I’m inclined to give Edwin a pass for a few different reasons, but the largest is that he really is so self-centered and socially clueless that he almost certainly never meant any harm, even when his behavior left a great deal to be desired. While I don’t want to date or fuck or even be close friends with prohibitively self-centered and socially clueless people (socially clueless is sometimes endearing to a point, but there are limits), I don’t mind a casual friendship with one here and there.

It’s weird to talk to an ex after a long period of no contact. Sure, he’s called me a few times sporadically on some pretext or other, but we stopped talking regularly last Fall, and now we seem to be inching toward a casual friendship point again. I guess. There’s something awkward about not knowing what you’re supposed to talk about, what’s going to open up old wounds or just plain be too personal. I pay attention to these things; I’m not sure he does.

In just a few conversations he’s mentioned a lot of odd and personal things, including but not limited to the following:

• He can’t go to the club without being hit on by all the ladies. (He’s mentioned this one on at least three separate occasions.)
• He lasts longer in bed than he used to.
• He’s so damn good-looking.
• The shower in his new residence is perfect for fucking in.
• He wants to find a Halloween costume this year that will show off his damn good-looking body.

It’s not that I have an issue with intimate disclosures (duh), but it all seems a little over-the-top, considering. Maybe he still harbors some resentment about the break up and wants to “[tell] me what I’m missing”, or maybe he thinks these are the sorts of things I’d be interested in because we’ve always been pretty candid in the past. Whatever the reason, these tidbits read as slightly off coming from an ex. Or possibly anyone else: I don’t want to hear anyone go on and on about what it’s like to be insanely fetching. Who even says that? It all ties in perfectly with his ongoing self-centered, socially clueless shtick.

I’m not exactly worried that he’s trying to entice me back or anything. Well, maybe a tiny bit, but I’m not vain enough to assume it. For now I’m just going to call it curious, funny, and slightly off-putting.  Still well better than our relationship when we were dating, though!

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I’ve never (literally never, which is probably weird at my age and player level) given nor solicited a phone number at a random pick-up spot. Flirting from a stranger always shuts me down right away. I know it’s terribly rude, but I don’t mean it that way. I’m just a shrinking violet. Really, ask anyone! (Okay, not really. But I really do hit a brick wall when it comes to flirting.)

But the fact is that with the cell phone number of a near-stranger I’d be tempted to send disturbing, creepy text messages, like “You’re painfully beautiful when you sleep,” and “We’re almost out of milk.” Because at that point in the possible courtship you really have nothing to lose and can really fuck with someone. And I’m afraid that it would seem like a perfectly good idea at the time!

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Hopeless tool of the patriarchy that I am, I just don’t like having very much pubic hair. I’ve been shaving to various degrees since I was sixteen, even though no one was helping me enjoy it until two years after that. It’s a tactile thing: I like feeling smoothness when I play with myself; I don’t want hair dampening sensation. To me, a shaved pussy doesn’t look much– if at all– better, and as long as I can sort out what’s where I don’t mind other people maintaining a healthy bush themselves.

But I’ve always had different standards for myself than I have for others. That’s why I feel confident saying you’re a degenerate for reading this smut.

In the realm of pussyshaving, though, you know what I hate? Razor burn. I hate it with the passion that we reserve for those who disagree with our politics and cut in front of us in line. It itches, and looks ugly, and sometimes even hurts (especially if you try to shave over it). I’m going out on a limb and guessing that every person who’s ever seen me naked, and not mentioned a razor burn that I had at all, didn’t exactly swoon over it either. I only fuck the brave, oblivious and/or polite, apparently.

Because, you see, I tend to get it a lot. Those chicks with gorgeously naked genitals swathed in silky, flawless skin? I’m not sure what they’re doing but I suspect they’re not shaving. Or maybe they are, and my skin is even more sensitive and fussy than I thought. Or I’m a Oh God I’m a freak of nature, aren’t I?

Bikini Zone cream has always helped the issue, but I accidentally transferred it from my hands to my lips after applying once, and the taste is not something you want on your pussy unless you’ve utterly despaired of getting oral sex that day. So there went that solution.

