quizzical pussy

Yesterday, while cleaning out a cupboard, I found an old journal I kept while Reginald and I were together. We were living in separate states at that point, and we agreed to write journals for each other so we could read them when the long-distance ordeal was over. This seemed more romantic than simply keeping in touch via chat and email, I suppose, which we did anyway. We were always looking for the most romantically dramatic way to navigate our relationship, including crying uncontrollably whenever completely unnecessary.

I wrote in mine faithfully a few times a week for about a year and a half. I think he wrote about two or three entries total in his. I remember how that hurt and confused me. Understandable, because it was somewhat telling as to the nature of our dynamic by then, about which I was even more clueless.

I wasn’t a girlfriend at that point; I was a supplicant. I prayed. I mooned. I counted the days between us like a rosary and I’d never even been Catholic. Reginald was my false and golden god. A blond god with floppy hair. I wrote florid fantasies that seemed to long for his pity and love in equal parts. Even if we were to ignore the fact that this man was abusing me emotionally every day, and each time I visited him he’d physically abuse me, everything I wrote  was desperate, needy, and absolutely starved for even the meanest scraps of affection. It is frankly disgusting. I’m so glad I never put that shit up on the internet.

I didn’t have much time to devote to reading that old artifact, but I felt a mild nausea flutter through me as I skimmed it. I wanted to reach back through the pages, grasp the wrist of that little girl as she spilled herself across them, and tell her exactly what she was wasting. So many years– her college years, which could have been a fun adventure. So much dignity. Her very self.

And truthfully, she probably wouldn’t have listened to me. She seemed to think that mortgaging everything she was and everything she could be was a small price to pay, when really she just wanted to be loved.

Teenage girls are so pathetic when they’re me. Honestly.

I wrapped the journal in a plastic bag like a thing that stinks and shoved it in the dumpster. Exactly where it belonged all along.

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Ever wondered why the woman on the left is so unattractive?

Some people get very, very specific about what kind of people they’re physically attracted to.

There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. Feeling guilty for having a type is a bit like feeling like a heel for preferring pecan waffles to strawberry Poptarts. It’s subjective, and you’re the subject. As long as you’re treating people who fall into your type like human beings rather than fetish fuel, follow your dreams and pass the syrup. It would be irrational to expect someone to be physically attracted to everyone, and you don’t owe anyone your attraction any more than they owe it to you to conform to your ideals.

But then there are those who take having a type to a whole new level, and get skull diagrams specific about what’s attractive to them. Take Erik Holland, the man behind femininebeauty.info (Warning: May contain body shaming in flavors both typical and exotic, homophobia, transphobia, racism, and gratuitous evolutionary psychology). Erik seems preternaturally concerned about the mainstreaming of “masculinized women”¹ as attractive, and infiltration of the fashion industry by gay men, who promote (you guessed it) masculinized women as a beauty ideal!

What’s a masculinized woman? So glad you asked. Apparently, any woman (typified by high fashion models, apparently) with a strong jawline, prominent cheekbones, a waist-to-hip ratio over .65, and/or other physical properties that seem to matter a lot to precisely Erik Holland. Also, I increasingly suspect the more I read through the site, any woman who is not white is hopelessly masculinized.

You can read here about all the features that are undesirable on a female body, and view the skull diagrams that I was totally not making up. Never before had I wondered, even for only a split second until I remembered I don’t give a shit, if maybe my ribcage is too big.²

Do not ask me why these features, even if they are “masculine”, are undesirable. He can dress it up as a crusade to save women from eating disorders or something, but I’ve pretty sure this is just about what’s desirable to this one guy. What’s more, I don’t understand what he’s even seeing half the time. Heidi Klum up there? Practically a man. The woman on the right? That’s a real woman. I do not understand why, exactly, but there you have it.

