You are invited to … A night of DIRTY QUEER SEX!
Tuesday, October 9th, 8pm acebook!
Glad Day Bookshop
598 Yonge St, Toronto, Ontario M4Y1Z3
RSVP on F
Featuring readers from the SAY PLEASE: LESBIAN BDSM EROTICA, and many special guests! Performers include Titus Androgynous, S. Bear Bergman, Drew Deveaux, Dorianne, Carrie Gray, and Andrea Zanin. Hosted by Sinclair Sexsmith, writer of the Sugarbutch Chronicles and editor of Say Please & Best Lesbian Erotica 2012.
In SAY PLEASE, Sinclair Sexsmith presents a cornucopia of queer kink—tantalizing tales rich in variety and saucy details of girls put in their place—and held there firmly. Whether readers dream of surrendering to a lover or of taking control, Say Please offers plenty of erotic inspiration and gives readers exactly what they want! Come hear authors from the book read their stories and celebrate the release of this kinky queer collection.
ABOUT THE EDITOR/HOST
Sinclair Sexsmith has been writing online since 1996 about identity, queer culture, feminism, and self-awareness, and teaches workshops on BDSM, gender, and getting the sex life you want. They produce the award-winning website Sugarbutch Chronicles: The Sex, Gender, and Relationship Adventures of a Kinky Queer Butch Top at sugarbutch.net. Contributing to more than fifteen anthologies, including five Best Lesbian Erotica editions, Persistence: Still Butch and Femme, and Take Me There: Trans and Genderqueer Erotica, Mr. Sexsmith is also on the board of the upcoming 2013 BUTCH Voices conference, and serves the Body Electric School as a coordinator. They are the guest editor of Best Lesbian Erotica 2012 and editor of Say Please: Lesbian BDSM Erotica, both from Cleis Press. More information about their events, workshops, and projects at mrsexsmith.com.
ABOUT THE READERS
Titus Androgynous is a performer, writer and, when time permits, boxer. A contributor to the queer fashion blog, DapperQ, she began writing as a way to explore her emerging dapper-butch aesthetic. She is fresh from an acclaimed gender-bent production of Henry V, and can’t wait to tease you all with some salacious prose.
S. Bear Bergman (www.sbearbergman.com) is an author, a theater artist, an instigator, a gender-jammer, and a good example of what happens when you overeducate a contrarian. He is also the author or editor of three books for grown-ups, two books for kids, four award-winning solo performances, assorted contributions to anthologies on all manner of topics from the sacred to the extremely profane. A longtime activist, Bear continues to work at the points of intersection between and among gender, sexuality, and culture, and spends a lot of time trying to discourage people from installing traffic signals there.
Drew Deveaux, the mischievous activist, has been pushing the boundaries of queer activism from her perch in Toronto since 2005. As an educator, Drew coined the term ‘anti-cissexism’ training to re-conceptualize the way we do trans education and see it through an anti-oppresion lens. Drew has often remarked that “bedroom is the last frontier of social justice”. Seeking to showcase the sweet reality that trans women can be just as sexy and sublime as their cis counterparts, Drew entered the world of porn in 2009 and has since been a part of over 12 features as well as appearing on many websites. The accolades for her work started to quickly gush in, and they include being a Fleshbot Top 10 Crush Object of 2011 as well as winning the Hearthrob of the Year award at the 2011 Feminist Porn Awards.