It’s actually been a lot better lately because I’m following the rule of only shaving with the grain of hair growth, which I used to think was for pussies. It turns out that it really, truly is, and should be observed accordingly. I’m also shaving a little less often (mostly because I’m exhausted and therefore not as precious about my bush these days), and conscientiously applying coconut oil after shaving.

Still, based on the recommendation of some head-shaving friends, I’m wondering if a safety razor is actually a gentler, superior shave, or just makes them feel like fancy gentlemen. Also, if this stuff works.

Oh god, no.

This…

…is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.

I’m so sorry, guys. I cannot take her anywhere.

This feeling informs very little of my behavior during actual sex (I have convinced myself, and dearly hope is true), but it dramatically influences–nay, dominates–the way I flirt, or even interact with my friends and the people I fuck. A great example of this is that fact that I do not, will not, can not send anyone sexy/risque/flirty/myspace profile/whatever pictures.

No part of me projects these self-judgments onto other people who take, send, and share sexy pics of themselves. Oh, not by any means. Please feel free to test me on this.

Over the weekend I went to a party at the local goth club. Objectively speaking, I can get pretty tarted up as long as I’m convincing myself that this is “just for fun” and not anything remotely close to trying to be sexy. I do tend to give myself the benefit of a doubt when it comes to dressing. It’s similar to my completely sense-making habit of enjoying wearing cute underwear but being terribly embarrassed whenever I’m found out. This particular night I put on a short skirt, high (as I can manage with my walking issues) heels, a t-shirt I assaulted with a pair of scissors, and these adorable striped thigh highs. And a good time was had by all.

Laramy wasn’t able to come out, having had kind of a shitty day. So as I got home and started to strip off my sweaty clothes, he was on my mind and I had a dramatically uncharacteristic thought process:

1. These thigh highs are kind of cute…
2. Laramy’s mentioned a couple times that he likes my legs…
3. He’s had a super bad day…
4. I never send him pics of me…
5. Ergo… maybe it would cheer him up if I emailed him a picture of my legs in aforementioned thigh highs!
6. I’d better hurry up and do it before I think this through any further.

And I wasn’t even drunk or anything! I’m not going to say that what I produced in the following moments using a camera phone, specialty hosiery, and an inexplicable lapse of inhibition was a “sexy pic”. It really wasn’t. The whole thing was supposed to be a silly “thinking of you” gesture, I guess. But after I sent it, I realized that it was hazardously close to a “sexy pic” attempt. The more I thought about it the more I started neurotically wondering if it was going to come across as entirely pathetic or just mostly pathetic, and by the time I got up the next morning I was grimly expecting the worst.

To his great credit as a gentleman, Laramy’s reaction via instant message was a lot more “I like the thigh highs” than “You preposterous creature, what’s with the flailing abortion of a jpg in my inbox?” But it was a bit of a struggle to resist asking, “So like, that picture is pretty much an embarrassment to everyone involved, right?” I felt kind as if I was watching myself in horror as I proudly brought roadkill pie to the cool kids’ sushi and sake party. My stoicism through all this was an inspiration to both of me.

Mere minutes later, I kid you not, a friend sent me a genuinely super-sexy pic of her amazing bare breasts, asking me to forward it on to Laramy. Which I did, gladly, content that I had actually found a way to at least help brighten up his morning in a much more productive way than my previous attempt.

If you verbally abuse someone, I don’t trust you. If you break things in anger, especially to intimidate or otherwise send a message to your partner, I don’t trust you. You can say it a million times: “I would never raise a hand against anyone!” “I’m not the violent type.” “I know not to cross the line.” Yeah, sorry. I still don’t trust you.

When I was a kid, no one sat me down to lay out the List of Unacceptable Behaviors. I honestly didn’t know that breaking things and punching holes in walls right next to me were red flag activities. I thought that if a guy didn’t hurt me, I wasn’t really allowed to complain. I didn’t understand that when a partner takes steps to try to isolate you from your friends and family, it’s time to dump the motherfucker already. If he told me he cared about me, well, that meant he did! Why would anyone bother to lie about that?

