quizzical pussy

Don't make this weird.

Happy International Women’s Day, everybody!

In honor of this highest and holiest of high holy days, I’m going to reveal something that may shock some people, and here it is: We’re really actually not living in a post-sexist age. Your mind’s blown, isn’t it?

I’m not here to tell you it necessarily sucks to be female, although concerning some parts of the world we can certainly make that argument. For me, though, in all my incredible comparative privilege, I more or less like being a chick and I’m not ready to turn in my pussy card just yet.

But even nestled in the bosom of Western culture we haven’t attained the basic equality that women set out to achieve generations ago. We’re closer, but we’re so not there. Equal pay for equal work is still a goal rather than a reality. Our culture produces children who believe that violence against women is easily justified. One in six women is sexually assaulted in her lifetime, and all too often it’s perfectly acceptable to blame her.

Women are still sexual objects, not just to some people, but to society as a whole. I know 20-year-old women who have anxiety over being “too old”. Too old to have a kick-ass career? Too old to make a difference politically or socially? Nope. Too old to be a doe-eyed ingenue; too old to be Miley Cyrus. Apparently legal is the new expired. And realizing that being pretty gets us more appreciation and success than any other positive trait, way too many of us have a near-religious conviction that we’re ugly: too fat, too tall, too short, too flat-chested, too pimpled, too muscular, too pale, too dark, too scrawny, too imperfect. We think that our toes are weird or that our stretch marks mean that no one will ever love us. And if no one is going to love us, we are somehow worthless.

If we mention that these things are unfair, we’ll often get called unbalanced, emotional, or irrational. There are still so many things to tackle, but as a small nerdy she-fish in an ocean of crap I wish women didn’t have to deal with, I’m starting tiny.

I’m starting with sexual harassment at the Sci Fi Conventions I go to.

Here’s an imagination exercise: Take a bunch of people who likely faced romantic rejection and isolation growing up, making sure that a healthy percentage of these are shitty at recognizing social cues. Add a common interest they may not get to talk to real people about all that often, and all the excitement and adjacent libido that would naturally result. Put some of these people in costumes designed to make the wearers look (with varying success) like cartoon and video game characters, and put others in corsets. There will also be people inexplicably wandering around wearing cat ears.

Hi there. It looks like you have a Fan Convention on your hands. You realize, of course, that with all those roiling factors in play, someone is going to try to fuck up this nerdy utopia by being super creepy, right? Some guy will inevitably think that the hot costumes exist only for his personal enjoyment and that any woman who likes the same TV shows he does must be praying nightly for someone just like him to appear and grope her tits.

Which is why I’ve taken on the daunting task of organizing an anti-harassment project at my local con. The convention has a sexual harassment policy in place already, but it hasn’t been implemented all that well, and some creeptastic geek-on-geek crimes have been perpetrated.

Creeps have been routinely grabbing or hugging people without permission or warning, commenting on their bodies uninvited, flirting aggressively… you know, the things that you might have heard about cons that make you reluctant to ever go to one, but that shouldn’t be tolerated. Worse, the injured parties have been afraid to report these incidents to con staff because they’re worried about seeming hypersensitive, or like trouble-makers.

But how fucked up does a culture (or subculture) have to be to alienate the victim and make the offender feel justified? Just because men tend to outnumber women at these things doesn’t mean they get to make it a boys’ club where the women attending are just so many sacrifices to the communal hard-on. And neither do women get to harass men, nor men men, nor women women. Let’s just be universally uncreepy.

Of course, nerds flirt at conventions. They get laid at conventions and have glorious, debaucherous times in an environment where free love and free energy drinks reign. I don’t want to put a damper on that, but seriously, the creepy people need to back the fuck off, practice common respect, and only put their hands where they’re expressly invited.

So I’m going to work to make sure the harassment policies are accessible to everyone, to educate the con staff and the con guests how to deal with creepy person encounters, witnessed or experienced, and to open a dialogue about this stuff. I’m going to try to make my little corner of fandom safer for catgirls and cosplayers.

In reality, though, there’s a good chance I’ll set a terrible example for everyone by shouting off-color jokes all over the place. But at least my horrible behavior will be a good talking point for whichever brave warrior takes over my post after I’m escorted off the premises.

Stranger rape is kind of like a shark attack. Most people are alert to the dangers of sharks. They’re something that we learn and agree to fear (Jaws, news articles, Shark week), and sometimes we avoid places and activities just to better our chances. Swim in the ocean? Walk down a dark alley? Are you mad? On the other hand, sharks can’t get to me if I’m in Albuquerque. If I stay in tonight with my Mastiff I’ll be safe from scary rapists. Well, safer. I hope.

