quizzical pussy

Sex tips are an odd institution. They’re like body mass index or the census: not necessarily useful for individuals. They’re often more just rough indications of averages, helpful tools to know what to expect in the general population. But despite what I may have said in moments of anger, I’ve never had sex with average. No one’s tastes ever perfectly match all the sex tips you’ll find. Hell, not ever all the sex tips match up with one another. It’s confusing.

This is why when I write about sex I talk a lot about myself: what sex is to me, what I like, what I think and feel about it all. It isn’t my narcissism (okay, it could partly be my narcissism) so much as the fact that I can’t realistically say “guys like this” or “girls like this”. I often feel uneasy declaring “Laramy likes this” or “Edwin liked this” because how can I get a good enough grip on these things to be comfortable saying I know them to be true from my outside, insecure, biased-as-fuck perspective? I like “Laramy seems to like this” or “Edwin said he enjoyed that” better.

This doesn’t mean I’ll never write a “How to Succeed at Reverse Cowgirl Without Really Trying” manifesto, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to take myself seriously enough to pretend it’s going to be widely useful.

Which brings us to blowjobs. A specific thing about them, really. From time to time I’ll run across a list of oral sex tips or some guy’s account of what makes a blowjob great for him, and often you see the same things come up again and again: lots of saliva, using hands, engaging balls, stroking the perineum. These are all things that have usually enjoyed warm receptions and glowing approbation from my barely-random-at-all sample of the population (read: guys whose dicks I’ve had in my mouth). Often, though, I pause when I read what may be the least-sexual all-star highly agreed-upon oral sex tip ever: eye contact.

I have no problem kissing, fondling, or fucking with eyes open and clamped onto my partner’s. Eye contact can add to the experience. It’s intimate, but doesn’t have to be emotional; sometimes it’s just deliciously intense. But for some reason I feel completely weird about establishing much eye contact when I’m giving head. For a moment of “this is fun, isn’t it?” camaraderie? Sure! But eyes locked on his for a substantial portion of the fun? It seems awkward to me. I’m not saying it should; it just does. I hope it doesn’t make me a bad feminist. I hope it doesn’t make my oral skills too inferior.

Here’s how I see it: I enjoy giving blowjobs, and part of why I like them is because they’re so entirely about pleasing the guy I’m with. I get off on how I’m making him feel in addition to the sensory pleasures of actually performing fellatio. But the point is mostly that I’m focused on him. That’s what many guys appreciate about it (although I’ve heard rumors that it feels kind of good also).

This might be way too neurotic, but I feel like in that sense I should be almost invisible. Or at least unobtrusive. If I keep pulling his attention back to me I’m intruding on his blowjob, even though I’m the one giving it. My mission is to turn my lips, my tongue, my hands, my throat, my larynx, into a chimeral machine of pleasure. This is not the time to make it about me. It’s not even the time to make it about “us”. It’s about him and his cock.

Also, I wouldn’t want either of us to feel bound by this eyelock thing. Looking down at me might get tiresome when maybe he wants to close his eyes and enjoy, or at least stop straining his neck to look at me. And I’d rather concentrate on what I’m doing, frankly. I want to be able to choose position and trajectory based on things like comfort, pleasure, and accessibility, not visibility.

Eye contact personalizes oral sex, of course. It might be a huge turn-on for a guy, seeing the dilated pupils, the raw cocklust pulsing in the eyes of the face with the mouth that’s currently housing his penis. Maybe it makes blowjobs romantic and sweet to extremes they otherwise seldom reach. I don’t know. I’d feel presumptuous. I don’t want to decide how personalized a blowjob needs to be. Maybe he doesn’t like me all that much; maybe he’s closing his eyes and thinking of England and the last thing he wants is me looking up expectantly, all like “aren’t we sharing quite the moment!?”

Now, if a guy tips my chin up gently and instructs “Look at me,” the whole thing becomes insanely sexy and I will fucking lock eyes like it’s my prime directive in life (until such time as the blowjob ends, at which point I go back to my usual prime directive, which is [classified]). But otherwise, eye contact’s not even on my radar.

Sometimes when I didn’t want to do the things that Clifton Overmangle wanted me to (e.g. meet him for a quick blowjob when I was tired, let him give me hickeys, send him naked photos) he’d pull out the squirting card. “Well,” he’d say, “my intention to bring you pleasure overcomes my preference to not have you pee all over my sheets. You should be more giving and generous, more like me, and do whatever I want.” I can’t remember this rhetoric ever working, but it did make me feel self-conscious, so I guess no one won. Of course my solution that I’d tell him if I felt I was in danger of ejaculating and he could back off was completely missing the point, as he saw it. We should be making sacrifices for each other or something.

