So the lady was like at the top of her game, asked about my country, praised my tattoos, told relatable stories about her own life etc., and she was so bright about showing me the vegan options, and made me try like half a dozen different flavours of halva. (It was genuinely delicious). She was a great conversationalist and I had a pleasant time chatting with her for a long while.

So finally I decided to bring home 10€ in caramel halva. This is where the scam hit: she was already packing it but at the minimum quantity of 100g, which was some ridiculous abusive price, 38€ or something. At this point I wall up and put on my best bimbo face to claim that this 10-buck bill is all I have. It's obvious that it's a lie and she knows that I know that she knows it's a lie, this is a glove slap: I mean what are you gonna do about it, call the cops? So the man of the pair approaches and starts a spiel that they've already cut the halva so now I have to pay. So I say with the most blatant cara de pau I can muster that oh well, my train is about to leave, and I give them the warmest goodbye smile and a wave, and leave them protesting without looking back.

Only afterwards I realise that I had tied up the woman for a good fifteen minutes that she could have been hustling, plus I got to try a significant amount of halva of various flavours, without paying a cent. She was good at the game so the sample portions were quite generous, too.

The lesson we learn from this is, you gotta roll with the punches; your story can't be static, it's a tool not a script. Con artistry is a dance, at the first sign of resistance from the mark you have to change your step. They really should have cut their losses and given me a miserable thumb of candy for 10€ profit, I had opened myself a weakness when I said “gimme this much in candy” without checking the price/kg first. But thanks to their all-or-nothing commitment to the script, I ended up indulging my sweet tooth for free and out-scamming the scammers, purely by instinct. And if they're smart they'll think twice before trying to con a Brazilian again lmao (I mean the Germans are right there—)

• Carinho: caress; cuddle. Literally “little care”. In the strict sense, a gesture of physical affection; more generally, any action that makes you feel cared for.
• Carinhosa: cuddly in a caring way. Affectionate and care-giving. A highly valued trait in a partner.
• Carente: the emotional state of being in need of carinho. Care-seeking. Like “needy” but without the negative connotation. “Hon, be nice to me cos today I'm carente.”
• Chorosa: the emotional state of feeling prone to crying. Vulnerable due to an influx of emotions. “Feeling fragile right now”. Implies similar needs as being carente. Distinguish “chorona” which is crybaby; being prone to crying as a stable personality trait.
• Aconchego: coziness; a cuddle that feels cozy.
• Chamego: a more intense form of carinho. In some dialects it's sexually charged, like, to grind on someone while dancing can be described as giving chamego.
• Chameguice: chamego-ness. The trait of being highly affective, in a physical sense.
• Colo: “lap”. But metaphorically like, nestling. The happy safe place in your lover's arms. To be “asking for lap” is essentially a way of expressing being physically carente.
• Cafuné: headstroking. Making carinhos by lightly massaging their head, passing your fingers between their hair and so on. Used symbolically in a similar way as English “headpat”, but it's slower and more intimate than simple patting.
• Xodó: someone who is your xodó is your baby. A xodó evokes in you an intense warm fuzzy protective care-giving emotion, maybe to the point of you getting overprotective or jealous. Not an exclusive term to romance; can also be used e.g. of a child or a pet, or a prized collector's item, etc.
• Mimar: to spoil. To treat someone; to go all-out on spoiling them, no holds barred. A highly valued behaviour in a partner.
• Mimo: a treat. A single “spoil”. Can be like, a physical gift, or a service like making fancy breakfast, or just a bout of intense affection, praise, cuddles etc. “You better be ready cos I'm gonna stuff you full of mimos tonight you cutie”.
• Dengo: when you act in a childish or playfully cutesy-dramatic way in order to elicit mimos and get a good chamego. The quality of dengo-ness is denguice.
• Manha: similar to dengo but hits different in a way I have trouble expressing.
• Manhosa, dengosa: being in an emotional state where you do dengos or make manha; or having that as a personality trait. Bashful from Disney's “Snow White” was named Dengoso in the Brazilian dub. n.b. being dengosa is a positive trait in a partner.
• Melosa: “honeyed”. Someone who expresses affection verbally to a shamelessly intense degree.
• Grude: “sticky material”; “glue”. Someone who wants to be up close to you at all times. can be used negatively or positively; e.g. “these two are such a grude lately [admiringly]“.

Much of our rich vocabulary for this field is indebted to Bantu languages. Once again, there's probably more I'm not remembering, exact nuances vary with speaker and age and subculture etc.

Have fairly close English equivalents

• Namorada: girlfriend
• Esposa: wife
• Mulher: woman, as in wife
• Amante: lover (illegitimate)
• Amizade colorida: friendship with benefits. Implies a recurring sexual relationship with no or lightweight emotional involvement. Lit. “colourful friendship”.
• Flash: a hookup. a one-night stand.
• Crush: as in English.
• Parceira: as in the English cognate.

No exact English equivalent

• Ficar: to make out with; lit. “to stay with”. Probably but not necessarily staying short of sex, though often sexually charged. Implies a fun/joyful aspect, and also probably an emotional/honeyed/crush aspect. Can be a one-off thing; if it's recurring, you have a
• Ficante: “stayer”, “stayent”. Someone you often make out with, but no committed relationship is declared. Implies non-exclusivity. You probably have feelings for one another, but keep it light.
• Pegar: to hook up with; probably but not necessarily sexual. Literally “to seize/grab/take”; often implies an active seducer role on the part of the speaker (“see that hot piece on that table? I been grabbing her”). Implies emotional casualness. Can be used of a one-night stand; if it's recurring, you have a
• Pegante: someone you have a sexually torrid, emotionally light, non-exclusive recurring relationship with.
• Peguete: same as “pegante” but the suffix makes it feel even more casual. Has a connotation like “plaything” or “boy toy” in my mind.
• Pegadora: assertively promiscuous and good at it. Seductress. “She fucks.”
• Ficante séria: You never declared a relationship but she's de facto like a girlfriend and if you forget her birthday or cheat on her there's gonna be trouble. Extremely Brazilian concept in that “serious casual” is a logical contradiction and makes perfect sense.
• Ficante premium: More or less the same as “ficante séria”, but funnier. Can be extended like “ficante premium gourmet comfort plus”, etc. “Yesterday my ficante premium plus saw me with the ficante comfort limited edition and SHTF.”
• Pensante, olhante, conversante: “thinkent”, “lookent”, “chatent”. The concept of “ficante” is so useful that the -ante suffix (the same as in “student” or “resident”) has now generalised to describe your beloved at stages of the flirting process, from when you’re thinking about or staring wistfully at her down to the actual making out.
• Ex-ficante: You never declared a relationship and you were never exclusive but your former ficante came to the same new year's party as you and your current ficante and now there's a maior climão (A “biggest atmosphere”. I think you get the idea.)
• Amigada: The wife equivalent of “ficante séria”. You live together and are for all intents and purposes a married couple, but never legally married nor declared your relationship to your family. Very very old word, like literally from the renaissance, so it has a bit of a grandma energy—it sounds to me like, “and your aunt ran away from home and became amigada with her cousin back in '63…”—but I still see young people using it, too.
• Namorido: Portmanteu of namorado “boyfriend” and marido “husband”. Not your husband but the relationship is so serious that the social role is like a husband. Maybe you live together (=amigado), or maybe not but you stay at each other's houses so often that you practically do; you go to family events together; you travel together in vacations etc. Boyfriend with husband characteristics.
• Namorida: Feminine of “namorido”; girlfriend with wife characteristics, even though the implied marida (a feminine of “husband”) isn't a regular word.
• Rolo: “It's complicated” relationship. “Situationship”. “In a dynamic with.” It's recurring, and it's not just sex for fun. Maybe not formally dating but there's too many feelings involved, you're falling for one another but one side or both is afraid to say it aloud; or you want to live in this state of ambiguity for longer; or maybe it's illegitimate on the part of someone; or not-quite-illegitimate-but-better-if-she-doesn't-know, that kinda thing. Literally a “roll”, but it's originally slang for trouble; mess.
• Rolo compressor: “steamroller”. You had a rolo and they came drunk to your party when you were petting your peguete and made a scene and you're the talk of the town for a month. Then they called you at 2am to break up, but then called next morning to say they're sorry, and…
• Caso: A “case”. An affair. An older word that can be used like amante (illegitimate lover) or like rolo (it's complicated). For example, a torrid, intense, and knowingly temporary relationship for the duration of a summer trip would be a caso de verão (“summer case”). Has a mature adult connotation in my mind, compared to the more young folk/nightlife energy of ficante/pegante.
• Contatinho: “little contact”. “I'm in her DMs”. Nobody has proposed or confessed anything yet but it's clear for everyone involved that you two are a thing already. They're like, incoming queue. You get sugar syrupy/flirty every so often to keep moving things towards IRL skinship. Back in my day we called this being fofinhas no MSN (“being cute on MSN”) but nobody uses that anymore.
• Contatinho de reserva, aka step: “Backup little contact”, aka “spare tire”. Not a side piece but a side potential piece. Someone in your DMs you've been jogando verde pra colher maduro (“playing it while it's green so you get to harvest it ripe”), like, no expectations, but the hustle never stops…

There's probably more I'm not remembering. This is like, slang, it has all sorts of variants and different nuances depending on dialect, subculture, generation etc. This is how the words sound to me in particular and, I think, most folk from my area and generation.

I often tell people: “if you keep a dream journal you’ll be able to have highly elaborate dreams like mine”. The act of keeping a journal primes your subconscious, as if some part of you who makes dreams gets the message and decides to put some effort. Or is that just an idea that makes sense to me so I tell them to people? Truth to be told, I don’t keep a dream journal, except if you count those exceptionally elaborate dreams I post on social media themselves, with Mastodon being my “journal”, or occasional jottings on my bujo when I have that feeling: “I must note this down” without knowing why. I don’t have the cinematic, plot-heavy dreams consistently or often. If I kept a dream journal, would their frequency actually increase?

2.

The idea gives me some dread. Though few of my dreams are outright nightmares, they usually aren’t super happy or pleasant either, with an anxious character to them. Scarier still are the ones that bleed into real life, with sleep paralysis hallucinations; many times including recently I have experienced a gradual shift from dreams to this reality, so that the last scene of the dream fades seamlessly into the scene I see from my body lying on bed—from virtual reality to augmented reality, so to speak. Watching a demon dog that had stalked you for your entire dream fade into the corner of your room walls, still growling at you, and then realise you're lying awake staring at the same room corner of where you sleep; or watching a parade of disembodied masks/faces coming from the gaps between boards on the ceiling, then realising you're in this reality staring at the ceiling boards—when I was young those things would make it impossible for me to sleep in my bedroom again at all. (Years later, when I found out about the Hounds of Tindalos from Lovecraft and how they are able to manifest from any architectural angle, that… did not help.)

I feel like without my hallucinations I am diminished, somehow; I want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. But maybe I am afraid that, if I start exploring my dreams, that kind of thing will return, and then where am I going to sleep? I don’t live with my mom anymore, I am the mom now; and a single mom at that; there is no one to go say: I’m scared, no lap to seek refuge into.

3.