Pretty sure this is just what happens when you confuse “what I’m attracted to” with “objectively attractive”. Even if you have a shrewdness of statistical studies saying that people generally agree with you, that doesn’t magically make it Truth. It just means that many, maybe even the majority, of people agree with each other. But that’s not actually what objective reality is made out of.

There’s no objective beauty standard. If everyone suddenly adhered to any one rigid ideal there would be throngs of disappointed people, mourning the loss of the most attractive (to them) bodies on the planet. If masculinity and femininity are even meaningful words, I consider them accessories rather than musculoskeletal markers. But even buying into this website’s strange paradigm, “masculinized” women look just fine to me. So do “feminized” men. In all seriousness, what on earth he even talking about most of the time?

In conclusion, one man has clearly put in an immense amount of effort to exhaustively define and glorify his ideal woman, but that’s not the extraordinary thing. The really impressive part is what a prick he is to everyone else ever in the process.

P.S. Ladies, if you’re still in doubt after studying those graphs, keep in mind you can send him your pictures and he’ll tell you if you’re feminine enough! Let me know how that goes, won’t you please?

1. Scare quotes because what the fuck? [↩]
2. Answer: No. My lungs are not rattling around inside there, and it has not as of yet broken through my skin. [↩]

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Remember that bra color meme on Facebook? Okay, actually, I’ll probably have to back up for some of you. Remember when Facebook was a thing?

Early last year a bunch of people started posting random colors as their Facebook status, and it turned out they were referring to what colors their bras were. And it turned out that was for breast cancer awareness! Surprise!

I don’t know how effective this exercise was, mostly because I’m pretty sure most people are aware of breast cancer and are more or less against it. If it caused just one person to donate to breast cancer research, or prompted one person to start doing regular self-exams, or started one person on the path to learning potentially life-saving facts about early diagnosis, or anything along those lines, though, I’m all for it.

But something occurred to me the other day when sex education activist and Scarleteen founder Heather Corinna tweeted this link, an article from the Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy that covers sexual harassment/assault, and what survivors were wearing. From the article (also quoted in Heather’s tweet): “While people perceive dress to have an impact on who is assaulted, studies of rapists suggest that victim attire is not a significant factor.” In fact, it may even be the contrary. The article goes on to say, “Instead, rapists look for signs of passiveness and submissiveness, which, studies suggest, are more likely to coincide with more body-concealing clothing.”

The cliche, of course, is the woman in the tiny skirt and the low-cut top who, essentially, sickeningly, people seem to think got what she was asking for. Now, I don’t think anyone is about to run amok with the above quoted statement and start telling women not to wear long skirts and Cosby sweaters lest they appear like they’re looking for trouble. That would be preposterous. I think the key takeaway here, for anyone missing it, is that whenever you’re tempted to blame someone for getting raped, you should shut your fucking mouth, take your fingers off your fucking keyboard, and think again.

Repeat as needed.

This is the awareness I’d like spread. And as I was thinking that, I remembered the bygone bra meme, and I wondered something. What if all the rape survivors with access to social media did something similar. What if we all posted what we were wearing when we were sexually assaulted? Would the world learn anything? Would people finally realize that in all the jeans and hoodies, microdresses, niqabs, soccer uniforms, Comme des Garçons couture, vinyl bra sets, three-piece suits, pajamas, and polo shirts, there is really only one constant: there was always, always a rapist nearby.

I’m not suggesting we actually do this. On most social networks it would mean potentially letting all your family, friends, and acquaintances know something very personal and raw, and I’m not sure I’m up to that myself. But still, I think it would be interesting, and I wonder what would happen, if it would make any difference in the way people see sexual assault. I’d like to think it would. I’d like to think that when faced with enough truth people eventually have to stop being assholes. But, you know, you’d also think that when a sex blogger is faced with enough truth about assholes she’d eventually stop being naive, and that might never happen either.

Still. Jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt.