Two things:

1. IT’S NOT PEE!
2. This is not a good method of getting a chick to accommodate you in bed; it’s an excellent way of making sure she becomes determined never to ejaculate around you again.

I have a friend who squirted the first time she masturbated. She also freaked out, of course, because what the fuck just happened? When you’re not prepared for it, squirting/gushing/female ejaculation can be a slight shock.

I can safely say I had thousands of orgasms not realizing that there was such a thing in the world as a Skene’s gland. I was visiting my boyfriend Reginald in Los Angeles, and one afternoon he fingered me for what felt like hours, he rode through every orgasm as I bucked and bleated. I was in such a delirium of pleasure I fell off his futon, and he followed me down to the floor, his fingers still pounding and flickering, not missing a beat. He was concentrating mostly on the strange rough patch near the front on my vaginal wall, which I knew was the G-spot, although I didn’t know what was about to happen. I don’t know how long it took, but eventually something sprayed out of me in the middle of a searing climax. And I was absolutely mortified. I hadn’t even felt like I’d had to pee, but I was sure that somehow I’d just wet myself.

Reginald, who’d been researching a thing or two, looked very proud. “Do you know what just happened?” he quizzed me. I shook my head, miserable. My skin felt hot as the blood bloomed red in my cheeks. “You just had your first complete orgasm.”

Reginald was wrong about that. Squirting orgasms are definitely intense, but they’re just another type of orgasm. They’re not any more “real” or “complete” than a clitoral, vaginal, anal, or any other type of orgasm: believe me, I’ve had enough different kinds to know this. People can and do have favorites, but that doesn’t make those favorites any better or more orgasmy than any other type.

I don’t squirt with every orgasm, every time I have sex, or even every time someone stimulates my G-spot and clitoris together, which is normally how it ends up happening, although it can certainly result from attending to one or the other location with especially dogged resolve. Are the best orgasms always like majestic geysers? Not even always.

I think Reginald’s misapprehension about this, and any feminist distrust of squirting you might run into, is due to how damn analogous it is to male ejaculation. Sometimes a woman’s orgasm (not mine, but a woman’s) is a maddeningly subtle thing. A partner– hell, even the woman herself– can be left wondering if she actually got off. Guys are easier: semen comes out. Mystery solved. If women start doing that too, illumination! She definitely just came, and the wet spot just got a whole lot fucking wetter. Enjoy.

It’s messy. It can be inconvenient. It feels awesome. I’m not sure what’s in it for the person not impersonating a fountain. I guess it’s got to be the novelty and the extra emphatic proof of a job well done that accounts for the fact that very few guys have complained about it. Clifton was the exception, and I half think he griped about it only as a bargaining chip, considering that the first time it happened he was gleeful but a bit disappointed I hadn’t warned him so he could catch it in his mouth. Most guys are fascinated by it, and feel pretty cool when they pull it off.

Of course, I’m terrible about warning them. Squirting isn’t something that I expect or plan; it just happens sometimes. Plus, it happens more often during oral/digital sex than the actual penis-in-vagina playtime, so this is probably early in the saga of sexual exploration when “foreplay” takes longer, and I’m not totally comfortable yet talking about what fluids might come out of me. But I seldom account for the enthusiasm people can have for a new toy, and too often I’ve squirted with a new partner before I gave myself a chance to bring it up. This, as you might well imagine, is embarrassing. “It’s not pee…” I usually end up saying apologetically. I swear it isn’t.

I was born into an attractive family. My parents had about a million kids, and in the looks department they mostly range from “pretty cute” to “damn, girl!”. But I’ve always felt like a spectator in this particular sport. Early on, a family friend informed me that I was not the best looking of the litter, and that’s been reinforced in countless ways over the years. I’ve been described as “the smart one”, “the funny one”, and occasionally “the talented one”, which are honestly pretty awesome titles, maybe even preferable to just looking hot. But it still rankles that I was never, even if everyone else was knee-deep in an awkward phase, “the pretty one”.

I’ve always felt like I have to rely on my personality to attract people. I can (hopefully) get you to forget the bump in my nose or my too-round face by being charming and making you laugh. If I can rope you into a real conversation, I may have a chance at intriguing you, winning you over, and then maybe you’ll consider boning me. I do not feel confident that I can do this on looks alone. Without the personality factor, I’d probably still be waiting to go on my first date.

I’m not saying that everyone is going to like me for what’s inside: some people think I’m annoying, don’t find me funny, and wish I would shut up so much. But I have a fairly distinct personality that some people are drawn to, and I think that’s been responsible for whatever social and romantic success I’ve had.

