My friend Michael McDonald invited me to perform stand-up at his birthday party.
Topics:
0:00 – Is This Birthday Party a Sex Party?
1:07 – Ayahuasca Play Parties
3:45 – Bufo Boinking
5:09 – Women vs. Men at Sex Parties
My girlfriend Emily requested that I roast her in front of her friends for her birthday party. This is what happened…
(This was the first stand-up I ever did…)
[This is a memoir chapter from The Divine Absurdity of Love: A Memoir and a Novella ]
The party was called Éphémère, a Belle Epoque-themed party, in October 2013. It was hosted by my friend Philippe Lewis, one of the most experienced organizers of play parties in the Bay Area.
Ladies in feather hats and bodices filled the mansion in Sausalito, and men in three-piece suits wore ascot ties. I was there on, believe it or not, a quadruple date—three kinky witches, and me, all on a date with each other in some type of amorphous polyamorous configuration.
At the beginning of the party, we—the four mutual daters—sat in a circle, clasped our hands together in a big ball in the center, blessing the marijuana chocolates we were about to eat. (This was California, where we bless our marijuana.)
Visions of an orgiastic pile of Sapphic love had filled my mind when I organized this quadruple date. Before this vision was consummated, however, the marijuana chocolate hit me hard. I sauntered into a side room to take a sit down and collect myself.
At that moment, a woman sat down to an electric piano, facing the room. She said into the mic that her name was Adey Bell. A black garter peeked through slits of her tight black skirt, while a black corset with touches of red lace flourished upwards. Neck-length bangs with blonde highlights sloped up towards cropped dirty-blonde hair in the back. In the front, the light green of her eyes reflected the candle flickers of the room like flaming absinthe. All accented by… a top hat.
The first moments of her first song knocked me backward. I laid back on the carpet, as if I had been shocked by a river of electrified honey and champagne hitting my ears. By the middle of the first song I started twitching and trembling, in my place on the floor. I had witnessed many explicit sex acts that night already, and now I was the one being penetrated—by her music.
Adey sang:
[The video version of my interview on the Hannah Frankman Podcast is above. Here are the audio versions on Apple Podcast and on Spotify.]
In the age of AI, traditional education is OUT, and self-taught AI skills are IN…
Within a year or two, the office job market will look radically different than it ever has, as AI washes over most workplaces.
How should young people change their plans for education as this AI tsunami crashes over the workplace?
In my interview with Hannah Frankman–a rebel maven of alternative education–I make a controversial claim:
In the age of AI, going to college will be a massive financial and career harm for most students, particularly those taking on significant debt.
(The exception is students who want to go into a field like law, which requires an academic credential and/or licensure, such as law, engineering, or medicine–though these fields are being upended by AI as well.)
Why?
Colleges have already demonstrated that they intend to keep young people away from AI either partially or fully, saying that using AI tools is “cheating.” Overpaid college deans correctly see AI as a threat to their business model.
(And yes, colleges are for all intents and purposes businesses–and ruthless ones at that–despite their fig leaf of non-profit status.)
Point blank: any young adult who has been kept away by their teachers and professors from learning about AI tools urgently, will be irrelevant to the job market next year, let alone in four years.
Students simply do not go to college (and take out large student loans) to become economically irrelevant, and they should not. So education needs to be rethought from the ground up as AI dominates every area of our economy.
What Young People Should Do Instead…
I was fortunate to be able to read the following letter to my father on his deathbed a month ago. (I was with him as he died of pancreatic cancer peacefully this morning, in my childhood home, surrounded by loving family.) When I read it to him, he said he felt deeply seen and understood by it, which was extremely meaningful to me.
#####
Dear Dad,
We know this will likely be the last letter I ever write you.
I could write a whole letter about all the ways you have loved me. You’ve cared when I was hurting, you’ve given great advice through the decades, and you’ve shown a passionate interest in my writing when I’ve shared it with you.
I could also write a whole letter about all the things I love about you: the unfathomable subtlety, beauty, and brilliance of your mind; your sense of humor when you get on a roll; the way you want the people you love to thrive, and the way you support them in doing that; and obviously, your care for the world and the inspiring way you manage to keep on fighting even though you’ve never felt much hope.
Here is what I want to focus on in this last letter: the way you have impacted me. The thing I most value about myself is that I’m a writer. (I know, I’m nice and caring and all those things I’m supposed to say I value about myself too—but what breathes fire in me is my identity and practice as a writer.)
I simply cannot imagine myself as a writer without you. Thus, I cannot imagine a version of Michael that didn’t have you as my father. (The same goes for Mom, and I’ll write her that letter too.)
I believe in teaching women to erotically dominate men (if they want to learn it!) The thing is, when you teach someone to do this, and you agree to be their practice sub, and she wants to mess with you and see what you’re made of, you may end up being ordered to do all kinds of crazy shit you would never do on your own…
Such as put on a wig, dance to Britney Spears, and worship a banana…
Last week, I shared with you an episode in which I started to teach my platonic friend Celinne Da Costa to Domme me.
In this episode, we discover Celinne’s inner dominatrix, Mystress Trixie… and boy does she come out of the gate swinging!
Before I knew what had hit me, and much to my surprise, Mytress Trixie dominated me into “Michelle”… who is quite a dancer!
And it was all filmed…
So if you’re ready to see the inimitable Mystress Trixie feminizing me into Michelle on camera… get out your popcorn and grab your front-row seat here on YouTube.
You will never eat a banana the same way!
A few months ago, I rang my friend and book coaching client Celinne Da Costa to catch up. Half an hour into our conversation, she mentioned in an offhand comment that she was interested in exploring her dominant side in her sexuality.