(image source)

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You always hear that rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power. And that probably holds true if you look deep enough, but why in the world would a rapist do that? On more casual reflection, I think that dictum has the potential to allow people to easily deny that what they did was rape. A lot of times, in their minds, it was completely about sex. They weren’t paying particular attention to consent, but they think they probably got it, more or less. And besides, they weren’t trying to take anyone’s power away. They weren’t being violent. They were just trying to get laid, man.

I believe that it’s easy for people to think “Rapists are monsters. I am a person. Therefore, I must not be a rapist. IT’S LIKE MATH.”

Piers Vitiard liked to bike and play lacrosse. He knew about Classical mythology and was good at Soul Calibur. He thought everyone should see Donnie Darko and the entire Godfather series. He was a pretty nice guy. He also raped me.

Reginald Sleeth dreamed of being a filmmaker. He always wove intricate stories in his head, but rarely wrote them down. His voice got louder when he was self-conscious, and he spoke in a fake Scottish accent when he wanted attention. He worried about getting fat. He thought that orange striped cats were the best kind. When he gave you a compliment you tasted it for weeks afterward. He was emotionally, physically, and sexually abusive.

They weren’t monsters, they were just people who did some fucked up things. And people don’t let themselves feel like abusers or rapists. They might have moments when they realize that they’ve done some fucked up stuff, and even feel guilty, but the homeostasis of the mind demands that our thoughts move on from there. We need to justify, rewrite history a little. We need to slant events in such a way that allows us to be the heroes of our own stories.

And along a similar vein, I’m no righteous, innocent victim. The choices I made were monstrously wrong, if I really examine them. I played into Reginald’s abuse, responding to his manipulations as if he’d scripted them and I’d memorized my part. I let our dysfunction teach me what it meant to be in a romantic relationship. Every chance I had to stand up to him, I folded; right up until I found the strength to leave at the very end. I excused Piers after he violated me, and made a point of trying to make it seem to both of us like what had happened wasn’t a big deal. That was unfair to me, to him, and to the next woman he got alone in a room. He learned nothing from what he did to me.

I got it all so wrong. I denied myself the protection and respect that were mine by right. I told them it was okay to disrespect me, harm me, use me. I allowed myself to become inhuman. Maybe I didn’t feel human in the first place. I do now, though. I know better now.

You can be a real person, even a normally decent person, and fuck up big time. You can be weak. You can collude against yourself in the sickest ways imaginable. You can be a rapist. You can be an abuser. Maybe you didn’t mean for things to happen that way, but motive isn’t everything. Sometimes what actually happened is important too. And you’re allowed to forgive yourself, but that really sort of requires admitting it to yourself first.

(image source)

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Warning: This post contains description and discussion of rape and its aftermath, including victim-blaming.

__________________________________________________________

While you’re being raped, you don’t get to feel like a person. Your personality, your history, your passions, your mannerisms, your interests, your pleasure, your protests: everything about you gets shoved to one side so your rapist can get to a hole.*

The violence is eloquent: you’re meat. People get to decline sex, so you must be something else. You realize through the fear and the horror that in that moment you’re nothing more than a flesh frame for negative space.

And hopefully one day that feeling goes entirely away.

When people say that rape is dehumanizing, that’s usually what they mean. To rape is to perpetrate an inhuman act that denies a person human dignity. But that only scratches the surface of what it’s like to survive a rape.

After you’ve been raped, you don’t get to be treated like a person. Your experience, your story, your anger, your grief: they’re all messy and unpleasant for everyone to deal with. Won’t you please put them away?

You’re going to be a statistic now. You’re going to be a cautionary tale. If you speak out or press charges, you get to be “the accuser”, whom people will likely suggest is trying to ruin your poor rapist’s life. Above all, you’re going to be a case to study and analyze so everyone can explain to each other why you were victimized. Because that’s more important than anything else.

See, if people can somehow figure out a way to blame you for being attacked, they feel safer. If rape is a crime of two wrongs, it can be prevented by scrupulously making rights.

