F*ckonomics 01: Desire and the Gauntlet of Dependable Fucks

With desire, you never dictate, you negotiate.

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There are some people who fit neatly into your Thanos gauntlet of dependable fucks. 

Everyone has one, a star league of casual and romantic sexual partners with whom they have undeniable chemistry and feel adventurous enough to explore their kinks and curiosities. The first ones you stumble on through pure beginner’s luck. But once you get a taste for your brand of fuckee, those peculiar notes arranged for maximal erogenous arousal, you become a connoisseur, able to tell if someone is that specific vintage that you like from clues as subtle as the way they stand in an IG photo. 

The thrill of a dependable fuck is in the randomness of how they are distributed and the dedication needed to find and convince them to join your harem. You spend time tracking them, following the trail of clues they leave online and offline until you find a point of entry, that hard to shake trait that ties every stage of your dependable fuck spec to their most vestigial version of their desire. You resonate with the vestigial self, and understand the inquisitiveness that made them discover desire in the first place. You know it because you didn’t have to seduce your first dependable fuck, that first dance was an organic courtship. 

To get this version of them to notice you, you must first study the armament of quirks and idiosyncrasies that they have scavenged over the years to protect themselves from the people who want to exploit their innocence and survive the spaces they must now inhabit and disarm it. Depending on how accomplished in subterfuge they are, this might take one evening of DM’s or years of careful planning before you find the thing you seek, a point of vulnerability. 

Seasoned connoisseurs know that vulnerability is masked in many ways; disdain, curiosity, haughtiness, sarcasm. When the nobles laugh at a peasant on the street, it is because he/she has done something that is artificially forbidden to them and beneath the derision is envy, riding on a wave of unmet desire. Connoisseurs know the thing to actually fear is indifference, expressed as a blocked number, or the timestamp of a read and unanswered message, mocking you as the hours accumulate. The trick is to hold their interest, no matter how it manifests until you see your opening.

Once you find that point of vulnerability, the thing that tugs at that umbilical cord for them and exposes it to light, it becomes a path through their defences to that concealed vestigial self. The tone of your interactions shift, earnestness replacing the chintzy jadedness that is their front to the world. You eventually lure them to your lair and court them with that mind-numbing fuck that temporarily neutralises the moral code that makes you repellent to the heightened version of your spec. Each response to this climax is unique, a direct manifestation of the irreplicable cocktail of experiences that shape a person’s sexual instincts. 

Amassing a gauntlet that powerful isn’t easy, except for a few extra lucky people who find their dependable fucks as a series of early lucky accidents and close shop. For the rest of the sexually active population, building your gauntlet becomes a quest that can sometimes stretch torturously into your late 70’s. Your palate becomes acclimatised and the random fuck doesnt really excite anymore, you begin to seek out rarer, more exotic flavour profiles to elicit a genuine reaction out of you.

The elevated version of your dependable fuck is usually in a different social bracket, higher or lower, depending on whether your palate leans toward more cultured versions of your spec or more dangerous. Culture breeds a sense of sophistication and ritual that you come to enjoy. Danger is defined by chance and chaos, unpredictability that heightens each encounter. 

With an elevated version of your dependable fuck, you get preparation, silken sheets, a candle burning in a corner, mood lighting and imported coffee. With a dangerous version, you get dingy hotels, covert exchanges of money and occasional glimpses into dystopia. Mood altering substances are usually part of the equation on either side of the track, but one comes with detailed instructions and elaborate setups and aftercare routines, the other comes with the trepidation of discovering what kind of high you get after you’ve had your batch. 

You can never tell how effective your seduction has been, or how long you have to enjoy this tamed version of them till their moral code overrides their interest in you. You can partially tame some into mutually understood domesticity, or form a transactional relationship with others, but you are ultimately a distraction to them. To the cultured, your presence is a cognitive dissonance that they tolerate in doses. To the dangerous, you are a shiny tourist exploring their dystopia, wilfully ignorant to how much you stand out and how dangerous that can be in certain spaces. When you aren't distracting them, they are levelling up or digging down. It is after all that momentum that attracts you to them in the first place, the musk of haughtiness or depravity that acts as fuel, igniting dopamine and serotonin, propelling them to excellence in everything they do by submitting themselves to new experiences, understudying its masters and then surpassing them. 