Can you always maneuver around these things? No. Albuquerque has an aquarium, and when an evil psycho wants to hurt someone he usually finds someone, and sometimes there’s not a lot you can do can make sure it’s not you.

When you get attacked by a shark, there may be a few people who say that you weren’t observing proper shark safety, or that you must’ve been dressed to look like a seal or something, but most people are correctly going to blame the shark.

Date/acquaintance rape is like a dog attack. There’s an adorable puppy in the park who looks perfectly friendly, and his owner says it’s okay to pet him. Everything seems okay, so you approach him and give him a friendly pat. Then, he tears your face off.

People will have a lot more opinions about a situation like this. You might hear a well-meaning “Did you let him see your hand before you touched him?” or a rueful “You should’ve known better than to try to pet a dog you didn’t know!”, even “You must’ve scared him!” It suddenly gets so much more complicated. Most people will be sympathetic, but a part of their minds may just work overtime to figure out how you were responsible because it’s scary to think that it could happen to them. And hell, they can’t imagine their dogs doing such a thing! Must’ve been something you did wrong. That makes it easier. But they’ll usually agree that you no longer have a face, that things went awry.

To be clear, I’m not saying that stranger rape is worse than date rape, although shark bites might tend to be more damaging than dog bites. I’m also not saying that rapists are like sharks and dogs. They’re actually like people…horrible, horrible people, and they’re completely responsible for their actions in a way that animals aren’t. I’m talking about attitudes here: the similes are about peoples’ beliefs and reactions to these events. Got it? Cool. We’ve got one more…

To some people, partner rape is like a Bigfoot sighting. It’s a ridiculous myth, a concoction beloved of the media and hyped beyond all reason. No harm was done, nothing out of the ordinary actually happened, and only lunatics and members of weird fringe groups believe in it.

But in reality, partner rape is more like a bite from a disease-carrying mosquito, spreading something really nasty, like the ugliest kinds of malaria or West Nile Virus. It is very real, and it’s a global problem. It can be invisible to the casual observer. The victim may have reasons to minimize the event or even think it’s commonplace, but the fallout is devastating. It is also, like a mosquito bite, not the victim’s fault.

People often dismiss partner rape. They’ll call it a gray area, or say that it’s “crossing a line” or “not cool” rather than saying it’s “illegal and disgusting”. It’s hard for many to grasp that a person can be raped by someone they’ve already consented to sex with in the past. It’s hard for victims to grasp that (see: my reluctance to call this rape); it’s hard for many experts-of-everything on the internet to grasp it. It’s obviously especially hard for the rapists to grasp it.

But when consent is absent and sex is happening, that’s rape. Consent must be clear before sexual activity starts. Assume a lack of consent until you have a clear positive indication that something’s okay. That’s the way human beings are supposed to treat other human beings. If you have to wonder whether your partner consents to a sexual activity, you should ask rather than assume. Nonverbal agreement is very possible (e.g. enthusiastic involvement, affirming grins, decisive nods), but if it isn’t obvious, you ask. And for the non-initiator, if you’re the kind of person who thinks consent questions “ruin the mood” and you prefer aggression from a partner, please become an emphatic nonverbal consenter or confirm what you agree to before things start, because an occasional “is this okay?” is a good, sexy habit that I’d prefer you not go around squashing. Consent doesn’t kill the mood. I promise.

After you get to know someone, consent cues can and do get subtler. You can relax a little when you trust each other. But if there’s hint of a “no” signal– verbal or nonverbal– everything stops. It’s your responsibility as a sexually active adult to ensure that you have consent. Every time.

That’s why the old tropes of “wifely duty” and “frigidity” and “compromise” are red herrings in the partner rape debate. There are lots of reasons someone might consent to sex when he or she doesn’t necessarily feel like it. A relationship is sometimes about compromise, and part of that might be agreeing to fuck your husband when you’re exhausted or to bone your girlfriend when you feel too fat. Sometimes it means that the partner with the lower sex drive tries to meet the partner with the higher sex drive halfway. All these things are okay. When you’re part of a loving couple, you often want to take care of your partner’s sexual needs even when you’re not precisely in the mood for it. But consent still needs to happen to get to that point. Compromise never means that the person who wants to have sex gets to force or pressure the one who doesn’t. If the pro-sex person wants to enact a compromise, it’s called “masturbating in the bathroom”. Only the anti-sex person gets to decide that sex is on the compromise menu.

Another thing people tend to say is that false rape reports are common, especially when a woman wants to hurt or punish a lover or gain the upper hand in child custody battles. It never fails. If you talk about rape, someone will probably eventually bring this up. About 2-3% of all reports of sexual assault are false, which is similar to percentages of false reports of burglary and grand theft auto. Lying about being raped is never okay, but this is not exactly an epidemic.

