Consent (The Ticket)
This piece sits with sexual risk and consequences: testing, pregnancy scares, cheating, and that very human “fuck it, do it anyway” moment when desire overrides your better judgment.
If you’re waiting on results, dealing with a recent diagnosis, or spiraling about a pregnancy or STI scare, read this only if it feels grounding—not punishing.
And if it starts to feel like too much instead of clarifying, it’s okay to skim it, save it, or walk away halfway through if your body starts tightening up more than it opens.
— Zan
Scene (The Ride)
It’s all fun and games…
until your genitals start looking like the photos from Health class.
I remember those pictures.
The ones that made everyone uncomfortable before we even understood why.
Most of us got one message back then:
“Abstinence is the only way. Don’t fuck each other. Please.”
Fast-forward to now and positive means something completely different on most timelines.
Positive mindset. Positive energy. Good vibes only.
And in the same breath:
- “I tested positive for COVID.”
- “The test was positive. We need to talk.”
Half a generation grew up not really knowing why that word used to make entire rooms go dead silent.
“Positive” used to mean: this could kill you.
Now it’s a playlist mood.
That disconnect… sticks.
Because, let’s be honest:
Sex feels fucking amazing.
Not in the pamphlet way.
More like:
- “I can feel my nervous system humming in harmony.”
- “Every sensible thought just left the building.”
- “I would absolutely make a stupid decision to feel that again.”
Have you tried it?
It’s the cleanest dirty trick nature ever came up with.
The only true, honest, animal expression two people (or more) can share, regardless of how they identify or who they’re wired to want.
I remember reading a study once that said an orgasm lights up the brain like a hit of heroin. No wonder we’re all love junkies, looking for a fix that feels like it might finally fix us.
If the world were built on the fantasy of zero-negative consequences, there’d be:
- official glory holes in every chain restaurant
- stadium-sized “adult clubs” where 300 people clap while you rail or get railed by the one with the curls
- anonymous, no-risk, no-paperwork, no-awkward-waiting-room hookups on tap 24/7
Consent would be a given.
Everyone would be honest about their status.
No one would ghost you after raw-fucking you in a parking lot.
Perfect.
Too bad I would still be too much of a germophobe to participate. 🫠
And yeah — I’ll say it plain — gangbangs are hot.
A pile of bodies, ten hands on you at once, being the one everyone is there to use and ruin and worship. Being the throat everyone shares. Being the one in the middle while the whole room orbits you. Multiple partners, being a wild slut, being “passed around the room,” getting dragged from lap to lap or bent over every surface in sight… the porn-fantasy side of my brain goes, yeah, that tracks.
In fantasy, it’s clean. Controlled. Nobody’s lying. Everybody got tested recently. No one is drunk. No one is dissociating. No one wakes up the next day wondering what the hell just happened to their body or their reputation or their head.
Group scenes, gangbangs, “use me until I forget my name” nights — the fantasy is valid. A lot of us have it. Being a slut is hot. Being wanted by more than one person at once is hot. Being taken apart on purpose is hot. Even if the idea makes you a little nauseous, the part about people being honest about what they’re carrying and where it’s going? That shouldn’t be controversial.
In reality, that kind of scene can still be done — under very specific conditions. Clear consent. Clear roles. A sober set of eyes on the room, bodies that are checked, meds that are taken, limits that are known, and a plan for what happens after. And yeah, the idea of being the one keeping watch is its own kind of hot.
The fantasy is, “Wreck me.”
The reality has to be, “Wreck me on purpose, help put me back together after, and don’t leave me introducing myself for the rest of my life as, ‘Hi, my name is X, and I have Y and Z now because nobody wanted to slow down long enough to tell the truth about what they were bringing into my body.’”
Let’s talk about the part likely doesn’t get you off:
- “Hey, we need you to come back in and talk about your results.”
- pregnancy tests you stare at until you forget how to breathe
- mental spirals that don’t care how hard you were five hours ago
I’m just someone who knows what it feels like to know better…
…and still say fuck it anyway, like the odds don’t apply to me.
Once.
(Okay, more than once. But this is the one that matters here.)
She cheated on me.
One-night stand with a stranger she’d just met.
We were in that “working it out” phase — a lot of back and forth about what we wanted, how we were treating each other, what we were willing to do to fix it.