The allure of a ratchet dependable fuck, once you have a few close shaves under your belt, is its endless potential to generate a thrill equivalent to daredevil sports. You temporarily abandon the boring safety of your ordinary life to orchestrate encounters that skate the edge of ruin, invigorated by the rush of walking the tightrope of amorality with conquests whose curiosity has been hardened by rough living into opportunistic cunning and leaving unscathed. 

The ratchet dependable fuck’s allegiance is overwhelmingly to self, and any external considerations are only made because they see obvious benefits to acquiescence or undesirable repercussions for rejection. These encounters happen because your ratchet dependable fuck is intrigued by your audacity and you are aroused by their defiance. Whoever takes the bait first is then pulled towards into a dalliance that either leads to orgasm or betrayal. The thrill for you is modulated by matching their cunning or demonstrating retributive power to dissuade them from attempting harm.

With stakes that dire, the wins are euphoric and the losses, emotionally and socially debilitating. The pursuer and the ratchet dependable fuck become co-dependent enablers, mutually avoiding the impending ruin by forgoing restraint and powering through encounter after encounter, vying recklessly to be the one to score the hit. You vacillate between impulse and strategy until one person falters. Respect is the currency bartered when you eventually bed your ratchet fuck; you earn respect and the right to compel them to suppress their instinct to prioritise self and centre your own pleasure. You lose respect and forfeit the sovereignty of your space, assets and in rare cases, your body and identity. 

As with all good sports, a win is only acknowledged when play is level. Any miscalculation tilts power heavily in one direction, elevating the other person who gains leverage out of the range of instant repercussions. Emboldened by this leverage, the pursuer abuses privilege or the pursued weaponises cunning or force. Undue advantage, whether incidental or orchestrated is rectified with a repercussive handicap. The pursuer who abuses power earns the stigma of non-consensual deviance and the ratchet dependable fuck who betrays the terms of engagement earns the stigma of criminality. 

Irrespective of role, stigma widens the spectre of anecdotes and evidence that outs the individual as a ‘risk’. It is this fear of stigma that repels the risk-averse and deters sexual neophytes looking to escape into fantasies from indulging their desires. With a big enough spectre, the individual becomes defined by their stigmas and their choices and actions are stripped of nuance. A big enough stigma and you start to attract a very dangerous club, composed of obsessive fanatics incapable of ‘vanilla’ intimacy and deviants with worse stigmas and less scruples. 

The appeal of the elevated fuck is entirely different. They are content with their station, fulfilled in other aspects of their lives and can insulate themselves from the contradictions of being classed and privileged. Their mild disinterest with conspicuous consumption or social capital is fascinating, as is their feral approach to sating desire. You want them because conquest is less about seduction and more about conversion. 

Cultured dependable fucks are worldly and idiosyncratic and as such, their validation of your ideas, intelligence, and prowess is a rare denominated measure of worth, universally bankable with diverse demographics of potential partners. This validation feels like a conmensurate bargain for the persistent anxiety that one day your glamour will fail and the transgression of fucking below their station will no longer excite them. 

One doesn’t simply seduce an elevated dependable fuck, you radicalise them. While the ratchet dependable fuck is well versed in the amorality of urban dating because it is essential to their survival, the elevated dependable fuck needs to be fervently evangelised about the restrictions of privilege and the pleasure that awaits outside of the informal but strictly enforced constitution that governs intimacy and sex. Evangelised instead of educated, because the very attraction between you and your elevated fuck is political and unfairly weighted against the person who has divested their protections if things go wrong. Courting them requires some narrative spin that frames your connection as exempt from the exclusionary politics of class that is an omnipresent influence in their lives.

Conversion means even if your cultured dependable fuck doesn’t give up class solidarity or reject its privileges, they become convinced of the sacrosanctity of their connection to you and defend its continued existence, and by extension the relationship in whatever form it manifests. In return you offer yourself as an outlet for their rebellions, an escape where they are free to rediscover aspects of their desires that were otherwise forbidden. 

