Once in a while you run across a person (in my experience, always a male, though I have no idea if this is pattern or statistical aberration) who opines that rape is a more horrific crime than murder.

O RLY?

I’m not interested in playing the “more horrific” game, nor being an armchair criminal philosophy expert. I’m really not. But there’s something disturbing about their reasoning.

Are you suggesting, person who has (every time so far) admittedly never been raped, that a rape victim would be better off dead? The response is usually something like “a murder victim’s suffering is over, while a rape victim has a whole lifetime to deal with what happened.” So that’s pretty much a “yes”. Rock.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I would prefer murder to pretty much nothing, and I think plenty of people who’ve survived rape, torture, and other atrocities may feel the same way. Some probably wouldn’t. But the bottom line here is that I don’t think a bystander is the right person to decide which of these people would be better off dead.

(image source)

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.

Countless times I’ve heard and read about how a woman is inescapably and biologically submissive: the penetrated, the supine, the taken. The image of being overcome and driven into is the source of apocryphal radical feminist notions that all penetration is at best a violent act, at worst automatic rape.

But to me, having something plunge inside an orifice that’s all-too-happy to accommodate it doesn’t feel all that passive. Nor does gripping that something in the crush of my mighty orgasm. Of course I’ve felt myself in the submissive position in sex before– in ways both lovely and horrible, but being penetrated wasn’t the factor that made it so.

One of the most alarming and saddening articles I’ve ever read on the subject of sex was Virginia Vitzthum’s 1999 Strap-on Epiphany. In it, Virginia recounts her experience of pegging (before it was called that) her boyfriend, Adam.

The article starts innocently enough. Sure, it flirts with the idea that a woman allowing someone to enter her body is empowering in its vulnerability or something, but it really doesn’t disturb me until she actually starts fucking Adam. Once she penetrates him, shit gets weird. (I refuse to resist pointing out that the link to the second page of this article says “Defiling Adam”. This is indicative of exactly the attitude you’re about to see.) Observe:

As “my” huge appendage disappeared inside him, his eyes showed shame, trust, fear and a sort of helpless adoration. In a way I’d never understood those words before, he was mine. The knowledge I could really hurt this person by being less than careful made me feel responsible, protective. The vulnerability appalled me at the same time; it was vaguely disgusting that he would let someone do this to him. Mixed in with the disgust was possessiveness. The thought of anyone else penetrating him seemed revolting. These observations clicked into place in quick succession; I felt like a projector being loaded with slides of maleness, of male seeing.

…I was conquering, silent, responsible, the taker. With his legs spread, Adam was agreeable, inviting, ashamed, taken.

When I first read this I was shaken. I’d never used a strap-on, and I wasn’t a man, so I felt completely unequipped to answer the question of IS THIS TRUE? Does penetrating someone really give you contempt for them? Is the act of being penetrated disgusting and weak somehow? This Virginia bitch had really upset me by suggesting that the sexual interactions I was having may be entirely different (in troubling, corrupt ways) to the people I was sharing them with.

I asked a few male friends, my boyfriend at the time. Some said, “Yeah, that sounds about right,” and some said “She’s overthinking it.”

In truth, I think that some people might equate penetrating with power, but it’s not an inevitable conclusion. Virginia’s views here weren’t objective, and they tell us more about her than they necessarily do about “men”. They tell us nothing about the native symbolism of a sex act.

Are you submissive to the food you eat? Is a canteen at the mercy of the water inside it? Eclipsing, holding, consuming, overlapping, absorbing aren’t words of weakness to me. We choose to think of the partner who welcomes the other into his/her body in such passive terms, but that’s choice, that’s perspective. It’s not innate to the nature of sex; it’s a commentary on our social paradigm.

I’ve had moments when I had a cock inside me and I was conquering, silent, responsible, the taker. Well, not silent, but close enough. And I refuse to be surrendering, tractable, helpless, and (wtf?) ashamed just because it feels good to fill my holes anymore than I would presume to project those words onto a guy I was pegging. It’s fucking piffle, is what it is.

…So 1999, anything else you want to tell me about sex? I’m all ears.