Turns out she was looking to get worked on instead of working it out.
After that?
There was a lot.
Shame.
Fear.
Anger.
Arousal.
Once we got past the initial betrayal, we were both worn down from what we’d become to each other.
Tired of crying and analyzing and apologizing and trying to act like adults about something primal.
We both just wanted to feel something “good” again.
And we still cared about each other, underneath the mess.
It had been a few weeks since the one-night stand.
First time she came over after everything was supposed to be “done,” it was meant to be friendly, wholesome, we’re adults, we can still talk.
The problem: we missed each other’s body.
I missed the way it felt to be inside her and hear the sounds she made for me.
We weren’t even officially in a dynamic or relationship at that point. To bypass the complicated “are we back together?” conversation, we lied to ourselves:
We’re just doing this as friends. We care about each other. We’ll just make the pain go away for a little while.
It was raw. It was real. It was human.
It lasted a while.
The dirty talk went obscene fast — on both sides.
“It made me feel free.”
“You stupid bitch.”
“He was bigger than you.”
“You’re a worthless slut.”
“I hate you.”
“I hate you too.”
We meant it and we didn’t.
We hated what we’d become — not just to each other, but to ourselves.
And it was hot.
Not cute-hot. Not rom-com-hot.
Ugly, feral, this-might-be-a-bad-idea hot.
I’m still aroused by the idea of being cheated on or “sharing” what’s mine — not because I seek humiliation, but because that night? The sex was nuclear. The emotional horror and the physical high fused into something that still runs through me.
The sex didn’t change me.
The intensity did.
Spoiler alert: we got back together after that.
Spoiler alert #2: she cheated again. Without permission. With much bigger consequences.
That shard of the whole story can wait for another time.
What matters here is this:
I knew it.
I knew exactly what it meant that she’d fucked someone else raw not that long ago.
And still — I went back.
Depressed. Angry. Wanting to “reclaim” something. Wanting to feel wanted. Wanting to feel anything that wasn’t the kind of hurt that just sits, refusing to resolve.
She was there. Warm. Familiar.
It felt… inevitable.
So I submitted to the moment.
No condom.
No pause.
No “hey, give me the betting odds on how likely that other guy has an STD?”
Just pure, reckless:
“Fuck it. We deserve to feel good again.”
Everything turned out fine, medically — every test negative, then and since.
Emotionally? That’s another story.
And that’s the point.
Being a Dom doesn’t make you a machine. It doesn’t put a firewall around your worst decisions. Under the right mix of pain and desire, even people obsessed with control will walk themselves straight into the fire.
The “I know better, I’m doing it anyway” hit is real.
You already know better.
I don’t need to explain what chlamydia is.
(I once had to write a five-page report on it for Health class. I really could explain it, if you insisted.)
You’ve seen the word incurable enough to know which ones you never want on your chart.
I’m not here to drag anyone living with any of that.
Some of you were lied to.
Some of you weren’t told.
Some of you trusted someone who wasn’t as careful as you thought.
Some of you took a risk fully awake.
You’re still human.
You’re still fuckable.
You’re still worthy of love, respect, and pleasure.
This isn’t about purity.
It’s about odds.
There’s one more layer to this nobody really glamorizes: telling people the truth.
If you know you’re living with something — HSV, HIV, HPV, anything that could touch someone else’s body or blood or future — that information belongs in the conversation at the start. Not because you’re dirty. Not because you’re dangerous. But because real consent isn’t just “yes” to what you want to do; it’s “yes” from someone who knows what they’re saying yes to.
And if they hear you, take a breath, and decide they don’t want to have sex with you because of it? That doesn’t make them a monster and it doesn’t make you unworthy. It just means their risk tolerance, their health, their history is built different. You still deserve pleasure and love and a full life; you just don’t get to trade someone else’s safety for a night where you pretended nothing was real.
And if you’re reading this with more letters on your lab report than you ever wanted — that still doesn’t make you untouchable. My attraction dial doesn’t slam to “off” the second someone discloses; it just means the part of my brain that likes risk management wakes up and starts doing math.
You’re still a person I might want to touch. The diagnosis just tells me how.
If you want a free, low-budget sex-ed trick that works better than those grainy Health-class slides?
Pick any STI.