Yes, I was naive like the cosmos is big: beyond imagining.

I can’t blame anyone for my lack of education here. My parents certainly didn’t expect their daughter to find herself in an abusive relationship as a teenager (or ever, probably). In fact, I’m sure they thought I’d meet a nice Christian boy who would agree with my dad and treat me like a treasured helpmeet, and we’d get married young (the most reliable way to prevent premarital sex) and bless them richly with WASP grandbabies approximately nine months after I finally discovered on my wedding night what a penis looked like. They may or may not have also expected me to learn to speak in tongues, but this was merely implied, never discussed.

But despite my parents’ peculiar and inaccurate prophesies concerning my romantic future, I think they were deceptively typical: few parents want to plan for the worst, and perhaps fewer see the looming specter of an asshole on the horizon. I wonder how many parents ever give the List Of Unacceptable Behaviors talk.

Do people pick the list up from pop culture, peers, mentors, or their own common sense (of which I’ve never claimed adequate amounts)? The chilling answer is that far too few of us do until we’re taught the hard way. Far too many of us learn what’s unacceptable by accepting the unacceptable until we reach a crisis point. For me, the crisis point occurred with Reginald Sleeth after he broke things, after he called me names, after he hit me, after he choked me, after he threatened to kill me, and after so many other Fucking Well Unacceptable Behaviors.

I’m not a therapist or any other kind of expert in abusive relationships, but I have spent a lot of time processing and examining my experiences and the stories of other abused partners. Often there seems to be a pattern of escalation. An abuser might test to see if he (or yes, she) can get away with throwing something across the room so it almost hits his victim. If he liked the response from that, he might smash something right next to her, seeming almost about to strike her with it, and scaring her even more. After that, he might start shoving. Just a little. And so on.

The Slippery Slope is a fallacy because it does not logically follow that circumstances will inevitably escalate. But neither does not logically follow that an argument’s automatically invalid if it notes a process of escalation. When a person self-justifies abusive actions shrewd to provoke fear and grant him control over someone, he can’t be trusted to adhere to higher frequencies on an honor code spectrum he’s already breaking. Not all verbal abusers and object-violent abusers graduate to hitting their victims. But many do, and those who don’t are still abusive and still patently Unacceptable. And if no one’s ever told you that before, I’m damn well telling you now.

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Oh, I know what you’re thinking: “Silly Pussy, chicks don’t have balls.” Well, you haven’t seen me sing karaoke, then. It takes serious stones to belt out Sister Christian by Night Ranger when you haven’t had a sip of alcohol since last October.

I guess you do have a point, though. Maybe I don’t literally have balls to be kicked in, and maybe Laramy’s cock doesn’t literally have feet with which to kick. But what did happen resulted in some crazy sensations that seem roughly parallel.

For a long time I’ve likened having my cervix pounded into to getting kicked in the balls. This was based only on the fact that it hurts and cramps and makes me want to stop having sex (I’ve met very few men who want to soldier on after I’ve accidentally taken out their artillery, if you know what I mean. Boo.) But one thing I pride myself on is my ability to understand proportion. I knew all along that it wasn’t a perfect comparison. There seems to be some sort of blinding nausea that comes into play in the balls scenario. As someone mentioned on twitter, it’s “like someone dropped a load of cement on your guts.” Also, there appears to be a profound full-body weakening that skates past mere pain and into the realm of horrifying comic book vulnerabilities. My cervix has never worked this kind of alchemy.

Until, perhaps, recently.

Laramy and I were in agreement: we were damn well about to fuck any minute. First, I thought I’d put on some music to drown out my caterwauling so I was bent over my keyboard, ass presented. Laramy came up behind me, my pants collapsed to the floor, and suddenly I found it incredibly difficult to concentrate on pointing and clicking anything. His cock slid in and I gasped as it split me. I’m not sure what it was: my pussy gripping harder than usual in ever denser and more furious orgasms, or some slightly altered angle as he fucked me from behind, but the intensity was blistering. I either had roughly 300 orgasms in rapid succession or one incredibly long one. I honestly couldn’t tell.