But I am trying to rationalise something more elemental. There is a base fear that I am very familiar with, since my first few visionary experiences. I call it the “oh fuck oh shit it just got real fear”. Like maybe you are attracted to magick or wicca or lucid dreaming or something, so you go seek after it, after like, something. Though you are also modern and educated and a sceptic, so half of you constantly thinks: you’re wooing yourself, none of this is real, it’s all scams and mind tricks. Metaphors, generously.

And then after a while you do in fact stumble on something, and it’s like falling down into an abyss head first, and suddenly all those metaphors seem actually really dangerous, and the question of the exact realness of their phenomenological status takes second place to: oh no oh fuck abort abort abort.

For example, both times I tried ayahuasca I had a single dose and did not have the strong, transformative visions that the entheogen is reputed for. Both times one of the ritual workers offered me the second dose, and I refused. Both times I got the impression that they knew exactly what was going on and scoffed a bit at my cowardice. Now part of the reason I didn’t want to take the second dose is that the ayahuasca religions I had access to both were Christian-based, and I just can’t agree with Christian stuff, it repulses me at a visceral level. But that’s not the primary reason. The primary reason was that I instinctively knew that if I downed that second cup, shit would get real.

4.

Sleep paralysis phenomena should be generalised as half-sleep phenomena, I think. Not every hallucination I have is accompanied by paralysis. The paralysis itself doesn’t seem to have the same terror & dread edge that it used to have, after I learned that it’s like, a thing that happen to people, the scientific explanations of it etc., and then just let it happen. But regardless: there’s a particular kind of hallucination/vision I have when in a state that is not quite awake but not asleep, either; both before sleep and after waking up, whether or not there’s paralysis.

5.

Most often my demioneiric visions are visual or auditory; the voices used to be more common, these days I think visions are more common. The one time that involved any other sense was the ghost girlfriend, who visited me three times; that was intensely memorable, hugging an invisible girl who was not(?) there, who felt so real that I swear I could see the indentation she left on the mattress next to me afterwards. The first time she came was in a period where I was dating a lot of women, but that night I was alone, and suddenly I had a girl to hug to sleep and I was like, “how nice, one of my girls came give me a surprise and lie with me”, and only once I was awake/sober enough to realise, “waaait a minute that would be a weird thing to do and how would anyone open the apartment door at 3am anyway”—that the feeling of her was suddenly gone from arms. The second time I do not remember at all; but my memory of this vision noted down “she came three times”, so I’m reporting it like that. The third time was the only time ghost girlfriend told me something, namely the word “goodbye”; her body them seemed to dissolve into a thousand pieces; the tactile feeling of snuggling to a human body and then have it shatter under your arms like polygons in a 3D game animation was so real and unexpected and unprecedented that I was more marvelling at how this felt than anything else. Ghost girlfriend never came again, nor have I ever had a tactile experience like that again.

6.

The first experience with sleep paralysis that I remember was umbanda-related, in my early teens. It was magnificently terrifying, maybe the scariest I ever had. The voice I heard—a sickly-sweet female voice—repeated a word three times, stretching out the stressed vowel in the third; I was desperately trying to move my legs, but they would only shake nervously; the voice stretching that vowel made my leg shake like a bamboo switch in the wind, and then the half-sleep state, and the paralysis, were gone all of a sudden. With no idea what was happening or what to do, I went to the kitchen and cooked something purely to calm down. Then I dug through my grandmother's husband's family's old box of books, and found Polyanna, which even to 11ish-year-old me felt too facile and condescending; but at that moment the book saved me, its message of positive thinking and optimism is absurd motivational-speaker material in daylight, but past midnight and terrified? it was a life raft in a sea of terror, it made it possible for me to try to sleep again. Then the same voice did the same thing—a word, three times, long vowel at third, leg shaking etc., with the same effect; only it was a different word this time. Curiously, that made it less scary; a weird thing happens to you and it’s a dreadful unexplained phenomenon, if it happens twice it’s like, a thing that happens. Repetition defuses. I was finally able to sleep.

I was able to remember the two words for years later, but I never noted them down and at some point I forgot them. How I wish I had them in the era of the Internet to look up, to analyse with my linguistics skills…

7.

A widespread half-asleep phenomenon that I also have and that one of my kids inherited from me: Mind radio. This is when you hear voices saying sentence fragments in your mind when you're about to sleep, in quick succession, changing speaker for each fragment, as if you were zapping through radio stations: I don’t drink milk I don’t drink—today she was fond of white jackets—in Vietnam the peasants might—nani ittenda, kono yaroo—butterflies rose and pink, I will give you, etc.

Mind radio does not sound like the voice of the normal internal dialogue, intangible in your mind; there's a definite acoustic quality to them, the voices have a very specific timbre and volume and a definiteness of sound. At the same time you're aware they are in your mind; you don't think they're coming from real life, that there might be a physical person in the room with you.

My mind radio tends to be pretty unpleasant and cause the oh-shit-it's-getting-real fear, which bothers sleep. I usually dread this when it happens, and try to drown it out with a youtube video or something. The voices don't normally make any sense, at least not in an obvious way; but mine lean towards mean words and a certain aggressive tone. Once I tried experimentally asking them things, inspired by techniques of how one explore one's plurality. The succession of sentence fragments didn't really reply directly, but I felt like they were kinda interacting with what I was asking, if in a sarcastic/mocking way sometimes. That's another rabbit hole I didn't get very deep into.

8.

Only now in my middle age, I started having an occasional phenomenon that seems to be a visual analogue to mind radio, happening in the same situation. Instead of voices I see images, each lasting maybe 3–5 seconds. Like the sound of the voices, these images have a strange definiteness to them; I'm not normally able to conjure images in my mind, I have a poor visual imagination, but these images are as if I was looking at a drawing, every detail visible. I can't make any sense of them, and like a dream the memory of them disappears fast. A chair on a furry carpet. A toy duck with ducklings. A masked man sitting and staring at me. The moon and stars, etc.

Curiously, these flashing images don’t seem to cause the type of dread that commonly accompanied my auditory mind radio, and accompanied also many (but not all) of the half-asleep, “augmented reality”-type visions. Could I invite the mind images on purpose? I have a vague idea of how to do that; a journal, the absence of distractions like music or podcasts, and just asking, opening myselves to it. Do I dare?

9.

A half-sleep phenomenon I experienced at least twice and never saw described anywhere else. I am sleeping somewhere outside and under the stars, somewhere natural, with all the stars we don't see in the cities. I always feel at peace under stars, like coming home, so I stare at them with love and gratitude. Eventually I close my eyelids, and find to my surprise that I can still see or imagine the stars, in all their incountable glory, exactly where they were before, every colour and position and everything. Baffled, I open my eyes again; there's all the stars. I close my eyes; the stars continue to be there.

Like in the “mind TV zapping”, the visual quality of these stars is tangible, concrete; very different than trying to picture things in my mind on purpose. I never had this happen with anything other than stars. It's as if stars, and stars only, could pierce right through the cover of my eyelids.

10.

I saw a recommendation that you try to talk to characters in your dreams, even while awake—like just write on a notebook and “imagine” or “pretend” you're talking to them, and you might be surprised at the answers. This seems exactly parallel to how it works to talk to plural selves, which leads to the obvious question: if the beings in your dreams are you, or at least some of them are you, are they a type of plural self?

11.

I like the idea of blurring the lines between dream and reality—wearing a piece of clothing you remember wearing in a dream, for example, or adopting a catchphrase or humming a melody, etc. If dream-personas are a type of plural self—could you invite a dream self to front? Extract them right out of one reality to the other?

12.

Conversely, could you have your awake-time plural selves hang out together in dreams, as in with different dream-bodies, to have adventures or romance or guidance etc.? Maybe lucid dreaming techniques could help inducing that?

13.

An experience I've had countless times was to fall deeply in love with someone in a dream, only to wake up and find out that the recipient of my affection does not exist, which is a very offputting kind of bummer. But I've had sequential dreams more than once—like the recent series of dreams that all took place at the “decrepit ghetto neighbourhood somewhere in Tōkyō” which achieved some notoriety, culminating in that cinematic story with the teenage serial killer/performance artist character.

Apparently it’s something that dream explorers do, try to get back at an old dream on purpose, to continue unfinished business or just to explore promising territory. Could I have been doing this all along when I have one of those romantic dreams, and keep up a long-term dream-relationship?

OpenBSD-chan tem 3 smartphones differents, cada um com níveis diferentes de segurança vs. aplicações disponíveis. Ela nunca deixa nenhum dos smartphones tocar um SIM card. Quando um serviço força validação por SMS ela usa um actionphone selecionado aleatoriamente de um sacão mantido no HQ do grupo dela no centro da cidade, longe do apartamento. Quando ela cruza as pernas você vislumbra um coldre, e tem mais ou menos certeza que ela não tem licença. Quando ela te leva pro apartamento dela ela pára dois ou três pontos de ônibus depois, e espera o ônibus de volta. Se você perguntar sobre qualquer uma dessas coisas ela diz: “opsec”, e não elabora. OpenBSD-chan não bebe, mas fuma maconha. Se vocês estiverem chapadas e você falar de política, ela começa a discorrer sobre como a direita e a esquerda são ambas corruptas e o povo ignorante. Fugu girl. A rota dela é yuri tóxico. * Tipo sanguíneo: B * Cocktail favorito: Virgin Mary

FreeBSD-chan herdou uma jaqueta de couro crop top da mãe dela, decidiu que era fashion, e usa a mesma jaqueta todo dia desde os anos 90. Ao contrário das irmãs, FreeBSD-chan aprendeu a se divertir em festas, depois de ler uma porrada de livros tipo “como fazer amigos” e “como se divertir em festas”. Hoje em dia leva mais de 30 minutos pra uma mulher que ela está dando em cima perguntar, “então você é nerd?” Ela trabalha no mesmo departamento que passou em concurso público há 20 anos e toda sexta à noite bebe exatamente 1 drinque no mesmo bar depois do expediente. Quando alguém tem treta com a namorada e precisa de um ombro pra chorar é pra ela que telefonam, ela tem fama de gente boa e com juízo. Devilgirl, com asas grandes e chifres de cabra. * Tipo sanguíneo: O * Cocktail favorito: Manhattan

OpenBSD-chan has three different cellphones, each with different levels of security compromises. None of them has ever touched a SIM card. When she needs SMS verification she uses a communal actionphone randomly chosen from a bag kept by her squad downtown and never brought anywhere near her house. You can spot a holster when she crosses her legs (isn't that illegal where you live…?) When she's taking you to her flat she always stops a few tram stops beyond, walks one back, and takes another tram the other way. If you ask about any of this she says “opsec”, and does not elaborate. She does not drink, but smokes weed. If you ask about politics while high she talks about how both left and right are dumb. * Blood type: B * Favourite cocktail: Virgin Mary

FreeBSD-chan has a slim leather jacket she inherited from her mom, decided it was cool, and wears all the time since the 90s. Unlike her sisters, FreeBSD-chan has learned to enjoy parties, after reading several books on how to socialise and how to enjoy parties. It now takes over 30 minutes before women she's hitting at in parties ask, “so you're a nerd?”. She's been working 20 years at the same corporation and every Friday evening stops at the same bar to have a single drink. People call her when they need emotional support or help with moving, she has a reputation for having her crap together. * Blood type: O * Favourite cocktail: Manhattan

FreeBSD-chan is obviously a devilgirl, NetBSD-chan too but the devil features are more subtle. FreeBSD-chan has goat horns and large wings; NetBSD-chan has pointy little horns and wears glasses. OpenBSD-chan is a fugu girl, necessarily, and her dating route is toxic yuri.