Maybe that’s why I find humor, kindness, and intellect so central to what I find attractive in others. I actually find that these affect my evaluation of physical merits. This sort of thing probably happens to most people: you meet someone who seems sort of so-so at first glance, but as you get to know this person’s mind-blowingly cool personality, he seems to get better looking each time you see him. Or, conversely, your first impression of someone might be “Wow, she’s stunning,” but you learn that she’s hideous inside and it’s not just that you’re turned off by her personality, she actually seems to get uglier right before your eyes.

The latter is what happened with my first boyfriend, Reginald Sleeth. When we started seeing each other I thought he was beautiful. It wasn’t just me. I had a picture of him up in my dorm room at university, and girls would sometimes pass through, stare at it, and gush about how gorgeous he was. But by then he’d already flashed his true nature as controlling, abusive, and venomously angry down to his bones. Those girls could say what they wanted; I didn’t see it anymore. Sometimes I could barely even bring myself to touch him, he’d become so unattractive to me.

A less traumatic example occurred in the elevator at a recent Sci Fi convention I attended. Laramy and I stepped on from the twelfth floor, and we both noticed a chick with great tits and a cute face wearing a corset, flying cleavage like a banner from the back corner of the elevator. We both smiled appreciatively to each other; we generally check out the same women, and it’s wonderfully bonding. But within seconds she opened her mouth and started loudly complaining that no one was complimenting her boobs, and she wasn’t getting enough attention. Her aggressive griping continued through three stops on the way down and all the way to the first floor. By the time Laramy and I had reached the lobby we were completely irritated and turned off. She actually went from fetching to repulsive inside of five minutes.

So while looks matter, they’re not everything. I’d rather have someone interesting, witty, sweet, silly, and funny. Okay, and adorable. And I’ve had the good fortune and excellent taste to get more than my fair share of genuinely pretty people into bed. But sometimes adorable comes later, after all that other good stuff, and that can be pretty awesome too.

Sofia: I’m preorgasmic.

Jamie: Does that mean you’re about to have one?

-Shortbus

The word for a woman who has never gotten off used to be anorgasmic, which isn’t very optimistic. The term preorgasmic is much more hopeful, but it seems like it might be a little too much pressure: like the universe is crouched in breathless anticipation, waiting for you to climax at any minute. All the time. And if you can’t hack it, you’re disappointing yourself, the word, the universe… everyone. Maybe it’s just my imagination running away with me, but I think I’d actually prefer to have a more desolate term and just let my body surprise me if it ever got around to coming. But I’m not much of an expert on not coming.

Laramy and I watched a movie over the weekend about a female sex therapist/couples counselor who had never had an orgasm, and not for lack of trying. What followed was a journey into a debauched New York City sex-drenched subculture, much like Alice in Wonderland if the White Rabbit were a hot chick with many tattoos and the flower beds were dozens of strangers engaged in joyous orgies. This is a world I’d like to live in. At one point Laramy asked “Are there really sex clubs like this?” and I replied, “I have no idea, but we should definitely open one.”

But it was hard for me to relate to the protagonist’s problem. Sure, at one point I was preorgasmic too, but I had to be eight years old or so at the time. I know women who’ve never gotten off, or whose sexual response is tricky and elusive, but I’ve never had any good advice to give them. I’m the opposite. There is no mystery in how to make me come. Of course you need some skill to get me off just touching my arm or back, but if you’ve found my clitoris or are penetrating me with anything more comfortable than a cactus, I’m not going to walk away frustrated.

There were ten months or so a couple years ago, though, during which I lost my orgasm. I had no sex drive, no periods, and couldn’t get off no matter what. I was dating Edwin Pomble at the time. He’d told me early on in our adventures that he hadn’t really cared for sex until we started fucking, and a lot of the change was down to the fact that he never had to worry that I was enjoying myself. He could just relax and have fun.

My orgasms are hard to miss. My pelvic muscles can contract with enough force to eject any cock. I usually cease my mid-sex caterwauling and get suddenly quiet. I stop breathing for a moment (a terrible habit). I make funny, blissed-out faces. If it’s an especially crazy one, my eyes roll way back into my head, which is super sexy…I promise.

I’ve noticed that the ease of getting me off sometimes goes to people’s heads. It did Edwin’s. Although he started out ambivalent about sex and self-deprecating about his abilites, by the time we’d been together for a while he would trot out the “I know I’m really amazing at sex, but is that all I am to you? An incredible lay?” card during arguments.

But all that stopped for a while, and poor Edwin didn’t understand what was happening any better than I did. Although I think part of it was the fact I was unhappy in the relationship, it turned out that the larger factor was a medical thing. When I got on the right thyroid medication things improved and eventually went more or less back to normal. But while I had this problem, I had zero interest in sex (which just goes to show how much we owe to biology, seeing as one of my dominant personality traits shut off one day because of hormones) so I didn’t really miss my orgasms all that much. It was troubling, but not really very frustrating. For me. I’m sure it was frustrating for Edwin, poor thing.