WHAT TO DO WITH A GAUNTLET?

A good gauntlet of dependable fucks reminds us that socialisation, conditioning and etiquette are arbitrary rules, imposed to bring some kind of order to unpredictability of desire. Desire is ungovernable, as is attraction. We cannot dictate, we can only negotiate. 

Dependable fucks are on the surface about compatibility, but they hint to a deeper and less acknowledged need; companionship. Desire is a powerful lens through which we see others and have ourselves mirrored back because it allows for a certain kind of vulnerability and affirmation, permission to be a version of ourselves that is primal and too intense for polite society.

But vulnerability is scary when all you are used to is control. Some people are so hyper-focused on the addictive nature of sexual conquest that they cannot contemplate the freedom of unrestrained vulnerability. Others are so disillusioned by the unpredictability of their desires that they abstain completely from any kind of experimentation. The rest of us are somewhere in between, torn between duty and desire, occasionally finding escape in the dependable fuck. 

It is incredibly difficult to remain in the realm of conquest with with your spec of dependable fuck. The longer you nurture that connection, the more you become infatuated with the promise of long term companionship, a possibility that exists just shy of your present circumstances. You experience what it is like to be temporarily freed of the strain that juggling societal expectations puts on your psyche. It is reminiscent of the weightlessness of a good high and how it can make psychoactive alterations to your consciousness.

This infatuation takes the focus away from the fleeting thrills of conquest and narrows it down to a simple task; whittling away the armour of responsibility that prevents you from ignoring all common sense and merging your otherwise separate lives. 

As we discover ourselves through the pursuit of our desire, we come to realise that attraction is a convergence that allows us to fall into rhythm with the object of our desire. The scale of our sample pool of dependable fucks allows for wild aberrations in attraction that we broadly categorise as the spectrum of sexuality. The longer we choose to indulge our desire, the more otherwise impossible scenarios we encounter. 

Falling into rhythm with someone of the same sex is homosexuality, falling into rhythm with men and women at varying intersections is bisexuality. Pansexuality is having such one of those even rarer intersections where every variation of sexual attraction converges into a super highway of attraction. Because of how often the pansexual sees similar traits in people who have vastly different presentations and identities, they have a better grasp of the randomness of the simulation and are less marvelled or inversely horrified by its unpredictability. Some pansexuals come to this realisation later because the wild draws come later in their lives, others have this realisation bundled with adolescence and as such do not have to work as hard to unlearn societally imposed restrictions. The trans person straddles two converged paths, where the dominant trait of the path they are on is in dissonance with the vessel they inhabit. Dysphoria is the unease of being assessed purely on presentation instead of identity and forced by circumstances not your making to constantly negotiate your existence with others.

Self love is finding a rhythm that works for you alone, carefully thought-out, with enforced breaks to refresh and recharge for the olympic task ahead. Romantic love, or a version of it, is what happens when you find a dependable fuck on your level. It is falling into a rhythm with someone who straddles that sliver between culture and danger. Someone on your wavelength. 

With someone on your level, cultured is not shrouded or out of touch, it is contemporary and a little irreverent. Dangerous is thrilling but controlled, like getting into a fist fight as an adult with the street kid you played with as a kid. There is the familiarity but they have learned some tricks, as have you. Beyond the sex, there is mutual discovery of the parallel life paths that your present choices require you to forfeit, a shared context of the zeitgeist that has informed your views on love and fulfilment. You feel like you could keep pace with them, that no matter how far your paths deviate, you could look out and find each other on the horizon and course correct towards them. And thats what keep you together and your level appropriate dependable fuck invested, satisfactory doses of realised potential.

The arena for our lifelong chase for happiness is massive, but so are we. No one is promised a smooth ride, not with the hormones that wrest control of our bodies, forcing us towards certain choices. So, make the most of your adventures in fucking till you find the one who can either keep up or inspires you to slow down. 

As an extra bonus. The sex sensei herself, HausaChocolate, has graciously featured me on her podcast Spit Or Swallow a couple of times. check out the episodes where I guest featured and talked about Dependable Fucks, How music is integral to good sex and the mechanics of dickmatisation