I have officially given up on finding romantic love.

Herein lie the confessions of a formerly freaky demisexual, and a relationships-and-kink-educator-turned-prude.

Welcome to the weekly dispatch, SENSUAL TERRORS: musings on creativity, movie culture, and some strange bits of life.

I am full of hypocrisy. For a self-proclaimed “gore whore,” I’ve done a lot of looking away from the screen and flinching this year. I saw things no human should ever have to see, thanks to the Final Destination franchise and Zach Cregger’s band of sickos that made Weapons.

And it’s this Substack note from

jericho

that made me realize another form of hypocrisy: That despite my founding of a platform called SENSUAL TERRORS, I’m surprisingly squeamish when it comes to sex these days, and maybe I’m using films that hint at the erotic to process my own suppressed sexual expression.

For a David Lynch and Cronenberg fan, I'm actually uncomfortable with embracing the erotic.

One person I love to see on my timeline on Substack and Threads is

kamory rose.

: Witchy, liberated, astute and in tune with her sexual and romantic desire in a way that makes my Venusian heart sing.

The way this kind of content gives me joy, I can’t say I’m completely repressed —although it only took 20 years to cast aside my sex-negative indoctrination.

I had my heaux phase several years ago, but even by heaux standards, it was admittedly lackluster. I could only really handle two people in my phone, max, at one time.

That’s not a heaux-tation à la Issa Rae’s Insecure. I think that’s just regular, Western casual dating in 21st century, right?

I mean, even when I was single and poly — practicing “solo polyamory” so it sounded like I was prioritizing myself, instead of being achingly and pathetically single despite a wealth of choice — I ever only slept with one person at a time.

It’s probably because I can do casual sex, but I can’t do meaningless sex.

And I’ve had to find out the hard way over the past few years that being honest and earnest with people actually makes an easy mark. I would say “Casual doesn’t mean careless,” and everyone would nod and agree, but, so many men and non-binary people got sick gratification of being the only person I was talking to or was really serious about — and by serious, I just mean seriously considering letting them hit, not serious about dating romantically.

I haven’t really been looking to get locked down, even though it was once something on my wishlist. I was just looking to have really good sex. But as someone in the kink community, who cares about my mental health and the wellbeing of others, I wanted to have a conversation first. I wanted to build a rapport first. I wanted to make sure I could trust the other person and that the other person felt comfortable with me.

That’s when sex was the best, I had found.¹

And even then, that would cause cognitive dissonance. People treated me like I lied about just wanting sex without a romantic relationship attached. No one ever called me clingy or said I wanted to talk to them too much, but many accused me of putting in an inappropriate amount of effort to be thoughtful. One enby broke up with me because I said “thank you” too much, like when he bought me food one night and went out of his way to pick up a matcha spongecake for me the next.

And on, and on, and on.

I have been punished so badly for pouring sparkling wine into flutes for a Moulin Rouge date night, or being thoughtful enough to bring a cinephile snob Francis Ford Coppola’s wine up on the Amtrak train for our first meeting, or nice enough to let…