Those who are anxious for the continued safety of partner rapists can rest assured that victims are still reluctant to bring justified charges against their rapists, especially in cases of partner rape. It’s obviously hard to tell how underreported partner rape really is, but very, very, very is a good estimate. Women who are raped by their boyfriends, husbands and exes have a lot of shit to wade through, and sometimes pressing charges is just one thing too many. In addition to all the physical, emotional, financial, and sexual legacies the rape can leave, the victim may be dissuaded from prosecuting even if the police believe her. And if she gets that far, what are the odds that she’ll get a conviction against a man with whom she’s had consensual sex countless times before? Unfortunately, while the myths of gray areas, compromise, and rampant false rape reports persist, the convicted partner rapist is sort of like, well, Bigfoot. Or at least the Barbary Lion.

The following personal story can be seen as a supplement to my series on rape and consent, although I didn’t set out meaning to write it. I started relating the experience as a brief example in an upcoming entry and it got longer and longer until I realized it was its own piece. To be clear, I’ve never called this incident rape; I’ve never known what to call it. It was a bad experience, though, so if reading it will upset you, read about tentacle dildos here instead!

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Reginald Sleeth and I were having a fight again. We fought a lot: snarling, ugly fights. He’d threaten to kill himself, or to hurt me. I’d bawl until the salt from my tears formed little icicles on my lashes. Sometimes the battles started when I’d raised my eyes too high from the ground in public and looked another man in the face, which always convinced Reginald that I was hell-bent on fucking that visibly-faced man. Sometimes they started when I found out he’d been making promises to other girls behind my back again. Sometimes I didn’t even know what the problem was and the fight just seemed to start without me.

We sat on his futon. I was sobbing, and he was only getting angrier. I just wanted things to be okay; I apologized again and again, not really knowing or feeling why. I said the words “I’m sorry” so many times they stopped sounding like words and became a strange background noise interrupted by the gasps and hiccoughs spewing from my wailing, puffy face. The part of me that I considered my personality had been broken for a while, and whatever was left of me seemed to cry a lot.

His face got crueler and he looked more disgusted with every sorry I said. But I couldn’t stop. It was mechanical now; it was the whirring gears that kept me breathing. Finally, I said the “I’m sorry” that tipped him into a rage. His movement was so abrupt and violent that I assumed he was going to hit me, and I flinched. But he turned away–toward the door–not toward me, so then I thought he was going to leave me all alone in his apartment with no car, no phone, no self. That scared me too. I reached out to stop him from exiting, but I realized I was already being pulled, dragged to the floor by my shirt. He ripped it trying to take it off. He tore my favorite bra too but it clung, wounded, to my body. His grip was too tight on me. The air conditioning was suddenly too cold on my newly bared skin. I shook my head, tried to back up, struggled to regain the safety of the furniture, to get away. I was sure he was going to hurt me. Badly. Maybe he would kill me. He was stronger.

Reginald was on top of me, holding me down with his knees while he undid his belt and opened his pants. He was hard and I was terrified. His anger and his force and my misery transformed even the erection I’d always been happy to see into something frightening. He grabbed my hair and moved me around to my knees, facing him. I cowered as he loomed in front of me, and I couldn’t look at him. I pulled away but he had my hair and I was too afraid of him to really fight. I didn’t say any real, human words because I wouldn’t stop screaming, and then he slammed my head down and rammed his cock into my mouth, and it felt like my face was on fire. I choked on my tears as much as his thrusts. My mewling panic was muffled now, less shrill and more like a ragged, guttural hum. I wonder if the vibrations made it better for him.

It didn’t take him long. When I felt him release into my raw throat it was bitter and nauseating. I wanted a drink of water. I wanted to be sick. But then his fingers jammed into me between my legs, raking against the dry flesh there and now a new pain tore through me. I was afraid to tell him no and I’d run out of screams, but I shook my head again and whispered “please”, mute tears running down my cheeks. And he did stop after a minute, and I curled myself into a ball thankful he hadn’t killed me, all the while just wanting to die.

Why why why why why? It kept buzzing in my brain. It was punishment. I’d finally done something that bad, and I didn’t even know what it was. The amount he must hate me is unfathomable I told myself, like hovering at the edge of a bottomless pit.

Reginald sat on the floor with his back to the wall, looking away from me. His presence nearby was ugly, but no part of me was willing to move. I was still and he was still as I tried to ride the roaring whys in my head. It wasn’t until I heard him crying that I looked and saw that he’d covered his face with his hands. I don’t think there were any tears.

“I’m scared now,” he told me, in a shrill voice that threatened hysteria. “I’m scared because I thought you wanted that and now I’m afraid you didn’t like it.”