Dorianne is a queer kinky sex enthusiast who writes in many genres including erotic short fiction. Her dirty work has been featured in The Mammoth Book Of Threesomes and Moresomes (Running Press), Best Women’s Erotica 2012 (Cleis Pres), issue #2 of Up & Coming Magazine, and on www.metanotherfrog.com. She is a regular reader at the Erotica Readers & Writers Meetup in Toronto. Visit her online at www.dorianneemmerton.com
Carrie Gray is a Toronto based BDSM educator, photographer, manufacturer and designer of strap on harnesses, bondage equipment and owner of ASLAN Leather Inc. Carrie has presented at The Floating World 2010, Dark Odyssey Summer Camp, Dark Odyssey WinterFire 2011, and has been teaching his classes through Good For Her in Toronto for over 10 years. Carrie identifies as a Gender Queer, Transgendered Butch and is a passionate advocate of BDSM as a self-empowering form of sexual, psychological and physical play. A lifestyle Daddy and Master, Carrie enjoys the discoveries that come from pushing the psychological and physical boundaries of top and bottom space through role play, the intimate power of spanking, flogging and the beautiful submission and control of bondage. Carrie’s scene experience and sadistic pleasures cover a variety of activities including knives, canes, needle play, single tails and age play. He believes that playing is an ongoing growth process and is always ready to learn new skills to share with others. With over 10 years experience as a BDSM educator Carrie shares his expertise and lessons in an engaging, open and entertaining format that encourages participants to learn through communication, play and participation.
When she’s not working on her PhD in women’s studies, Andrea Zanin travels the world to teach about sex and sadomasochism. Back at home, she co-organizes the annual Canadian leatherdyke weekend An Unholy Harvest and runs a pervy book club called The Leather Bindings Society. Andrea blogs at sexgeek.wordpress.com, writes the “Ask the Sex Geek” column for In Toronto magazine, and pens pervy porn, most recently for Tristan Taormino’s Lambda Award-winning “Take Me There: Trans and Genderqueer Erotica,” the Leather issue of Salacious magazine, and the forthcoming D. L. King collection “Under Her Thumb: Erotic Stories of Female Dominance.”
Thanks for all the great book recommendations and thoughts in the Gaga Feminism interview blog tour thread, folks.
Someone commented, “I’m just kind of surprised with all the thinking you do on gender studies and feminism you are uncritically endorsing gaga feminism.” I’m not sure I’d say I am “uncritically endorsing” gaga feminism—but I did like reading the book, I think there was a lot of interesting content, and a lot of things to think about and chew on. I’m not sure I agree with everything in the book—but hell, I don’t agree with everything I wrote on this website. I don’t think that I have to agree with everything. I still think it was worth reading and interesting, especially the parts about how gender studies and feminist thought are evolving to include a less binaristic view of gender, the indicators of that in popular culture, and how we as queers and genderqueers and other outlaws can continue to encourage that binaristic breakdown.
I’m not a theorist, so I’m not going to go through the whole book and write up the parts I think need broken down further or that I disagree with. It’s kind of an interesting intellectual exercise to do so, but frankly, I don’t have time. I’d rather be having kinky scenes that I can write about later, or writing love letters, or planning for my next classes.
So! Hey, there is a winner of the giveaway …
Congrats Emily! Thanks, Beacon Press, for providing the books.
I—like, I suspect, many of you—was first introduced to Jack Halberstam’s work in college, where I read Female Masculinity in a gender studies class. Jack’s work has been largely influential on the gender binary critiques and to many people that I have studied and read since, and of course influential on my own ideas about gender and performance and masculinities too.
And, he’s got a new book out! The book is called Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal and it’s published by Beacon Press, officially released yesterday, September 18th. It’s an incredibly readable book—like Jack said in my interview with him for Lambda Literary Foundation earlier this year, it’s on an unacademic press and intended for a wider audience. So even if you’re not a theory buff—and I’m not, though I do love theory—it’s a very good read.
A Few Quick Questions for Jack Halberstam
(It’s intimidating to interview one of your mentors! Thanks Jack!)
1. When you discuss the concept of “gaga feminism,” which you say is a feminism “that recognizes multiple genders, that contributes to the collapse of our current sex-gender systems, [and is] a feminism less concerned with the equality of men and women and more interested in the abolition of these terms as such,” (p25), I find myself identifying deeply. I run in many communities which are more invested in that than in the analyzation of the male-female binary, and often feel disillusioned with the mainstream feminism movements which have less concepts of breaking down the system and more that seem to maintain it. How can gaga feminism help queers and genderqueers and other marginalized communities get our message farther into the mainstream, to continue to influence the larger culture? What barriers keep our gaga feminist perceptions of gender from reaching the mainstream, and do you have any suggestions for how to continue the activism of working to break down those barriers?