You? You were asking for it. Or unprepared to defend yourself, or maybe your lifestyle put you in danger’s way. Or whatever. Something like this just wouldn’t happen to everyone else, or everyone else’s loved ones. It happened to you for a reason. Had to. Otherwise things get uncomfortable!

Apparently this time-honored system of rape aftermath management holds rock solid even when the person who was raped is an eleven-year-old little girl.

A little girl can be gang raped by at least 18 men and boys, and people will point out that she dressed provocatively to look older than her age. They will comb her Facebook account trying to prove that she engaged in transgressive behavior. The men who raped this little girl can take video of the rape and share it at school and on the internet, and some fucked-up woman will have the gall to comment, “These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives”. I want to believe that she’s referring to the soul-rot and gut-burrowing guilt that should encroach after committing such a vile act, but I don’t. I believe she’s referring to their reputations and the legal fallout. I believe she genuinely feels more compassion for the rapists than the eleven-year-old girl they brutalized. And I feel sick about the human race.

The New York Times and other news outlets repeated this victim-blaming bullshit without comment. NBC news invited someone to come on a TV program to say that this child was a willing participant in her rape. The way this story has been treated isn’t atypical, it’s only more dramatic because how can you blame an eleven-year-old for getting raped ARE YOU INSANE??

When people say that rape is dehumanizing, do they realize how much we as a society help it stay that way? Can anyone truly be surprised when rape survivors choose to remain silent?

We couldn’t protect and care for a little girl. We couldn’t work together to keep her safe. We couldn’t create a world where those young men would be sickened at the mere thought of hurting her. That would’ve been too much to ask, certainly. But why in the goddamn can’t we admit that she did nothing wrong, and they did?

Are we fucking animals?

*The mechanics of rape do not always work this way. I want to be very clear about the fact that I’m drawing from my personal experiences to express a feeling I believe may be communal, or close to. I’m not saying that my specific experiences are universal. Not all rape involves penetration. However, I believe it always involves some level of being involuntarily reduced to a body.

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In one sense, my memory is positively elephantine. I remember conversations I had when I was four years old: not dramatic, important ones, but mundane, forgettable ones. I remember what cigarettes my best friend smoked Sophomore year of High School, and which ones she switched to when we were Juniors. I remember the descant to a choral piece I learned in fourth grade, and all the words to mc chris’s Fett’s Vette.*

I can basically never find my keys. If they aren’t in one of my two I-will-not-lose-them-if-I-consciously-put-them-here-every-time places, one of which is my coat pocket, there’s a lot of frantic searching punctuated by screams of “DEAR GOD MY KEYS HAVE GONE FERAL!” in my future.

This is how I know that there’s more than one kind of memory, and I suck at at least one of them.

So if I’m packing stuff up for a day or two away from home, I’ll inevitably end up forgetting something. Sometimes it’s totally unimportant, like a DVD I promised to lend a friend who’s been super excited to see it and possibly even planning a party around it, and at other times it’s of vital, national security-level importance, like my moisturizer.

A couple months ago, I was visiting my boyfriend for the weekend, and the thing I forgot was my birth control pills (also my thyroid medication, which is less relevant to the story but is not much better an idea).

There are people in the world who’d just turn their cars around, trek back home, get the necessary medications, and return triumphant. Those are exactly the kind of people who forged this great nation and will eventually launch a manned trip to Mars. I’m more the kind of person that drives for an hour to her boyfriend’s house and then majestically proclaims, “I am feeling rather tired. Do you mind if I lie down?”

Once I’d realized my mess up I did feel like a tool, though. Laramy has mentioned several times how nice it is that we’ve gone condom-free with each other, and I didn’t love the idea of him having to use them just based on my defective brain’s fuck-up. That’s when I remembered those little magical sponges.

Several years ago, an ex and I had a ton of condoms break. They probably broke almost half the time; I still can’t quite figure out why. After trying several kinds, we just gave up and started looking for other options. Enter the sponge, a little foam disk filled with spermicide. You added water to get it frothy, shoved it up against your cervix, and could fuck all day!

