Curate It For Me, Daddy
Curate It For Me, Daddy
Written by Gavin Miller
Photographed by Olivia Flanz
The seemingly straightforward title of “songs i wanna get fucked to” is more layered than one may expect. Trinna, the playlist’s creator, says in the description that the playlist has a “‘please be gentle when you’re ripping me apart’ kinda vibe.” At 13 hours and 34 minutes, the playlist’s bold length challenges the selectivity of its creator. However, I trust Trinna’s judgment on every pick; each one feels delicately curated.
What is strange isn’t the playlist itself, but the sheer amount of followers it has garnered. Spotify is not an app often defined by followers and playlist saves, but Trinna’s playlist has amassed 141,615 saves.
Though, “songs i wanna get fucked to” is far from the only playlist to garner mass success in the realm of public, curated sex playlists. There’s the popular (but rather plain) “Bedroom Playlist 2025 🔥,” the sensual “Dirty Bedroom Songs,” and Spotify’s very own steamy playlist “Silk Sheets.” At the time of writing, “Silk Sheets” has 2,415,108 saves. With only 100 songs, Spotify’s playlist appears brief when compared to Trinna’s broad musical explorations.
This all may sound like a needless exploration into something benign. After all, sex is personal, and if one doesn’t let someone else directly curate their music, won’t curated algorithms remain? If someone wants to shuffle their own playlists, algorithms work to sustain the listeners' previously established tastes, while reasserting tunes matching playlist titles (Wong). Even if “songs i wanna get fucked to” is shuffled, 141,615 listeners may be indulging in sex curated not just by Trinna, but by Spotify.
The solution to corporations’ creeping dictatorship into the bedroom is seeing sex, romance, and life, as play. Play theory posits that play—an action unfolding “spontaneously (but not randomly)”—is pleasurable because anticipation is disrupted by a surprise discovery within the act (Eberle 229-230, Markowitz). Play theorists' term for the ambiguous goal of any activity in play—“peak performance”—isn’t known, nor imagined (223). Peak performance is continuously discovered, leading to endless angles to approach the potential pleasures of play. Though, these different angles do not necessitate that sex must shock, nor be completely random. What they instead point toward is a startling reality: That curation, the fantasy of sex resigned to a saved, premade playlist, has become an overbearing leash for normalizing consumerism in intimate corners of one’s world. The corporate drive for users to share sex playlists stands as another clear marker of overcuration in private circles of play.
If play must begin with a “purposeless” act—something done for the sole purpose of doing it, that doesn’t mean a romantic gesture or shared romantic activity can’t have a direct recipient (Eberle 215). Instead, it directs that, for personal pleasure’s sake, the goal of any gesture should be the act in and of itself. There should be no expected outcome. By overplanning, curating, and crafting one’s gestures, an expected outcome is generated, which limits the initial pleasure of surprise when the action is eventually taken. If I want to give someone flowers, I go, get flowers, and think of my loved one as I perform the journey. However, going to get flowers because I believe giving flowers is the expectation of a boyfriend, limits both me and my girlfriend’s pleasure upon receiving the flowers. My expectation of her reaction—built through consuming online content of many women receiving gifts—disrupts the “thread of delight” when performing the action itself (231).
When one has sex to a premade sex playlist, the pleasure of the fantasized sex when creating the playlist limits future discovery. This limitation happens for the same reason mass pornography consumption alters sex: The pleasurable anticipation of later sex interrupt the potential for spontaneous playfulness during the act. No one is really there. Instead, two fantasized objects are reflecting their past desires in one another to a soundtrack created with the present moment in mind.
The sex one could have, the romance one deserves, the relationships one should pursue; each can be found online, curated for consumers. Though, what the online consumer innocently observes is not true; it is a fantasy that can never be actualized. The consumer is always set up to be let down, because online surfing, while playful, is simulated. Real play includes a crucial act of “discovery,” arising from the aforementioned “continuous thread of delight during play” (231). The unnecessary boundaries—advertising, capital, data retention, reliability—of a mass-tested algorithm limit discovery. Both the sex playlist and the landfill of online content, created to manufacture sensuality when necessary, numb the potential for genuine surprise.
The machine expands beyond sex and romance. The curated sex playlist, the curated feed, the curated work life, the curated book recommendation, the curated home design: These all allow other sources (algorithms, content creators, etc.) to pick rules for one so that they may be continuously surprised by the fantasy of their potential performance. It never comes. Once the action is taken, one is obedient to the imagined result, not their whims.
There are levels to the sway of corporations one allows in their life. It peaks with a brand-sponsored sex playlist. A less curated (but curated nonetheless) option would be to create one’s own playlist. Still, those streams are being used to recommend similar songs to your account, and build other’s sex playlists through recommendations (Wong). One’s own sex playlist is an amalgamation of Spotify’s perceived perfect sex playlist, based on countless prior examples. True spontaneity in romance becomes a seemingly impossible feat under digitized dictators.
But there are steps to take against their reign. One always has the potential to limit the content they consume and interact with. In limiting curation and expectations while experimenting when possible, the world ground for play (and pleasure) multiplies.
No one’s lifestyle should be dictated; everyone should be reminded of how free they can be. One never knows the limits of pleasure until they surpass it, and that passage is achieved through the most pleasurable possible form of spontaneity: play.
You log on to your curated feed where Instagram suggests the New York Times for your center-left American viewpoint, but you like it because their yearly book recommendations strike your fancy, especially the curated list by the fifth author, whose taste is selected by the Times for its mass appeal, and so you save the post containing the article in one of your many Instagram lists that you never return to, all the while imagining the sex you’ll have with your lover tonight—the sex that matches all the content that you watch—to the beautiful tune of “songs i want to get fucked to.” Finally, maximum pleasure.