Great questions Sinclair! As you say, it is frustrating to see so many people acting as if male and female are totally stable categories and as if all the changes in technology, in social formations, in sexual identities and in the visibility of queer bodies have made no difference whatsoever! I hoped and still hope that GAGA FEMINISM would have some appeal as a more mainstream and readable book and that it would be able to circulate complex ideas about sex, gender and fast-changing technologies of gender in an accessible and fun way. That said, there have been a few books out recently like How To Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran, The End of Men by Hanna Rosin and Marry Him by Lori Gottlieb that purport to be feminist analyses of men, women, marriage, work, love and family but actually they mostly shuffle around the same old cliches about hetero reproduction and hope for the best. GAGA FEMINISM begins with the premise of taking a longer tradition of anti-marriage, anti-capitalist feminism seriously and joining it to new queer theory and queer forms of life.
2. I loved your writings about The Kids Are All Right (which start on p54). I enjoyed that film quite a lot and have had many elaborate conversations about its construction, but you articulated some new things I hadn’t heard. I am especially curious about what you said about depictions of relatively sexless long term (lesbian) relationships, as I have been theorizing a lot lately about keeping the spark going in a long term commitment. You’ve been with your partner for many years now—do you have any tips or suggestions about staying sexually connected and satisfied while building something long term?
Well, my point there was that straight culture likes the idea that lesbian long-term relationships are more prone to “fizzle out” that others because women are the kindling rather than the spark when it comes to romance…pardon the metaphor but you get my point. Heterosexual mainstream conversations about desire love to depict women as the ones who create an environment for love and romance and men as the ones who set the whole thing on fire. For this reason, when you have two women, the old narrative goes, you have a lot of love and cuddling but no real…spark! So, The Kids Are All Right feeds into that narrative and assigns all the sexual energy to the sperm donor dad. But that was just one of many reasons I found the film disappointing. As for tips on staying sexually connected etc…sorry dude, I am a terrible advice columnist!!
3. You talk quite a bit about butches and butchness in this book (p86). I do a lot of organizing around butch identity and community, including some work for the BUTCH Voices conferences (and of course your book Female Masculinity has been a huge influence on my understandings of genders). You mention the concept of stone and melting the stone in particular, which is something that I discuss and think about often. I tend to define stone as “having control over how one’s body is touched,” which is not quite the same as impenetrable or not ever receiving sexual pleasure or stimulation. Have you noticed that the caricature of stone butches as “rigid or immobile or frozen” (p86) has changed as we are entering an age of gaga feminism, with more depth of understanding and multiplicity in our definitions of gender roles in general? How can we continue to break down those frozen stereotypes and build something unique and open, with more room for people to be expressing themselves authentically and not feeling stuck in limitations of labels?
Yeah, definitely. I was just using the example of the stone butch in GAGA FEMINISM in order to say that we assign pathological narratives to masculine behavior when it appears in the butch (inflexibility or impenetrability becomes neurotic) but not when it appears in a man. If the man does not want to be penetrated, then he is, well, normal! And in fact, if he does want to be penetrated, then he is suspect. I think GAGA FEMINISM is about recognizing the rapidly generated new forms of desire, embodiment, orientation that proliferate all around us and developing new systems for naming them, owning them and inhabiting them.
**
J. JACK HALBERSTAM is the author of four books, including Female Masculinity and The Queer Art of Failure. Currently a professor of American studies and of ethnicity and gender studies at the University of Southern California, Halberstam regularly speaks and writes on queer culture and gender issues and blogs at BullyBloggers.