When my thyroid levels were still iffy, but rising, I finally got off by masturbating while doing deep breathing exercises, which I still find makes my orgasms more intense (this is why holding your breath is a terrible habit, by the way). A couple weeks later I had Edwin jack off against my clitoris, kind of slapping it with his cock. I don’t know why, but I absolutely love that. Would these methods help anyone else? No idea!

So while I had this little taste of what it’s like to have an orgasm block, I’ve never had to wonder if I’ll ever be able to come. I knew from early on what I like and how my body reacts. I was always confident that my climax issues were temporary. I still don’t know what it’s like to be preorgasmic. I’m lucky.

In fact, I’m so easy I worry about it. Later in our weekend together I flashed my left nipple playfully at Laramy while we were cuddling in bed. Guys are to nipples as magpies are to shiny things, so of course he started teasing it with his fingers, tonguing it, gently sucking. I had three orgasms from this inside of five minutes.

“Does it get irritating how easy I am to get off?” I asked after a bit. I worry about this way more often than I bring it up. It’s particularly embarrassing when I’ve just had a blatant orgasm during a PG-13 second-date make-out, but it almost always makes me a little self-conscious.

“Why would that be irritating?” He seemed puzzled.

“I don’t know. Kind of like always having to play a video game on the easiest level. Like there’s no challenge to it or something.” I swear this makes sense in my head.

“That’s very silly. I never think, ‘Wow, this would be so much cooler if I had no idea how to get her off, or maybe if I had to apply the same super specific stimulation until my tongue was numb and my jaw ached and I gave up in despair and she was completely frustrated and unsatisfied.’ You don’t have to worry. I don’t think I’ll ever get sick of watching you come.”

…Which is good, because being hyperorgasmic is pretty fun for me.

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of male sex toys. I think they’re every bit as good an idea as their female counterparts, and those are canon in Quizzical Pussyland. I even want a Fleshlight of my own so I can fuck it with my Feeldoe. Is that meta or what?

I say I specifically want a Fleshlight because I’m a little wary of some of the other toys out there. Like with any partner, I have some standards for my sex toys. I’m not saying that my masturbation aids have to be charming, witty, and have pretty eyes. I’m saying that they need to not creep me right the fuck out.

Fleshlights are cute, with a range of neat little orifices and inner textures (lotus, twista, ultra tight, vortex…), many of which seem appealing. The coin-slot “stealth” orifice is the closest these things come to being creepy (I can’t help but think it’d be like fucking a Barbie piggy bank, if there were such a thing), unless you find the hilarious “Succu Dry” vampire-toothed mouth off-putting.

Another  masturbator that seems pretty cool is the Tenga Flip, which looks like a hyperbaric chamber for your cock, or possibly something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It might seem a little sexless and sterile for some people, but since I have a well-known robot fetish I’d have no trouble putting my equipment in this docking station. Hopefully the tech wouldn’t revolt and the ending wouldn’t be totally inscrutable.

There are other sleeves and masturbators that seem pretty great. But there are many, many toys for guys out there that seem like catastrophically bad ideas. They’re designed oddly, marketed awkwardly, rendered patently unattractive, or just seem weird somehow. I realize that a vulva or a mouth is more aesthetically complex than, say, a penis, and that might account for some of the problems I’ve seen. But let’s face it, it doesn’t explain away all of them. Let’s examine some of these issues a little more closely:

Terrible Marketing Copy

The Super Head Honcho Masturbator has the following quote in its description: “It’s as good as a blow-job. Women will be dancing in the streets.” You know what guys like to think about while they’re masturbating? How much chicks hate giving them blowjobs! If my boyfriend had one of these and we were about to have sex, I’d definitely just hand him his Super Head Honcho Masturbator and a bottle of lube and tell him, “Enjoy your foreplay! Let me know when you want to fuck. I’ll be on the couch playing Pokemon.”

…Except how I like putting cocks in my mouth and the Head Honcho doesn’t have anything to do with that. That quote is just reinforcing the “Hey, consumer, you can’t get a woman to blow you, so you’d better buy this!” stereotype that I already mentioned I hate. This also seems like a rather dim marketing strategy.

Hilarious Details

Some guys are turned on by a full bush. I’ve had zero real guys complain that I shave mine, but I had a phone sex client who would always treat me to a diatribe about how I was hurting my “poor little peach” and crippling my sexiness whenever I forgot his preference and told him my character was smooth. So there’s a market for pubic hair.

The Full Bush Vibrating Cyberskin Pussy isn’t just a clever name: it was clearly meant to cater to the bush-loving demographic. But I can’t help but think that something went wrong in the execution. Something about it seems a little… off. I don’t think that pubic hair grows the way they think it grows. I vote we rename this “The Swedish Cleft”.