I mentioned that I am a switch (meaning I go both ways in the Dom/Sub dynamic) and I since I know both sides, I enjoy and am good at supporting women in discovering their dominant side. It’s fun for both of us. I also like the politics of it: women learning to dominate men subverts the patriarchy.
Celinne was supremely interested in this. We are completely platonic friends, and I supported her professionally in her process of writing her amazing memoir. So I assured that teaching/learning dominance can be done without anything involving sex, or even running erotic energy. Dominance is about progressively taking control in an encounter (with consent) and that can be completely platonic if that is what’s called for, which was the case here.
She asked me how this worked. I explained that many of my female friends in the Bay Area are interested in learning to dominate men erotically, and I have shown them (in fact, I don’t seem to know any women who are not interested in learning dominance. Maybe that’s the kind of women I hang out with! :)
In three cases, women I have trained in their initial phase of learning have gone on to become badass and very successful professional dominatrixes. Two of them have combined BDSM with pre-existing healing modalities they already worked with. One of them supports herself lucratively entirely from this work now, and another recently earned $15,000 in a weekend private immersion.
(Note: I taught the skill of erotic dominance, not the professional/business/marketing side of professional dominance, which is a whole other game and which these women got other mentorship/support from pro-Dommes to learn.)
Celinne is always up for adventure (that’s what her whole memoir is about) so I suggested I give her a training session over video call, we record it, and if she’s comfortable with it, she could release it to her audience on her podcast. (We’ve actually never met in person, though I wrote copy for her and helped her on her book writing for years).
Celinne was a HELL YES to this. So we did it. For 2.5 hours straight. Raw, unfiltered, in a single take.
I’m honored and grateful that Amanda Sukenick interviewed me about Joyful Pessimism in depth on the Exploring Antinatalism Podcast. Links to watch/listen are below:
Listen to the audio on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Soundcloud, Google Podcasts
Since anti-natalism content is regularly censored from social media platforms, here are backup files of the video and audio versions of the interview, in case any of the above are ever removed by the platforms.
Due to college labor practices, many adjunct professors now need side hustles; Dr. Mistress Snow’s involves beating up men in a sex dungeon.
[This is the full version of the Daily Beast interview I did with Mistress Snow, Ph.D. Due to their length guidelines, they did not include large parts of my introduction, and some parts of Mistress Snow’s answers. Segments not included in the Daily Beast version are indicated with asterisks **before and after the segments.**]
When you think of a college professor, you don’t usually think of a dominatrix. And, you also don’t usually think of someone who is so underpaid that they don’t know how they’re going to afford rent or groceries. However, due to college administrators’ relentless drive to cut labor costs via outsourcing college instruction to freelance “contingent faculty,” the latter situation of professorial poverty is increasingly common. And for that reason, at least one professor—whom we’ll meet soon—has taken up the former as a side job.
More than half of all college professors are now “adjuncts”: part-time freelance instructors who often have the same Ph.D.s as their tenured and full-time colleagues, but who get paid low amounts on a per-course basis, with few or no benefits or job security. Typically, adjuncts (also known as “contingent faculty”) string together gigs at multiple colleges, which pay an average of $3,984 per course. Three courses a semester, or six per year, is considered a full teaching load–many adjuncts report it’s difficult to get this many courses–which implies a typical yearly income of $23,904 for the “lucky” adjuncts with a full-time-equivalent teaching load.
For reference, full-time baristas at Starbucks make an average of $27,030 per year, and are eligible for benefits including health insurance, dental, vision, 401(k), paid time off, parental leave, and even emergency financial assistance during family crises; adjunct professors typically receive none of these benefits. **And, making these thousands of dollars per year more plus benefits as a barista does not require ten or more years of study and foregone earnings during college and graduate school, nor the often-six-figures of student debt that adjuncts carry.
One researcher titled his book on this downtrodden half of the professoriate “The Adjunct Underclass.” The title is apt: according to research from the UC Berkeley Labor Center, 25% of part-time college faculty are on some form of public assistance, including Medicaid, welfare, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and/or food stamps. Since 50% of the faculty are part-time now, taken together, these statistics imply that one-in-eight college professors are adjuncts currently on public assistance. If you’re taking a college class right now, there’s a chance your professor just showed up to your class having slept in her car.
Welcome to what one team of researchers have referred to as “The Gig Academy.”
How did this happen?
For my Daily Beast article about Mistress Snow, a college professor who is a dominatrix, I did background research on famous people who did porn and other forms of sex work while in college. Tasha Reign—who did porn in part to pay her way through UCLA, and was also doing porn during her recent master’s program in journalism at USC—told me that her friend Brett Rossi also did porn while in college.
Brett was kind enough to grant me an exclusive interview on this topic; she has never publicly discussed the relationship between her porn career and her college education.
How did you come to do porn while in college?
I was a runway model since I was 14. Once I turned 18, I started working at the Playboy Mansion as one of Hef’s little painted girls for parties. I was introduced to somebody who worked for Penthouse, and it went from there. At first, I was mostly just a centerfold in the beginning. I started doing hard-core girl/girl scenes in 2010, when I was 21.
The sole purpose of me entering the adult business was because I had to survive for myself. My family was not poor, but we were not rich either. When I turned 17, I moved out on my own where I was not supported or helped financially by anyone but myself. Before porn, I had gotten a lucrative job as a mattress salesperson where I moved up the ladder quickly and became a manager. After I got into the adult entertainment industry, I started using the money that I was making there to go to nursing school in Los Angeles, in 2018, when I was 29.
I wanted to become a trauma nurse because when I was in high school, I lost my very first boyfriend to a drinking and driving accident. The trauma nurses kept him alive for 3 days. They worked so hard and fought so hard for his life that I always admired them and wanted to fight to save lives like them.
I was still doing porn to pay for school when I started. But I was outed by a student, and I was bullied out of nursing school.