Now imagine you’ve just been told you have it.
Really imagine it:
- telling the person you’re seeing now
- telling the next one
- explaining it to someone you actually like
- watching them go quiet
- waiting to see if they stay
Sit with that for a second.
Not to scare you out of sex.
Just so when you say yes to something risky, you’re saying yes to that version of the story too — not just where the world narrows down to the pleasures of the flesh.
Safe sex isn’t “never do anything risky.”
Safe sex is risk management.
Some boring, unsexy examples:
- getting tested regularly before someone has to ask
- asking them when they were last tested — and actually listening
- using condoms, dental dams, and whatever barriers keep fluids where they’re supposed to stay
- getting off on the build, not just the penetration
- knowing when your mental health is too wrecked for your judgment to be trusted anywhere near another naked body
I don’t do all of these perfectly, all the time. But the older I get, the more I hate giving the dice free rolls with my body.
You don’t have to be a saint.
You don’t have to be monogamous.
You don’t have to be vanilla.
You just have to want your future more than you want the moment where you say,
“Fuck it, let’s go.”
Porn gets dragged a lot, but let’s be brutally honest:
Porn has probably saved more lives than it’s ruined.
Masturbating to strangers is safer than being inside them.
Just you, your hand, your toys, your screen, your mess.
Sex with yourself or with someone on the other end of a camera?
That’s harm reduction.
Is it the same as the real thing?
No. Not even close.
But it’s a hell of a lot safer than turning your body into a series of medical surprises.
There’s another angle people don’t like to talk about:
Pregnancy.
You can be the careful one.
You can be the one who asked the questions.
You can still end up staring at a plus sign that does not mean good vibes in that moment.
And then there’s the aftermath:
- court
- co-parenting with someone you barely like
- child support in a country that doesn’t care what your mental health looks like
- a kid who didn’t ask to be your consequence
Or you’re the one carrying it, doing the math on your life and everyone’s opinion, while the person who helped you make it gets to decide how “involved” they feel like being.
And yeah, sometimes it’s lopsided in the other direction:
Two adults hit the “yes” button in the dark; sometime later, one of them has a legal bill and a moral verdict with their name on it for the next 18+ years. That’s its own kind of brutality.
Again — not a morality play.
Just odds.
Here’s what I’d like, if you end up taking anything from this:
- I want you to feel all the way alive in your body.
- I want you to have the kind of orgasms that make you feel unfathomably blissful.
- I want you to wake up next week and next year and in ten years without needing a pill schedule to stay alive, or a lawyer to stay solvent, or a therapist to glue you back together from one night you weren’t ready for.
The safest sex is always:
- abstinence
- masturbation
- online-only stuff
- kink that never crosses the skin barrier
Do whatever you’re going to do — just don’t do it so blind you forget you’ve only got one body to burn through in this lifetime.
I’ll say this plainly:
- condoms don’t make you less dominant
- asking for test results doesn’t make you less desirable
- taking a step back when your brain is screaming for a fix doesn’t make you weak
It makes you someone who plans to survive their own story.
Because the fantasy is:
“We fucked, it was perfect, nothing bad will ever happen.”
The reality is:
“We fucked, it was hot, and I still had a plan for my own life afterwards.”
If someone reading this has already taken a hit they can’t undo?
You’re not dirty.
You’re not broken.
You’re not banned from love.
You’re just someone with more information than you had before.
Use it.
Companion track: “Positive” – Spearhead
Aftercare (The Comedown)
If this one lit up your fear-brain — “positive,” consequences, the ugly little fuck it impulse — that’s not you being fragile. It’s your system recognizing what the piece is actually about: desire is real, and denial gets expensive.
This isn’t a purity speech, and it’s not a dunk on anyone living with a diagnosis or carrying a scare. It’s a reminder that grown-up consent includes information: what you know, what you don’t, and what you’re asking someone else’s body to agree to — without tricks, omissions, or post-facto explanations.
So let the landing be simple and clean: no spirals, no shame rituals, no turning one night into a life sentence in your head. You’re allowed to want what you want, and you’re allowed to set rules that keep Future You intact. Whatever you did before, you still get to choose what happens next — with eyes open, and with your dignity still in your hands.
Cycle II – Coming of Age (The Hidden Life) · 07 (v1.00)
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