In short, hers are Mary Sue problems, and the story never ends. I want it on record that I have never slapped her. I’m not going to insult your intelligence by suggesting that I have never wanted to.

She’s currently in her first serious relationship, with a guy she pursued, something she’d never had to do before. “It’s so empowering!” She made a fist and pummeled the air as she told me this. “I wanted him, and I went after him, and now he’s mine!” To be honest, it doesn’t appear she had to work very hard. As she reminded me, she’s so much better looking than her new boyfriend she’s surprised they don’t get strange looks walking down the street. When he seemed uninterested at first she was indignant. But with a little persistence she seduced him, and she couldn’t be prouder if he were every bit as attractive as she is!

And yet again I was reminded that being the pursuer is something I’ve never experienced. My relationship with seduction has been mostly avoiding mocking laughter by eschewing it. So if it were empowering I wouldn’t exactly know, but it wouldn’t exactly surprise me.

I have this sense that there was once a time, long ago, when people were meticulously taught social graces as part of a well-rounded education, much like children are theoretically supposed to be taught geometry now. They learned how to be charming, how to have presence, how to hold a conversation, even how to tell a story that captivates one’s audience. Of course, this could well be a romanticized version of the past that’s a side effect from getting my working knowledge of old timey social interactions from novels. Dialogue is usually a little snappier when an author’s had the chance to mull it over for months and then edit it a few times. Perhaps these social graces have always been things we pick up only if we’re lucky, with one in a million of us seeming magically born with them like Henrietta was born freakishly adorable.

The one thing I know is that they are skills, and as such can be learned. And pretty much the only group who seem focused on systematically improving theirs are Pickup Artists.

As a community, Pickup Artists are at times awe-inspiring in their pursuit of self-improvement. When I make it a point to observe their process without judging their motives, it becomes clear that what they call “inner game” is largely an effort to build self-esteem. And while beginners learn scripted gambits to start conversations, the ultimate goal seems to be attaining true, engaging conversational skills. It’s only mildly off-putting that having legitimate discourse is often referred to as “improvising” rather than “talking”. The problem (if there is one, and that depends on your perspective) is that for some reason this is all done in the service of getting laid. All that effort to become a better¹ person gets cast in a manipulative light when it’s so single-mindedly libidinous, and frankly dehumanizing for anyone else in the sexual equation. But at least it’s honest.

I’m not honest.

I want what Pickup Artists want. I know what it’s like to feel like a social loser, and deep down, I don’t expect people to overlook that and see that I have a good heart and throw me a great big party with balloons. To be fair, my heart isn’t really all that spectacular. What I really want is to be charming and witty and poised and ever so magnetic. And my motives aren’t just to be well liked and make people smile, although those things are certain wonderful and welcome. I also want to be desired. I want to infect your mind like a melody and stab through you like hunger. It may be weakness telling me this, but I think it would feel empowering.

Even if I never took advantage of it, I’d want to know I had that power to seduce if I chose. It bothers me that the thing stopping me has never been nobler ideas about reciprocity and ethics and all that. Maybe those things factor in somehow, but it’s mostly fear I’d fail and look like a loser.

What makes this even worse is that I’m fairly sure that “Hey, wanna do it?” would work often enough that the question of seduction as art is barely worth thinking about.

(image source)

1. …or at least more socially pleasing

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And I’ll wonder to myself, Is this it? Is today the day I’m finally going to wear fake boobies in my bra? So far, it never is.

Sometimes I would like to have bigger tits. If the reason were any simpler I’d have to grunt it. Women with big boobs get a lot of sexual attention when they show them off, leading me to imagine it’s pretty easy for them to get sex any time they like. This is a lifestyle that appeals to me.

To be fair, at other times I wish I had smaller boobs and 12% body fat. Basically I want to be Princess Mombi, but with modular bodies in addition to all the heads. I don’t think that’s asking too much.

Anyway I was blessed with boobs I’d call just about average-sized. (Though, in a Serling-esque twist, I think my tits have grown a little since I went off birth control pills, despite my actual weight staying stable. If anyone can figure that one out, let me know. ***Spoiler: Also no, I’m not knocked up***) They’re not tiny, but they’re not formidable either. So at one point I bought those weird silicone inserts in a fit of “why the fuck not?”.

But I haven’t ever worn them, and the reason is not an ethical issue with deception, nor the fear that someone will get a disappointing handful of plastic if a spontaneous hookup should happen. And sadly, perhaps, it’s not because I looked inside myself and found that I like me just the way I am. The major reason is that I don’t really understand how to use them.

They didn’t come with instructions. Do they go at the bottom of the bra, to boost the flesh boobs up higher? Do they go on the sides to push the cleavage together? Somewhere else altogether? I don’t know. Wherever I put them they look weird. It always just looks like I stuck a big brick of plastic down my shirt. Which I guess I sort of did.

