi were very exciting and soothing. First, she quickly proposed that we sit and rest and cuddle for a bit (cuddle being the active ingredient in the proposal for me, i.e. initiating touch without my having to keep playing the game of figuring out if that was welcome), then see about heading to that jam, which was in Fairmount. I again said, “Maybe!” We sat on the couch and she reclined against me and volunteered that I could understand cuddling/touching as a blanket green light “until I say no,” which was an ambiguous but possibly thrillingly wide open permission. I asked if she had a clear sense of where her “no” was and she said, “I don’t know, like maybe if you tried to kill me.”
We talked on the couch for a couple hours…I was doing a lot of ambient mostly pretty light/slow caressing, starting with her arms and shoulders, then neck and chest, then under the cut of her dress and onto her tits—periodically stopping to check whether meaningful advances/escalations were okay; they were. After maybe an hour (!) I unbuttoned the top button of her dress (there were 5 buttons); 30m later I unbuttoned the next and we were continuing to talk as she lay with her really lovely tits exposed (and non-urgently played with). We were mostly not talking about the touching that was happening, nor what it might/might not lead toward. Though at a certain point she did mention that she’d noticed the nods to kink in my Feeld profile and said she hadn’t had much experience with that, except for having a few sessions of someone tying her up but not fucking her. I told her I had a fair amount of kink-related toys/accessories and that we could play with some in an experimental way if she wanted to try them. She didn’t exactly reject the idea but said that that kind of thing would probably be better in a relationship that had a bit more trust built into it.
Around 11 or so she checked her phone again—it was getting late (for the purposes of the jam as well as her 9am flight) but we were both enjoying ourselves. I asked if she wanted to continue what we were doing in the bed; she did.
That continuous talking and slow physical escalation (to the point that it wasn’t really clear that it *was* escalation, or at least that it was escalating toward the presumptive terminus of climactic sex) continued for the next several hours. The bedroom was mostly dark. Before long I’d taken all her clothes off—mine were all still on. Something I noted: her pubic hair was pretty remarkable, vast and thick and dark and tangled, in a way that to me read as animal/wild and earth-goddessy that was in sharply charming and sexy relief to the chic clothed exterior (and the knowledge that she’s good at computers) and that gave the bush a flavor of secrecy/mystery that aggrandized me by granting me special access/witness… and being aggrandized, i.e. feeling confident and special in how I’m valued, is ofc an important pillar of desire-formation for me. Also the ways the pubic hair contrasted with how smooth the rest of her was: that was a yes for me.
I was alternating through some periods of more intense massage and gentler petting. As I did, there would be these occasional little flare-ups of horniness and my touching might become more overtly sexual—not just tops of thighs but also her ass and cunt. I’d trace a few circles around her clit, maybe briefly slide a fingertip inside her. She’d give an appreciative moan or breathy vocalization but they were subtle and not quite on the level of “fuck me now.” And then I’d back away and things would calm down again. The talking continued uninterrupted. She would alternate between positions, sometimes laying on her back, sometimes her side with her back and ass pressed against me, sometimes facing me and curled up onto me. The most escalated things became for a while was a moment when she was facing away and I started attending to her with my mouth a bit, some kissing/licking/biting on along the arc from shoulder up neck to ear. Then it slowed down again. I was enjoying the conversation, the touching, the intimacy so much—it would’ve been silly not to feel like that abundance wasn’t enough. And would’ve been even sillier to compromise it with a disappointing sexual effort out of a sense of compulsion or greed. I also asked her a few questions about her sex life and learned that—surprise surprise—she’d experienced quite a bit of disappointment with “straight men,” and I think said she hadn’t fucked one in a year, and that her most satisfying recent sexual experiences had been with a woman. That created/clarified a new branch from the overall decision tree. On the one hand, I wondered whether that disappointment she expressed reflected that her sexual tastes just didn’t work with straight men—and also wondered whether she counted me among that demographic (my Feeld profile says I’m gender-nonconforming, I believe). On the other hand, her underwhelming sense of the competencies of and her need for a male sexual partner maybe activated a sense of sexual ambition in me, the desire to prove something, to give her a certain kind of gift…and without feeling like there was much “competition” for high status in her personal sexual pantheon… combined those things probably just clarified that the initiation/addition of sex is always a roll of the dice, one that can deepen intimacy & security or diminish it, one that can feed the ego’s desire for superiority or its equally compulsive susceptibility to inferiority.