…which brings us to…

Dealbreakingly Embarrassing Name

The design could be absolute genius, the orgasmic promise superb. Still, I just don’t see myself buying a Flip A Sister Over or an ATM (not referring to banking) masturbator. Where I come from we try to keep our masturbation devices classy, thank you very much.

Resembles Something Deeply Troubling

I may never learn why anyone would choose to give the Kinky Virgin Masturbator a scalloped detail around its gaping suggestion of a vulva, but I hope they realize that it gives the toy an eerie vagina dentata/hookworm flavor to it.

However, I don’t have time to worry about The Kinky Virgin. I’m too busy praying to Paul Verhoeven Almighty that the My Cocoa Stroker isn’t hiding under my bed. I can confidently state that this is NOT what pussies are supposed to look like. Why why why would anyone put a body part inside something that looks like the brain bug from Starship Troopers? I loathe the people who brought this abomination into the world and I hate everything they stand for.

WHAT?

The reviews for the UR3 Pocket Ass are really good, and maybe I’m missing something, but does the disembodied finger tugging open its “life-sized” anus add something positive to this toy, or is it just really, really funny?

Real Dolls are arguably kind of creepy, but their anime-inspired Boy Toy line is far creepier. “Hey, Dawg. I heard you like the uncanny valley, so I put your sex doll in the uncanny valley so you can be unsettled while you fuck fake women.”

And don’t even get me started on ROXXXY. Robots are keen, but I’m with Holly on this particular one. I wouldn’t touch this “companion” with a ten-foot arc welder.

In closing, dear god what IS this thing?

I dated Edwin Pomble for several years, but I never understood his odd prejudices. One in particular that galled me, upsets me to think about even now, was his awful double standard about toys.

Excepting necessary concessions to propriety, if I’m acquainted with (nevermind boning) someone for any length of time, I’ll probably start talking sex toys eventually. People like to talk about their hobbies. I talk about the ones I love, the ones I lust after, the hilarious ones, and the ones I want invented yesterday. And I’m never shy about the fact that if I were a dude I would gleefully and unashamedly use masturbation aids, because I think they’re a lovely idea for all sexes, genders, races, and creeds. Edwin was tolerant of this only to a point.

“It’s fine for girls to use vibrators or whatever, but it just seems weird for guys to use anything… it’s so pathetic,” he insisted one day.
“Why is using a Fleshlight or something any different from me using my jackrabbit to get off? They’re both just simulated versions of genitals.” I pounced. I don’t like this weird idea that a guy fucking plastic is any different from a girl fucking plastic. It grates against my sense of fair play.
“Well…” Edwin was a slow talker. With a hint of conflict my conversational rhythm lapses into a staccato gallop, so this harmless idiosyncrasy always piqued me. “…it’s just not the same…” Another pause.
“Why not?”
“It just… isn’t. It’s sad when a guy does it. It’s like he can’t get a girlfriend so he has to use a pretend vagina.”
“That’s ridiculous. Why should you or anyone else care what someone does all alone and in private? If it feels better than your hand it’s a great idea: simple as that. And maybe it feels twenty times better. Have you tried it?” I challenged, setting myself up for a very easy “don’t knock it ’til” rejoinder.
“Well… my ex once…bought me… something.” Huh. Really? Now this was getting interesting.
“Cool! What was it?” I leaned into the question.
“It was like, a masturbation… thing. A sleeve or something.”
“And did you try it?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t like it?”
“It felt really good, but…then I felt bad about it. So I threw it away.”

He threw it away! He fucking threw away a perfectly good sex toy. That’s sad! In my world, it’s practically a capital offense. A lovely sex toy whose only purpose in life is to help you get off, that exists only to enhance your pleasure, deserves better than that.

It bothers me no end that most people seem to think that when a girl uses a sex toy she’s adventurous, empowered, and sexually aware, but when a guy uses a sex toy it’s depressing unless he has a female chaperone, and even then the toy must mostly be for her benefit. Even those who get behind the idea of a man using dildos and buttplugs on himself often still revolt against the idea of him using a male masturbator. In short:

Toy penetrates flesh = HAWT
Flesh penetrates toy = UR A LOSER LOL

…Why? I honestly don’t get it. I can’t even argue against this prejudice in any systematic way because I have no idea where it’s coming from. If anyone out there can give me a logical reason people arrive at this conclusion I’ll give you a jelly bean.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some horrifying male toys out there, which is exactly what Part 2 of Quizzical Pussy’s “The wank that dare not speak its name” series will be about. But really, anyone who doesn’t (and no one should) have a problem with my dildo collection needs to stop worrying about guys using sleeves or other sex toys. It doesn’t mean we’re beneath all standards for human contact; it just means that we’re occasionally eschewing our hands for a fancier option.