Really, it’s just too damn much trouble to play titty tetris every time I want to look hot.

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Tonight is the finale of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 3. Who cares, you ask? I do. My latest brush with acute illness has left me with a lot of time on my hands. Did you know you can watch every single scintillating episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race ever produced right on logo’s website, tiny and pixelated beyond your wildest dreams? Well, you can.

To say that I lay in bed watching every episode would be a gross understatement. I also watched the extra catty web exclusives where you get to see the drag queen contestants bitch about each other backstage.

All in all, I’m excited to see who wins. I actually, really, almost and maybe even truly unashamedly am.

Part of this, of course, is research. Or maybe reverse research, because I’m actually a drag king. That’s right: I have exactly one performance to my masculine alter ego’s name (which I can’t share because I just know he’s destined to become a famous playboy and I still have a secret identity to play fast and loose with here). And I’m just a handful of days from another, if I can decide what song we’re lip-synching to.

It was once explained to me that to do your makeup as a king, you just reverse everything that queens are supposed to do. So while a man will put a white stripe down the center of his nose to make it appear narrower and create the illusion of feminine features, a woman has to draw a dark stripe instead to make the nose appear wider. I have no idea whatsoever if this is valid or not. I know exactly enough about makeup to have never bothered to learn anything and I own a book by Kevyn Aucoin that I don’t entirely understand. That’s pretty much all I can say for myself when it comes to makeup.

Really, the assumption in drag is that the genders are opposites, and have minimal overlap. If I walk like a woman I obviously can’t be walking like a man. In a recent episode of Drag Race, a queen advised a straight jock on his first flight dressed as a woman that “girls don’t point”. Like, at things, with our fingers. Which, I have to admit as a girl, I do. But what we’re dealing with in drag isn’t gender; it’s fantasy gender.

Which is why it’s so powerful and challenging and fun, really.

But this is also why there probably won’t be a reality show all about drag kings. It’s the same reason handsomeness pageants aren’t neck-and-neck with beauty pageants for popularity and scholarship opportunities. Same reason both men’s and women’s magazines have hot chicks on their covers. This is gender 101 shit. We more or less all fetishize the image and the fantasy of femininity, regardless of which gender/s we’re actually attracted to. In performing the opposite gender, women lose that double-sided edge we come to expect. We’re no longer universal visual shorthand for “sex object”.

It took drag to make me stop and wonder if guys don’t sometimes feel bad that they’re largely excluded from pretty.

Of course, I kind of also love this about being a drag king. Performing maleness I don’t feel any pressure to look sexy in the ways I’m used to failing at (big boobs, long hair, perfect figure et al.), and I think that’s why I suddenly almost feel sexy. Or something.

Or maybe I’m drunk with power because I have a big fucking packing penis.

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Not Pictured: Me.

My mission for today is to answer the (my exact) age-old question: Can Quizzical Pussy look sexy in a photograph?

You’d think that if it hasn’t happened by now it’s simply not going to, which seems like a reasonable argument. But today, if I can work up the guts, I’m going to pose for my friend Viola Sharqtipus, who is an amazing photographer. I’m not sure that people can look bad once she points her camera at them.

But I know I can always count on my body to try.

Gulp.

(image source)

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Dammit.

Laramy got me an Android this past Christmas. I mean this, of course, in the phone sense, not in the Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation sense, which is unfortunate but understandable.

It’s kind of cool to have a phone that doesn’t flip open anymore. No longer do old women accost me while I’m texting, crying “Goodness, my dear! We have the same phone!” and weakly waving their jitterbugs aloft. My flip phone had a camera, thank you very much, boasting an entire megapixel. So there, bitch.

My new phone is awesome. I can do all sorts of things to avoid being productive and paying attention to people. Alchemy is basically an opiate with a touchscreen interface. I’m told my Android can also make and receive calls or something, but whatever.

But this is interesting: According an older entry on OkCupid’s fascinating OkTrends blog, which features the spoils of their various dating site data mining adventures, Android owners get less sex than other smart phone owners. Or perhaps, more precisely, sleep around less.

Since the data is all from OkCupid users (though quite literally over 9,000 of them), maybe this is a pure anomaly. We can generally say that a single dating site isn’t a perfect microcosm for the entire population of Earth, but since there’s no ready explanation for why it exists anyway, I don’t see any blatant reason why this correlation would be limited to OkCupid users only, and not translate to a wider sample.

Here’s their pretty graph:

Notice that these numbers are all for 30-year-old smart phone users. Android owners have had an average of six partners, whereas female iPhone owners are total studs with twice that, and Blackberry users fall somewhere in the middle. This correlation plays out in phone owners ages 18 to 40.

