Deedee Redletter
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deedee-redletter.bsky.social
Deedee Redletter
@deedee-redletter.bsky.social
8 followers 12 following 7 posts
I write "Sex in the Future" on OnlySky. I hold degrees in philosophy and information science. My special interest has been human sexuality since I was three years old.
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deedee-redletter.bsky.social
New "Sex in the Future" on OnlySky!
onlys.ky/drive-dispar...
#sexInTheFuture
Site header: OnlySky Article title: "Depathologizing difference: Drive disparity" Tagline: "We'll all have more happiness and fulfillment when we can recognize individual differences in sex drive." Byline: Deedee Redletter Site header: OnlySky Excerpt: Sex in the future will become more varied for more people, as increasing negotiability (both on apps and IRL) prompts self-discovery and exploration in the populace at large, leading to a renaissance of societal and personal sexual self-acceptance. I've mentioned before that I'm non-disordered hypersexual, which means that I have an enormously high sex drive but I'm also in complete control of it. I worried for years that if I ever satisfied my drive, I would become despondent and isolated. I worried I would try to use sex to fill a hole, and wind up sick of sex with nothing but a bigger and emptier hole to show for it. (I am exercising positively Australian levels of pun control here.) Section header: "A sex analogy from Doritos" Excerpt: Like continuing to eat Doritos after you've stopped "really tasting" them, continuing to fuck after the point of satisfaction genuinely is empty, unfulfilling, and unhealthy. At a certain point, it can even meet psychological criteria for compulsive, obsessive, or otherwise maladaptive/disordered behavior. When this happens, it's called "hypersexuality disorder," and because we almost never talk about non-disordered hypersexuality, we usually just call it "hypersexuality." This unfortunately leads to the impression the disordered hypersexuality is the only kind. I've been professionally evaluated for this, and it's not an obsession, fixation, addiction, or compulsion. I just like to fuck a lot, and I'm completely in charge of my drive at all times. Site header: OnlySky Excerpt: That's future I think is worth fighting for. Worth building. Worth sticking around to see. Satisfying my drive helps me care about the future, because I'm not distracted by misery in the present. And I want to be clear here: it's not "lots of sex" that I credit with this positive change in my life. It's the right amount of sex for me. I'm not saying sex is a panacea; I'm saying that having one's drive satisfied is beneficial, and not having that is a problem.
October 18, 2025 at 8:27 PM
deedee-redletter.bsky.social
New "Sex in the Future" on OnlySky!
onlys.ky/the-roaring-...
#sexInTheFuture
OnlySky header above a black and white photo of a 1920s drag ball at Webster Hall, descriptively captioned as such. Article title: "Odds and ends: The roaring twenty-twenties". Tagline: We're repeating historical patterns from a hundred years ago, in more ways than one. Byline: Deedee Redletter, 29 Sep 2025 Section header: "Why fascists are always incompetent" Excerpt: When systems make a positive difference in our lives, we tend to tolerate them, and the occasional bad actor usually isn't that big of a deal. But it's a horse of a different color when your federal government is going through a technofascist takeover. And these guys are so hilariously incompetent, they've been caught with their pants down again and again: using polls on privately-owned social media to claim popular approval when the real thing is not in evidence, having no contextual knowledge to understand the things they're shutting down, and constantly shooting themselves in the foot (when they're not aiming for the neck, anyway). Section header: "Stochastic radicalization" Excerpt: The ineradicable proliferation of internet and hacker culture will always be a decentralized thorn in the side of any technofascist regime, Shadowrun-style, and the inherently subversive nature of resisting systemic control makes it sexy. One thing that we pretty much always see about gritty underdog rebels is that they tend to party hard. This is a justified trope, a case of art imitating life, because the emotional release of hard partying both boosts morale and protects it by reducing stress. Excerpt: Put all these factors together, and it becomes clear that any fascist regime that tries to exercise control through systems, will also create popular resistance to those systems as a necessary byproduct of the very action those systems rely on. You can read stories or listen to podcasts about heroic resistance to the Nazis and other totalitarians, and many of these histories start the same way: an ordinary person got sick of the regime’s nonsense and decided to make an opportunity to do something about it. This is something that “just happens” whenever fascists do their thing.
October 3, 2025 at 9:20 PM
deedee-redletter.bsky.social
New "Sex in the Future" on OnlySky!
onlys.ky/ancient-gree...
#sexInTheFuture
OnlySky letterhead above a photograph of the Parthenon (probably?). Title: "Odds and ends: Ancient Greece and sexual identities." Tagline: "The ancients thought of sexual behavior as a phase of life, not an immutable identity. We can learn from that idea." Excerpt: "The Greek male lifestyle was necessitated by the combination of respectable female scarcity and phallocentric culture, telling men that the true and proper way for them to be men is to act on their 'overpowering urges' (ever hear of confabulation?), while simultaneously gatekeeping socially appropriate partners behind cultural expectations and structures all their own. Our lives too are constrained and directed in large part by myriad cultural forces, and as we navigate this complex terrain, we will often work out our issues in bed." Excerpt: "I think most people, most of the time, really do feel happy in a traditional marriage, living socially approved lifestyle, and following the culturally preferred life-plan. Traditions become traditional for a reason: on some level, at some time, /they work./ "But what about the rest of us? Should we be forced into that life-plan, even if it doesn't make us happy like it does the rest? And the author of this half-remembered article crystallized the central idea, that paternalistically /forcing/ people to do what will /probably/ make them happy is actually totalitarian and evil, when she wrote words that seared into my brain forever: 'Feminism was never about happiness. It's about /choice'."/ Excerpt: "The question of whether we can have all this without the strictures and abuses of capitalism is a story for another time. But the point is, to some degree, freedom of choice and lifestyle is /an inevitable byproduct/ of an industrialized capitalist information economy. You can't have 24/7 gas stations without people adapting to overnight hours, and partying accordingly. "So as this hypervaried economy continues evolving, so will our choices and our lifestyles. We may never have such coherent lock-step life phases again as the Greeks of antiquity had, but we can still make our own meaning out of whatever we have available, and we can find community with those who are in phase with us, so to speak. It’s not newfangled at all, this is no 'twentieth-century decadence gone mad' as the moralists insist. Depending on how you count and where you look, it’s as old as civilization itself."