(image source)

Don’t you dare tell your little girl there’s no monster lurking in the closet. Because I just read the abstract of his paper on Nerve-Sparing Ventral Clitoroplasty. And actually, I think he’s not so much in a closet as practicing pediatric urology in New York. Either way, he’s out there and he’s the stuff of nightmares.

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.

(image source)

It’s Tuesday, which means that here at Quizzical Pussy, it’s also ConTuesday. While I have your attention as you await anonymous internet dirt, I’d like to remind you that Buy A Sex Toy Day is coming up on June 4th. If you’re like me, you’ll want to start planning what to buy now. While you ruminate on that, have some confessions!

Got back together with an old girlfriend of mine. We both have other partners, she’s married, and everything’s cool, except that we fuck unprotected, just not to (my) orgasm. We both know it’s bad, but we really get off on being bad, and it’s some of the hottest sex I’ve had in at least a year and I don’t even feel guilty about it.

My girlfriend is into calling me “Daddy” in bed and even brings it into every day situations every so often. It makes her happy but I can’t stand it and sometimes it’s even hard to keep my boner it’s so silly and gross. I try to humor her though because she does stuff just for me too.

Years ago I blackmailed my friend’s girlfriend into giving me a blowjob. I had caught her cheating on him and told her I’d tell him if she didn’t service me. I wish I could say that I felt so bad that I didn’t really enjoy it, but it was the best one I’ve ever had to this day. I did feel so bad that I stopped blackmailing her after that and never told my friend anything.

I’m attracted to chubby guys, but I’m a really fit and sporty girl, and not willing to change that. Whenever I start dating a deliciously chubby boy, after a few months he goes on a health kick trying to keep up with me, even though I always worship his round, soft body. I make them feel self-conscious by contrast, I guess. It sucks. I can get my physically perfect guy, but I can never keep him. :(

If you have anything on your chest, take it from that chest and deposit it into my online form! Tell your deepest, darkest sex secrets anonymously here.

I ended my relationship with Edwin Pomble when I finally got the courage to tell him that I’d been raped years before, and he probed relentlessly for more information, making me relive the event in excruciating detail for over an hour until I couldn’t stop crying, then screamed at me and told me I must’ve liked it.

Don’t ask me why I tried to be friends with him after that, but I did. I extended myself until I unraveled, trying to show him that although I couldn’t trust him enough to have the relationship we once had, I still cared about him and didn’t want to “throw him away”, as he put it.

It took him all of two weeks before he stopped apologizing and started resenting me for not taking him back. Sometimes I wondered: was I being too hard on him, being a bitch about the whole thing? He certainly thought so. But when I actually considered being together again I couldn’t stomach the thought. It didn’t matter how perverse and unyielding I was being, the breakup event had forever fractured the way I saw him, the way I felt about him. No part of me wanted him back.

So we tried the friendship thing. I made an honest go of it, but I don’t think he did. To him, our friendship was a purgatory he had to suffer through until I finally came to my senses and begged him to be my bride. The longer things went without that happening, the more resentful he became, and the more he pressured me to give him his way.

…

It is a frigid Saturday night. We’ve been broken up for a few months. The hemisphere has spun into a biting post-holiday winter gloom. My illness has been unkind to me for all of the newborn year so far: my headache raging and my joints complaining. I’ve been stuck indoors for a week, lonely and bored, feeling just better enough today to be restless. Edwin calls and invites me out to a karaoke bar a few blocks from his apartment, to come hang out with few of his friends. Great, I think. I can socialize with Edwin in a friend-type way on neutral territory with witnesses, all the post-breakup planets aligning perfectly for once. Plus, he’s been alluding recently to one of his friends being interested in him. I hope maybe it’s one of the chicks that will be at the bar that night. We can all hang out together and I can give them my unspoken seal of approval. I decide to get in non-pajama clothing for the first time all year and meet them.

10:30 PM. It shouldn’t be a shock that the bar’s crowded, being Saturday night and all. But Edwin seems to freeze up as soon as he sees how many people are there. He declares his intentions to leave. I want to stay, and tell him so. I damn well came to sing karaoke and have fun, not to go to Edwin’s place and sulk together, or whatever. So I stay and sing and have fun with a bunch of people I barely know.