Giveaway! I have one copy for one lucky commenter …
Thanks to Beacon Press, I’ve got an extra copy of Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal to give away. I’ll pick a number at random on Monday, the 24th of September, and the corresponding commenter will get the copy.
In order to enter, simply leave a comment on this post and tell me one influential book you’ve read about feminism, or one book about gender, or something you love about Jack Halberstam, or something else entirely. Make sure you leave a valid email address; anyone can enter. I prefer to mail the book to someone in the US, because I’ll be paying for postage—so if you are outside the US, I might ask you to kick me a few bucks to cover the cost of mailing you the book.
Tomorrow’s Gaga Feminism Blog Tour post will be at The Qu—check it out.
Gaga Feminism was sent to me from Beacon Press to review. Thanks Beacon! Pick up your own copy at your local feminist queer bookstore, or, if you must, from Amazon.
One of my best friends, Amy Butcher, published a mystery novel this summer called Paws for Consideration. It’s about a wheelchair-bound woman named Daisy who lives in the Castro and loves dogs (more than people, most of the time). She stumbles upon a dog whose owner is dead on the street and vows to solve the mystery of his death when nobody else seems to be doing much about it—and stumbles into a world of BDSM play parties and leather and queers.
It’s such a fun read, pretty quick, hard to put down, and full of San Francisco references and internal dog dialogue (I have a theory that pretty much all that any/every dog thinks is, “I’m a dog I’m a dog I’madog,” but Ames is convincing me otherwise). I highly recommend it—it’s on Amazon!
This Thursday—tomorrow!—Ames is doing a big release party/scavenger hunt in San Francisco at the women’s building for this book. I wish I could be there! I was trying to figure out some way that I could, but it didn’t work out. Please go in my place and say congratulations to her for me—you can say I sent you, then you’ll have an excuse to talk to her. (She’s a hot silverfox butch, if you hadn’t noticed that yet, so you might want an excuse to say hi.)
Details:
- Thursday, August 30th
Audre Lorde Room, The Women’s Building
(3543 18th Street, San Francisco)
6:00-7:00 optional scavenger hunt
7:00-8:30 awesome event!
RSVP on Facebook
Join us in celebrating the publication of Paws for Consideration, the debut mystery novel from former Women’s Building board member Amy Butcher. Performers, readings from the book, an optional scavenger hunt with prizes, premier of the book trailer video . . . and more! All proceeds from book sales will go to support The Women’s Building.
Scavenger Hunt—How to participate:
The scavenger hunt will take you to real locations straight out of the mystery novel. In order to participate, you’ll need a QR code reader for your smart phone and an old-school paper Clue Sheet. Links for both of these are below.
At each site you’ll find a placard with a QR code (that’s how you know you found the right spot). Scan the QR code and it will bring up a video. The video will tell you about where you are, pose a challenge to solve, and then provide clues as to your next destination. In all, it should take you about 45 minutes and it should be fun!
The placards will be in place by 6:00 pm on Thursday, August 30th. Remember to bring your completed clue sheet to the party no later than 7:15 to qualify for great prizes. Doors open at 7:00.
Watch this video for more information.
More details, links, suggested QR code readers, over on amybutcher.com
Does that not sound like SO MUCH FUN? How often do you have the opportunity to attend a scavenger hunt around San Francisco? Hope you can make it, and hope you enjoy the book as much as I did.
I’ve got an erotica story in a new anthology, Girls Who Score: Hot Lesbian Erotica edited by Ily Goyanes, and I’m taking part in the book’s blog tour at girlswhoscore.com today.
My story is called “A Good Workout,” and it’s one of the first butch-on-butch erotica stories I’ve ever written. Despite my #gymbunny hash tag on Twitter, I’m not much of an athlete, and never have been. But a few things came to mind when I started thinking about the scenarios that I’d possibly find myself in that would be sexy and somewhat athletic: the locker room at the gym, other butches in that locker room and the way we don’t really acknowledge each other even though we have some gender solidarity in a mainstream women’s space, and the lesbian story from My Secret Garden edited by Nancy Friday that I read fifteen years ago about an anonymous encounter in a steam room.