Around 2am, probably coincident with one or both of us taking a bathroom break, she checked her phone and realized how late it had become—the possibility of the jam had come and gone. When we were embracing again, I said: “Do you think we should try to fuck?” Just because it touches on some themes you and I have explored, I’ll expand on this briefly. One of the things that gave me internal permission to ask the question so straightforwardly (in addition of course to her straightforward communications as well as all the eroticism and figurative-and-literal nudity; it would’ve been very different to have asked that question in the middle of dinner, though looking back I suspect she wouldn’t have rejected the question itself outright if I had, though her answer may have been different then) was that I was clear in myself that I was not hoping for a certain answer and hoping against another. I was not only accepting of both the possible yes and the possible no… I really myself *did not know* which was better, which I preferred. And a big part of the reason I didn’t know which I preferred was that I didn’t know what *she* preferred. Without knowing that, I couldn’t form a mutually considerate/beneficial preferred course of action. I think/observe that one of the things that happens when we go through these debates inside ourselves about what we should do, how to initiate a thing to make it happen, is that we actually overlook the fact that desire is/must be mutually and collaboratively constructed. In our anxiety to figure out how to phrase and whether to say, we forget to include the other, i.e. we exclude the other, and so it involves an element of artifice, not to mention an element of goal-orientation that in many ways is anti-erotic, of compulsive performativity that is somehow both people-pleasing and selfish/manipulative and circumventing of collaborative desire- and consent-making. Is some amount of erotic charge sacrificed in the consulting and the making-explicit? Maybe so, but I think that is variable from person to person (get you someone you can ask; someone who is comfortable enough with their own desire to participate collaboratively even from/toward a submissive intra-sexual position; someone who is mature enough to make healthy trade-offs between security and eroticism)… I also think that erotic charge can be regained more sustainably after the consultation. If the question itself turns the other off and defuses the whole thing…then you can still consider that a successful consultation if you yourself are not so goal-oriented and dependent on getting a certain answer. If they reject your efforts toward clear and collaborative communication, then that still is a successful negotiation… they have revealed their terms and their operating style, and you have more quickly and painlessly identified an operational incompatibility…that is a win, actually! Using the scientific method as a metaphor, an experiment does not require the hypothesis to be confirmed in order to be successful, to have produced knowledge. If the human experimenter is too dependent on the experiment producing a certain outcome, they will inevitably tip the scales. They might even manipulate the experiment into producing their desired outcome, but then there’s the replication crisis. Cf. Edison’s thing about how he didn’t fail 100 times to make a lightbulb; he successfully found 100 ways not to make a lightbulb. Cf. that study about how pottery students who were instructed to make 30 imperfect pots become much more skilled than those who were instructed to make 1 perfect pot. Cf. that thing from the Third Chinese Patriarch of Zen: “The Great Way is easy for those who have no preferences.” Cf. the elusiveness/deterritorializing impulse of desire and your lifetime’s experience of trying to get others to want what you want.
Anyway, in response to my question, she gave a kind of lamentingly moaned “I don’t knowwwwww.” I can’t reproduce what she said after that verbatim, but basically I think she worried that to fuck after all that talking and right before her leaving would’ve somehow positioned the fucking as the goal in a way that might’ve cheapened all the intimacy that had come before. Which made a lot of sense to me! And I did not want to cheapen it. I did not feel I needed the sex. I felt incredibly lucky/grateful for all the connective intimacy and like it would’ve been hubris to want more. Will also note that, almost immediately after that exchange, the sexual escalation really started.
She said something to the effect of: I don’t know if you (Steve) have been getting hard, or… And I realized how one-sided the flow of touch had been. I mean it’s always my instinct (I guess this is what people mean by “topping”) to lead on touch. I sometimes use the metaphor of relating to the theater of sex as if the other bodymind is the instrument and I the player. There is a projectile element to my erotic attention. Sometimes, usually in response to my trying to build a mental map of another person’s erogenous zones, they will ask about mine, and I usually understand my erogenously sensitive parts to be: my cock, my hands, and my eyes. The first one is really the only part of me that, when directly stimulated, can lead to climax. The eyes and hands can escalate/accelerate arousal for me, but in a more complex dance-like way that works with a different subject-object calculus, and they are both to some extent proxies for processes that are happening in my mind. It pleasures me to touch another appreciatively and impactfully (i.e. pleasuringly). It pleasures me to be the player and to observe the music of another’s instrument. But every partner/instrument is different. And on some level I think most of them are also in their own ways dependent on knowing that they are reciprocating the pleasure in some way—and they all have different senses for how that pleasure is/can be reciprocated. Sometimes, as I play with another from the topping/player position, all they really need is occasional (usually verbal, or at least vocal) feedback that the process is pleasurable for me. Some are content to just lay there and receive attention (that in its performative character may vary from worshipful to brutally/primally objectifying). Some need some opportunity to *do*/*give* in order to trust they are reciprocating pleasure (enough to keep feeling/receiving it). Attuning to those individualities is part of being a good player in the sense of the soloist-and-instrument relationship as well as the collaborative co-ensemble-mates relationship.