After a while like that, I was starting to feel crampy enough that the mad orgasms weren’t dulling it anymore. It was really starting to fucking hurt, actually. But I have these priorities, see. When one position is bringing pain, you don’t throw the baby out with the sexual bathwater (…it got weird, didn’t it?), you change position. So I switched to an even lazier posture: missionary. And then we fucked some more. The pain seemed less urgent. I pretended I didn’t see it sitting there, watching us fuck. The orgasms (orgasm?) kept coming in, crashing. Laramy was pounding harder now, building. It suddenly occurred to me that when all that climaxing, analgesic of the gods, stopped I’d probably have something unpleasant to deal with. But you know how when you’re in the throes of passion you just don’t care?

But, as they ever must, the orgasms eventually came to an end. And sweet leaping Odin, a singular and absurd pain broke across my body. It was rather like the feeling one has during and just after a spinal tap: blasted with weakness and nausea and an inexorable pressure. I was shuddering and hysterically panting/giggling, though I assure you it didn’t seem funny at the time. I wanted to get to the bathroom in case I had to throw up, but I could barely move at first. Just shake. And laugh. Then I tottered semi-successfully to the bathroom and splashed some water on my face. I felt right again within 10 or 15 minutes.

I think I traumatized Laramy a little. The last thing he wanted to do was hurt me, but I was so set on ignoring everything to keep having awesome sex he ended up not getting much of a choice. It was so totally not his fault, but I know he felt pretty bad. Probably because I looked so wrecked from it. Fortunately he wasn’t so upset that he’s refusing to have sex with me now or anything.

But you know, it did kind of feel like someone dropped a load of cement on my guts, so I’m wondering if somehow we fucked at an angle where his penis kicked my cervix, and that I experience the female version of being kicked in the balls. Either way, I’m going to recommend you go ahead and not try it.

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Today's post isn't really about sex. But this makes up for it, no?

I was born in the United States, and that’s where I live. Today is Independence Day here. It commemorates not any victory or truce, but simply the intention to stop being a trodden-upon colony. This is kind of like celebrating your anniversary with a paramour on the day you first admitted you wanted to fuck each other rather than the day you actually did for the first time. Which is fine, really, just an interesting choice that becomes completely meaningless unless there’s some decisive follow-through. Which, in the case of the Declaration of Independence, there was. It was called the Revolutionary War.

I’m somewhat conflicted as a U.S. citizen. It always feels awkward that there’s not a proper word for us. “American” is desperately broad and kind of pushy, as if the manifest destiny myth gives us the right to claim ourselves the sole possessors of all flavors and varieties of Americas, some of which are entire continents. Sure, “America” in this case is just shorthand for “United States of America”, and no one else seems to need it as much as we do (try saying United Statesian. It just doesn’t work), but it bothers me anyway. Other things bother me more profoundly. Our country was never, even once, all integrity and liberty and pie. The United States government and its citizens systematically slaughtered and displaced the people of sovereign native nations to get us where we are today. They enslaved and exploited those people and so many others for generations. No ends justify those means.

I don’t believe our founding fathers were infallible or indefatigably noble. I don’t think that they necessarily planned for “all men are created equal” to mean seriously fucking everyone someday. They were, as we are, products of their era and culture, and that means they had some pretty shitty ideas about plenty of subjects. Instead of perfect intentions and godlike wisdom (or even the moral high ground), though, they gave us wonderful promises and forged them into law. That’s their beautiful legacy.

What I love about my home are the promises it was built on. Those flawed men gave us the framework to grow into an honest, fair, and free society, or as close as we’re likely to ever get. I intensely believe this, and it makes me grateful and yes, proud.

But just because those promises were made doesn’t mean they’re automatically kept. I don’t just think, I observe that we’re not as free as we think we are in this country. Votes become increasingly difficult to verify as paper ballots are phased out. Appointing corporate lobbyists to White House cabinet and advisory positions has become de rigueur. People are lining up to hand in their reproductive rights, relinquish free speech (funny how limiting someone else’s rights also compromises your own), and to thwart the one provision in the Constitution that seems designed to give us a fighting chance if everything goes irretrievably to hell. We’re losing cherished friends, family, and compatriots in two interminable wars that most of us don’t seem to believe in. Our president, who was stridently opposed to the Patriot Act while he was campaigning, recently extended it by a year, and was met with precious little outrage.