I wanted the characters to be taken with each other in a mirroring kind of way, seeing themselves reflected in each other’s body. They have a few moments of gender solidarity, not quite acknowledging each other but still recognizing that they both go through odd gender pinprick encounters with the women in the locker room on a regular basis. And then, what happens in the steam room … it isn’t so much about overwhelming desire in each other with romantic interest, but about curiosity, almost like the commonality of same sex encounters that many straight people experience as pre-teens and teenagers.
Here’s an excerpt from “A Good Workout.”
- I grin. I breathe and feel my feet on the floor, get my bearings and don’t waste time. I slide down from the upper bench and you are on the edge of your seat, I easily grab your waist and flip you around, your ass against me, my arms around you, one hand pushed between your legs and the other twisting those pink nipples. As my fingers find you wet and open you bring my other hand up to your mouth and suck two of them down, tongue swollen, lips wet. I keep my grip around you as I plunge two fingers inside you deep and you groan again, that same release that all those pull-ups had you uttering, the same instinct to buckle and pulse overtaking you. I pull my fingers out slick with your juices and find your clit, start jacking you off, the shaft of it hard and swollen under my fingers, throbbing with my touch.
You quicken under me.
I pull you back against me and our bodies slide against each other, your back against my large chest, my nipples still hard, my stomach against your lower back, your ass against my pelvis. If I had a cock it’d be in your ass right now, and as soon as I think that I can feel it, and you press back against me as if opening up, squirming, and I keep my grip as I reach around you to jack you off. You aren’t easy to get off, I can feel it, that barrier between us, but I can feel how you like to be taken, how you like to be a boy under my touch, how you like to bend over and give it up for me, because that’s how I like it, too.
Our bodies are talking to each other without our heads getting in the way. Our cocks are hard and thrusting, and I am thrusting, and you are thrusting into my palm. Your hand pushing my fingers deeper into your mouth though it is open and you’re breathing around it, I feel your breath cooler than the air. My arms are dripping with sweat and steam, I can feel it rolling down my skin.
It was fun to use second person for the other character, I don’t usually do that in my stories but I like how it reads, I think it’s a bit more intimate.
There’s quite a bit more about the other stories in the book over at girlswhoscore.com, and the blog tour is continuing through the end of August, so keep your eyes open for even more excerpts and writings. Pick up the book on Amazon.com or at your local independent queer-friendly bookstore.
TranZwear sent me three different packing undies—their most popular models—to check out: two different models of boxers, and one jock strap type. TranZwear alters already existing briefs, boxers, and jock straps to get them to more securely hold packers. In this case, the Dockers are the TSW PackRight Harness with the secure packer, which means it’s got elastic bands and an o-ring sewn into the front of the briefs that will keep a packer in place. The Champion black boxer briefs are the PackNGo athletic boxer briefs, so instead of cotton they’re “moisture wicking” and have that slick nylon feel. Instead of a harness inside these, the front pocket is sewn shut. TranZwear describes it: “Modified performance mesh interior pouch provides support and ventilation, and holds your packer secure without any movement during the day.” The jock strap has a security strap to hold the packer in place.
I’m totally in love with the Dockers briefs and they fit so perfectly well that I’m going to look them up and get some more of the same in the same size. The others aren’t quite as much of a perfect fit, though I do like the sewn-shut “interior pouch.” After losing a packer because it rolled out of my briefs into an East Village toilet, I pretty much never pack without attaching it somehow, either in these briefs, in the SpareParts Pete undies, or with a packing strap or pouch, and I do go back to these TranZwear products frequently. They’re simple, and high quality work. I frequently forget I’m wearing anything modified or special and just feel like I’m wearing regular undies—which is exactly how it should feel.