So at that point, I said something to the effect of, well you should also spend some time touching/playing with me/my cock. She had already instinctively started doing some more touch-giving, mostly kind of massaging my thighs. So I took my shorts off—then, a few minutes later, my underwear (“orca” gray New Balance-brand briefs with a “mulberry” waistband that I’d just bought and were *making their debut*)—and she slowly started playing with my cock, which was suddenly and reassuringly very responsive. I say reassuringly because I had masturbated in the afternoon before the date, mostly because the impulse arose and I thought it might help me approach the date in a more relaxed and non-testosterone-driven-goal-oriented way. But also there was some sense of administering the potential of sex in that, for me, the first time I have sex with a new partner, I can be kind of quick to orgasm. This is usually a strangely one-time thing and so I think clearly has a big psychological component, which my psyche thus presumes must be changeable and within my control, and I haven’t had a chance to test this pattern with a new partner for a while, so it may be obsolete or heading that way. After that first occasion with a new partner, I don’t really struggle with timing issues. And within that first occasion, I can usually manage that (stray thought about how one of the benefits of the topping position is being in control of time/pacing), but it does take some resources to do so and it diminishes the amount of surrender I can give to the experience. But then also in my amab vehicle I do have a refractory period, so there is a bit of a trade-off here and an imperfect gamble with time and rhythms (of my body and the date’s natural unfolding)…I’ve never really struggled with erectile responsiveness in like absolute can’t-get-it-up ways (outside one specific and highly charged occasion that I’ll tell you about another time; I blame the other), but there are still degrees.
Anyway, the timing and energy had worked out so that I was quickly/immediately hard—maybe that signal in and of itself was reassuring and arousing to her, maybe also her desire was unleashed a bit by being invited/instructed to do some giving, maybe also the question of whether or not we should fuck defused some of the pressures or just energized the situation by making the prospect of sex between us even more explicit, maybe our shadow sexual selves were pushing back against our mature parts’ sobriety and sense of being able to control the horny devils inside—and after a bit of time I returned to touching her simultaneously and we had both obviously risen to a new category of arousal (hers signaled to me (and compounding mine) through rhythmic physical movements that were responsive to my touch and through changes in breathing/vocalizing and plus she had quickly become very wet, which I cherished and told her so). I said something like, “Are you sure we shouldn’t fuck” and she said something like “no” and then I knew. Depending on how you want to look at it, either surrendered/gave permission to myself or more actively took up the permission that was offered to me. I accepted. *We* accepted.
At that point she said: “Maybe we can try some of your Dom toys.” Bit of physical awkwardness/inefficiency as I went in the closet and went digging through my Target bag of accoutrements (I really need a sexier storage system). (Stopping to note how especially for the top one of the most challenging elements of sex is *holding the energy* while attending to the logistical and infrastructural demands & erotic interruptions that are mostly unavoidable with sex. The discipline of management studies probably has things to say about this as a leadership-morale issue. I think you could also analogize it to or see it as an embodied microcosm of issues of faith and observation/devotion, the alternation between knowing and believing.) I was not wanting to experiment too flamboyantly/riskily both because I didn’t fully know everything she liked and was comfortable with (and maybe she didn’t either) and frankly because I was really fucking exhausted. Inventing and executing/leading a scene at speed is really resource-intensive, not least because of the ongoing attunement required to do it well. Something funny and maybe tragically beautiful/beautifully tragic about climbing up to the neocortex to enact a satisfying descent through the brainstem, through the body, through the mattress.
She expressed an interest in being blindfolded and restrained. I have a really nice set of hand/ankle cuffs, which I made sure to mention were made of vegan materials (Alicia is a vegan), dark gray crocodile-skin-patterned exterior and faux-fur interior, with a really satisfying weight (here I will encourage you, to the extent that you are interested in dedicated sexual toys/accessories, to drop dime; the bodymind knows when materials are cheap and it is reminded of capitalist exigencies and it feels itself disgraced/devalued by them; plus its ability to suspend disbelief and immerse in scene is inhibited). I strapped them on/her in and linked her ankles and wrists to one another, first ankle-to-ankle then wrist-to-wrist separately, then all four together in a system (she was laying on her stomach). I also took up the role of teacher to just talk through what I was doing, which was partly driven by the experience asymmetry but also an occasion to inhabit that top-friendly role for me. Zooming in here on another topping tip: simple narration, in my experience, does a lot. Until/unless they’re totally lost in sub-space, and sometimes not even then, someone who’s in the bottom/sub position tends to feel an anxiety not only/always about what the other is going to do (that’s dependent also on trust, which is variable, including within a single sexual event), but also about whether the connection-in-the-desiring-mode is still active. Are you still doing the work of holding the desire. Are you still being a good and dedicated leader. Are we still in it together and am I doing a good job. Have you kept the faith. Can I keep surrendering and surrender even more. The simplest utterances go a long, long way.