What’s going on here? Theories?

It seems that iPhones tend to take better pictures than Androids, but Androids take better pictures than Blackberries, so that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Anyway, that would be assuming that these people have met most of their sexual partners through OkCupid, and all in the past few years. So that’s not it.

And I refuse to believe that a statistically significant number of people out there are seduced because of personal electronics, so “shiny phones are the new shiny cars” rings hollow. But if they were, my Droid is pretty awesome; sleep with me.

This has to be something about which people which phones appeal to, I think.

Either way, I like to think I’m bringing up the average just a bit, being a tad more in iPhone country with my number of conquests. Come on, Android people, let’s get laid more!

(image sources)

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I have sex. I fuck. Because I find the term hilarious, I bone. I do all these, and additional things, passionately and sometimes with a deep, abiding love thrumming through every molecule of my body.

I’m not really a “make love” person.

Disliking the phrase “making love” is probably at least a little more hackneyed than the nomenclature itself. I don’t care. It rubs me the wrong way. It’s overly sentimental and treacly and euphemistic. Edwin Pomble never once– in years– said he wanted to “make love” to me… until after we broke up and he was was feeling particularly maudlin one day. I laughed at him. I’m a bitch.

If you need to make love, if just having sex isn’t going to work for you, I’ll gladly microwave a mess of peeps for you to stick your dick in, because I’m clearly not sugary enough. Then I’ll go fuck three of your best friends. Notice I will be doing the microwaving because I’m a romantic.

But I have absolutely no issue when the term pops up in old movies, when it means flirting/making a pass/wooing. That’s adorable, and it makes more sense. You’re literally forging a love bond out of a preliminary attraction. That’s making love; the other one is making babies .*

I’d say we should bring the old definition back, but at this point it’d just confuse everyone beyond redemption. Just think how many times a day you’d be obliged to launch into an explanation featuring Cary Grant.**

(image source)

*Or for some of us, avoiding same.

**Not that this would be a bad thing. Just time-consuming.

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Stop hating your body.*

Today, now, right this second, and for realsies. Just stop hating it. Because most of the time your body is not the problem. The problem is you’re mental.

I’m running into way too many gorgeous people lately who seem to genuinely think they’re unattractive. To the point where it’s clear that their self-perception and actual looks aren’t on the most basic of speaking terms. If they, the resplendent, cannot muster up a modicum of customary smugness over how fucking pretty they are, how am I supposed to achieve basic self-acceptance? Please, you privileged, you ugly-impaired, you kings of New England, can you please stop making this about you and realize it’s about me?

I read an article several years back about some study that showed series of pictures to a bunch of men in Great Britain to determine the perfect B.M.I. for ultimate attractiveness in a woman. It’s 20.65.

Even today I still remember that number to the hundredth decimal place because upon reading it I immediately went to one of those online B.M.I. calculators, entered my height, and determined exactly what I should weigh to be scientifically hot.

And lo, I weighed more than that. And I was slightly more convinced than ever that I was irredeemably ugly. I definitely already felt that way before, but I was firmer than ever in my conviction.

But to be honest, if I were exactly– to the ounce– at that utterly arbitrary-but-for-a-random-internet-article goal, I’d probably have still hated my body. I would likely hate it now. I will probably always hate it to some extent. I also realize how completely fucked up that is. Which is why I’m telling you not to. I’m also telling me not to, incidentally.

Here’s the weird thing: the women (also the men) I’m attracted to have B.M.I.s all over the map. If I think you’re sexy as a person, then your curvy softness, or sculpted musculature, or sparse silhouette, or bountiful roundness, your whatever is an intrinsic part of that. The quirks, the realism, the tender truths make me weak with lust because they’re so damn pretty.

But me? I can’t possibly expect anyone to like me unless I’m flawless. It feels highly insulting to others, making them look at me while I’m so imperfect!

I’m realizing, however, that pretty much all of us (except PUAs, who seem to be more the exact opposite of this) have absurdly high standards for what we’re supposed to look like, and a healthy appreciation for diversity and natural beauty in others.

So what I guess I’m saying is, you’re probably a lot sexier than you think you are. And especially if your body is healthy**, and strong, and generally does what you ask it to, you should really start loving it. Hard. Because it’s amazing. And it’s probably also really, honestly beautiful.

(image source)

* Oh no, I do realize I’m not the boss of you. I really do. Please don’t be mad.
** I’m excruciatingly aware that there’s this whole other level of complexity when you’re not healthy and your body seems like a total dick sometimes. But still, your wracked-with-pain body is very likely more lovely than you’re giving it credit for.

