Laura Desirée's job is to invent new sex every month, professionally, for a stage. She reports that she runs out of ideas. She also reports that her first session as a professional domme involved blindfolding the client as fast as she could so she could get her written notes out — a step-by-step playbook for conducting an erotically charged power exchange. Every commanding presence you have ever assumed was effortless started somewhere near a laminated agenda.

Laura is an erotic architect: fifteen years across burlesque, adult media, sex work, intimacy coordination, and now creative direction for the members-only erotic theater SNCTM, where what appears on stage is real rather than simulated. She is also the host of Eros Unbound, a monthly erotic literary salon in New York where six to eight writers read confessional work about sex they have actually had — and where, at intermission, two hundred and fifty adults in evening dress are handed notepads and twenty-five anonymous minutes. Laura describes them writing furiously, like an exam they have to pass in order to graduate. The pages get read aloud at the end. Nobody knows whose is whose, and everybody's is in the room.

What she and Dr. Emma trace from there is the seam between talking about desire and having it. Laura reads the present as a social sex revolution — we may be the most articulate generation ever to discuss ourselves as sexual beings, and possibly the most over-analytical. Emma presses on the obvious cost: sex has to be felt, and we may have made it too cerebral. Laura's answer is her own phrase, an intellectual erection — the thinking brain aroused, but only worth something if the arousal routes back through the body.

She declines, throughout, to be an expert. She will relay her findings. She will not tell you what to do with them.

So: if the paper were anonymous and you had twenty-five minutes, what would you write — and what would it cost to say the same sentence out loud, with your name on it, to the person already beside you?

Part One of two.

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Full show notes: [here]

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