Of course I hadn’t liked it! What the fuck? I probably looked at him like he was speaking Icelandic, like he was a Martian teapot or a huge aphid-shaped gumball. Why would anyone want that?

“Remember?” he sputtered. “Remember how you told me you wanted that? I didn’t think I could, but I wanted to try. For you!”

Oh shit. It fell on me, a cold, dead weight. Months ago I had told him that I’d fantasized about “forced” blowjobs. I had wanted it to be like a game, defined sex play done in fun. Not like this. Never like this. How could a misunderstanding be so profound? But it had happened. He’d done it for me. He’d taken my throat while I cried, while I was terrified. And it was my fault because I had literally asked for it.

I unraveled myself from my fetal position on the floor and gestured toward him affectionately. I could not bring myself to touch him yet. I was fighting back nausea and shudders, and tears leaked silently from my eyes. I was so thirsty I couldn’t afford the tears, but they wouldn’t stop. “I’m sorry,” I told Reginald. My voice sounded tired and raspy, but I tried to make it soothing. I knew I had to say this or worse things would happen. “I’m sorry I made you do that, baby. I know it was so hard on you. It’s okay. You never have to do anything like that again.” I hoped like hell he never would. I stared vaguely at his cheap, stained carpet because I couldn’t look over at him and I couldn’t look down at me. I hated us both too much just then, as I kept purring my lies and his breathing quieted. “You were so good, baby. You were only doing what I wanted you to do, and it was very wrong of me to ask. But I’ll never, ever force you to do those things again.”

Does this happen every year?

The day after Valentine’s Day my laptop broke out in a rash of news articles and blog entries about sexual violence. Maybe it’s because sometimes rape feels like the other side of the sex coin that Valentine’s Day embraces, or maybe there was a coordinated effort/awareness day that I didn’t know about. Maybe the day-after-Valentine’s Day thing is a red herring and President’s Day is the real culprit. Maybe it’s Zeitgeist. I suck at Zeitgeist sometimes.

Breda got a day-early jump on the trend when she wrote about a video that was posted on ManUp, a campaign whose mission is to stop violence against women. The video’s original source is Omnipeace, “a humanitarian fashion brand that donates 25% of all profits to charities promoting peace, education, human rights and ending extreme poverty in Africa by 2025.” The video, which I’m going to call the iRape video, uses violence against women as a trope to call attention to ongoing violence in Eastern Congo over conflict minerals (tin, tungsten, titanium, and gold ore). The video isn’t just about rape, really. Rape is one “weapon” being used, and it’s not the only intolerable thing happening there: Omnipeace uses rape in the iRape video because sexual assault is especially visceral, horrifying, and to many the rape of a pregnant woman (which this video depicts) is even more so. The overarching issue is that electronics manufacturers (and by extension, consumers) are fostering violence (definitely including rape) when they buy these minerals from the wrong people and out of the wrong mines in the Congo. The escalating war crimes, the unchecked violence, and how corporations are providing economic motivation for them to continue, are the larger issues, and rape is but one really, horribly disgusting aspect of all that.

The iRape video does the job it was designed to do. It communicates the problem and even appropriates pop culture images culled from the once-ubiquitous silhouette commercials for Apple’s iPod. Surely Apple is one of Omnipeace’s biggest targets here, if only because it’s emblematic as an industry leader. In the sense that it presents information about conflict minerals and violence in the Congo, it accomplishes a lot in ninety seconds.

But it raises some issues. Some of us…well, I… think making rape into a cartoon/parody is just a shade tacky. Even the “iRape”… “iSuffer” copy in the video is so flippant it kind of makes me sick knowing that they don’t mean it as a joke, they’re only accidentally presenting it as one. When you use rape as a supporting argument or an attention-grabber you’ve just invoked something complex and rife with emotion– sometimes raw, throbbing pain. I also think it’s worthwhile for organizations to make it very clear when reposting and sharing the iRape video that it isn’t about rape in general. It’s pretty specifically about rape as a war crime, and to me it’s more successful at highlighting a regional conflict and its related atrocities than it is at saying anything about violence against women in a broader sense.

Breda linked to iRape via ManUp, “a global initiative to engage youth in preventing violence against women”. Theirs is an admirable goal, and I haven’t a clear enough picture of them yet to say whether I agree with their politics and methods or not. But clearly their mission isn’t specific to the Congo. So the fact that ManUp has the Omnipeace iRape video as the lone offering in the “Media Center” section of their globally-minded website seems like a counterintuitive decision because it depicts a very specific type of rape in a very specific context–with little surrounding explanation–on a website that has a very diffuse goal.