I decided if I picked up some sponges at the pharmacy the forgotten pills would barely be missed! When Laramy and I went out on errands I asked him if we could swing by Walgreen’s. “Are you sure? We can just use condoms…” Laramy offered. “No,” I insisted, “We should get the sponges.” Condoms are great, but it’s hard to deny the fact that they kill some sensitivity. I was determined that Laramy wouldn’t be punished for my forgetfulness.

We found the sponges on the bottom shelf, below the rubbers. “They want fifteen dollars for three of them? That’s insane!” Laramy opined. I’d remembered what sponges cost, but I forgot to realize that he wouldn’t love the idea of me “wasting” my money just to keep him out of latex. Just then, a box of Encare spermicidal eggs right next to the sponges caught my eye, on sale for about half that much. My ex and I had used those too, and they’d worked just as well, although they were less convenient because you had to use a new one every time and wait a few minutes after insertion before fucking could commence. “I’ll just buy these, okay? Eight bucks. No condoms. Awesome!” and waltzed to the front of the store to pay for them. I had saved the day! Albeit from my stupid memory. Still, I was a hero. Maybe I’d get America to Mars after all!

Later, as we were making dinner, I felt a hard cock press against my ass and a pair of hands on my tits. Moments later Laramy was inside me and I was halfway to coming. Mercy, do I love spontaneous sex.

It wasn’t until he declared “I’m gonna come” that it occurred to me that we’d planned to use backup protection and we kinda, well, hadn’t. “Wait! Wait! Come in my mouth!” I suggested enthusiastically. He enthusiastically complied. Later I learned that guys find this sort of thing hot anyway, in addition to being a practical, last-second measure. Score.

Upstairs, the Encare eggs sat unused in their little, slightly squished box, biding their time…

The next day it was sex o’clock again. We were thinking ahead a little better at this point. “Do you want me to put a condom on?” offered Laramy. “No,” I said, “I can just put in one of those insert thingies, if you don’t mind waiting ten minutes.” He did not. We found other things to do than intercourse for a bit, and then I looked at the clock and it was ten after sex! Oh yay!

He started fucking me. Then he started fucking me harder. Then a look of what I thought might be profound concentration came over his face. “Maybe my vagina just feels too amazing to contemplate, but he’s trying anyway,” I told myself, “Yes. That must be it. How ambitious!” Then he slowed down, paused. “This is really hurting!” he confessed.

Oh my God. My vagina feels too ouchy to contemplate!? An alternative interpretation that hadn’t yet occurred to me.

“Shit! Then stop!” I suggested. He pulled out and ran to the bathroom to wash his dick.

“It must be the spermicide in that stuff! I’m allergic to it or something!”** He called as I followed him. He was sitting in the bathtub,. scrubbing with soap. Truth be told, his cock wasn’t looking a comfortable shade of red. This is when I started apologizing, I think. I felt like a total douche. I’d insisted on the Encare thinking I was being helpful, when all along he hadn’t been quite sure about the plan and was too polite to say anything.***

Sometimes I honestly do not know how he puts up with me. But this is how incredible my boyfriend is: he wanted to keep going! “I’ll just slip on a condom,” he explained. That way he’d avoid the allergens in my pussy. After everything we’d been through to avoid them, the condoms were coming out anyway. Ah, well!

I can honestly say it was good for me. For Laramy, less so. “Condoms really aren’t that bad,” I concluded after my ninth orgasm.

“…I think some of that spermicide must’ve gotten lodged in my urethra…” he replied. Oh, so not that good for him after all. Oh.

“WHY DID YOU KEEP GOING?” I asked, appalled.

“A champion fucks through the pain.”  Indeed.

Laramy says that the events of that weekend had nothing to do with his decision to finally schedule that vasectomy he’d been wanting for years. It’s likely just coincidence that a few weeks later he made the appointment at last.