September 19, 2025 at 10:06 PM
deedee-redletter.bsky.social
New "Sex in the Future" up on OnlySky!
onlys.ky/the-amish-re...
Article screenshot with the title, "Odds and ends: The Amish response to technocentrism"; subtitle, "We could all take a lesson from the Amish approach to technology"; and thesis, "sex in the future will need to incorporate overt elements of mindfulness and meaning-making, and this will resemble the Amish approach to technology in their culture." Body excerpt: "in this way, language itself is also a tool, and it intimately shapes our thoughts. George Orwell understood this one he wrote about Newspeak in '1984': it was designed intentionally as a constrained language, for the function of constraining thought. Words both shape and constrain language, they channel them in a robust way, and figures a speech entrench those channels, reinforcing thought-patterns. "And so, the way we use language to talk about technology constitutes us participating in the programming of our own thoughts about technology." Screenshot of embedded video with a transcript of Microsoft's 2014 Superbowl commercial, entitled "Empowerment." Body text reads: "This was clearly intended as a wholesome bit of feel-good inspiration, it's literally titled 'Empowerment' - but through the lens of sociotechnical systems, we see an unapologetically technocentrist viewpoint on display. Technology does these things to us and for us, because we cannot do them ourselves. By eliding the fact that we humans use technology to do these things, and linguistically placing the agency within the technology itself, we are placing this transformative power firmly in the hands of the Tech Bro priesthood, which then hands down blessings to us lowly mortals." Another excerpt. Section heading reads: "I promise this applies to sex." Body text reads: "This kind of mindful self-restraint is sorely needed in our hyper-individualist, socially atomized, Late-Stage Capitalist culture. I've been talking about ethical sluttery, about queering the culture, about re-writing sex scripts, and about polyamorous breeders being a vector for queer acceptance writ large. "But in all this, I haven't addressed the 'mindless pleasure and meaningless sex' angle. This has..." (excerpt ends)
September 13, 2025 at 7:30 PM
deedee-redletter.bsky.social
Slid it in under the door, but it still counts! New "Sex in the Future" on OnlySky (art coming later):
onlys.ky/the-glass-is...
Excerpt: The glass is half-full, and AI can't draw it. We need to use technology mindfully to enhance our experiences without diminishing ourselves. Sex in the future can provide a much-needed respite from the capitalist mandate of "faster better more," although this will be complicated by capitalism's need to create market niches for exploitation, and tempting advances in AI will only complicate matters further. Schumacher echoes this point in distinguishing "tools," which enhance a person's labor power, from "machines" which do the work and relegate workers to technicians. The less we use tools and the more we use machines, the more work sucks, to drastically paraphrase. It can be a subtle and blurry difference, but ethics is hard. To drastically paraphrase Aristotle, "Anyone can fuck, that much is easy. But to fuck the right people, in the right way, at the right time, to the right extent, and for the right reasons - that is much harder."
August 29, 2025 at 11:39 PM
deedee-redletter.bsky.social
New "Sex in the Future" on OnlySky!
A hand-drawn pic of the "Tawdry 2000" computer, which looks suspiciously like the Tandy 2000 home PC but possessed by the spirit of Audrey II, waves a one-button mouse and a "Joculus Thrift" headset while saying, "Love me, Seymour," on its screen. An article snippet with the title, "AI chatbots are coming for you: The binge-and-purge reinforcement schedule." The teaser reads, "Are sex robots a safe outlet for unhealthy urges, or do they make the problem worse?" The article opens: "Sex in the future will see AI chatbots turning into automated phone sex lines and sex droids - but these bots will always be problematic and lacking, owing respectively to foibles in human psychology and limitations in the way the bots are made." An article snippet with the header, "Catharsis, or reinforcement loop?" The snippet reads: "Let's build the case up backwards. Research shows that venting anger is not effective as anger management (the so-called hydraulic theory of emotion popularized by Freud), because it essentially feeds and strengthens your anger muscles. Far from managing your anger, you become an angrier person. Acting on oppressive urges, likewise, feeds and strengthens oppressive attitudes, because we reinforce those attitudes by acting them out. As a popular aphorism has it, we become what we repeatedly do." An article snippet that reads, "The moral of the story: anyone who tells you they have a sex droid so they don't hurt real people - especially a suspiciously undersized one - is lying either to you or to themself. "This is binge-and-purge behavior, and it reinforces and emboldens the behavior as long as it goes unaddressed. Next time we'll leave the children behind and focus more on 'cognitive brittleness,' a consequence of having brains that run on associative connections instead of on pure rationality."
August 3, 2025 at 4:53 PM