Daguerreotype: Arai Takashi, “Ōsaka-yuri 2,” 2008.

Content notes for this piece: Explicit discussion of sex; historical lesbian art, some of it graphic; BDSM mentions.

When I think of folk I've been with who were equipped with a vagina, almost all can be clearly classified into two general types: the clitoris-oriented, and the penetration-oriented. Those who primarily like clitoral stimulation usually also like penetration but are kinda meh about it, and won't, like, chase it on their own initiative. And vice-versa for penetration enjoyers.

A clitoris-oriented bottom likely will enjoy oral sex, as well as clit toys (vibrators, suction devices, pain tools if they're a masochist). When doing penetration, it always pays off to find ways to simultaneously stimulate the clit. If you're doing PIV, for example, you can “ride them high”—lie on top of them to fuck face-to-face, pushing your body up so that your cock or strap-on is pressed from the inside towards their belly button, and move your body in such a way that your abs and shaft rub against their clit. You can also use rabbit-type cock sleeves, hold a vibrator between you two, etc. If doing fingerfucking, you can tongue the clit at the same time as you penetrate them, or do a pinch grip with fingers going inside and thumb hitting the clit (keep thumb well lubed; if their vag gets wet, adding your saliva is enough).

Bottoms are often subby, and a clit-oriented bottom may see penetration as a thing they do for you, an offering of their body. Depending on their kinks, this may matter for them more than physically getting off from clit rubbing. If you get one of these, I advise you to seek the level of intimacy and trust where you can really let go of the need to make them feel pleasure, where you can black out from all sense and reason and just pound the hole in whichever way makes you get off the most; that ends up being a superb experience for them too.

A penetration-oriented bottom, by contrast, actively craves a hard fuck. They generally want it intense, vigorous, and long-lasting. But you can't just shove it in either, their lust needs to be switched on first. I mean I've been with girls who like, needed to be bred unceremoniously anywhere, in a corner of an empty lot or their home building's stairwell or at a dark corridor at the university; you pull down her panties wherever, and she's instantly ready and eager to take it. This is because they get off on those situations, as a kink. But in most cases, penetrative libido arrives slowly, and it's best to turn on the heat gradually, playing with their body without hurry, until they're coiling and twisting and begging for it. The longer you edge them the better it feels when you finally fuck them.

People who like to be pounded often divide into a few subtypes:

• G-spot enjoyers: Curve your fingers up inside towards their belly, not too deep in. Feel for a spongy, ribbed texture. Press on their Venus mound from above to increase pressure against your fingertips. Experiment around the area and monitor their reactions. If they say something like, dunno, “oh god oh god fuckfuckfuckfuck”, that's a G-spot enjoyer. I've never found a toy that does this better than my fingers.
• Cervix bottoms: Constantly yearning for a deep fuck. You can test this by getting two of your longest fingers as deeply inside as humanly possible, pound that a few times, monitor their reactions. If they get off on this, you can go hard and long and rough, but not necessarily fast, certainly not fast from the get-go. Let them feel each plap. This type benefits from dildos and strap-ons.

Be aware that many of these activities aren't for everyone. Most women I've been with find cervix pounding downright unpleasant, except the ones that crave it the way a plant craves sunlight. Some folk find G-spot stimulation a disagreeable peeing pressure, not desirable at all. There's no secret here; ask how it usually works for them, experiment with touch, observe, learn the language of their body.

Photo: Jessica Tanzer's “Bear and Aphra”, for the magazine “On Our Backs”, 1989.

For every type of bottom mentioned so far, once you find that one thing that hits the spot, they'll be wanting a lot of it. Like a lot a lot. Be prepared to do it until your hands hurt, until your arms ache with spasms and cramps, until your jaws are so tired you can't speak. Then keep going anyway. Take short breaks when you need it, snuggle them a bit, then continue. These long sessions of lesbian intimacy, weaving in and out of sex, with no clear boundary between fucking and cuddling, each aftercare snuggle doubling as foreplay for next round, lasting four, five, six hours nonstop are the best thing in the world in my opinion… Be ambidextrous, when one hand can't go on switch with the other. Or when one hand is tired, try holding its wrist with the other hand and keep pounding it as you would a toy (this also allows to increase the intensity, so instead of feeling the stimulus weakening when you tire, they'll gasp with the new wave of pleasure). When tonguing, try various different movements—circular, lateral, vertical; at varied spots; with and without suction; with hard suction—and once you find something that makes them spasm with pleasure, do a lot of that thing, for a very long time.

Keep every fingernail of both hands trimmed as short as possible. (“Oh no but she's straight, I'm just visiting my friend”—trim those nails first. “It's a company party, it's not like my coworkers would—” trim your nails. “He's not into it actually, we do shibari nonsexually”—trim those nails before the shibari. “Ew no it's a political protest not a hookup spot, it would be #problematic of me to flirt, these are just comrades”—trim. those. goddamn. fucking. nails before you put one fucking foot outside your house. Trust me on this one.)

If your bottom is both able to orgasm and needing to come, then your forearms will cramp like mad and your jaw will get unbearably painful right when they're about to climax. This is a law of physics. Keep going anyway. Ramp it up.

The key is to enjoy fucking them. If you actively get off doing their holes, you'll never get bored no matter how many thousand times you repeat the exact same movement. In other words: be a top +.★(UωU ).*o☆

You can increase the speed of stimulation gradually over time, but—don't rush to this. Too much speed easily gets unpleasant. Marathon not sprint.

A further word on orgasms: Not everyone orgasms. Among people who do, not everyone wants to orgasm. Even if they do, they may prefer for it to be pushed off for as long as possible. Many people can masturbate themselves to orgasm, but never come when stimulated by others. And some would, in fact, prefer if you make them come hard before you're done for the night. You have to talk about this, and ask how it works for them. I advise always looking beyond orgasm-oriented sex, as it opens new, wide and spacious vistas. People with vaginas who can orgasm usually do it through clitoral stimulation; a few can orgasm from penetration but that's not very common at all. Magic wands often (not always!) can induce orgasm; some bottoms actively dislike this about wands, it's too much too strong then over too fast.

(Always get the cable-powered magic wands. In my experience girldick tends to take better to the Hitachi/Europe Magic Wand (greater head travel/bump), while factory-installed clitoris tends to do better with the Doxy (greater speed of vibration). I don't have enough data on neovag to observe a preference trend. Fundraise an Europe MW for us, and I'll report what my girls say about the Europe MW vs. my trusty Doxy-sempai.)

Woodblock: “Fumi-no-kiyogaki”, by Chōkyōsai Eiri (1801). The top is saying: “Seeing as we’re going to do it like this, I’ll put lots of the cream on it. So really make yourself come. Without the cream this big one would not go in.”

The last subtype is size queens. These will not reach a truly transcendental experience with soft girlcock. Probably not with hard mancock either, for that matter. To top one of these we don't just want length; we want, crucially, girth. With fingers, you'll be working towards fisting; with straps, towards dilating onto thicker and thicker dildos, until they're scarily massive. Size queens function much like masochists, they're tough as nails and proud of the extremes they can get to, and enjoy the process of always pushing those boundaries further. Your role is to be the pusher, to find a pace that's neither boring nor unbearable.

I can't write a full guide to fisting here, but there's a ton of info online. The key is to study it well, then take it easy. Go slow, enjoy the process. If both of you end every session thinking you could have gone further that's great, it means you have a reason to meet up again. Get familiar with fisting lube (it's basically lube by the buckets; you'll need all of them buckets). Learn about safety. Imagine the worst happened and you do serious damage, assume there's heavy bleeding, panic etc.: what would you do next? Study and prepare for the worst possible accident before it happens, then do the work so it doesn't happen.

Almost everything you learn from fisting guides will also apply for dilating onto bigger dildos. Learn also about anal sex if you haven't; at big sizes a lot of it is similar, how to keep it pleasurable even when constantly pushing the limits. Keep adding lube and keep working with their psychology; at challenging levels of penetration, it all rides on their internal relaxation, their comfort and trust, their welcoming of you.

(As an example of what this can look like, a thing I've done a few times to cuddly bottoms during genital penetration, when they have trouble with my girth, goes like this: I will start with a finger, then two, maybe a lubed three, then just tease with the tip of my cock, and all the while I'm cajoling them in a sweet syrupy voice, “oh this feels so good, you feel so good, dang look at this juicy bod, you're making me so happy right now, you're great at this, you know?...” then as I push just the tiniest bit in, I started getting more suggestive like, “you're doing so good, you can take more, right? for me?, yes that's it, relax, I know you can do it, I won't hurt you don't worry, let me, you can stop at any time, just let me in, it will feel so good to be all the way in, yes relax and let me”... then when I feel like they're ready for it, I switch brusquely into a low dommy voice, clear imperative in command: “Let me”. At this their canal instantly relaxes and opens itself for my cock like a flower to the morning sun. This gets me off like, so much.)

Painting: Believed to be from the Puruṣāyita (“virile behaviour in women”) chapter of a Persian translation of the Indian Kokaśāstra (11th century). The Persian manuscript is lost at the Bibliothèque nationale de France since 1984. The butchy top with the bow-dildo in the painting is believed to be a female harem bodyguard, said in the Kāma Sūtra to practice puruṣāyita; the bow was their prescribed weapon. Puruṣāyita in the Sanskrit originals clearly refers to the use of dildos between women, but English (male) translators often render it as a woman heterosexually riding a man. Source: Penrose, “Postcolonial Amazons”.

Do keep in mind that this entire guide is just like, generalisations from experience that I use as rough roadmaps when getting to know a new partner. There's infinite individual variation. Maybe someone loves a deep fuck but hates penetrative toys of any kind, or thrives on a clitoral suction device at the same time as being fucked, and so on. I've been with masochists who hate being spanked with something inside them, and others who can only really enjoy penetration with that extra spice. You always need to stay open and curious, to talk, experiment, observe.

But if you clicked this, Dear Reader, then you wanted the tea; and I am nothing if not forthcoming with tea-spilling. The fact that Google fired me with shut-up money only makes it more fun to do it. So go get some chamomile and sit comfortably, for this is an old woman reminiscing; let’s talk about capitalism and anarchism, about the precariat and surveillance, plush dolls and churrascarias and gay argots; let us go back in time and space, and journey to tropical Brazil in the distant time of 2007…

1. Treason

2007 wasn’t a good year to start a new career, as it turned out.

Google back then prided itself on broadcasting its Best Place To Work award, won year after year after year. Younger people will have trouble picturing this, but Google used to nurture an image of being the “good one” among megacorps; they championed open standards (except when they didn’t), supported open source projects (until they backstabbed them), and used language that corporate wasn’t supposed to use, like “don’t be evil” (until they, infamously and in a true dark comedy move, retracted that motto). The work environment was all colourful, nerdy cool, not a single necktie in sight—this was seen as brave and refreshing rather than cringe and tired, you see. And they made a big deal out of something called “20% time”: Every engineer was promised 1/5 of their work time for themselves, to do anything they want. (Google owners will still own whatever you create during your 20% time, natürlich). Famously, Gmail came out of someone exploring their interests during 20% time.