I was up way too late, but the Sci Fi convention I was attending had negotiated extended pool hours with the hotel. I couldn’t resist the temptation. I had to check out the hot tub.

I like cons. They’re silly and exuberant and many of my nerdy friends are there. But there are also all these… other people around. Some of them are the “friends you haven’t met” kind of strangers, indubitably, but there are also the “that guy that talks like a robot just farted on me in the elevator” kind. So conventions are admittedly a mixed bag.

Another thing about geeks: they’re often (not all of them, mind, but probably more than average) starved for attention, kinky, and accepting of the social quirks of others. I love this about them, but it puts a little extra pressure on me to be tolerant of quirks I don’t enjoy.

Take, for instance, bad breath. I have nothing against you if you have bad breath. I think you’re, like, fearfully and wonderfully made and stuff, and I’m sure your gorgon breath has nothing to do with dental hygiene and everything to do with a medical condition you can’t control. I’m not saying it’s your fault or that it reflects on you as a person (although I am totally judging you) but I’m still going to want a significant space between your face and mine. I would like you to stay outside the breath bubble, had I my druthers.

…And that’s just one example. But it often comes back to the personal space thing.

But I was talking about general acceptance before I was talking about my raging olfactory hatemongering. Acceptance is good. It’s freeing. Watching some of these people, it’s like a metric ton of societal pressures have been lifted off their shoulders for one weekend and they tool around frenetically, being who they wish they could be every day, in a gentler world.

This is all just a very round about way to say that as I entered the pool enclosure, 90% of the people there were stark naked.

Fandom is populated with some legitimately hot people and a host of other people that aren’t… I mean, that are more… well, people I’m sure are beautiful on the inside. I’m speaking for me here, since everyone finds different things attractive, but I’m going out on a limb and saying that there were three naked people tops at that highly attended pool party who would be considered above-average looks-wise.

Yeah, it’s shitty that my brain made evaluations about which naked people were pretty and which weren’t. They were just hanging out (ha) and not necessarily asking to be stared at and graded by shallow sex bloggers. But guess what? I’m human and I’m anonymously honest on the internet, and my brain probably didn’t do anything yours wouldn’t have. So there.

I wasn’t actually there to gawk at naked or to be naked. I was there to relax a bit in the hot tub before bed. If I flirted with some hot people (naked or clothed) so be it! But personally I’m a little naked shy, so I stripped down to my bra and knickers and grinned at my own cleverness having selected dark colored undies that day.

The sunken hot tub was crowded, but I found some space next to my (betrunked, if you’re curious) friend Crispin Hijanx. We chilled out and maxed, relaxing all cool, trying not to stare directly at anyone’s fun bits. It was all of two minutes before a naked (not ugly, if you’re curious) guy I’d never seen before came up and started small-talking me. I made some fairly bland, exhausted answers, failing in my attempts to not watch a curvy girl with an awesome ass ascend the hot tub stairs and dive into the nearby pool. When she was safely submerged, I turned back to my nameless naked companion.

“So,” he said, now that he had my attention, “you’re not going topless?”

I looked down at my bra “No. No, I guess I’m not.” Actually none of the women there were topless. They were naked or suited. But I guess Nameless Naked Dude thought boobs would be a good start.

“Why not?” Hmmmm. I’d never had a stranger ask me why I wasn’t showing him my tits before. His tone creeped me out: like he wasn’t mad, just disappointed. Like I was cheating him out of something. I suddenly felt oddly exposed. With all the flesh in that room he was feeling petulant that my breasts (probably the smallest pair in the room, even) were going to remain a mystery.

The cute thing about carefree light-hearted nudity is that no one makes that a big deal of it and no one solicits it. Everyone’s enjoying it, sure. That’s natural. But I don’t think that a hot tub needs an Ambassador of Naked. I didn’t have to flash Crispin the “save me” eyes or anything, but the whole exchange did convince me that the best way to get me to keep clothes on is to creepily request that I remove them. Maybe that was Nameless Naked Dude’s cunning plan all along: to keep me covered and hasten my departure. If so, his naked fu is very good.

Or: Let’s all have a chuckle at my needlessly intricate self-loathing!

When I first started masturbating with mens rea and intent to get off (rather than my earlier preteen system, which was basically “Wow, neat! This feels cool! I wonder if other people know about this!”) I ran into a slight problem when it came to fantasizing.