I kind of prefer having a packing strap or harness, something that keeps the packer attached to my body rather than attached to my underwear, since it feels more like clothing or an attachment when it comes off, but I would still much rather have it secure than not, and these are great options. Thanks, TranZwear.
The Dirty Queer Sex Tour for my book Say Please: Lesbian BDSM Erotica, published by Cleis Press this past spring, has taken me to San Francisco, Seattle, LA, New York City, and Boston so far, and there is still more to go. This summer, I’ll be in Atlanta (this weekend, actually) and Chicago in the next month, places that have generously requested I come and do a reading, but I don’t have a full set of contributors to the book to read with me in those two places.
Are you in Atlanta or Chicago and write kinky queer stories? Or are you a fantastic performer or reader who would like to read someone else’s story? Are you available June 30 in Atlanta or July 24th in Chicago?
I’m looking for others to share the stage with in those two cities. Send a brief sample of what you would read (1-2 paragraphs) or a video clip of your reading to mrsexsmith (at) gmail.com and I will get back to you. Each reading has a limited number of slots and will be filled first come, first serve.
PS: My Tour Calendar has been updated! I’ll be in Chicago for a week at the end of July doing many workshops, including Writing About Sex, Fucking Forever: Sex in Long Term Relationships, and Cock Confidence. I’ll be stopping in Milwaukee, too!
Kristen and I attended the Lammys on Monday night, the Lambda Literary Awards ceremony to celebrate excellence in LGBT literature. I’ve attended the past four years and while neither book that I edited was a finalist this year, I hope Say Please will be next year!
And, in addition to attending and being a judge, which I was last year also, I presented the erotica category with Emmanuel Xavier, and got to rip open the envelope and pronounce the winner of the Gay Erotica category. There were beautiful speeches by Kate Millet and Armistead Maupin, who were awarded the lifetime achievement award, and by Stacey D’Erasmo (one of my favorite writers ever) for the mid-career award. I was thrilled to celebrate Tristan Taormino’s anthology Take Me There, which I have a story in, that took home the Lammy for Transgender Fiction, and I was sad to see Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme not win.
Some notable winners:
- Lesbian Debut Fiction: Zipper Mouth, by Laurie Weeks, The Feminist Press
- Lesbian Fiction: Six Metres of Pavement, by Farzana Doctor, Dundrun Press
- Lesbian Memoir/Biography: When We Were Outlaws: A Memoir of Love & Revolution, Jeanne Córdova, Spinsters Ink
- LGBT Drama: A Menopausal Gentleman: The Solo Performances of Peggy Shaw, by Peggy Shaw, University of Michigan Press
- LGBT Nonfiction: A Queer History of the United States, by Michael Bronski, Beacon Press
- LGBT Studies: Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes, by Lisa L. Moore, University of Minnesota Press; Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality, by Margot Weiss, Duke University Press (was a finalist but didn’t win, but I am going to look this one up)
- Transgender Fiction: Take Me There: Trans and Genderqueer Erotica, ed. by Tristan Taormino, Cleis Press
- Transgender Nonfiction: Tango: My Childhood Backwards and in High Heels, by Justin Vivian Bond, The Feminist Press
- Lesbian Erotica: Story of L, by Debra Hyde, Ravenous Romance
- Lesbian Poetry: Love Cake, by Leah Lakshmi Piepza-Samarasinha, TSAR Publications
I tossed ‘em into my Amazon store if you’d like to sort through them over there:
I am really excited to read these. I’m thinking I might make it a Lammy summer and just go for it. I’m definitely going to send this list to my book group and see what interests them.
It felt a little different this year … it was sold out, I think there were more people in attendance, and I think there were more trans folks, genderqueer folks, and people of color than I’ve seen at previous Lammy ceremonies. I hope that’s true. It also seems like the Lammys are getting way more press than they used to. The first year I attended, I went online after to confirm my notes and couldn’t find any article covering it from any publication, and now there are quite a few online publications covering them. They have definitely stepped it up and it seems to be paying off.