“I’m doing a and b right now.”
“I’m going to do x and y.”
When in doubt, just externalize your desire and satisfaction in some way.
“I’m really enjoying touching you.”
“I really want you.”
“I’m excited to fuck you.”
“I’m imagining doing c and d.” (This especially good for bringing in fantasy that can’t be enacted in reality, and almost all sex is actually operating on those terms and with the ingredient of fantasy to some extent. The difference between kinky sex and vanilla sex is less material-mechanical and more an idea.)
Risk the vulnerability of making desire explicit. Risk externalizing your imaginative life and subjecting it for either approval/joining or rejection (which is data generation) or collaborative re-shaping. Risk being/saying the obvious—the anxieties you bring about cliche-v-originality are not really attuned to the actual laws of the sexual economy. The most powerful sexual experiences, I think, may proceed from something highly individualized and specific, but swim upstream toward the archetypes, sometimes even through them to some kind of pre-conceptual/pre-personal demiurge—and as you approach that place, unoriginality disappears as a risk because it disappears as a possibility. There’s nothing unoriginal when you are at the Origin. There is also no risk in being strange if you accept that your “goal” is to approach the Mystery. There is no risk in being silly when you accept that you are playing the game, the one infinite game. There is no risk in being imperfect or perverted when you understand that that game is about using your flawed individuality to return to the perfection of unity. There is no risk in being human when you remember that you are also God. Unwind yourself. Go beyond your binaries. Don’t be a little bitch about it. Or, if you must, accept that you’re a little bitch and proceed from that place. “Enter zen from there.”
Returning to our tale, I also told her that, to suit her interest in blindfolding, I had a nice (red neoprene (her dress was red and the programming language she works in is called “Ruby,” a connection she made explicit some 7 hours earlier) hood that only had a hole at the mouth. She giggled about that and that gave me a twinge of self-coco but it didn’t seem like a rejecting or judging or even awkward giggle, so I proceeded. She mostly stopped talking for a while after that. Maybe that had to happen somehow—one of us had to stop talking—and it took props and costumery (i.e. tech) to make it so.
Here I guess most of what I have to share is mechanical. Obviously much of my/the experience transcended the mechanical, but then the mechanical is all that language is really equipped to deal with. With her restrained and mute (muteness had been an interesting recurring theme throughout the ongoing conversation, I’m recalling/appreciating), I took out a vibrator (a Hitachi Magic Wand, which if you don’t know is pretty iconic; I bought it for my Dionysus costume at the last mummer’s parade but was also partly motivated by wanting a really good vibrator at my disposal) and started using it on her. Pretty quickly, she became multiorgasmic (came and became and came). As I interpreted it, she proceeded through a few kind of wave-like orgasmic clusters/sequences that seemed to have a couple local climaxes within each wave (and more with each subsequent wave). She was also a squirter, I found out. Which of course is very hot and satisfying/ly aggrandizing, even though I can’t take total credit for it. Then I disconnected her ankles from her wrists and put a condom on (a meh-grade of bleh). I think my personal decision tree with sex starts with the imperative that I want to avoid coming before my partner at all costs//if at all possible. Outside of occasional and highly specific acts, I usually don’t feel satisfied with a sex act if my partner doesn’t climax—I know that’s a politically and psychodynamically loaded preference. And my energetic capacity for bringing someone else to climax usually plummets after I’ve had my own. But so having abundantly satisfied that imperative and turned myself on in the process, I started fucking her (at first with the vibrator, because it is an additional pleasure/aggrandizement for some parts of me to experience a partner’s climax while I’m inside them), and after she had another climactic wave, I put the vibrator away and started prioritizing my own climax and then I came. Then we kept cuddling in bed for another, idk, twenty minutes. Then we dressed and went to the stoop and I smoked a cigarette and she ordered an uber—a red Tesla (Google tells me the factory names for the two most common shades of red that Tesla uses are Ultra Red and Midnight Cherry Red; I’m not sure which it was but I hope the latter)—and I hugged her goodbye. I went back inside, fried up a vegan burger in the cast iron, ate it, and fell asleep around 6.