I hadn’t discovered the wonders of visual aids yet, so all I really had was my libido and my imagination. I would lie alone in bed in the silent, friendly dark, thinking about sex. I only had a rough idea of what sex was at this point, but I could feel the vague promise of it purring down between my legs. I wanted to pretend it was more than that, though. I wanted to think about what it would be like to share that lust and that dark with someone: another body, a counterpoint breath weaving through mine. But there was this difficulty, you see.

I couldn’t figure out an honest way to fantasize about sex. I could not realistically conceive of anyone actually wanting to have sex with me. No one had ever told me that boys only wanted one thing from me, but if they had I wouldn’t have believed it for a second. I was shy, undesired, awkward, unattractive, uninteresting: being invisible was the best I could hope for. Being admired was something that only happened to other girls. How was I going to pretend I had a willing partner? My suspension of disbelief just wasn’t that good. I’d start composing a story in my head about some attractive guy from school touching me and my brain would jump in, “Wait wait wait. Are you delusional? Every girl he goes out with is stylish and thin and decidedly unhideous. This fantasy is ridiculous!” And pop! I’d lose the budding narrative. I was usually too disgusted with myself to try again.

I wouldn’t even let myself imagine an anonymous guy. “Nope. Not buying it. No one would ever want to touch your boobies.” I had to admit I had a point.

But horniness really is the slutty cougar mom of invention. It wasn’t long before I came up with an ingenious way for “fantasy me” to get sex without overburdening my skepticism and turning all my masturbation sessions into self-harangues about how ugly and worthless I was. I didn’t imagine myself thinner, prettier, or with better social skills. I did way better…I turned to Sci Fi.

I’d pretend myself into a dystopian society where as some strange ritual, everyone in my high school had to have sex with one of our schoolmates as determined by blind lottery. It was kind of like a Battle Royale key party. Each girl went into a cramped little chamber that was furnished with a bed, and there we waited for our surprise sex partner to enter. No one knew what or whom they were getting into until the door opened. Of course, my guy always turned out, through the magical luck of daydreams, to be whichever one I fancied especially at the moment.

Once my crush opened the door and realized it was me his face would fall (my hypercritical brain demanded this). Mortified, I’d immediately apologize for not being someone attractive, but he’d reassure me that it was really okay; he knew it wasn’t my fault, and besides, he’d always thought I was kind of funny. Oh good. Funny. And that’s when the fun could start. Then and only then would my brain allow me to fantasize about having sex. It was like the cheat code for my self-loathing.

I was so sure that no one would ever voluntarily fuck me, which is weird because I later found out that several of the guys I locked in that fictional sex pod with me would’ve had all sorts of sex with me in real life if I’d given the least encouragement. I’m so glad I eventually stopped being a teenager.

I’m no one’s sterotypist laureate or anything, but it seems to me conventional wisdom holds that men and women fap very differently. Some sources actually contend that women can’t fap at all, and that they only “schlick”, but that’s misogyny for you. Schlick isn’t even a word, and it sounds off-putting.

So let’s just all agree that girls can fap. And do. Some more frequently and enthusiastically than others. And perhaps it really is true that men and women tend to gratify themselves differently. Maybe men and women are from different planets, and those planets have very different masturbation rituals. Like…

“How men masturbate”

Let’s look at a fap in the life of your average bloke. He’s going to want a healthy clutch of porn, his hand, and ideally a bottle of lotion. A quick click animates the pretty naked things on the screen and his dick snaps to attention. He’ll graze on different porn scenes, flitting over whatever catches his eye and discarding it when it loses his interest, moving on to the next stimulus, and then the next. Alternately, if he’s in the shower or another place where porn isn’t readily available, he’ll use his imagination and fantasize about fucking his friends’ girlfriends or his wife’s sister or his squash partner. He focuses on the most sensitive spots on his cock with a fast and heavy, practiced touch. His orgasm is quick and workmanlike. He’s done this thousands of times and faps with efficiency, for results.

“How women masturbate”

Women don’t masturbate so much as make love to themselves. Women don’t like regular porn. They like “erotica”. There are special porn companies that make smut with story lines and character development and poignant portrayals of intimacy, but everyone knows that most women prefer their erotica in text, be it slash featuring anime characters or bodice-ripping plucked from the grocery store.

When a woman decides to masturbate, it is an event. She pours herself a glass of wine, lights some scented candles, and luxuriates in a bubble bath or lays back in bed with a favorite toy. And there she escapes into an erotic fantasy, becomes other people, slips into breathless moments and exotic roles. Her hands wander all over her body, teasing her neck, thigh, nipple– like a lover might, tracing circles that spiral ever closer to her sacred center. Finally, when she’s ready and she’s at an especially hot paragraph, she stimulates her clitoris or impales herself tenderly with a dildo. It’s spiritual, vital, powerful. It’s part of the process of falling desperately in love with herself. Hell, she might even have an orgasm!