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They’re a tactile dream: soft, round, delicious with a distracting embellishment at the tip. They are the anatomical equivalent of the peanut butter cyclops cookie. They’re also capable of providing complete sustenance for a growing human being (this part being less like cookies), which is quite a parlor trick.

One of the most intriguing things about boobs is the variety they come in. If tits had their own nation someone would eventually refer to it as a melting pot. You can see their outline, their size, maybe even catch a tantalizing glimpse of cleavage (and all those vary widely from person to person), but you have to do some real exploring to find out what the nipples are really like. They can be big, small, corks, nubs, dark, pale, perfectly delineated circles, gradients, smooth, bumpy, crinkly, and/or run through with metal, among many other possibilities. Sometimes it’s maddening trying to guess. Sometimes when you finally get to play with them you realized you had it entirely wrong, and that’s kind of amazing. I love being wrong. I love discovering.

Playboy has this Evolution of the Boob article on their website. It’s about what style of breasts were in vogue which decade (starting with the ’50s, when Playboy started). It’s possible that Playboy is really primarily talking about the preferences of its own editors over time, but to a point you can’t argue with the fact that tit fashions change. That being said, I’m not sure I’ve ever looked at a topless woman and thought, “those are so last season”.

Perhaps even more than decades, people have preferences. I like all the boobs, but there’s something about those ’60s torpedo boobs that I find very compelling.

But I don’t believe I’ve met many people who have admitted to preferring augmented breasts. I’m not sure if they’re actually unpopular or if that’s just the crowd I tend to run with (I mean, obviously they’re not presenting a huge handicap if women keep getting them). But somehow or other I’ve gotten this impression that a boob job would indeed limit my sexual options, or at least be a liability.

I don’t see a problem with fake tits; I’m fine with most body modification. And I don’t see why they would deter me from having sex with someone. But I can say this: bare augmented breasts often somehow look less naked than natural ones. It just feels like the woman still has something on, even when she’s totally stripped. Maybe that’s why the people who don’t like them really don’t like them. Implants do make for amazing cleavage, though.

(image source)

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Have a Venn diagram of the many, many shades of non-monogamy. Click to engorge.

By Franklin Veaux, the cat responsible for the Human Sexuality Map, which is also pretty damn cool.

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Body acceptance is hard for anyone, I think. We all have things that we hate about our bodies, things that we feel severely limit our worth as sexual objects and maybe even as people. If you don’t feel this way, maybe I’m just projecting my own self-loathing onto you and assuming I’m more normal than I really am. That’s entirely possible. But I hear the way people tend to talk about their bodies, sometimes with a nervous half-laugh, maintaining a facade of plausible deniability in case some one figures out that they occasionally, maybe often, all of them, feel like trolls. Because NO ONE MUST KNOW.

We’re told that confidence is sexy. And it’s true. Some of the most romantically and sexually successful people I’ve ever met didn’t necessarily look better than the people around them; they just believed they were hot stuff, and everyone sort of went along for the ride. Cleopatra would be the classic(al) example of this phenomenon: she wasn’t ugly, but she was never considered visually beautiful. Yet her voice was enchanting, she was past mistress in spectacle and fantasy, and she carried herself like, well, a queen. And today we’re all pretty sure she was exquisite (see: Sophia Loren, Vivien Leigh, Claudette Colbert, Elizabeth Taylor, possibly Angelina Jolie). That is confidence doing its job well.

But still, it’s hard to be confident just because confidence pays off. You can’t manufacture confidence out of whole cloth and wishful thinking. You have to nurture it over time until it gets to be a habit. And until then, what? I guess we fake it. I think that most of us fake it most of the time.

A while back, I was talking with some friends and this one guy came up. Everyone agreed that he was shady by virtue of consistently trying to weasel his way into the life of any insecure female he could find. I’d never really met the guy, but had seen him around at cons. I had to agree, though, that it was a creepy M.O. “Don’t worry, though,” my friend Penelope said. “You’re way too confident for him to bother with. He’d never even pay you any attention.”* Too confident! HA! The masquerade continues…

I didn’t contradict her because I want to be too confident to be the victim of some shady guy who preys on self-loathing and vulnerability. In my heart of hearts I believe that I’m not, but I try to maintain that image when I can.

But I dream of the day when I can feel pretty and strong and worthwhile and sexy. When I can look at myself in the mirror and think “Hey, not bad” without the reflexive response of “Actually…” I want to like myself naked. I want to like myself in general. And I’d like to one day, many years from now, look at some nude pics of myself from back now and think, “Man, I was hot.” Frivolous, yes, but fundamental.

(image source)

*Yes, it occurred to me she might have just told me that because I’m too ugly for him to bother with and she wanted to paint that in the best light possible, but I have rejected that possibility on the grounds that there are limits to how ugly I’m prepared to feel.

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