But then he calls and leaves me a voicemail explaining how he had really been worried about me and that’s why he’d wanted to leave, and he wouldn’t have left if he’d known I was okay with it (note: we did talk about how he wanted to leave and how I wanted to stay before he left, so I suspect he’s trying to manipulate me somehow. But I’m pretty easy to manipulate, as we will see). But I start feeling like a bit of a prat. Maybe it was rude of me to stay at the bar when he didn’t want to. I don’t really know. So despite my “being alone with him” misgivings, I leave after a couple of hours of karaoke and stop by his place to prevent being a total jerk.

As soon as I climb the stairs to his second floor flat it’s clear he wants to have sex. With me. He’s really, really adamant about it and I in turn am really, really adamant about not wanting to. I tell him I don’t think of him in that way anymore, that I want to be friends and nothing more. Yes, I, sex fiend, am refusing sex! I try to leave. He grabs me, presses against me, then, rebuffed, starts going on about how horrible the rejection feels. He’s getting more and more passionate, getting upset, maybe getting angry. This flips a sort of switch with me. I can’t explain it very well. I tend to have problems putting my feelings above a guy’s feelings (especially if his feelings resemble anger) in a disagreement like this because for years any disagreement meant I was in major, violent trouble (see: my entire relationship with Reginald). Edwin seems angry to me, and my will collapses.

Fear crackles through my body, a response to things that have happened before as much as anything happening in the present. Adrenaline pumps into my bloodstream for no reason, I feel far away and small. The protests I was making moments ago seem like they came from someone else now, like I was reading from a fantastical script that I could never hope to really live.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. If you want, we can have sex,” I hear me say. The words are mechanical. I sigh as I say them. It is clear to us both that I absolutely do not want to.

He says, “Are you saying that because you think you’ll lose me if you don’t?”

“No,” I tell him, “I’m saying it because I don’t feel that I have the right to say no.” And that’s the simple truth. In that moment, I’m afraid not to give him his way, although I don’t really know why.

So he makes a big show of how he doesn’t want that. How he isn’t that guy. I’m still frightened, but I’m thankful. It’s exactly what I was hoping would happen if I told him the truth. I haven’t figured out yet how to not feel this fear but it’s not going to win tonight. My body is nominally mine for now. I head for the door. I hit the bottom of the stairs. My hand is on the door knob.

A split second before exiting I hear him say, “I’ve changed my mind. Come back .”

It feels like my blood’s been flash frozen and my skin’s been slapped with something cold, dead, ugly. I don’t know why I do it. I don’t know why I scale the stairs and numbly follow him into his bedroom. For some reason I don’t feel I have a choice.

It is the worst sex of all time, and I’ve had some bad sex. I just want it to be over. My cunt feels arid then raw. I hate how his sweat drips down on me. The condom breaks and he doesn’t notice until after. I can’t even make myself care. For some reason I just want to know that there aren’t any pieces of it stuck inside me. It’s all that matters now. As I ask him if they all came out with him, I choke the words out. He tells me it’s all there. The thin veil of senseless panic leaves me and I’m flooded with nausea. I excuse myself to go to the bathroom and quietly wretch into his toilet. As I leave, Edwin says he loves me. It sounds far away.

…

The next day I found a small, round scrap of latex inside me and snapped from numb to livid. Not even at him, really just at myself.

It’s Tuesday again, and that means more anonymous secrets to share!

A friend of mine recently became engaged to his girlfriend. As I’ve gotten to know her better I’ve learned that she is very into the kink scene and he’s very vanilla. I don’t want to steal my buddy’s girl or anything, but that doesn’t mean I don’t to make her my slutty little secretary so I can spank her for all her mistakes and fuck her across my desk.

I lost my virginity, not to my sweet boyfriend of the time, but to a close friend at a party. Then I lied and told my boyfriend I had broken my hymen masturbating, before losing my “virginity” again. I felt like because I hadn’t actively said I’d date him (he kissed me and then assumed and I felt trapped until the day I ended it) that it was ok to cheat on him. I finally broke up with him after getting an additional boyfriend and girlfriend which he knew nothing about. He doesn’t know until this day I was never faithful.