In war-torn Congo, rapists are certainly often armed. Non-combatant civilian women have no practical means to defend themselves nor access to legal justice. The details are far removed from what many of us might experience in other parts of the world (and in this and many other respects we are so damn lucky). Here in the United States, for example, that isn’t what rape usually looks like.

Breda’s point that self-defense knowledge and preparation (particularly access to and training with firearms) are key to preventing violence against women is an important one. Her declaration that “…the only way to stop violence against women is to make it a very, very risky endeavor,” is nothing more or less than absolutely true. There are dozens of ways to educate and mitigate and hope the bad guys stop being bad guys, and some of these can help, but they’ll never eradicate sexual violence. Only a culture that tolerates no rape and gives women the tools to enforce that standard would have any chance of existing beyond the threat of sexual violence. I’d be thrilled to see more organizations focusing on teaching women how to defend themselves, and spreading the message that it’s completely appropriate to do so. We shouldn’t be expected to leave our protection solely in the hands of men/authority figures/social change campaigns.

But it bears repeating that “you can fight back!” is not the same thing as “you should’ve fought back”, because I think sometimes people conflate the two. You can’t tell a rape victim she (or he) should’ve been “better” at being assaulted and violated. Well, obviously you can, but if you do, you’re an asshat. Empowering women to stop sexual violence dead in its tracks is good; expecting women to claw, shoot, gouge, or maim their way out of every such situation, and wondering what’s wrong with them if they don’t or can’t, is just another way of blaming the victim. Blaming the victim really needs to end, people. Rape isn’t just a physical fight, and even if it were, not everyone has the strength or reflexes or equipment to stop it. Sometimes sexual violence isn’t exactly what you expect it to be, and if we don’t have a clear and realistic picture of what diverse scenarios rape can include, we definitely can’t stop it, decry it, loathe it… in fact, we’re in immediate danger of tolerating it in many of its more insidious forms.

Ladies, are you prepared to fight whenever you’re on a date? Are you prepared to claw your best male friend’s eyes out at a moment’s notice? Would you kill your husband rather than succumb to forced sex with him, or might you take the abuse, and maybe even blame yourself for it? If you’re an average American silhouette woman bopping around to your iPod in Everytown, USA, the armed soldier bogey is probably not what you need to worry about. The scary shadow you need to keep your eye on is the inky outline of the devil you know.

I’m not saying that all the men in a woman’s life are potential rapists. I am saying that 77% of rapes are committed by non-strangers, and sometimes it’s hard to see these coming. If you’re a man and just felt a glimmer of umbrage reading the examples I gave at the beginning of the previous paragraph, your reaction should provide one flash of insight as to why women might have a disincentive to remain ever-vigilant and prepared against acquaintance rape. Often men want and encourage us to be on our guard with every guy… except with them, of course.

Britni posted a great piece on marital rape and the mythical gray area it presents. I want to address some of the things that occurred to me while reading it, but that will be its own blog entry (Soon, my pets. Very soon…) because I’m not writing a goddamn dissertation here. I’m just some chick on the internet who happens to be not so fond of rape.

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.

“Another reason we didn’t work… I think I’m a little kinkier than you.” There. I said it. It was a step away from admitting that my sex life with Edwin Pomble had been on the boring side, sometimes.

We’d been broken up for months, and we still had these periodic conversations about why he thought we should get back together and why I disagreed. I was willing– even anxious, for motives that have all but escaped me now, to try being friends. But I couldn’t date him. Not ever again. The reasons were manifold: they covered energy-sucking dealbreakers like his propensity for creating drama out of thin air, and his hobby of always making everything about him. There was the intellectual and educational deficit that echoed between us, parroting back his plaintive “I don’t know what sanctimonious means, so it doesn’t do any good to call me that.” There was also the fact that he’d said incredibly ugly things when I admitted to him that I’d been raped back in college, which made me loath to trust him. Maybe I didn’t even want to forgive him. Somewhere in the midst of all of it, I suppose I sort of stopped liking him. But also, as a little side issue, there was the boredom.

I have no problem with plain old vanilla sex. I love it, actually. Vaginal penetration, maybe a little foreplay beforehand– I’d never want to give that up. The problem is that it gets boring when the feeling that there’s never going to be any experimentation beyond that “no frills” plain sex insinuates itself. Because frills are such amazingly wonderful things. Even splendid traditional sex seems kind of oppressive when you start wondering if it’ll be the only thing on the menu until time beyond knowing. And that had been my relationship with Edwin. When we had plain old vanilla sex it was often good: his penis was just about as big as I could handle, and he often described cunnilingus as his favorite thing to do– many women would be ecstatic with this combination. He wasn’t very imaginative, though.