I don’t think much of anything else came out of it, though.

I found out I was always overworked on drudgery; my main job was to fix boring bugs on the Ruby on Rails internal user accounting system that someone else had developed. When I complained that this was a far cry from the academia-like, exciting research environment I had been promised, and asked to be assigned to a more challenging project, I was told the following rationale against it: “no”. Moreover the deadlines and expectations were such that even if I worked (unpaid) overtime every day, I was still was at risk of a performance review. Making actual use of the “20% time” felt like a pipe dream.

And all that with wages well below even the local market in our crumbling Third World economy. With no exciting research positions nor self-managed time nor good compensation, what was the advantage over a high-paying job at Microsoft or IBM? A bright blue vinyl floor and WarioWare Wii in the cafeteria? Well we were the hip tech vanguard, we were all geniuses, we were paid in prestige and promises and ego massages. Perform good enough and you might be awarded a smattering of shares at some point, get some crumbs from the bountiful capitalists' table.

Like most employees I blamed myself for not working hard enough to get good compensation—or to have time to exercise my right of 20% free time… Until I saw in the “Googlegeist” statistics that some 95% of employees never use their “20% time” at all, being trapped under the same pressures as I was.

I started a discussion about how the recruiter's promise of “20% free time” could maybe be this little thing that the forgotten priestesses of ancient Samarkand called a “lie”. There was an internal Blogger system, only available for other employees and bosses; and I wrote a post arguing that if no one feels able to use their 20% time, then it’s not much of a perk, is it.

The result of this was my boss having a fit over me “backstabbing” him. See, me complaining about the unfulfilled recruiter promises marked me as an Unhappy Googler. And Google, if you remember, was the Best Place To Work. It was very important that every promising young engineer thought of Google as the dream job where everyone is happy. Unhappiness isn't allowed. My manager was severely scolded by his manager for having dissatisfaction (gasp) within his team.

I said, “But the issue is real and not my fault, don’t you agree? I just used the data to bring it to attention. Didn't you say we operate under 'radical transparency'?” (I was young and believed in this kind of slogan. Yes, I was a sitting duck and didn’t stand a chance.)

Boss replied,

Radical transparency doesn't mean you get to say negative things.

Exact quote, I remember every word in that backroom in Phoenix, AZ.

Ever heard of the 1984 dark comedy RPG «Paranoia»? It takes place in a dystopian future society called the Alpha Complex. The Complex is ruled by the Computer, which is perfect and makes no mistakes, guaranteeing the best possible life for all humans. If someone commits a crime, for example, the Computer will always know—every wall has cameras—and instantly disintegrate the offender—every wall is packed with death lasers.

Of course, if you suggested that this ever happens, you would be implying that the Computer can raise a criminal human. It would logically follow that you’re holding the Computer to be less than perfect. That accusation is a crime of treason. Treason is punished with death. Nobody ever complains about life in the Alpha Complex, which goes to show how perfect the Computer is. In fact, everyone in the Alpha Complex is perfectly happy with the Computer's rule. To feel unhappy is equivalent to accusing the Computer of making mistakes, and it therefore constitutes treason. Happiness is mandatory. Are you happy, citizen?

2. The Google Precariat, Part I: dictbot

(Photo by Stephane DUPRAT / Hans Lucas.)

When you joined Google, you were quickly overwhelmed by massive amounts of corporate jargon—a hundred opaque project names, TLAs for everything etc. To help new Googlers settle in, the Intranet had an online glossary.

Now in the spirit of “20% time”, we were encouraged to tinker with pet projects, or so they told me. And we used to hang out in IRC chatrooms back then. So I made a little IRC bot that would fetch definitions from the glossary. Very basic stuff, if someone said “wtf is Chrome” in the channel, the bot would dump the summary paragraph, “Project Chrome is an initiative to develop a Google web browser, based on KHTML…”

I then got scolded for it, because I was leaking private information into a space that could be accessed by “temps, part-timers, and contractors”—Google's sprawling precariat (put a pin on that, more on that later). As I alluded to, we Googlers were pampered with prestige; but the “temps, part-timers and contractors”—no fun name for them, they were always called “temps, part-timers, and contractors”—were second-class in Google Nation, had to be constantly put in their place in a myriad ways. How else would the Engineers feel like geniuses, if there wasn’t a “normie” class to be treated worse than them?

One of the barbed-wire fences around temps, part-timers and contractors is that they should not have access to inside info, e.g. what is Project Chrome. My bot was, allegedly, violating that norm. I pointed out that all that my bot did was to fetch info from the glossary page, and that anyone with access to the IRC channels already had access to the glossary page.

Dear Reader, this is how I became responsible for provoking the Computer into fencing the glossary website away from temps, part-timers, and contractors.

3. A lament from Project Android

Illustration: John Patience, ISBN: 5-232-00383-6.

The Reader might well imagine how I had become persona non grata to my boss after the “backstabbing” episode. When I wrote that blog post, I had gotten a number of emails from employees thanking me for talking about it, saying they’re glad someone is finally taking a stand, praising me for my bravery.

Now my posture back then will feel very natural for those of you who only met me post-transition, and knew me from the start as this like, badass nazi-punching antifa thug with no filter and no sense of consequences. But you have to understand: back then I was a shy little nerd terrified of everything. I wasn't brave; I was incredibly, magnificently naïve. I was maybe the only person in the world who believed Google’s corporate kool-aid; I bit it hook, line and sinker, I really did believe we were some sort of new, dynamic academia, we didn't work in offices we worked in “campi”, the company was a way to fund exciting new research and we were there to improve the world by organising its information. At least I thought I was.

Interviewer: What attracted you to Google? me: I agree with the Ten Principles of the company. Interviewer: The what now? Me: The Ten Principles? Google's Principles? In the 'about' page? Interviewer: Uuh, sure…

It did not even occur to me that it was all a scam, that everyone else knew it was all a scam and the actual point was to get rich. In retrospect I should have read the undertones in early Paul Graham essays; I was a literary girl, I'm good at undertones; but I only read what I wanted to be true.

Not long after my post in the Intranet Blogger, there was a post by some engineer I didn't know; a core programmer from the secret Project Android. Out of the three big ones I had to stay quiet about, Project Android and Project Chrome got finished and became highly successful—only to immediately turn into world-wrecking monstrosities that we, low-level grunts, would never have imagined. The third project, a physical-layer broadcast technology for the Internet—Youtube with HD quality if you logged in at showtime—never went forward.

But this insider, they were venting about how disappointed they had become with the directions that Project Android was taking. They were losing their motivation, this is not what they thought the “Linux phone” would be about, this wasn’t what they signed up for. The blogger was silent on any tech details, or what exactly was so disappointing; but with the benefit of hindsight it's easy to imagine.

A few days later, the same person posted something like “haha disregard that, I was having personal mental health issues and wrote a ill-conceived rant but it's all my fault really, of course there's a always few bumps but Project Android is amazing actually!! Y'all are going to love this, it's going to change everything!! We're organising the world's information and making a difference”, etc. etc.

Like, conspicuously back-to-back, the two posts.

I’m an airheaded bimbo but at some point the lesson will penetrate even my smooth brain. This time, I was observant.

4. Mona, entendida, odara… 🤔 elza

I wasn't out as trans yet, but I was already proud to be queer. Showed up first day with neon orange hair, unicorn T-shirt, the works. That made of me a Gaygler™, and Google Belo Horizonte was always happy to have me on team photos to add some colour and progressiveness to the image.

Now even though Google is fundamentally a spyware advertising company (some 80% of its revenue is advertising; the proportion was even higher back then), we Engineers were kept carefully away from that reality, as much as meat eaters are kept away from videos of the meat industry: don't think about it, just enjoy your steak. If you think about it it will stop being enjoyable, so we just churned along, pretending to work for an engineering company rather than for a giant machine with the sole goal of manipulating people into buying cruft. The ads and business teams were on different floors, and we never talked to them.

One day one of the AdSense people asked me for a little meeting. They sat right by my desk, all sleek and confident, and said that they had heard I was a Gaygler™ and were wondering if I could help with one of their clients. “Can you tell me some words that the Brazilian gay community uses? like slang, popular media you like, names of parties, that kind of thing?”

Caught off-guard and unsure how to react, I struggled to think of gay-coded speech, and I was expertly mined for pajubá terms to be fed into the machine. Whole interaction took maybe ten minutes. The AdSense goon left, never to be seen again, leaving me feeling violated in ways I couldn't articulate.

Google supported its queer employees.

After I got marked as a troublemaker and put into the inevitable performance review, one of the items raised against me was that my company profile page was 'too personal'. the extent of personal information in my profile was this sentence: “I am a nerd, a bisexual polyamorist, and a parent.”¹

5. The Google Precariat, Part II: A water purifier’s salary

“Sure, we give aid to the poor! We’ll only need your registration forms, bank statement, and certificate of good conduct!” Cartoon by Karl Berger for Augustin.

You might have noticed, Dear Reader, that I have made somewhat contradictory claims: 1) that we Engineers were pampered, and 2) that we Engineers were underpaid, pressured to do unpaid overtime at salaries low even for the Brazilian market. Such was the carrot and the stick. We all were told that if we performed just a bit better we would get higher pay, shares, positions at cool projects, and the biggest carrot of all: a relocation to the magical Global North where human rights are real. A way through the wall.

We trudged on, with little more than promises and hope. But we trudged on with style. The offices were all gaudy in Google colours with vinyl flooring, full of fridges with free snacks; the break room had the latest Playstation with brand-new high-tech Rock Band controllers; when you joined in you got a small bonus to buy toys for your desk (most Engineers got legos, I got a pink Kirby plushie I would dress up). This was unheard of; companies at the time were all Microsoft, all performative professionalism, Google was fun! Google gave you Perks, gods, so so many Perks. the Lumon motivation baubles from “Severance” gave me heavy Google flashbacks. We were periodically treated to dinner with the managers at the most expensive churrascarias. Master let us eat right there with him, inside the big house.

I will be honest and say that most of my fellow programmers ate that shit up, we had all been gold-star kids and here was the hottest company in the world constantly massaging our egos, telling us we were better than everyone for being geniuses. I would have loved to feel the same, I tried to feel the same, but I came from poverty and I could not stop noticing the precariat: temps, part-timers, and contractors, an entire layer of the company who did the brunt of work without being Googlers. No toy budget for kitchen staff.

It's the little things that bugged me, how people would eat the free candy or have a bowl of cereal and just leave trash and dirty dishes everywhere for the cleaning ladies (contractors) to deal with; more than that the way nobody looked at them or said “thank you”. We Brazilians have a social class for that, a social code underlying that studied invisibility, I knew what this was: these were maids.² Servants. The women in my family, my friends at school. The “campus” was pretty open and my then-wife visited it a few times; it creeped the Fuck out of her, the distinction between people and non-people.