There’s been a serial rapist attacking women at knifepoint on my campus over the past three weeks. Everyone’s scared. I personally hope he attacks me. I want to kill him in self-defense. I don’t know if I could do it, but I’d like to try to take him down with me.

I have two kids and a good sex life with my hubby. I have never been able to find my clitoris. Books, web sites, drawings, photos…I’m starting to think I don’t have one!! I know where it should be but I can’t find mine and I don’t think I’ve had any sensation from that location. I would die if anyone knew!!

Send me your secrets!

You may be interested to know that although I’ve been putting sex confessions up for a little while now, I haven’t yet had anything close to an inkling of whom any of them are coming from.

I’m not sure if that says something about the wonders of anonymous forms or my profound density concerning recognizing writing styles (if people who leave comments on the site or whom I know in real life are indeed sending in secrets). The only ones I know for sure about are the ones I send in (for the record, the one about Lemon Party was me and it’s absolutely true). I can’t even begin to speculate on the rest.

Without further ado, here are this week’s secrets:

I’m a nice and lovable guy who gets along brilliantly with everyone who meets me or knows me. And yet 90% of the things that come out of my mouth are lies…about everything, starting from simple things like what I did that day or ate the previous. Ending with things like my level of education (I’ve lied it to be higher and lower than it really is) and pretty much everything to do with sex. I’ve been to a psychologist with this problem and ended up making things up so well that she said that I’m just imagining the fact that I’m lying to everyone and about everything.

I made a big deal out of my fuckbuddy sorta-kinda-a-little gray-raping me when we broke up, but I never told anybody that it was the second time. Several months before that he’d gotten on top of me and I’d said “no” and he stuck his dick in me anyway. But only for a second, and it didn’t hurt or anything, and maybe it was some kind of misunderstanding, I was lying naked in his bed after all. So I felt like it would be silly to make a big deal out of such a small incident and kept seeing him.

Oh, and before that there was an incident where he just lay on top of me and held me down (he’s got a good hundred pounds on me) and didn’t let me move for several minutes even though I was begging him. But he didn’t do anything sexual to me, it was just… weird.

It’s not at all my place to say whether you should consider your own experience rape or not, but I feel like I should say this in hopes that you’ll read it: I personally think that any time you’re saying no and a guy sticks his penis inside you, it’s a big deal, and you’re perfectly justified and not at all silly if you treat it as such. I know there are lots of forces that work against feeling justified in that, so I want to make sure you hear it from somewhere. For what it’s worth.

I want one night in the sack with my boyfriend’s best friend. Just one night. I don’t want to date him, don’t want a relationship with him (god knows it wouldn’t work), but the way he looks at me sometimes I know he’d eat me right up. I just want to see what he would be like to fuck. I know we’d go after each other like a pair of crazed weasels. I don’t feel terribly guilty about it; I’m sure my boyfriend keeps a file of women in his head that he’d like to go after, just once, just because they turn him on that much.

I haven’t had sex with my wife in a year or thereabouts. She’s given me head ONCE since our wedding. I should of realized this would happen, when we were dating and engaged she NEVER offerred, I always had to beg. Then when she knew she had me it stopped. Other than the disappearing head we had an OK sexlife until the sex stopped too. Now I think I hate her or close. She’s a glorified baby-sitter (for kids I love but who she insisted on having) who always wants more cash and attention. The worst thing is that I’ll never have the guts to divorce her or cheat.

When I was young, I used to watch porn on my parents’ computer. I’d also read hot (but badly written) erotica about everything: beasiality, food, stepfather rape, whatever. When the computer started getting viruses and bugs related to sex, my parents asked me and my siblings about it. I blamed my older brother. They still don’t know it was me. (I’m female)

Now go visit the Sex Confessional and anonymously tell the internet something you’re never going to tell anyone who matters. You know you want to.

It’s ConTuesday! On Wednesday. Remember, please, that a day late is not always a dollar short. Which basically just means that I think we have a good batch this week.

I think Lemon Party is kind of cute. I’m not attracted to the men in question, I’m just happy to see those old dudes having fun and getting it on in their declining years. It gives me hope for the future. I honestly don’t get why people are so horrified by it.