As a former bookseller, they have always been on my radar, but I think they are getting a little more widely noticed. Or maybe I’m just more and more involved in the queer literary scene? That could be true too. Regardless, I had a fantastic time, it was great to run into friends and to meet authors I didn’t know of before.
Here’s a full list of the winners, and I’ll keep an eye out in case they post more photos.
I’ve been searching for The Perfect Harness for a long time.
I think at a certain point I gave up, and gave in to the fact that there’s no one singular perfect harness, and that I’ll just have different ones for different things or for different cocks. I haven’t been reviewing harnesses as much lately (though I do still try to keep up with what’s new out there).
Recently, though, my beloved Jaguar G harness reached its last days, and I replaced it with two other harnesses from Aslan Leather. I know some folks really don’t like leather because it is an animal product, and as a former vegan I understand that, but as someone obsessed with the best possible materials I can find, I just haven’t found anything better—or even comparable. There are quite a few vegan options for Aslan harnesses, for the record, and I do really like the Slick G.
And while I love Outlaw Leather and many of the other companies who make great harnesses, I think Aslan is the best, hands down. Their leather is buttery and feels already broken in, and so easily becomes a second skin, conforming to the heat of my body and wrapping me in it so I can barely tell I’m wearing anything at all.
The Jaguar G
The Jaguar is one of their most popular harnesses, and I would say is one of the most popular harnesses period, based on the dozens of Cock Confidence workshops I’ve conducted and based on a totally informal survey of everyone I meet who partakes in strap-on sex. It comes in various colors—like white, black, and cherry.
I prefer the Jaguar G, the g-string one-strap version (because of the way the one strap hits my clit while I’m fucking). But there are many variations to the Jaguar, and I bet you can find one that is perfect for you.
I frequently go back to my Leather Pleasure Harness, which I also frequently recommend to folks who are starting out with strap-on play because it easily converts from a one-strap to a two-strap and back, so you can experiment with both and see which one you prefer, and because it’s relatively affordable, much cheaper than a lot of the other fancier leather harnesses anyway.
The Leather Pleasure Harness
I’m not sure how many of these harnesses I have basically worn through in the last five years or so. Three, four, maybe? Maybe it’s because I don’t know how to take good enough care of my leather—but I clean it with saddle soap, have experimented with mink oil, and nothing I do can quite make it waterproof enough that eventually, it doesn’t end up soaking into the leather and unable to come clean. I’m the kind of person who will use a thing until it is pretty much unusable, I wasn’t exactly raised middle class, maybe more like upper-working-class or lower-middle-class or with middle class aspirations, so it sometimes pains me to retire one of these harnesses, but I care a little bit more that my sex toys are attractive and safe to share, and after a certain point, my leather harnesses are neither.
So this time, when I asked Aslan to send me a new Jaguar G, I also asked for a new Leather Pleasure Harness, but this time with the leg straps in rubber instead of leather. Because that’s the piece that gets all … beautifully juiced up, anyway, that’s the piece that becomes uncleanable after a while.
And I couldn’t be more thrilled. I love this new harness, and it is so much easier to keep clean. I’ve reviewed the Leather Pleasure Harness before, so check that out if you want more details about the harness specs.
Between the Jaguar G and the Leather Pleasure Harness, I think my search for The Perfect Harness might be over. If nothing else, any other harness definitely has a lot to live up to. Thank you, Aslan!
Aslan Leather sent me the Leather Pleasure Harness and Jaguar G for review. Pick it up over on Aslan’s site, or at your local independent feminist queer sex toy store.
Drawings of the RodeoH Boxer Brief Harness by KD Diamond on the RodeoH Tumblr
And the winner is …
Commenter #48, Jen!
Jen, I’ll send you an email—just need your size preference and mailing address, and RodeoH will send that right out to you. Thanks, RodeoH!
Lenore on 
Shereen on 