We had those expensive, high-tech water purifiers, several on each floor. One day there was a discussion on the topic of cost savings, and I suggested the traditional Brazilian solution—the well-known ceramic filters in terracotta jars; they're consistently rated among the safest, need no electricity, make the water cool even in summer without spending any energy, cost little and last a long time before you need to replace the charcoal element, which is anyway inexpensive. The idea was dismissed out of hand. Too low-tech, I suppose.³

The fancy water purifiers weren't owned by Google; they were leased, at a high cost. Somehow it bothered me a lot that each of those excessively technological water monsters got more money per month than any temp, part-timer, or contractor.

The water purifiers were never fired.

6. Cathy don't send that email today

Google was my first taste of smartphones, back when that meant a Blackberry (delightful, sturdy little corporate toys with pleasantly clicky, full-QWERTY thumb-keyboards). Mobile data plans were prohibitively expensive for anyone on wage labour, but I was graciously allowed to use my company phone for private purposes; and I delighted in the novelty of not getting lost for once, walking up and down the hills of Belo Horizonte with futuristic, always-on Google Maps under, whoa, unlimited data.

Which is to say, Google was my first taste of the surveillance society that has now become the new normal.

The Reader will remember our big carrot; all of us at Google Brazil worked hard to get the job because it meant a ticket to the Global North (potentially). Now I had been a weeb from an early age, and back then I was already like, intermediate to advanced in Japanese. So of course my dream was to move to Japan. But when I talked about it with my boss—a disembodied face from Phoenix to whom I would report under a giant monitor; this too felt very new, very high-tech, and very dystopic at the time—he dismissed the idea out of hand, saying my Japanese wasn't fluent and that this would make me a poor fit.

I talked to my colleagues about it and someone said, wtf girl no, most international engineers brought to Shibuya cannot even say konnichiwa, if anything your language ability and cultural experience with the diaspora make you the ideal candidate. We had a relevant contact in Google Sweden, and my mates said I should talk to them about contacting Shibuya directly regarding relocation.

And there I was after putting a target on my back as a troublemaker, about to directly contradict my boss and look for a way into Japan behind his back. My colleagues sternly advised me to never mention any of this by email, and also not call from my desk. “You really think they would do that? Just go on my email inbox and breach privacy? :O” International calls were very expensive those days and I didn’t have a landline, so I ended up calling Sweden from a company line inside a little cleaning closet, between brooms and bottles of disinfectant, in the dark, after everyone was gone from the office. Sorry, “campus”.

The Sweden contact told me they knew people in Tōkyō and were sure they would be happy to have me. A couple weeks after that, I was fired. (Mid-economic crisis, in the 3rd world, with one 2-year-old kid and another about to be born.)

And it was so weird and surreal to be in that little locker room, afraid of every whisper, aware that every communication was being spied on. And when I tell this story to my now adult children, I struggle to convey how weird it was. I realised belatedly that they never experienced existing with technology without it being the default expectation that it's hostile to you and it's spying on you all the time. For them this has been the case all of their lives.

Today, the concept of “spyware” has been obsoleted because every software is spyware. Google's “organising the information of the world” turned out to be indexing which Gaza families to bomb, children and all; “making money in the free market to invest in social change” was about bankrolling literal, textbook fascism. Today, for us Latinx to even briefly step in the USA, if we don't have an always-on handheld device with spyware “social media”, its absence is taken as proof of criminality. I will never visit Arizona again, and my kids will never know a world that's not like this; but for me I saw this world being forged up close and personal, deep in Mordor where the shadows lie.

7. The Google Precariat, Part III: Without a Heart to Guide them, the Other Powers are Useless

Art: Vultureclaw

I was always an anarchist, abstractly, but in many ways Google was my political awakening.

We had an office party every Friday evening. Every single Friday. It was called TGIF, “thanks God it's Friday”, and involved fancy finger food, drinks, and more of those dystopic heads on monitors talking to us of all the great things Google was doing to revolutionise the world. Thanks to TGIFs, we all could leave work early on Friday afternoons.

I was such a sucker for things like this, I was so entranced by the food variety and the socialisation and the festive atmosphere, that it took me a long time to think of Brecht's question (“All those feasts—who did the dishes?”).⁴ Belatedly I realised that none of the dishwashers would think of Friday afternoons like, “graças a Deus é sexta-feira”. My privilege of working less and partying every week was paid by them staying late every Friday, dealing with the aftermath of our juvenile entitlement. Most of these women will never step inside a Fogo de Chão restaurant in their lives; while we were taken on fancy dinners at a whim by the bosses, when they wanted to reassure us of our specialness.

One day, shortly before I was fired, the 2008 crisis had hit full force, the Phoenix office that managed us got shut, and Google had fired 70% of the South American precariat, in one fell swoop. Then, during one of my last TGIFs, I accidentally listened to two high-level managers talking about it, two white male gringos in expensive business-casual. They were commenting on how the company was still doing perfectly fine without all that weight.

And that's not what stuck with me, the arguments, no. I understood the incentives to do layoffs, and the human need to rationalise them. What stuck with me was their happy smiling faces. Their laughing.

Yes they laughed about it. Out loud.

I had full awareness of what it meant for Third World people to be fired under the crisis, what it was about to be like for the Argentinians, for our families—but so did they, they were down here, they knew the reality. They talked to us every day, they had their spreadsheets handled by temps and were now here eating food prepared by contractors. Yet here they were, in tailored clothes that cost more than a cafeteria lady's living expenses, partying happily without even bothering to pretend to be sad about all those families. Not caring enough about us to even bullshit.

Any sympathies I might have had about the simplistic logic of free-market liberalism evaporated under that laugh.

As a little girl I used to despise cartoons like Captain Planet, whose devilish, paper-thin villains destroyed the world with manic laughs for nothing but the thrill of power, polluting for the sake of polluting. I thought that was deeply unrealistic, and condescending too; I felt talked down to. I cherished nuanced villains like Lady Eboshi from Mononoke-hime, the leader of Irontown who was destroying the ancient forest—but with the goal of liberating women from violent patriarchy and poverty; Irontown was a refuge for outcasts, its mining economy a ticket out of male domination, and Lady Eboshi would give her own life for her girls. Complexity! Humanity!

It was at Google that I learned that no, capitalists are actually literally the same as Captain Planet villains. We are not blessed enough to live in Ghibli reality, capital owners built us a 90s trashy USA cartoon reality. What is crypto mining if not a textbook Captain Planet villain scheme—to kill and raze and destroy for nothing but imaginary tokens proving that you did lots of killing and razing and destroying? What is GenAI if not stealing energy and water and even art itself, only to syphon it all into a grinder, producing no benefit but the hoarding of even more money away from the poors—when you already have more money than a human being could possibly ever spend? What is this all-encompassing addiction to “number go up” if not Sly Sludge, dripping happily with pollutants, going “Aloha suckers! I'll miss this profit paradise but I have a souvenir to remember it by”, as he picks a briefcase full of money and leaves the island to explode?

My experience at Google drove me to want to understand capitalism, and I would eventually find in Malatesta the answer as to why capital owners cannot help but be cruel, revel in cruelty, performatively broadcast cruelty; why the cruelty is indeed almost a side effect, a corollary to what it means to do capitalism. A mould that grows inevitable on material that’s inherently rotten. Every action you take has consequences not just for the world but for your psyche; you cannot avoid being affected by your decisions, anymore than you can avoid the third law of motion when you punch a wall. You cannot make people work for you and hoard all the profits while they are stuck with fixed salaries, without in the process developing strong feelings on why you're entitled to do that and how they deserve it actually.

But before I got into political theory, it was Google who demonstrated to me what is capitalism, firsthand up close. I wouldn't say that this was worth working there, but I benefited from the lived experience; from that part of it, and nothing else.

Footnotes

1. That was me in egg state beating around the bush; I am now fully out as a jock, a lesbian relationship-anarchist, and a mother. I added this footnote so that men stop hitting on me because I wrote the b-word once in this text about capitalism.

2. Anyone interested in the Latina “maid” as a social class is encouraged to watch Que horas ela volta? (2015) (English title: The Second Mother). It’s an engaging and heartwrenching film but keep in mind: everything it portrays about the social othering of maids is factually true, and happening today.

3. If this kind of thing appeals to you and you haven’t heard of it yet, I am pleased to introduce you to the low tech magazine.

Who built Thebes of the Seven Gates? All articles name the names of kings; I gather the kings brought those boulders on their royal backs? And great Babylon, who fell and fell again, Who put'er back together, every time? In which flats of gold-paved Lima lived the road-pavers? The night the Great Wall of China was finished, where did the construction crew hang out? Awesome Rome is full of triumphal archs. Who arched them up? Also— who did the Caesars triumph over? We sing the palaces of Byzantium— the whole thing was just palaces? Even Atlantis of tall tales shouted, choking, as the seas swallowed it whole—

for its slaves.

Young Alexander conquered India. All by himself then? Caesar defeated the Gauls. Did he bring along a cook at least? Felipe de España, el Prudente, cried when his Armada sunk into the sea. And nobody else cried that day? In the Seven Years' War, Federico Secondo grasped victory. Who else grasped it with him?

All these pages, all these conquests. All those feasts—who did the dishes? Every ten years a new Great Man. Who covered the budget?

So many headlines. So many questions.

Content warnings for this one: Text addressed at transfeminine folk; explicit discussion of sex and kink, including sexual experiences, intended as informative rather than erotic but rich in detail; discussion of HRT, surgeries, genitals, gender feelings; reports of a lively sex life; discussion of low libido when perceived as a negative, and of girlcock as positive; corny 5th-grade humour.

elilla& how are you a top without testicles? How do you even have erections? I'm transfeminine, can I preserve my sexuality after HRT?

There are many complicating factors so let's start with a tl;dr. This is the stuff that I consider the most important, based on my experience and that of trans folk I know:

For sexuality generally:

• Be aware that you don't have to be sexual if you don't want to.
• Keep in mind that your new body may have a very different type of libido. Learn how your feminine body works, don't expect it to be the same as before.
• Have partners who make you feel affirmed and safe and desired (protip: t4t).
• Have sufficient levels of estrogen. (Most cis doctors won't give you this.)
• Keep in mind that your physical and mental health and general life satisfaction affect your libido too. I know, who can afford to be healthy in this economy etc., but it helps a lot to find some form of exercise that you enjoy doing regularly (it doesn't have to be intense or “sportsy”).
• “Follow the breadcrumbs”. If you want to have sex but the libido isn't there, fool around a bit even if you're not feeling like it, see if it shows up. Der Appetit kommt beim Essen.
• If you're kinky: Go deeper. Find new kinks. Break your own taboos. Avoid stagnation. Ride the curve.
• Do not frame sex as an obligation or proof of attraction or personal worth.

For transfeminine erections specifically: all of the above, plus:

• Do not frame erections as an obligation or proof of attraction or personal worth.
• Play with your soft genitals too (“clit mode”).
• Explore forms of sex that do not involve your genitals at all.
• In particular, try topping the traditional lesbian ways (hands/fists/dildos/straps/tongue), you'll probably love it.
• Consume t4t material and positive erotica that helps you see your genitals as affirming of your gender. Surround yourself with people who give you this security.
• Consider body mods, surgeries, jewellery, custom lingerie etc. that help you claim ownership of your genitals.
• If you're on cypro, switch to other forms of T blocking.
• Erection meds and topical T are options.
• I'm using this list item to reinforce the recommendation to do exercise.