When I was a teenager, I used to stick my tongue up my boyfriend’s nostrils and sometimes I’d pull his nose hairs out with my teeth. I thought it meant we were very intimate.

(When I was a teenager I thought my boyfriend leaving a surprise  context-free dog collar on my car for me to find the morning after a sleepover with my girlfriends was weird until he explained that it was romantic. Not why it was, just that it was. Ah, to be young again.)

My friends host porn parties sometimes where we have a potluck and mock the porn story lines and techniques. I mock the porn, too… but secretly some of it turns me on.

(Porn turns me on too, buddy. We should start a support group.)

One of my best friends in the whole world has been in love once in her life. She’s over 30 now. She was dating a guy who was a bit dickish. I was friends with him too, but he was a dick. He talked behind her back about how she wasn’t right for him and he felt trapped. He started off using her for sex but it got out of hand and he didn’t think he could ever have feelings for her.

One night him and I were hanging out while she was out of town and he tried to kiss me. I dodged it and told him he was out of line. I never told her about the kiss that almost happened. He dumped her about a month after that. I told her she was better off, but I’ve never brought myself to tell her that he tried to cheat on her with me. I think it would destroy her.

I still masturbate to nekkid pics of 2 of my exes. They think I’m destroyed the digital images, but those are really hot women were talking about. Deleting them is worse than smashing a priceless painting. It’s a mite shady, but I’m being the gentleman considering I could have them all up on the internet right now.

I laugh louder than anybody at homo/fag/gay jokes…unless my gay friend who’s dick I regularly suck is listening. My girlfriend thinks I’m being sensitive, but really I don’t want him to be offended and stop our secret ‘movie nights’.

I tweeze the stray hairs around my nipples religiously. When I move in with my boyfriend I’m going to have to be very sneaky about my tweezing, because he always talks about how his ex had nipple hair and how grossed out it made him. I always carry tweezers in my purse in case we get trapped on a deserted island.

I had a girlfriend for a while who was both kinky and had self-esteem problems. And was religious. I could hit all her buttons and make her forget all of that and do whatever I wanted, whatever she wanted… and then she’d come off the endorphin high and wallow in regret, and come back to me so I could make her feel better again. I don’t know if it was rape. She said yes after she said no, does that make it okay? After her brain chemistry changed because of things I was saying or doing, and she was willing to do things she explicitly told me not to do, is that rape? She didn’t think so, my friends didn’t think so, my psychologist didn’t think so, but something inside me keeps saying it was. But if it was, why don’t I feel bad about having done it…

My college boyfriend didn’t want to have sex before marriage, but I convinced him that oral sex wasn’t sex (something I don’t really believe) and, after he said no more oral, that it didn’t count if I gave him a handjob and he only finished in my mouth. I feel kind of bad about it, but mostly I’m just annoyed that he didn’t want to have sex with me.

…These last two confessions are particularly interesting in juxtaposition to each other. Without clarifying details, they could easily be describing very similar situations, but one confessor’s partner was female and the other was male. Was one of these more disturbing to read than the other? I’m really curious what everyone thinks.

Anything you’d like to confess? Anything with which to shock and amaze this corner of the internet? Lay it on me.

Secret time! This set hasn’t even emptied my inbox of juicy secrets yet, but I’m trying to share them in posts of easily digestible length. Enjoy! There are more to come soon…

As a teenager, I couldn’t get a proper dildo so I masturbated with stuff I found around the house. The weirdest object I used was a rubber toy alligator. It was actually pretty good.

(Tail first or teeth first?)

I’ve had fantasies about most of my friends at some point, but it the asking and aftermath would just be too weird to try anything. But, I’m mostly afraid that the ones I don’t wanna fuck will be jealous or insulted!

I fooled around with a man in his thirties when I was 15 and 16. It actually turned out really well, and we’re still good friends (6 years later).

I’m a cis female who identifies as bi, and I’ve definitely fallen in love with/had super intense chemistry with a woman before, but the women I have ended up having sex with I wasn’t attracted to.

I am highly intolerant of foreplay–it bores me and dries me out. (I’m a chick!)