Whenever I brought up trying new things he never had a single solitary idea. I understand that sometimes these things are hard to talk about, but I don’t think he was hiding any dark fantasies; I really just don’t think he had any. He did mention that he was open to trying new things with me, though.

Once, I asked him to be aggressive during sex: quite aggressive, actually. We all want to be thrown around a bit and called a dirty little slut from time to time, right? Well, I do! I don’t want constant or erratic, unrequested aggression from a partner, but sometimes in a purely sexual context it’s a game I want to play for a little while. He seemed confused by the request, but he tried it out and did surprisingly well. He actually got quite into it after the first couple moments of uncertainty. I got off many times, he got off, and I felt heartened. It seemed a resounding success! “That was awesome,” he breathed. “Yeah,” I agreed. As we held each other in the dark afterward, waiting for sleep to seep behind our eyes, a new optimism flooded me. Maybe this was the beginning of something. Maybe we could start experimenting more. Maybe I’d underestima…Edwin interrupted my reverie with “If all rape was like that, they wouldn’t call it rape, amirite?”

Um. No. Fuck! Way to make it go from zero to creepy in one sentence, buddy. It kind of made my skin want to flip inside out just to get farther away from him.

I’m not going to say I never discussed trying new things with Edwin after that, but I always kept the discourse hypothetical: I never asked for another damned thing. It wasn’t the first bad experience I’d had sharing a fantasy, but I was determined that it would be the last time with him, anyway.

It helped that I didn’t need anything specific. My kinkiness isn’t very exact. I guess I want to try (mostly) everything: I want to take charge sometimes, get used as a fuck toy others. I want to play with an exaltation of toys, roleplay to make myself dozens of different people, and give and accept pleasure in a thousand different ways. As long as it’s safe, sane, and consensual, sex should be rife with boundless and varied possibilities. That’s the way to keep the game fun, I feel sure.

After our breakup, Edwin was angry and had a lot to prove. He talked about wanting to change for me, but I never wanted that. I didn’t want a different Edwin; I just didn’t want Edwin period. He figured if he could convince me that he’d transformed into a creature that contradicted all my stated reasons for not rushing back into his waiting arms, he would never have to feel rejected again. A few weeks after our conversation about kink, we decided to do the “hang out as friends” thing people often seem to try after deciding they were a big fat mistake together (dating-wise) but before deciding that they’re a big fat mistake together (any-wise). He reminded me of what I said with a smug little grin on his face. “You may have underestimated me,” he divulged. “You think I’m not kinky, but lately I’ve been researching a lot of new sexual positions. Don’t you want to try them out with me?” Aww, honey.

An expanded repertoire of ways to have no-frills vaginal penetration? Wow, somebody call the kink police immediately. Also, no. I do not want to try them out with you. I can actually find sexinfo101.com on my own, thanks.

My flirting skills are roughly on par with T-Pain’s singing ability sans Auto-Tune. I’m aware that I recently described performing lap dances for my friends, so I should probably clarify. I can flirt recreationally– purely for the joy and play of it all, but when the flirting might have a purpose (i.e. testing the waters for imminent sexin’), I suddenly have no idea what I’m doing. I can easily come on to people whom I feel sure aren’t a sexual possibility, when I feel safe with them and I know that they’re not going to read too much into it. But with strangers, I freeze. I don’t turn diffident or timid, understand; I’m just completely non-sexual. I’m practically one step shy of calling any potential suitor “bro”.

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Example:
Interior. Restaurant. Evening. Quizzical Pussy enters and sits down. An attractive gentleman caller saunters up to her table. Things are about to get pretty fucking uncomfortable, folks.

Gentleman Caller: Hi, I’m Roger Jollylad. I saw you when you walked in and thought you looked like lots of fun.

Quizzical Pussy: Ohai. I’m Quizzical Pussy. I try to bring the party, whenever possible. It’s kind of you to notice. (offers high five, like a tool)

Gentleman Caller: You’re cute.

Quizzical Pussy: My favorite dinosaur is Parasaurolophus. What’s yours?

Gentleman Caller: Do you want to maybe hang out sometime?

Quizzical Pussy: Ummmmmm. I’m going to go fight those guys in that booth over there. I’m pretty sure they’re assassins or something. Peace,  bro.

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It’s especially bad with guys. I think it’s because it’s so much easier to assume (because of statistics about sexual orientation and stuff) that women aren’t going to take pleasant recreational flirting seriously. Often, when a male comes up to talk to me in a bar or some other “let’s pick someone up” type of venue, he’ll end up asking me if I’m not into guys, because I’m just that neutral.