I blocked my testosterone and I immediately lost all horny. Is this my imagination? Is it supposed to be this fast?

No, it's really that dramatic. It's really that fast.

Do you take cypro by any chance?

Yes, how did you know?

Cypro is more systemic in the body than most blockers. Anedoctal reports including mine suggest that it's harder to keep erections under cypro compared to other ways of blocking testosterone, even under comparable T levels. If you want to preserve erections, consider switching to bicalutamide, estrogen monotherapy, or GnRH blockers if you're lucky enough to have access to those. (These alternatives are also safer, so also consider them if you're indifferent about erections). Or just do what I did and cut off your gonads lol

Conversely, if you're dysphoric about erections, cypro may be your ally. But try not to use it for more than a few years; work towards SRS for a definitive and safe solution. Most people only need a very low dose of cypro to completely and utterly block androgens; try 5mg/day plus estrogens, and if that's good enough, try 5mg every 2 days; only increase if needed.

I'm a top and on cypro, is it hopeless for me in the meanwhile?

Absolutely not. I was on cypro for 2 years and kept merrily fucking butts. Was a bit more of a challenge, but that just made it more satisfying to find ways to make it happen anyway.

I started HRT and I think I'm ace now.

Well do you want to be ace? If you like it this way, you don't have a problem, you have a shift in identity. Enjoy!

If you had a reduction in libido that you perceive as a loss, and you want to feel sexual again: most people experience a change on the type of libido when they switch hormones. Though this isn't an absolute, testosterone seems to incentivise spontaneous libido, and estrogen responsive libido. It's hard to know how much of that is psychological from the social roles of “man” and “woman”, but it definitely felt physical to me, and I know a large number of both trans men and trans women who report similar experiences—though by no mean 100% of everybody I've met; keep the sexual diversity of people in mind, exceptions aren't rare and you may be one of them. Moreover this binary isn't absolute, comprehensive, or static; everyone in the world will have oscillations in libido amount and flavour, depending on the situation, state of the body and mind, connection with the partner, Venus retrograde, Gods know what else. For example, for promiscuous people like me, it's an almost universal experience that new partners bring out spontaneous libido, already during the hunt.

Can you describe what the shift in libido felt like for you?

Unter testosterone, spontaneous libido was urgent, almost like having to pee, or having to crack your fingers when they're tensely uncomfortable. It would happen without rhyme or reason (I recall getting hard for no reason in the midst of trying to understand math textbooks (and I don't even like math (ok δ looks kinda fuckable but…))).

Under estrogen, my responsive libido frequently needs to be fed before it can exist.

“It's when you only want sex after the sexy stuff starts happening”.

I'm now on transition year 7. On a typical weekend I have some lover on my bed and unless it's a brand new girl I won't be actually like, feeling sexual towards her, or looking forward to sex all the time. I'm doing my own thing dealing with life stuff, or we're chatting politics, or we're just hanging out and chilling. Truth to be told, I'm kinda aware that people expect sex from me (given how I present) but often I feel kind of lazy about the idea of having to set up all the gear for anal sex, thinking today maybe I'm not in the mood, and so on. No crave.

But then she will, say, sit on my lap without warning, touch my lips to attention, then give me that huffy shallow breathing that bottoms do as she brings her mouth close to my ears and murmurs: “choke me, Mistress”… aaand 5 minutes later I'm in bed pounding her.

Because most people I date have the same type of libido, that works the other way, too; when I'm the one feeling horny first, that usually means blowing some sparks towards my lover and blowing up the fires and waiting to have a good stable flame going on before we're cooking. Or if. I'm writing this after having 4am sex cos I randomly woke up horny next to the week's lover; I enjoyed without hurry the soft pleasure of big-spooning their body and exploring it without holding expectations on whether they would correspond or not; I would be genuinely satisfied with either outcome; as it happens, they did react in the body language of sexual pleasure, which in turn made me hornier, which changed how I played with their body, and so on, one tiny little notch at a time… That's responsive libido. Sometimes I'll just lie with a girl on the sofa all evening weaving in and out of highly sexually charged cuddling back to soft little hugs and forehead kisses as we browse memes together. The embers never catch into flames but that soft horny is so comfy and cozy anyway. I love those evenings about as much as I love fucking ass for an hour nonstop. If you learn to enjoy all sorts of experiences, you're never frustrated.

Wait—if both you and your lover are having a responsive-type libido on that day, doesn't that generate an impasse?

I mean, yeah. Dear Reader, I bid thee welcome to the †Lesbian†Bed†Death†.

Ok I couldn't resist the chance to explain why LBD exists but like, I don't like the negative framing, again: There's a whole universe of things you can do together as lesbians, you don't have to care that sexytimes isn't happening. You can garden together! Read comic books lying on her lap! Play little gay visual novels from itch.io and voice act the characters! Mask up to ambush local nazis! Bake cookies for one another! You know, girl things?

Ok, I get it, you've been thirsting over one another online for 6 months and you travelled to be together for one precious weekend and now nobody is feeling like sex and it feels like a bit of a shame. In this situation you can do a bit of that exploration and see if you can get the feedback loop of horny started. I've seen people call this “following the breadcrumbs of your libido”; going through the motions a bit, chasing an inkling of what you intuit will feel good today, until it hits. (I personally think of it as “making offerings to invite in the demons” rather than breadcrumbs, but you do whatever metaphor works for you.)

And if you're kinky: ride the curve. Hike the heck up that escalation curve. Even if you don't feel like it at first, do it consciously, deliberately. Once you strike the right nerve that gets her to shake with pleasure, your responsive libido will… response. It will response so much.

All this talk of bed death and baking but you seem horny online all the time though??

That's mostly a persona; both an aspect of my history and my identity, and a political positioning. I've been hypersexual since I was like, 11, and much of my life centred on navigating the various stigmas and ostracisms involved with that, both from conservatives and liberals. At this point I'm done masking. At the same time, after 40 and on estrogen, I've calmed down significantly. “Don't you have sex with like 4-5 different people per month?” As I said: calmed down significantly.

(See? That was my persona again, so well-practised at this point that it comes naturally. In a lewder period I do have that many partners or even more, e.g. the past four months or so; but I've also had periods with little more than vanilla-ish sex with known lovers once or twice a month, e.g. most of 2024. This has to do with mental and physical health too.)

No but seriously, most of the time when I'm hornyposting I'm not actually feeling aroused, it's just my aesthetik. Besides, presenting horny on main is a major way that I find new lovers in the first place. Responsive libido works online too, so when the right type of girl replies with the right type of comment to a kink text, it heats me up immediately, and we build from there.

Fairly rarely, estrogen does give me spontaneous libido, but it's not like before where I would like, have to take care of it in the next 10 minutes or get frustrated and lose the chance. Rather it's a seemingly random but low-burning, quiet, pleasurably painful type of horny that does not demand an orgasm and does not go away with one (so masturbation feels unsatisfying and pointless) but it like, colours my entire day, makes me scratch the walls craving some unspecified depravity. I'm not the only woman who calls this state being “in heat”. It's highly distracting, like, I cannot weave at all. I love it. My “heat” lasts maybe 5–6 days in a row for me. I can't induce it on purpose nor make it go away.

🤔Is any of that libido variation some sort of hormonal cycle?

Maybe? But I doubt it's from HRT. Back in the day I've experimented more than most trans women with inducing hormone cycles, from very high E2 doses to zero exogenous, with various doses and timings of P4; but could feel no clear unambiguous correlation with libido states. E2 does make me slightly more prone to crying and P4 affects my sleep in ways that are hard to define, is the best I can say I noticed cycling HRT.

How do I know if I'm ace or if I have my libido blocked?

Sometimes people ask “how do I know if I'm really trans?”. I find that question to be a red herring. “To be”, the copula verb, is a philosophical landmine, anything can “be” whatever you want it to be, or not, it's playing with words. (Like when fascists go “Can you just define what is a woman—” a woman is my throbbing cock is what she is). The question isn't whether you “are” trans, it is: do you want to transition? If you do, then the question becomes: how?

Same rationale for whether you “are” “really” ace. Who cares? If you're enjoying life without sexual cravings, nice! Have fun with all the extra time.

“I don't know what I myself want, though”—yes, of course, we've all been there. There's no magic trick there, you have to pay attention to your body and your emotions and explore and experiment out of your comfort zone and observe how it feels. Just don't get so attached to identity labels that you start forcing yourself to fit them.

(I didn't set out to reminisce so much when I decided to write this FAQ but since I'm already here, might as well. Hopefully telling about how my sexuality (re)developed can give people a reference point or a contrast to understand their own process? Or maybe I just want an excuse to write about my #journey. Too late now, buckle up…)

Immediately upon transition, I was convinced I must have become nonsexual. For the first time since childhood I wasn't yearning, and it felt kinda good. Refreshingly peaceful. I was pretty ok with that development. I had other things in my mind anyway, Gods know that first year navigating all the traps of gender and identity and the medical cistem was… a lot.

But that “peaceful” was always a “kinda”. There was some footnote to it, some restlessness I couldn't quite place. It took time for it to grow into discomfort, but the discomfort pushed me to go out again…

See, the thing is, I had been a top, and promiscuous, and dominating, and sadistic. These alignments didn't really go away; I just unconsciously distanced myself from all that because, like, even if I know rationally that there's plenty of women tops, dommes etc., these things are still socially associated with masculinity, so it felt like I would regress, would be seen like a man if I admitted to any of it. I didn't think that with words, I felt that instinctively, without realising it.

Another parallel: Some three months ago I got into powerlifting. I can now deadlift 95kg at 5 reps, and though I'm doing this for strength and not looks, my body changed faster than I expected to put on visible muscles. Not a lot of muscles, mind you, but moving in the “Vi-from-Arcane body” direction is feeling incredibly gender right now. I'm into it. And, after all this time doing high-femme outfits, I found myself trying out a sleeveless vest-and-dress-pants combo, profoundly enjoying the way that I can now pull off a soft butch bodyguard look without feeling like it makes me look like a dude. (Having D cups help).

And I had to square these euphoric feelings against how hard and unhealthily I had dieted in my first transition year to lose every bit of muscle I could, how I always felt bad about a muscular frame, how even years into transition I only went back into muay thai with trepidation, afraid of looking like a guy if I got strong… What a joy it is, to be secure enough in my gender that I can now admire muscles in myself as much as I admire them in other women.

Every aspect of my sexuality was like muscles, or like wearing pants. Each little part of it had to be reclaimed, slowly and with much effort.

At the beginning, I felt like asserting to be a woman was already asking for a lot. I couldn't possibly also expect other women to be interested in me, that would be too much. I felt like the very caricature of the trannie predator, this middle-aged, phallic, sexualised monster who chases women in female spaces. N.b. I emphatically do not hit on women except in contexts like, dunno, queer parties after they return my smiles; but it felt like I could be that. Maybe deep down I was secretly her? The #problematic type of trans girl? So all of my problem aspects had to be buried deep. I felt like, as a woman, I would be decidedly unattractive; I was convinced transition meant my sex life was over.