I’ve told very, very few people about that night when a guy I was set up with by a friend sexually assaulted me. I’ve had a hard time convincing myself that it wasn’t my fault and that it actually was assault. Because I am the rape apologist’s wet dream – I was drinking, I’m a known slut, we were on a date, we’d been kissing, for fuck’s sake, we’d even played a strip drinking game with all our mutual friends – before they went off to have sex and left us alone.

I know it doesn’t matter. I said no. Maybe I was a tease. But I still said no. I didn’t even hedge! I put on my clothes, said I just wanted to sleep, said no no no. Over and over again. But I was drunk. My head was fuzzy. When he pulled me down and tried to make me in the mood by giving me oral through my panties (which I held onto when he’d tried to pull them down as he pulled me down) I thought to myself, ‘I like oral, shouldn’t I like this?’ And I didn’t push him away at first. At first being the first thirty seconds. Then I pushed him off, because no, I didn’t like it, because no, I didn’t want it.

That last part I leave out of the story I told to the few people who know. It confuses even me. How can what happened to me be called assault when for a few seconds I tried to get into it? All of my hardened feminism wouldn’t doubt another woman for a minute, though. Another woman telling me this, I would say over and over again that she had a right to say no -whenever- she wanted it to stop, and if it didn’t it -would be- assault or rape. I had said no before his attempt at oral – that was assault. I said no after when he made me reciprocate – that was assault. I said no as he rubbed his erection on my back, pulling on my clothes and begging me to just let him in, just for a second, it would be fast, just the tip, for around an hour because our hosts had left us to spend the night in the living room – that was assault.

But there’s a part of me that still thinks it was just a bad date. A bad night with an asshole. He didn’t rape me, after all. If you don’t count forcing a penis into someone’s mouth as rape, anyway. And that was for only half a minute at most! I didn’t even leave! Sure, the buses had stopped running, and I would have had to get a cab home, but if I was willing to spend the night in the same room as my would-be rapist (as long as I could convince him to stop trying), how could that be assault? And I only had the one nightmare about it. Not a big deal. I mean, I was fine! I hated him after that, but it didn’t make me feel like my body wasn’t mine, it didn’t put me off sex, I don’t get flashbacks. I’m fine. And if I’m not traumatized, how could it have been assault? Or rape?

All these things I know aren’t true, but I can’t help thinking them. Obviously, I never called the cops. They wouldn’t have done anything, and I would have needed more confidence that something needed to be done to make anything happen to him. I only told the friends who set us up the bare minimum. He wouldn’t leave me alone, he kept grabbing at me, I said. They apologized, said we’d never hang out with him together again.

But I know – intellectually, no matter what other victim blaming shit goes on in there, that I was assaulted. That it was only my force of will that kept him from completing his rape of me. A girl just a little less assertive would have walked out of that apartment raped. And if it happened to me, it has probably happened to other girls, and will continue to happen to other girls, and I really had an obligation to go to the cops, if not for my sake, then for theirs. But I didn’t. And that makes me feel so full of guilt.

(I think a lot of women who are raped feel conflicted and unsure about many of these things. But that asshole raped you, and you have nothing to feel guilty about, not even in regards to your silence. Thank you for sharing this.)

While we do have a lot of sex with dominance and submission, my boyfriend is really into the sappy romantic stuff. He likes to go slowly and gently, staring into my eyes. That doesn’t do it for me, but it is an important part of his sexual needs, so to make it more interesting for me, I’ve come up with a fantasy. In this fantasy, the slow and gentle isn’t about romance – it’s about dominance. I don’t want him inside me, and he’s going to make sure it lasts and lasts, and I feel every inch of him taking me, over and over. The eye contact is another way of establishing exactly who is in control. Using this fantasy, he gets the sappy romantic sex he needs, and I get the dominant sex I need, and we routinely have simultaneous orgasms. It’s fantastic!

All those stories about lesbians in olden times who dressed and lived as men and married young women who didn’t know any better because they didn’t even know what a penis looked like turn me on very much.

I sometimes wish I could do that and have a pretty, innocent little wife who saw me as a real man. I could do it if I infiltrated a sheltered religious community. Yes I’ve put that much thought into it. I’m a straight woman by the way. WTF

Do you have a secret to share anonymously? I want it!