The government can do bad things. It will sometimes try to do them in secret. There are recorded, admitted instances where this has happened in the past. So I have to ask, has any government in history ever cleaned up its act and restored its integrity on its own, without a coup, a war, or at least the undeviating insistence of an incensed public? What makes us think a government that, for example, covertly performed mind-control experiments on many of its citizens without their informed consent mere decades ago can be trusted today?

And yet, apathy thrives. Helplessness encroaches.

I realize that everyone has a different vision of the ideal America (mine has a lot of naked frolicking). I don’t know the answers to everything, and I’m not pretending to. I just feel very strongly that no good can come from a nation’s citizens having fewer rights and sitting idly by while more important promises are broken. Even if you’re not using all your rights or you don’t particularly like some of them, aren’t they… I dunno… kind of nice to have? Just in case?

My fellow United Statesians, have a great Independence Day. See fireworks. Grill meat (or tofu, if you’re kinky like that) over fire. Celebrate your state’s relaxed sodomy laws. Do something outdoors. Our nation is beautiful and you have every right to love it. But today I feel bound to remind myself that freedom isn’t something you’re necessarily born with and get to keep. That’s the way it should be, in a perfect world, but in reality freedom can be taken away at any time. That’s when you have to decide whether or not you’re going to declare your intentions to fight for it. And then, fucking follow through.

I don’t know how parents determine their daughter’s clitoris is “too big”. I don’t even know what that means. I was under the impression that big clitorises were sexy anyway, but no one should be evaluating a child’s genitals in such a way unless they’re presenting an actual medical problem. “Being bigger than average” isn’t a medical problem. But somehow, a bunch of parents decided their daughters’ clitorises were too big, and turned to Dr. Dix P. Poppas for help (you probably think I made that name up, but I didn’t even!).

Dr. Dix P. Poppas is nothing if not helpful. According to this and this and this he’ll helpfully hack into your child’s healthy clitoris (as young as 4 months) and pare it down to some arbitrary acceptable size. Then he’ll stimulate her clitoris with a vibrating device and ask her how it feels… not just once, no! Every year. He’ll keep a chart. A chart of your daughter’s mutilated clitoris’s sexual response. Across years.

There’s no way to convey this in normal-sized font, so…

Creepy. Evil. Creepy.

Why this is guy allowed perform experimental surgery on children and then systematically molest them is anyone’s guess.

I posted about this on twitter the other night, and comparisons were naturally made to male circumcision, which I’m also entirely against (concerning male circ, Holly Pervocracy wrote about it recently, and made some excellent points, as she tends to do). I’m not sure if we’re talking equal atrocities considering the potentially-scarring, prolonged aftercare involved, but to me these seem like obvious civil rights issues. We’re talking about the physical integrity of a person. You don’t fuck with that, even if you’re that person’s legal guardian. What am I missing here?

Maybe it’s down to the fact that I don’t want kids and can’t realistically put myself in the position of a parent, so maybe there are complexities to this I can’t grasp, but when we’re talking circumcision I’m appalled when otherwise-intelligent people whose opinions I respect trot out tired, unsound reasons for cutting off pieces of their hypothetical babies’ genitals. I’m not going to fight all the stupid pro-circ. myths right now because Intact America does a thorough job here. But really, the bottom line is that I just feel that cutting a child’s genitals for arbitrary reasons is never justified. Trust me, when they’re adults they’ll have plenty of time to decide if they want to mutilate their own genitals.

Why would anyone force a child to submit to any surgery that’s medically unnecessary? Or does that just go back to the “Why is there evil in the world?” question.