(image source)

* Not to say that I can perform them all with the correct rhythm in the original tempo…
** Turns out lots of people are. Oops.
*** Never be polite to the detriment of your cocks, lads.

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Reginald Sleeth and I had been dating for all of two weeks. Our dates usually consisted of me driving the half mile to his house and rushing upstairs to his room where we’d make out furiously. That night, though, he handed me a tightly folded piece of college ruled paper first.

I knew it was a poem. He’d given me several already. Reginald liked to write love poems to girls. Years later my friend Miriam, who also dated Reginald for a while, and I would go back and compare and realize that some of the heartfelt verses given us looked shockingly similar. Kid must’ve kept master copies somewhere.

But this was the first poem I ever unfolded to discover blood smeared all over the paper.

Reginald looked rather like a cat who’d dragged his freshly killed bird onto the porch. I reacted rather like that cat’s owner.

“What, I just don’t even… I mean what happened here?” Beat. “…It’s a very nice poem.” Nice save.

Reginald proudly showed me his hand. There was a distinct gouge. Then he produced a blunt decorative knife. “I designed this years ago to one day spill my blood for my love. And now it’s yours; I have no more need of it. It has done its job.”

I’m not even kidding. He seriously talked like that.

I figured that perhaps my sense of the romantic was underdeveloped. I liked Anne Rice as much as the next little demigoth, but I was more creeped out than moved. Of course my (most) fatal flaw kicked in at this point and told me that I must be the one who had it wrong.

It soon became clear to me, though, that Reginald expected me to perform the same gesture. It was supposed to be some kind of sacred lovers’ ritual conceived in Reginald’s head at some point. That was more or less why he gave me the knife.

I just wasn’t going to do it.

Understand, I really thought I loved Reginald at this point. The bloodletting had meant something to him, clearly, and I didn’t want to ignore that. But seriously? No part of me was happy that I had his blood on a piece of notebook paper, and I wasn’t jazzed about the idea of following suit.

And if I ever did, I knew it wouldn’t be with his Renaissance Faire knife. Thing was fucking letter-opener-dull! And coated in his blood.

In retrospect, this should have tipped me off. This wasn’t ever going to be a healthy relationship. Yes, healthy relationships can involve exchanging blood or playing with letter openers, but they’d at least require a little prior communication. And less peer pressure.

As for my dilemma, one morning I nicked my ankle in the shower shaving and I realized I’d solved my own problem. Well, one of my problems. The other one I kept around for a long, long while yet.

(image source)

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I don’t give it much thought anymore, not in the present tense. It’s always “Oh, that wacky Reginald Sleeth used to do the craziest (evil) things!” in my head. My conscious mind has moved on from all that, put it in the past. Unfortunately, the rest of me hasn’t caught up yet.

I’m still a beaten girlfriend somewhere deep down.

I’m realizing how profoundly affected I really am by it all, to this day. My self-esteem was never great to begin with, but staying in a physically and emotionally abusive relationship for years trained even that scant confidence out of me. And while, believe it or not, I’ve scraped a fair amount back for myself, if we’re making comparisons, I can’t escape the learned worthlessness that was my liturgy for so long.

I wonder if I’ll ever let myself feel like an equal in a relationship. If I’ll ever feel entitled to ask for things or even make demands. If I’ll ever believe that I was chosen, that my partner is with me out of desire and not just kindness.

Will there ever be a time when, after I’ve said something stupid and made someone I care about angry, I won’t slip into that old numbness and terror? The cold tingle that comes when the mind spins in a loop of self-loathing and the body feels heavy and wrapped in moss.

This might be one of those things that’s hard to understand unless you’ve lived it, and I hope you haven’t lived it.

I’m afraid that the legacy of a really poorly chosen first relationship will be that I can never behave like a truly healthy partner. And with the amount of hate I have and show for myself, can anyone reasonably be expected to not develop contempt for me?