I’m not opposed to something coming of the “safe” flirting. It’s not a matter of teasing to get a jolt of power or control. Normally, for me, this type of flirting is about showing affection– not withholding it, and unexpectedly finding that playful flirting has transmuted into serious flirting is often a welcome and sweet development. Thing is, I’m not nearly as worried about people wanting to touch my naughty bits as that they will think I’m assuming that they might want to.

See, I’m concerned about being attracted to people without permission. About offending them for presuming that they’re viable conquests. I have no idea where I got this, or if it’s common at all. Maybe lots of people feel this way and no one admits it because it’s kind of silly. Rationally, I realize that most people aren’t going to backhand me for daring to see them as sexual possibilities. Even if not interested, chances are they’d be flattered by a little attention, right? It’s not because of logic that I’m so wary of imposing my libido or interest on people who haven’t invited it. It’s something else. Something stupid. Something I have the hardest time shaking. It’s so bad that I won’t allow myself to admit (even to me) an actual desire for someone until orgasms have come into play, or at least a vigorous make out. I can think you’re objectively pretty and even say you’re attractive in a general sense, but I won’t feel or express actual lust until I have the go-ahead that only physical interaction provides. And even then, I’m so very careful.

For someone who’s kind of a sex fiend, this is slightly obstructive. If I flirted a little more, a little better, judiciously, I bet I could get way more laid.

I want it. No, I don’t lust after it. Masturbating with a tentacle dildo would be more a matter of novelty than actual desire. While cephalopods are super awesome, and ever since I saw The Future is Wild I absolutely believe that they’re going to inherit the Earth, it’s hard for me to sexualize them, or their appendages.

It would be more in the family of giving a foot job: something to try just so I could say (mostly to myself, and possibly to the internet) that I have.

I get why there’s tentacle porn. Kind of. Apparently sex with octopodes has been a theme in Japanese literature and art since the early 19th century. So when hentai creators were faced with the prospect of forever turning penises into pixelated blobs to comply with censorship regulations someone cleverly dipped into the historical vault and pulled out a writhing, slithery tentacle that was all too willing to get down to business. For the greater good.

I don’t get why that should be hot, per se. I also don’t really like coffee, but I’m not thrown every time I pass a Starbucks. I figure it’s just a personal choice. Some people get off on watching women popping balloons; some people get off on watching cartoon women with balloon tits being forcibly penetrated by tentacle monsters. Or maybe everybody actually just finds both things funny. I mean, even if you did find this stuff unbearably erotic, part of you would realize that it’s hilarious, right?

And that’s why I need this toy. It just can’t get around being funny. I want to bring this tentacle dildo on adventures with me. I want to take vacation photos of the tentacle dildo: in front of the Louvre, gravely contemplating the heretical MacDonald’s there; taking advantage of perspective by pushing his mighty suckers against the Leaning Tower of Pisa to keep it from tipping over. I want tourists everywhere to pose with my tentacle dildo. I want virgins to flee from it. “It’s okay, virgins!” I’d laugh, “he’s friendly.” But they don’t understand English very well. My tentacle dildo and I would have a laugh about the misunderstanding over tea and Turkish Delight.

But the really compelling thing about owning this tentacle dildo is that it empowers a person to say “my tentacle dildo” a lot. You know, without having to do so much imagining. My tentacle dildo. It should be a show or something. Things being what they are, probably an anime.

You know what’s frustrating? Entitlement. Or, I guess I should say a misguided sense of entitlement. I don’t like it when I run into it on the freeway or at the grocery store, and I sure as goddamn don’t like it when it burrows into my sex life.

A sense of entitlement, in my experience, can be the biggest distinction between a date and a rapist. It often transforms a partner into a bully, a disappointment into a snit, and if it doesn’t let up your sense of entitlement will make me want to stop touching your naughty bits, without fail.

Not too terribly long ago I used to mess around with Clifton Overmangle. He proved a challenging playmate. If we interacted on a purely platonic level, we were fine. Mostly. Sure, he mocked my voice, my clothes, my mannerisms, and my lack of coordination ruthlessly, which wasn’t totally fun, but tolerable. When bathing suit areas come into the equation, though, mockery became one small element in a constellation of issues. His only two settings were “not touching me” and “hurting me”, omitting all the luscious possibilities that lie between. Sure, roughness has a place, but more importantly it has a time, and that time is not always. Additionally, his interest in my pussy was conspicuously outstripped by his involvement in my ass. I’m absolutely up for anal play, but I hate feeling like my genitals are either going to be neglected or considered a chore.