“After all, who would ever be interested in an older, tall, dominating yet maternal, lesbian futa top?”

That was definitely a belief I had.

Of course I started attracting the interest of women pretty much immediately, cis and trans. (And enbies, and femboys…). I would go online and see terf op-eds from the UK and think women now hate me forever. Then I'd tremblingly, terrifiedly, talk with women IRL and they'd be all like, “hey so I wanted to buy one of those egg vibrators want to go to the sex shop with me?” and “let's hang out at my place, I can cook vegan for you?” and “oh the sofa is too uncomfortable, why don't you sleep in my bed?” and I'd be like, she can't possibly be hitting on me, right? This is normal for girls, right? She's sleeping so close that I can feel her soft oscillating breath on the skin of my lips but I bet this is just what girls do, it doesn't mean she's like, into me, that's impossible… 💦

(Actual example.)

(No, I didn't act on it.)

I was so happy when my body started changing that I started posting selfies, and unexpectedly they got swamped with feminine thirst, which led to a cycle of exhibitionistic affirmation, and soon to my first few t4t lovers. And slowly, slooowly, all these sweet femmes managed to convince me that I wouldn't be considered a “man” if I bound a girl in ropes and made her come with a magic wand, with the argument that they wanted me to do exactly that, which was kind of a hard philosophical position to debate.

Having this mutuality of desire was crucial to reconnecting with my libido, because what I'm trying to get at here is— I'm not vanilla. Even before transition, doing the same type of basic-ass penetrative sex with the same person bored me to death. To be sexual again I needed to feel free to explore my taboo/problematic/cringe perversions; luckily, turns out plenty of girls are into that.

So you see, for me my loss of libido was tangled up in all sorts of gendered trauma and social pressures and anxieties and whatnot. And that wasn't visible to me at all. I had to fool around and try out stuff, and I needed a ton of time and a ton of support. My broken heart was only ever healed thanks to the power of love ♥

Good for you, sister! But my problem isn't the libido; it's that I'm a top and I can't get hard anymore. You seem to have it easy…

Ok so even after I was sexual again, for a good couple years more I was convinced that my body didn't work for genital penetration anymore. I had this entire identity where I was like, “yeah I don't have working hardware, and whatever I'm not into it anyway”. At this point I had learned about dissociation, which let me understood why, before transition, I had to picture myself somewhere else to be able to have penetrative sex. And, thanks to BDSM I already had experience with my hands, with toys, with my tongue; and, now as a girl, doing other girls with those tools was more pleasurable to me than I ever imagined possible. I was, at long last, a lesbian top; it felt too good to be true. (It still does.) Who cares about boring old penis in hole anyway?

And I don't think that was wrong, mind you. I don't even think my “ace year” was a misunderstanding or anything, not really. That's who I was, at the time. People who met me at that place met me as such.

Then on one memorable evening I had a visit from this girl with a 100% submissive personality, intensely bottom urges, and a particularly attractive, perky round butt, and at some she was just lying there butt up and… yeah. T at unadvisably low levels, cypro all over my system, transfeminine dysphoria, eventually no testicles—e por si mueve. Girlcock does not care, none of this matters before the might of “Gosh I wanna fuck this butt”.

I was promised horny hormones and you keep doing this lovey dovey trauma healing woo, come on give me the deets, how do I hack the body

The trauma healing woo is crucial, ok? But without further ado:

• Ideal E2 levels vary from person to person but for most people it's somewhere between 300pg/mL to 900pg/mL. If your SHBG has gone up, you're doing too much; increase E2 as much as you can while keeping the SHBG zero or minimal.¹ Having enough E2 isn't important just for sexuality but to keep your energy levels and clear mind in the absence of testosterone. Most doctors won't prescribe you enough estrogen, so unless you're lucky enough to have access to a trans-literate clinic, you'll have to DIY. Injections are to be considered the first-line choice for most transfem people; they give good levels and work well for almost everybody. Other methods that worked for me or people I know are a relatively high dose of gel (or, better, spray) on testicles, lower corner of jaw, and forehead (in that order of preference); or combining transdermal E2 with sublingual/buccal pills.
• Progesterone might or might not affect libido. Some people swear by it. I thought sometimes it did help me feel horny, and sometimes I couldn't feel any difference. I take it anyway, but when I forget to take it or experiment with a break, it doesn't affect my sexuality unambiguously. Nothing that isn't utterly overshadowed by, say, cute girl in a mesh top smiling at me at the rope meet.
• Some trans women will stay in the “upper female” testosterone range on purpose, to have more spontaneous libido and energy; or apply T topically on the genitals, for erections. This won't affect your feminisation if the rest of your HRT is well managed. (If you do topical T, please inform your partners of that.)

What about sexual medication?

Vasodilators like sidenafil and tadalafil work fine for trans women who want erections, but doctors often deny access to them. Fortunately cis men DIY those so they're relatively easy to find.

Bremelanotide reliably stimulates libido for many people (regardless of hormones or genitals). But I can't see a sex life depending on it; would be very awkward, having to take a shot 2 hours before every time your gf wants sex. I recommend it as a party drug at best. The brand-name product is only sold as injections, but on the gray market you can find a nasal spray, too.

You're into herbs, right? Is there any data on herbal treatments for erections that work without T?

Anecdotal only, no concrete research either way. My best results have been with maca, which has moderate evidence for erectile function and semen volume without any measurable effects in androgen levels. Ashwaganda also has moderate evidence for sexual function and ejaculation volume and doesn't increase androgens in postmenopausal cis women—there are even isolated case studies of breast growth under it.

With all these complications, how do you keep consistent erections?

I don't. A lot of the time during arousal I'm soft, or half-erect. Even when erect, it comes and goes.

Mira Bellwether, in the zine “Fucking Trans Women” (which you should definitely read if you haven't yet), has called girldick “temperamental”; when she wanted to coax her cock into topping, it would stubbornly refuse; then when she was least expecting it and not at all prepared for anal sex, it popped up rock-hard and aching with lust… this has been my experience often, too.

How do you top while soft, then?

First of all, I take it as fundamental that penetrative sex is optional and a bonus to me. Most lesbian tops rely on their hands and dildos and straps, and I have all these options, plus, sometimes, delicious live cock. Sometimes I'll bind, domme, top and/or hurt a submissive girl all while I'm fully clothed, without stimulating my body at all; I find that to be a very rewarding type of sex when the mood calls for it.

Remember too that penises are homorganic with clits. Soft girldick is just a big clit. It has the fun nerves and everything, and can be played with in all the ways you'd play with a clit. Get them to tongue it, put a vibrator on it. Sit on their face.

If at some point I want to incentivise my cock into an erection, for example for a photo, I have to play with the responsive libido until she shows up. If I'm alone, for example, this usually means written erotica or browsing flirty DMs. I consider neither penetrative genital sex nor orgasms to be “goals” during sex; I find goal-oriented sex productivist and spiritually unsatisfying. There’s nothing that kills the mood faster for me than feeling like I have to perform.

But if I want to get harder with a bottom, maybe I'll fuck something that doesn't require a full erection, or an erection at all (mouths and lubed thighs work great).² Or bring out the wand vibrator and tease us both. Or switch to some other type of play and explore different flavours of arousal. Breaking a taboo or crossing a line that turns a kink up a notch makes me hard basically 100% of the time. Even straight people talk of “heating up the sex life”, right?

Conveniently, the process of softening up an ass for penetration also makes me horny, so teasing and lubing and edging and fingering a bottom will both make them easier to fuck, and me harder. Most of the time. If it doesn't, hey, that's what lesbians invented dildos for.

One complication is that with intermittent erections you can't rely on condoms very much—I've had one too many close calls where a condom almost slipped off mid-penetration. I've tried using a cock ring to ensure they're held in place, but it wasn't enough. Now I use internal condoms (often sold as “female” or “vaginal” condoms), which work great for anal sex, too. I also consider it fundamental for promiscuous people to do PrEP and regular STI tests, doubly so if you're into anal.

Do you get pain during erections/penetration without testosterone?

I've seen reports of it but I don't. I mean sometimes a very hard erection has a pleasurable degree of background ache but that was the case before transition, too. I think experiencing intense pain may have more to do with disuse than atrophy or hormones; or else it's individual variation.

Do you get ejaculations without testosterone?

Nope. Sorry. Wish there was a way to have big showy money shots for the aesthetic value, without androgenisation; but as far as I could research, there isn't.

Transfeminine folk will still produce ejaculate for, dunno, two or three years after starting HRT, tops? then it starts steadily drying up. Girlcum is therefore a precious delicacy, to be treated as a treasure (sweet and unscented, clear and thin, delicately intoxicating…). These days I will cum maybe between a couple drops to a small stain on my panties, and it tends to come more as a leak in the minutes after I'm finished with my reverberating multiple orgasms, than as a triumphant jet during the orgasms themselves. The amount of liquid people produce seems highly variable between individuals, and also within the same individual depending on type of HRT and how long they've been on it.

Do you get atrophy without testosterone?

I was never the dick-measuring type, and I'm not sure whether mine has reduced in size or not. The glans definitely seems smaller, giving it a slender tip; but the shaft remains as thick as I remember it being. Somebody once called this pattern—thin and easy at the tip, until you reach a suddenly increased girth—my “knot”, which made me feel very positive about it. Generally all the transition changes I had with girldick—the feminine glans; the larger, darker raphe; the increased skin sensitivity; the softness; the neutral scent; the sweet taste—were crucial in making me able to see my cock as “mine”, as something different than boycock; a process of body reclaiming that culminated in the orchiectomy, which fully removed any dysphoria I might ever have felt about penetrative sex.

At any rate intermittent erections will reduce the effective size some of the time, so girldick is unlikely to be the type to satisfy a size queen. (Why do you think the Goddess gave us bigger fists…?)

All that sounds surreal but I'm not like you, I could never be like that…

That's how I felt about all those cool trans women, too. For like a decade. “They're too awesome, I wish I could be trans too, what a shame I'm not trans if I was trans I could transition.” Even now this life still feels surreal for me myself who am living it. But hey, there's a top shortage out there, and your hard work is sorely needed! And your soft work too, for that matter! Comrade, thirsty bottoms want you to do your part for the community! o>

Feedback

1: People have asked where are these numbers from. Several sources:

• Widely used E2EN 15mg/14 days protocol seems to solve “stalling” lack of feminisation issues for many trans women who came from lower levels of E2 from transdermal or pills. That protocol generates a curve from 300 to 600pg/mL on most bodies.
• Dr. Power's experiments on how much E2 people can take before free% levels start to drop (between 300 to 1000pg/mL for the large majority, N in the hundreds).
• My own experience (wildly successful both in bodily feminisation and mental state, but only after I changed to spray and upped my levels over 300pg/mL) and that of people I personally know.
• Cis woman pregnancy levels as a ceiling of how high a fem body may go in natural conditions (over 7000pg/mL).

Higher levels also have the benefit of acting as monotherapy to compensate subpar blockers like spiro, and potentially compensating for tricker androgenic pathways like adrenals, post-SRS spikes, and the backdoor.