I want a do-over. I want my first boyfriend to be that nice Mormon boy who hugged me like I was made of lava.

On a lighter note, Bangable Dudes (and Dames) in History: for when the living just aren’t cutting it, but the undead have inexplicably turned sparkly.

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My 2011 resolution to be more confident is progressing horrendously. One month in, and it just feels silly. Childish. Like my new year’s resolution was to pretend to be a princess. Step one: make a cone hat out of poster board and felt.

Confidence is something you earn, right? You can’t decide to become more confident, just out of the blue, because confident people are enviable, now can you? Today it feels like no. You can’t. And neither can I. Not today.

Today I’ll know– not believe, but know– that no one could ever want me, as a friend or a fuck or a lover or even a pizza delivery guy. Any evidence to the contrary will be ignored. Today I’ll spend time rediscovering the fetal position. Today I’ll wish I were someone else: doesn’t even have to be a princess, just anyone else. Today I’ll wish I weren’t so honest on my blog.

Yeah, so.

May subtly revise resolution to refocus on just not being a wreck. Wish me luck.

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The strip club wasn’t what I imagined it would be. I was expecting tacky. I was expecting neon. I was expecting a lingering whisper of sweat and booze. But I was expecting all that to be married to effort: a little velvet, a tassel or two. Some varnish obscuring the grime.

This was a pit.

Actually, more than anything it was like a small community workshop theater. A single room, the club was black painted wood with two pine platforms (also painted black) where the brass poles stood, dull and worn. There was a little neon. And there were men in g-strings.

Between the makeshift stages, a shower was built into the back wall. Wednesday was shower night, but the shower was broken. Of course it was.

I hear that female strip clubs– that is, those where the strippers are women– are more velvety. They try harder. Male strip clubs– specifically gay male strip clubs, I’m told, don’t bother with pretense. I have no idea if this is true in general. To this day, I’ve only been to one, and it was true here.

In we walked, a gaggle of females. The club was dead. We didn’t care. It was Miriam’s birthday, and she wanted to visit this pit on shower night, dammit, shower or not.

There were two guys working that night. Two. A short, wiry guy with a pretty face and a tall, beefier guy with a, well, a face. He had a face.

We chicks danced a little with the newly out dean of a local university. Then we sat down directly adjacent to one of the platforms, ordered drinks, and watched the guys take turns working our pole. It wasn’t until about five minutes into Wiry Guy’s performance that we realized he was wearing an electronic tether over his tube socks.

Classy. Classy is the word for that.

Beefy Guy, not to be outdone but lacking the necessary state-mandated hardware, was at a loss for a moment. Then he wrapped his flaccid shaft clear around the brass pole and seemed to feel better about himself.

Did I mention class?

As the night wore on I got a bit bored. It is a great shortcoming, but I can really only watch people I’m not attracted to writhe around naked for so long before I want to pull out my Nintendo DS. In retrospect, this is probably why Beefy Guy approached me.

“You’re very pretty,” he began.

“Oh. Uh. Thanks,” said my lips. I’m not giving you money, dude, said my brain.

There was some inane small talk on his part and some noncommittal nodding on mine until he saw some bruises on my arms.

“What happened there?” Beefy Guy made his face-which-he-had-yes-indeed look concerned.

“Just some horseplay,” I answered honestly. Clifton and I were hanging out fairly often at the time, and there was a lot of wrassling.

“No one… hurt you, did they?” We were really breaking the stripper fourth wall here.

“Not at all,” I assured him. “I pity the fool.”

“Good. Because I just couldn’t stand that.” Okay, Beefy Guy… oh wait, he wasn’t done… “I could never hurt a woman,” he told me earnestly.

I nodded.

“…except that one time when my girlfriend cheated on me. But she also stole my stereo, you understand.”

“Um. I think my friends are ready to leave. Now.”

I’m very likely never going to that–or possibly any– strip club again. I don’t care if they get the shower fixed.

(image source)

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