…Yep. That’s definitely how men and women masturbate, respectively. But I’m such a special snowflake that none of it applies to me.

How I masturbate:

I’m actually much closer to the male stereotype when it comes to fapping, but I suspect that many women are. I can’t relate to its female analog. It seems too damn elaborate, like a lie that tries to cripple your skepticism with irrelevant details. I may need to put in a lot of work to seduce someone else, but myself? If I can’t be my own sure thing, we have a problem.

I think lots of women actually do like porn, and not just “girl porn”. Plenty of us like the really hot, exploitative kind. When I’m in the mood for video, I’ll watch mainstream, gay, or lesbian porn: hot people fuckin’, preferably saying derogatory things here and there.

But usually, I don’t just masturbate like a guy; I masturbate like a fourteen-year-old boy. I browse through pictures of hot naked chicks, my vibrator poised on my clit (or I’m actually jacking off, but we’ll cover that another time), eager eyes darting to the next picture, and the next, and the next. I’m not thinking about aught but the scandalous things I want to do to these women: there’s no grand backstory, no character development, just me-on-them action. In my mind’s eye.

Sometimes I do this for literally hours. Because although I normally pride myself on my will of adamantium, once I start getting off it is really, really tough for me to make myself get back on.

It’s a relief to be able to admit this aberrant behavior now. I spent a long time lying to boyfriends and telling them I thought of nothing, absolutely nothing, or just them when I fapped. We’re all mature enough here to realize that our partners are lying through their teeth if they tell us that, right?

Of course, sometimes I will think about fucking guys, usually things I did with partners in the past, things I wish I’d done with them, or things I intend to do with them.

…Or I fantasize about fucking my friends’ girlfriends. Just kidding. Kinda.

One thing that may be more stereotypically feminine about my system is that I actually do prefer “tasteful(ish) nudes” when it comes to pics. I don’t really need the spread-eagle pussy shot; in fact, occasionally it just looks tacky to me and I move on to something with a little more mystery: a wall to scale, a thicket to penetrate.

Sure, I’ll fap to hot text sometimes: a well-crafted erotic story or a field report from a fellow blogger. Not often, but it certainly happens. I’ll also masturbate casually while watching TV or reading a completely neutral book: it’s like fidgeting, but much better. I honestly do masturbate too much, the more I think about it. But really, every single other guy from my planet seems to have the exact same problem, right?

I’m massively creeped out by the purity movement and abstinence culture. You know how religious parents and teenagers– mostly daughters–buy into virginity in a big way with purity pledges, purity balls, purity rings, and… I dunno, probably chastity belts? That’s creepy.

I’m not even going to get into how I hate the fact that we’re teaching young women that their worth depends on their ability to withhold sex and/or to provide an unsullied sexual vessel to some schmuck in the future. I’m not even going to mention that. Well, barely.

What specifically makes my flesh crawl is the concept that somehow fathers are supposed to be the custodians of their daughters’ virginity. The implication that a man can more or less own his child’s sexuality at all is unspeakably corrupt, and giving her a little extra attention in the form of jewelry and dressed-up dancing doesn’t sanitize the concept or make it any easier to swallow. It’s still creepy as hell.

Take a look at this sample purity pledge, culled from the Hollywood Purity Ball’s website:

I (Name) pledge my purity to my father, my future/husband and my Creator. I recognize that virginity is my most precious gift to offer to my future husband. I will not engage in sexual activity of any kind before marriage but will keep my thought and my body pure as a very special present for the one I marry.

…Okay, I’m not trying to be a dick here, but what business is it of this girl’s father, future/husband, or Creator to care so damn much about stifling her emerging sexuality? These three guys are heroically falling all over themselves to bellyflop on some catastrophic grenade, but it’s actually just this poor girl. Now that she needs a training bra she might want to think about sex at some point and do other things associated with puberty. The pin has been pulled! Horrors! “Save yourself, Creator! Future/husband and I have got this. You have other virgins to make.”

And as “precious gifts” go, I think that if I were a guy I’d value other things in my future wife above her absolute lack of experience. Some examples that spring to mind:

1. An awesome sense of humor that still manages to pretend I’m funny from time to time
2. Compassion
3. Wit
4. A terrific ass (I’m an ass guy)
5. A sense of adventure in and out of the bedroom
6. Unfuckingbelievable blowjob skills
7. Independence, self-agency, and the ability to make up her own mind instead of just listening to her daddy all the fucking time
8. A good DVD collection
9. A ravenous intellect
10. A ravenous sex drive

If you don’t know what you’re doing or what you like, you should date and have some fun figuring it out. Being clueless isn’t your cue to go get married. Maybe it’s okay to give some virginity to your husband as a very special present, but for heaven’s sake, it shouldn’t be yours!