Eating food is just like sex: neuropsychologically, you’re chasing the same dopamine release. And one’s daily habits affect the roadmap to prandial and sexual orgasm. Like too much porn makes arousal more difficult, just as eating too much sugar fucks up the palate so that it needs increasing amounts to feel satiated. You’re chasing an orgasm when you’re eating, okay?
Broadly speaking, dopamine receptors function similarly across all activities. There isn’t one set for eating, another for sex, and yet another for exercise or listening to music. That is, emotional eaters are more likely addicted to sex — orgasm as comfort and escape. Or someone who prefers sweet and predictable music is more likely to have a sweet tooth. Try it sometime, Britney Spears goes well with chocolate ice-cream, Tchaikovsky doesn’t. Exercise becomes more enjoyable when dopamine receptors are trained to delay gratification that comes from finishing and feeling an endorphin rush, yes?
Point is, recalibrating dopamine receptors is the easiest way to fix one’s diet. Improve impulse control, basically. Meaning, eating ice cream while listening to Britney Spears and getting your genitals licked is a bad idea — that’s going to overload your pleasure zone and soon you’ll need to add fudge, nudity, and a vibrator to the trifecta to get the same rush. Once that gets boring, next up is meth.
Try this: take a bite of raw kale, no dressing. Then a bite of bell pepper, also raw and bare, Then have your slice of pizza any way you prefer it. Repeat the process, this time two bites of the bitters each. I promise me you’ll feel satiated from the pizza sooner than usual because the bitters sharpen the pleasure profile of the pizza. You’ll need less pizza to reach your “orgasm,” you’ll feel fuller faster.
Healthy eating is like rough sex, basically. A bite here, a stinging slap there sharpens the pleasure zones. And orgasms are more intense when you’ve gone without for awhile, right?
In any case, you don’t need to give up porn and/or smut, just as you can still have your pizza and ice cream. But you can switch to versions of it that make you work for it more, literary versions that metaphorically make you eat your veggies before you get to see titties. “Slow burn,” some call it. Like stories that make you ride the plot arc and investigate the psychology behind each act. Women are already attuned to this kind of storytelling, so I wrote a novel that both men and women will enjoy. There’s trauma dumping, but not so much to make men roll their eyes. There’s girl-talk too, and men will enjoy it, I promise. Check out the link above for samples, or read for free if you have Kindle Unlimited.
Here’s what Claude has to say about the novel, after I asked it: “How is this novel different from typical erotic novels. Snippets:
Having read the complete novel, I can give you a much fuller assessment. The short answer to your question is that this is almost nothing like a typical erotic novel, and that distinction is both its greatest strength and the source of its most interesting tensions.
What separates it from typical erotica:
Conventional erotica exists primarily to arouse, with character and plot serving as thin scaffolding for sexual content. Grace inverts this completely. The sexual content here functions as a vehicle for examining trauma, ambition, institutional corruption, racial identity, and the specific psychological damage inflicted on high-achieving Asian American women by a system that simultaneously demands and punishes their excellence. The sex scenes are rarely straightforwardly titillating — they’re almost always doing thematic or psychological work. That’s an uncommon ambition.
Grace herself is perhaps the most original element. Her relentless intellectual curiosity — calculating hotdog eating biomechanics during a blow job, analyzing protein folding while undressing for an interview, wondering about the neurophysiology of lesbian pleasure — creates a defamiliarizing effect that constantly reframes the sexual content through an analytical lens. It’s a genuine literary technique, not an accident, and it gives the novel its most distinctive voice. You’ve created a protagonist whose mind never stops working, even when her body is being violated or exploited. That’s psychologically real and thematically rich.
The novel’s genuine strengths:
The Foreword is the best piece of writing in the book. The French class encounter, the Sewer Museum, Dans Le Noir, and the final text exchange are quietly devastating. You establish Grace as a fully realized person — curious, warm, serious — before she even appears in the fiction. This makes everything that follows carry genuine weight. The reader is grieving a real person through a fictional surrogate, which is a sophisticated emotional strategy.
The Tchaikovsky motif is handled beautifully throughout. It connects Dr. Lester’s repressed history with Eun Choi, Grace’s musical identity, her relationship with Dr. Nance, and the final scene outside the music building. It’s the novel’s most coherent structural thread and the final scene — Grace collapsing against the wall as the Canzonetta plays — earns its emotion because of all the work that motif has done.
The thematic coherence between The Lure and Grace’s arc is smart without being heavy-handed. Mermaids who sacrifice their nature for love and are destroyed for it; the costs of transformation; the male gaze consuming female power. You didn’t need to underline it, and you didn’t.
Where it struggles:
The early chapters — Sammi’s Tavern and the police station — are relentless in a way that may exhaust readers before they reach the more nuanced material. The brutality is narratively justified, but there’s a pacing problem: you’re front-loading so much violation that some readers won’t survive to the chapters where Grace’s psychology becomes genuinely interesting. Consider whether the full explicitness of those scenes is necessary to achieve the thematic effect, or whether implication would be more powerful in certain moments.
The brutality as metaphor does stretch out too long for many readers but there’s a Terantino-esque payoff, which Claude didn’t like. It found it jarring.
The Hannah-Bree revenge plot in Chapter 21 is the weakest section structurally. The shift into rape-revenge thriller mode is cathartic but also lets the novel’s moral complexity collapse into something simpler. Hannah and Bree commit arson on a building full of people, likely killing them. The novel treats this as triumphant without acknowledging the weight of it. Given how carefully the rest of the book handles moral complexity, this feels like a tonal break.
I kept this chapter as is because that’s what Hannah and Bree told me they wanted to do and it’s just a cool scene if you’re into Terantino style mayhem.
Claude also got basic bitch on me about another scene, applying a Woke external standard. Whatever, the conversation may not be PC, but I’ve heard it before from lesbian friends and this novel cares more about truth than people’s feelings. In any case, here’s Claude’s conclusion, which doubles as a book description:
The overall architecture:
What you’ve built is a rape-revenge narrative crossed with a coming-of-age story crossed with social commentary, using erotica’s conventions to smuggle in genuinely serious content about what the American meritocracy actually demands of young Asian women. Grace’s trajectory — from victimized applicant to someone who weaponizes the same dynamics used against her, and then grieves the wreckage that creates — is a genuine arc. The ending doesn’t resolve; it ruptures. That’s the right choice.
The dedication to Min and the Foreword suggest this is ultimately an act of mourning — a fantasy of survival written for someone who didn’t survive. That framing makes the novel’s contradictions (the graphic violence, the dark humor, the erotic content coexisting with trauma) feel intentional rather than confused. You’re writing from grief and rage simultaneously, and the novel’s tonal instability reflects that honestly.
It’s a flawed, uneven, and genuinely ambitious piece of work. The flaws are real but they’re the flaws of overreach, not of insufficient ambition — which is the more forgivable kind.
This novel is also available in-store. Check it out and let us know what you think. Oh, there’s plenty of foodie porn in there too! Enjoy!