Solo Pleasure with Carly III
I’ve learned a lot about desire this year. And about myself.
Some of the lessons I welcomed. Others tested everything I thought I’d accomplished on myself in the last few years. But even the painful learnings left me with something hopeful: the realization that I’m still a student. Still messy and unfinished. Still capable of surprising myself.
Let us all forever remain students of our selves and our desires.
~~~
My desires are becoming clearer to name. But they remain difficult to satisfy.
The first one, as I have shaped my mouth around this feeling:
To be witnessed, not just physically, but emotionally.
Second, similar, but even harder to capture:
To feel seen before I am touched.
I think many of us believe self-knowledge is something achieved alone. The work of meeting your inner child, understanding your attachment style, processing emotions, these things do often begin in solitude.
But growth needs to be tested. And that’s only possible with another human. Imperfect, unpredictable, emotional as they are.
You can do all the inner work you want, but until another person holds up a mirror that reflects something you didn’t want to see, you can’t really know whether you’ve changed.
The times I have thought something would never happen again—falling in love, feeling intense desire, wanting, needing—I have always been proved wrong. It is never the last time.
They always come back.
Other things too. Insecurities. Old wounds. Men.
When something awakens in you after a long silence, it can feel like the power belongs to the person who activated it. As if they created the desire rather than just revealing it.
But the desire was always mine.
I’m studying sexology now, which means I have the strange privilege of being able to apply academic language to some of my more perverse inclinations.
Recently I learned about erotic self-focus, a psychological and somatic concept in which women are aroused by seeing themselves as the object of desire.
Erotic self-focus is not about objectification though. It’s hyperconnection. Becoming absorbed in your own experience of desire and pleasure.
When I read about erotic self-focus, something clicked into place.
I have long enjoyed sending nudes into the ether for validation and compliments, and this pastime has formed the basis of whole relationships and epic, unfurling fantasies.
There is often an exchange involved, sometimes beyond words, these virtual partners will send photos and videos back to me.
But the images that live rent free in my head long after the interaction has ended are of myself. My body, as I photographed it, legs open. My hips, rocking softly in a video I made. What remains in my mind of my counterparts are only the written responses my images elicit.
What keeps me suspended in such an intense state of desire in these interactions isn’t wanting them. It’s the experience of becoming hyperaware of my own desirability through their eyes, through their words.
There are moments when I will stop everything I’m doing to stage a nude photoshoot in my room to send out for these exchanges. I obsess over lighting. Angles. Poses.
The act of capturing myself becomes devotional.
I am a perfectionist, especially about my own image. I can be judgmental. But in these states, my horniness quiets my brain enough for me to select and send without overanalyzing.
This is my entry level bliss: I’ve become subdued by my own desire, worshipping myself.
That worship often leads into masturbation. First, I touch myself to capture evidence of my arousal, in theory for them—to show my wetness, my desire, my body responding to the interaction.
But then I find myself stuck in a loop rewatching my video of myself—dripping over it—and I feel my fingers crawling slowly inside me. Drawing my wetness out to paint my lips. Everything becoming so slippery I can barely hold on.
I’m masturbating to myself. Using another person’s gaze as a mirror to access myself.
It’s nice. But it’s not mind-altering.
For me, attention becomes erotic when it conveys emotional perception.
It’s the difference between the slickness of want versus the fucking gushing of feeling safe to feel. The difference between the kind of orgasm that’s a nice punctuation to your day, versus one that makes you weep with release.
I can generate arousal through desirability alone, but profound erotic openness requires emotional attunement. The fantasy collapses the moment I feel reduced to the superficial.
What I want is worship that transcends my body.
I am attracted to people who listen carefully. People who notice things. Who remember. Who pay attention to shifts in my breathing, my tone, my silences. People who become curious about my feelings instead of intimidated by them. Who know to put a firm but soothing hand around my throat when I need to come back to them.
The highest compliment I can give someone is my attention.
I like to be taught. I don’t want desirability imposed on me by someone who hasn’t studied me deeply enough to hold it responsibly. I like to be held intellectually and emotionally as much as physically.
And maybe that’s why the softest words stay with me longest.
Not the promises about how someone will ruin me by going down on me for hours. But the moments where desire melts into care.
When they say: Let me help hold you together.
I think about this a lot. About how erotic it is to feel emotionally handled with gentleness. What it’s like to have someone observe your anxiety spike and instinctively move closer instead of away. I melt.
And if you can’t hold my emotions, how could you deserve access to the softest parts of me?
Real intimacy asks this of us. To trust and lean into the tension. It transforms sex from consumption into connection.
I didn’t expect my months of reflection on desire to come together on an afternoon in Amsterdam, but it did.
I was attending my first ever rope workshop. Shibari is an art form I have long observed from a distance, curious but maybe too distracted by the challenges of daily life to really consider the submission required in getting tied up, literally.
I was paired with a beautiful woman a decade older than me as my rope top, and I couldn’t have asked for a better first. It was her first time tying too, and the mutual vulnerability was magical.
She was so soft with me as she coiled the jute rope around and around my waist and chest, binding my arms to my body, looking deeply into my eyes for signs of approval or discomfort, and checking in the whole way through. I held her gaze for long moments, and also felt comfortable enough to close my eyes and enjoy.
It was an act that combined all of my deepest desires into one experience: a physical witnessing was required for the placement of rope but it was the emotional connection that made me feel more and more seen with every turn.
What I didn’t expect about being tied—and this was not even a suspension tie—was to feel so held. As she drew the rope around me each time, it felt like a loving caress folding into a firm hug, the kind that resets you when you lose your balance.
It wasn’t her hands touching me, but first her eyes, and then the rope. The distance between us was so full of care, it became erotically charged, the tension of trust was exquisite.
So I decided tying myself for solo pleasure would be the culmination of all I’ve learned this year. While I know there is a special beauty in the dance of being tied, the rope instructor did say you should experiment with tying yourself before you submit to being tied by another. Learn your limits privately, but don’t isolate so completely that you’re unable to sway and bend with a rope top.
My rope is long and silky, but has some bite when I pull it against my skin. I am still a novice, so I do a simple ladder tie on my thighs, standing in the mirror. The rope feels like a teasing hand that wouldn’t be afraid to smack my ass, and as she cinches around my bum, I imagine exactly that.
It’s just me and the rope as I loop and cinch and wrap. I can feel the heat between my legs intensifying. I’m wet. When it’s time to tuck the tails I am nearly dripping. I can still move but I’m restricted, and this is enough to feel like I’m being held down. Held down and held. You have to feel it to know.
I do a trust fall onto my bed in a position where I can still see myself in the mirror and reach under the rope to begin to explore my wetness.
In and out, first just my middle finger, shallow circles, then I add my ring finger, alternating strokes with and strokes without. The tension of my legs tied together increases the beautiful pressure of filling myself.
I normally prefer external stimulation for solo pleasure, but being tied I have an aching need to be penetrated. But eventually my need to grind on something compels me to turn over.
Here, having my legs tied together is agonizingly frustrating. I feel myself close but unable to close the distance.
I remind myself to breathe and find my rhythm. I focus on the rope around my ass, the way it feels like two big hands gripping me together. I imagine these rope hands pulling me down on the cock of my fingers and I begin to feel the familiar pulse of orgasm arriving.
I fuck myself through the waves, feeling myself clench my fingers, my face pressed against the mattress. Eyes watering. Heart racing. And then I stay like that for a long time. Holding my cunt while I’m still held by the rope. Completely subdued and still.
