Brittney (name changed) was my favorite babysitter when I was a kid. I was, give or take around 13. She babysat for me and my sister at least once a month, and she babysat us at least twice before I got up the nerve to tie her up. Weeks passed before Ella, 25, began to confide in her friends that she had been raped. While she didn't find them to be exactly unsupportive, there was still a consistent and major hurdle: "They are oftentimes surprised when they realize it was a woman who assaulted me."

When I kissed Lynette goodbye at our appropriately miserable reentry to the real world — Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan — I still wasn’t exactly sure what the hell I was supposed to do next. Ben and Bella also switch, "we take turns to practise on each other. That's the best part," says Ben, "especially today. I was tired and stressed, but now that's disappeared." It was Ben who saw a friend's shibari snap on Facebook. "It looked like something you could nerd out on, that would be fun to learn together as an alternative to movie night." How has it impacted their relationship? "It's improved it, in that we've got more to do — but our relationship didn't need rescuing," says Ben, "it didn’t need spicing up — it was spicy already!" I ask Bella if shibari turns her on. She says, "for me it's more a sensual thing — the sensations on your skin, the intimacy you can have with your partner." She adds that she finds the studio calming, echoing Ben who's, "glad it's not a dungeon."Chinese scientists find a NEW bat coronavirus linked to pangolins that has same freak mutation as Covid - and some experts say it shoots down the lab leak theory Finally I caught Brittney and the game came to a halt. Now that she was captured I was to take her to my hideout for her to be my prisoner. But the attire isn't all leather and latex. In fact, if you wandered in before anyone was bound, you might mistake the Rope Jam for a yoga class, such is the predilection for Lululemon leggings and loose printed cotton trousers getting an airing between Goa and Glasto. I'd probably put money on at least one of the guys running a pop-up Beard Bar in Nunhead, selling artisan moustache wax made of oils secreted from his girlfriend's scalp during a head massage from monks in Tibet. Photo: Bones and Rope That night, Matie and Jamie convinced me (against my natural inclination to avoid live entertainment) to go to the evening’s scheduled attraction, a comedy set by Elvira Kurt. Before Elvira performed we were welcomed by Tisha, Olivia’s VP and our cruise director, who greeted the “ladies of Olivia” and announced a few of the events coming up over the next few days, including a meetup for the “Older, Wiser Lesbians,” or “OWLs.” (“Date me, OWLs!” Matie whisper-yelled next to me.) I come from a queer universe where traditional butch/femme identities seem old-school and retrograde, second-wavey, practically heteropatriarchal. There’s a lot wrong with that perspective — for one thing, a lot of the modern queers who shit on butch/femme dynamics aren’t from the working class, where those identities were born — but it’s one I still sympathize with, especially as someone who’d previously been hesitant to claim femme identity as my own.

Have a seat on the edge of the bed," Marie told her. "Put your legs together and lift up your feet."

By this point, I was — somewhat unintentionally — quite drunk. We started making out (I was still peeing) and almost right away, I began writing a goofy story about it in my head, thinking about how I’d relay the anecdote to my friends (“So I had sex in the bathroom of a catamaran???”). But there was another part of me that was very much not into it, especially when the makeout gave way to other things and people started banging on the bathroom door. I settle for some Kelly Clarkson, and after my screechy but enthusiastic rendition of “Since U Been Gone,” five (!) different women approach me, complimenting my performance. One of them tells me her friend thinks I’m really cute, and could she buy me a drink?