2: In one memorable occasion, I was doing negotiations and STI risk disclosure with a new bottom, and said like, “I like doing intercrural to warm up—you know, thighfucking? Rub some lube between the thighs, grab them together and use the hole to get me off…” They look straight into my eyes and say, shakily: “You won’t need the lube”. That, dear Reader. That was a responsive libido moment for me.

I started HRT at 34; I'm now just 41. This is how my breasts look after 6½ years of transition:

• In a well-fitted bra
• Nude, front
• Profile of rightie
• Profile of leftie
• Squishing to show volume

Description for the visually impaired and those who don't want to look at partial nudity: My breasts are now big and bottom-heavy, looking quite impressive from the front, voluminous enough that they could easily hold a santoku knife under the fold. The areolas are huge and salient, while the nipples proper are pointy but not that big. The volume is still a bit low relative to the circumference, an aspect more visible in profile; but there's enough mass to have a satisfying pear curve on the bottom line. Squishing a breast reveals enough volume that I can't hold it in one hand; it looks like trying to compress a water balloon.

I’ve achieved this size by 1) taking ownership of my own transition with self-medication rather than trusting the cistem, and 2) jumping at every sketchy, possibly dangerous, and probably ineffective breast growth method I ever heard of. The caveat, however, is that I am Brazilian and curvy, from a Latina family; both my mother and my daughter have bigger breasts than me. So it can be that I merely lucked out, and none of my experiments did anything. Or maybe something helped, or was strictly necessary (after all, I know many trans women with a family history of large breasts, who still don't grow much under standard HRT doses). With a sample size of 1 and without controls, it is impossible to know. But in any case I wanted to document this in case anyone else wants to try stuff, and also to rub it in the face of my first endocrinologist who kept us at under 100 pg/mL E2 while telling all his patients that trans women never grow large breasts. Gee, I wonder why your patients don't ?

I will do the opposite of recipe blogs here, and first list the ingredients I used to make my boobs, and only then ramble about my life story and the meaning of these babies for me.

Stuff I did to try to grow breasts

In order of the confidence I have in the available evidence, rather than chronological order of attempts. Content warning : Discussion of body weight/fat issues.

1. Actually decent HRT (high confidence):

   • Good androgen blocking (i.e. not spiro). I started with cypro, 5mg every 2 days, then had an orchiectomy. Note that cypro is not just a gonadal suppressor but acts systemically on other sources of androgens and it's a progestin to boot; this might have affected things (or not).
     • Warning : Cyproterone acetate has some risks; research it well if you want to DIY, and monitor your liver function. You only need it in very small doses; do not trust doctors who want to prescribe you more than 2mg/day. I wouldn't recommend taking it more than 2–4 years. If you're not physically active, find some form of exercise to offset the possible added risk of thrombosis. Or just use bicalutamide, which is a good blocker and safe.
   • Higher E2 than the cistem will give you. Ideally: Get a lab that measures free E2%, increase dose until it drops; that's your optimum dose. Alternatives in decreasing preference: Increase dose until SHBG starts spiking, use the highest dose that doesn't trigger SHBG; if you can't do that, aim for 600 to 900pg/mL; if you can't do labs at all, get injectables from the gray market and do the recommended dose and frequency.
   • Use non-liver routes for E2. Order of preference: injections > spray > gel > sublingual. For transdermal, use scrotal skin and high doses at, regularly, every 12h. 6× Lenzetto twice a day (3 per application, on scrotum) gives me over 600pg/mL.
   • Sometimes oral E2 too, to spike E1 every once in a while. (I know 1 trans girl whose body transitions well on E1 alone; a minimal 2mg E2 pill somehow explodes her E1 way above recommended levels, a 4mg E2 pill gets her sick. She feminises with serum E2 lower than the average masculine level. Bodies are different.)
   • Progesterone. I cycle it along with E2 levels, but I don't think the cycling changed anything compared to just taking it every day. Probably.
   • In general shake things up periodically. Vary doses, method of administration, and hormone combos every so often or whenever you feel stalled.

2. Body fat (high confidence):

   • Be thicc. Either do the yoyo method (diet to very low body fat then plump up again, to redistribute fat under estrogen), or try to get more fat if you're low on it, or just have weight and wait. Breasts are made of fat and to grow breasts you need to add fat.
   • Make sure your HRT is on point to also get curves as you add fat.

3. Possible IGF-1 supplements (low confidence):

   • Zinc, magnesium, selenium, acetyl L-carnitine.
   • Vitamin D, lots.
   • High quantities of plant-based protein in your regular diet.
   • Weight lifting, HIIT.

4. Herbal feminisation (low confidence)

   • Pueraria mirifica. Source the real thing directly from Thai vendors (look for Kwao Krua “Kao” (“white”, kǎao, กวาวเครือขาว)). This is the single most powerful phytoestrogen that I have tried.
   • High-dose spearmint pills.
   • High-dose licorice for short periods (this can fuck up your liver, take breaks.)
   • I started growing breasts on the above 3 combo alone, before I could access blockers or estradiol. At 6 months of herbs they were already budded.
   • Of interest: red clover, hops, flaxseed.
   • Milk thistle, specifically isosylibin-B, does something with androgen receptors that makes it a topic of study for prostate cancer (high confidence). It might do something that helps with feminisation (low confidence). Don't use silymarin compounds that don't have the isosylibins, look for “full spectrum” or grow your own.
   • Phytoestrogens are “weak” receptor activators. OTOH I suspect weak estrogens might have roles we don't yet know. There are documented cases of accidental gynaecomastia from plants in the literature, but they're rare. Taking herbs along with synthetic hormones might either complement meds and improve your transition; compete with them and hinder your transition; or do absolutely nothing and waste your money. Nobody really knows.
   • It's better to put effort into procuring DIY estrogens than fiddling with herbs, and cheaper, too. Herbs might be a good skill to have as an imperfect substitute in case of supply chain collapse, assuming you can grow your own rather than depending on buying pills (but stockpiling raw chemicals and learning to homebrew is a more efficient approach).

5. Local aromatase triggers (low confidence)

   • Generally submit breasts to lots of stimulation, handling, sucking etc. You know what to do. (Brava-type suction devices seem to have a good record for this, but they're very costly.)
   • Boob growth oil: 2.5% lavender essential oil, 2.5% tea tree essential oil, flaxseed or almond as carrier. Do a patch test first. If you get no allergies after a full bottle, you can double the essentials. This might or might not do anything for growth but it will be good skincare at the very least (if you aren't allergic). There's, afaik, 5 documented cases of gynecomastia or prepubertal breast tissue growth on lavender or tea tree skincare; the association with aromatase is just a hunch from me.

What my timeline was like

Details are fuzzy from memory but:

• For 6 months: Pueraria powder, oral + spearmint pills + licorice pills (this was enough to start growth)
• For ~6 months: E2 gel
• For ca. 2 years: E2 spray, 3× every 12 hours, on scrotal skin, + CPA 5mg every 2 days, +P4 100mg/day oral
• + Yoyo diet, went very thin then back to chubby
• + The IGF-1 supplements
• + Regular milk thistle and irregularly phytoestrogens

These 2 years saw the larger part of growth, already gaving me B cups or higher. By this time I had a cleavage and breasts readily read as “female”. Then there was the orchiectomy, and after that my regime regularly became a 4-week “lunar” cycle:

• I start with a “double” estradiol enanthate injection, intramuscular, 30mg (with the goal of inducing high variability in levels)
• Over the 1st week, E2 should rise
• Over the 2nd week, E2 should start to fall
• On 3rd week, I take P4 300mg/day. This is also the week where I tend to do most experimentation, e.g. the skin oil.
• 4th week is a “rest” week where exogenous levels should be low. I have noticed that my breasts regularly ache during this week.

As mentioned before, every so often I shake up things a bit. I am not particularly recommending cycling as I'm not sure there's much evidence for it; it's just a routine that fit me well. Sometimes I try a “steady” regimen too, and I can't say I've noticed any big differences in how that affects my bodily changes compared to cycling.

On trans breasts and what they mean for me

Back in my denial phase (which lasted 23 years…), I found out at some point that everyone has inherent breasts, and that you only have to give them the right hormones to let them come out. And I used to daydream like, “dang what a shame I'm not trans! I bet my breasts would be awesome and look great on me. I wish I was trans, then I could take hormones and be a girl with a feminine body. Oh well, life sucks, I will bury myself in fucking computer programming I guess.”

It turns out growing boobs is a bit more complex than that, and most trans women have trouble getting sizeable ones. I have no idea how much of my success is due to my self-experimentation vs. genetics vs. other, unknown factors in my lifestyle. (Aromatase cycle from inflammation from Brazilian levels of sugar consumption? Implausibly high amounts of lesbian sex? Pombagira spirit possession?).

But even though I was fortunate for an old transitioner, my breasts also had a common transfem difficulty; there's something lacking in volume and shape. On bust circumference alone I would be 90D, even more in a good day (and since cup sizes are proportional to band sizes and 90cm is a lot of band, that would indeed be massive). But my breasts are lower volume than the typical, i.e. somewhat tubular/conical, so I usually downsize bras to 90C to squish them and get some roundedness, or else the cups don't really fill up, which feels depressing. The volume issue has improved significantly after year #5 on HRT, but it still feels like they're not as round as cis women in my family. [edit: After writing this I tried fitting a few bras and it turns out that, as of year 6, I'm actually better off at 90D now. Yay!]

I don't know what's the missing piece for trans women to have fuller breasts; I suspect growth hormones, since teenagers have a lot, adults have little, and trans girls who transition early seem to not have this problem. But I noticed that no matter what estrogen regime I tried, I never got the layer of subcutaneous fat that cis girls normally have over the ribs and on arms; this must be related to conical breasts, and it could be something lacking in the estrogenic or progestinic supplementation itself; in this case I suspect it's something to do with in-tissue generation of hormones, or with the “weak” estrogens (E1, E3, maybe E4 too—cf. breasts filling up on pregnancy), or with factors that control the density of receptors, or some of the “other” hormones nobody pays attention to, which must have roles not yet known. Science on even cis female health is severely underresearched, let alone trans.

In any case I got big enough breasts that cis doctors now regularly think I'm lying when I say I never had implants. I don't know what witchcraft gave pretransition me that intuition that I would have great breasts and feel alive and myself if I took hormones, but it was spot on. And these are more than aesthetics for me; I mean the aesthetics are awesome, big boob antifa gf is 100% my gender, but they're also powerful misgendering deflectors. I'm tall, I transitioned too late to have a girly face, and I can't afford surgeries. So in early transition, I felt compelled to perform more femininity for the cis than I would in a reasonable world. These days I have a much more practical, butchier presentation than before; I don't worry about maintaining a hyperfem voice anymore, I only do makeup in special occasions, I can now wear “unisex” shoes without feeling bad, etc. This isn't just because of breasts—these six years gave me a lot of body feminisation and, just as importantly, a lot of confidence—but damn if the breasts don't help. As long as I find a way to have some cleavage showing, I'll be gendered woman.

If that sounds like something you'd benefit from, but hormonal growth isn't working for you or you can't wait, I want to encourage you with all my heart to get some implants; there's nothing bad about it, even cis people do surgery all the time to adjust their breasts to their needs. For everyone else, I'm leaving my ADHD-ass, not exactly scientific approach here as one more data point that breast growth is indeed possible for us.