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While I like to name things as much as the next sexual deviant, naming my genitals would feel too much like dissociating myself from them, and that’s the last thing I want to do a) because that’s where I have a great deal of my fun and I have no wish to start living vicariously through my own body parts, and b) because if they got to have opinions they’d probably be very disappointed in me just now because I haven’t been keeping up on my caretaking duties (read: masturbating) lately.

I have jokingly given my tits names before, patently unsexy names that I throw out at really inconvenient times.

INT. SOME RANDOM COUCH – NIGHT

Groping is happening. Groping moves in a booberly direction.

Quizzical Pussy (indicating left breast): Ooooh, see that’s Statler.

Confused Dude: Huh?

Quizzical Pussy: The other one’s Waldorf. Now back to the balcony, kiddo! The old boys aren’t quite done with you!

Confused Dude: You sicken me.

Quizzical Pussy: Ah ah ah I lahve eet!

…This sort of thing is really great fun until I run out of people willing to fuck me. That’s when the laughter stops.

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Recently one of my Facebook friends posted the following status update: “Smile, it makes people wonder what you’re thinking.” It’s another quote in a long line of hackneyed “folksy wisdom” gems he’s read or heard somewhere, and just had to share. But even as folksy wisdom goes, this advice is really atrocious.

I can think of countless reasons to smile: a friend’s face, the sun on your skin, the elation of running and jumping and climbing trees, remembering that puppies exist, or getting a new sex toy in the mail, just to name a few. But just to get a reaction from people, to seem more intriguing? Booooooooooring. I can get behind smiling out of friendliness, or to put people at ease, but this stupid cliche goes a step too far. It’s “I want people to think of me in a certain way, so I’ll disingenuously alter my behavior.”

This, gentle reader, is why we can’t have nice things.

Cilfton Overmangle texted me out of the blue recently to ask if three days was still the customary amount of time to wait to call a girl after getting her number (I don’t know why I’m the person he asks, but whatever. I’m here to help, I guess…) I wasn’t trying to be glib in the least when I responded that he should simply call her when it was convenient for him to talk and he would care to have a conversation with her. Has anyone not heard of the “three day” rule? And doesn’t it seem contrived and a touch desperate-not-to-seem-desperate when you can tell someone has purposely waited exactly three days to call? I’m not the mayor of dating or anything, but even my commitment-phobic ass couldn’t muster up a speck of contempt for someone calling me on days one, two, or four, especially if a decent conversation arose from it.

It strikes me that conventional wisdom encourages us too much to fake things, to play games with each other for social rewards. The fact that there’s a “rule” of how many days to wait before calling an individual with a pulse and a mother and unique thoughts and experiences betrays such cynacism. And you know if Quizzical Pussy is calling you on your cynicism you’ve gone too far.

That’s my major issue with Pick Up Artistry: it couldn’t be less like art. Art is human, individualistic, all about sharing a unique and fallible perspective. It’s against homogeneous rules; it runs counter to a jaded, cookie-cutter approach to people and the world. Hell, even if an artist is expressing a misanthropic point of view, the act of creation itself is the opposite of cynical.

In fact, the “art” referred to in PUA is more just at odds with being “artless”, in the sense that has positive connotations of sincerity and being unaffected.

Instead of embracing the natural, PUAs (and girls that follow The Rules or whatever the kids are calling it these days, or other con artists) devote themselves to running through life like it’s a role-playing game. And the person you’re trying to date isn’t even the princess you need to save or a member of your party. Your “target” is just another monster to vanquish on your way to your goal. So if you don’t get results with one chick, you just need to beef up your stats, or else you threw the dice wrong and luck just wasn’t on your side. Either way, you’ll encounter lots of HB9s on this level, so you’re cool… you’ll get the next one. How is it a good idea to treat a potential partner like a non-player character? Like ultimately, they don’t matter.

There has to be a better way to deal with rejection than dehumanizing people. Can’t a person not want to fuck you, yet remain fully human? Can’t social interactions be more about discovery and less about achievements? Can’t you just relax and see where and with whom you fit naturally, without trying to force perceptions and opinions you can’t control? Can’t you just smile because you feel like it, call when you want to, and acknowledge that if you’re playing a game, we’re all in it together and probably actually all on the same team?

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