Also, he was a “virgin”, only interested in oral and possibly saddlebacking at some point. I’m not a fan of technical virginity in concept. Feel free to do whatever you like on your own timeline, but when you’re sexually active and claiming that you’re a virgin because of which orifices are involved, I have to ask, what are you protecting? A hymen you could’ve broken in a hundred comparatively boring ways? Some magical brand of virtue I’m unaware of that doesn’t tarnish when mouths and asses are substituted for vaginas? A pretend superiority over the rutting masses… you know, the ones who rut in a slightly different way from you? In addition to all the other ways that it’s silly, insisting that digital and oral sex aren’t real sex is tantamount to saying it’s impossible for me to fuck a girl because I have no penis. It’s an absurd construct, and I feel hypocritical enabling it.

Despite all this, we had some good times. On rare occasion, there’s some appeal to the prospect of having a few anal orgasms, getting bruised up all over, and ending up with a penis in my mouth. Eventually, though, the inarticulate rage that I sensed behind his roughness got to me: I became more and more convinced that it was coming from a hostile rather than a playful place. It felt like he was working out his internal choler on me just because I was there and physically weaker. When I tried to talk about it, he opined that I was a control freak and wanted to micromanage his behavior. When I explained that it was upsetting me, he argued that it shouldn’t. Yeah, well, it did. So I went on a Clifton sabbatical. This wasn’t an attempt to punish him by withdrawing sexual favors or acting out of pique; I just felt like our emotional tendencies were poorly matched. Anger distresses me, and he seemed consumed with it.

It wasn’t long before Clifton decided I could help him in another way. I should send him pictures: pictures of my ass, my tits, my feet, my pussy (even my pussy, of all things!). He reasoned that it shouldn’t be emotionally taxing for me, and he would be less bothered by the fact that we weren’t sexually interfacing anymore. It was, he asserted, the perfect solution.

Um no.

“With the glut of good porn out there, I’m sure you’ll manage without me,” I responded, unimpressed. I didn’t understand, he protested. He needed my help; I was more of a fantasy object for him than I knew. My body, my expressions, my blowjobs… there were times when he wanted to get off to me, and his usual porn was no help. He needed dirty pictures from me, and he needed them immediately because he was turned on now and it was getting late. These are arguments perfectly situated to thud against a skeptic’s mind with the true ring of bullshit. How can a fully aroused male not have a plan B? Especially when plan A hasn’t even admitted to owning a camera. Even if he was incapable of finding satisfaction without an image of me to wank to for some occult reason, that didn’t make it my problem. Invoking the already stupid fallacy of “You gave me blue balls, therefore you owe me _______.” at a distance of several miles insults everyone’s intelligence.

He was upset that I refused. I was selfish, arbitrary, cruel, unfeeling, and more willing to indulge my insecurities than help out a friend. For months he repeated his request, and this was the new complexion of our “friendship”.

There are people out there who enjoy trading racy pics over the internet with friends, strangers, partners, whatever. I’m not one of them. I’m not any kind of exhibitionist. When it comes to photographs, I haven’t evolved much past the loathing I cultivated during my adolescent awkward phase. I’ve spent entire years of my life avoiding cameras: I literally cannot provide visual confirmation that I was on this planet in 2004, and I’m okay with that. For me, giving someone sexy pics is a big deal, and it requires perhaps more trust than bondage would.

Now, it didn’t irritate me that he asked for pictures. It irritated me that he did not stop asking. He became pushy, plaintive, and disrespectful about it. I never understood when getting a picture of my ass became his inalienable right. When did desire become entitlement?

After literally hundreds of denials from me, he recently suggested we start meeting up again as a way to alleviate his preoccupation with pics. Circular? Not to be believed! In addition to the old problems, I didn’t want to physically deal with someone whom I routinely had to remind over and over in text that my body is subject to my choices, and that no means no. Even for a “virgin”, you’d figure this stuff is pretty elementary. Thus we found ourselves at a total impasse, and at that point each of us had a moment of crystalline clarity:

1) I realized that as much as I like to give people multiple chances before I cut off contact completely, I actually already had in this case, and things were only getting worse.

2) Clifton realized that I wasn’t going to give him naked pictures or blowjobs in the foreseeable future.

My insight made it a great deal easier to take the insults that flowed from his; I was done, he knew I was done, and now it was just a matter of hearing why I had been really, horribly, inhumanly unfair about all of this. I sat through it because I find that when you deprive a guy of his parting shot, he never feels quite fulfilled enough to leave you alone after that. And Clifton and I were at last on the brink of the exciting and glorious prospect of leaving each other the hell alone for good and all.

I’ve had to deal with this type of thing too many times: just because you’ve had or think you could have fun with my body doesn’t make it yours. I’ll decide what I want to touch, where I want to be touched, whom I want to invite inside me, and whether I want to send images of any part of me. If that’s selfish, then… fuck that. It’s not selfish. It’s my birthright. It’s non-negotiable and as true for me as it is for everyone else. To these few but precious things, I am justly and unquestionably entitled.