quizzical pussy

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

I’m not really a “make love” person.

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

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

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

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

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*Or for some of us, avoiding same.

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

I think most people keep secrets from their partners. Not all, mind, but a solid majority. It doesn’t have to be a deep, dark secret. It can be something benign and trivial that’s kept back to avoid hurt feelings or drama or unnecessary complication. Does that weaken the relationship? Depending on the severity of the potential revelation, sometimes not at all; sometimes only if the secret gets revealed in a non-anonymous context. So! Have a peek inside some other people’s relationships! Or possibly yours…

I wrote in before about not being able to get my partner off with blowjobs. I found a happy medium! I still can’t get him off that way, but he makes the most wonderful sounds and thrashing spasms if I go down on him after sex.

Wait a minute… this isn’t a secret you’re keeping from your partner, is it? This is a celebratory confession! I have to say, you guys, I love celebratory confessions. They make me wanna give all sorts of cyber high-fives.

I get turned on when other women hit on my boyfriend. Which is reasonably often, cuz he’s a sexxay guy. I wish that he got turned on when guys hit on me, which also happens reasonably often, but he just gets insecure.

Clearly someone should be hitting on both of you at the same time. Trust me. This is the optimal solution.

Every time I have sex I use the same fantasy to get off. I’m throwing a dinner party for my husband’s boss in hopes of helping him get a promotion. I go into the kitchen to check on dinner. My husband (or so I assume) comes up behind me and lifts my short red sequined dress up to my waist. He then bends me over the kitchen island and pulls my black lace thong to the side and begins to fuck me. About half way through I hear my husband, who is in the dining room, ask if we need any help in the kitchen. I realize that it’s not my husband fucking me, but his boss! It feels so good that I just go with it! The boss tells my husband we’re coming (cumming)…..and we DO.

I totally get this. I was just reminded yesterday after a dream full of high adventure and flirting with my ex Edwin’s old roommate that I had quite a lot of fantasies about him when Edwin and I were together. There’s an unconfirmed rumor that I was tempted to spring that little gem on Edwin at one particularly horrid point after we broke up, but I opted for the moral victory by being nice instead.

I just took your fun fantasy to a dark place, now didn’t I!?

I want my significant other to fuck me. Why won’t she? I’m very, VERY specific about times and needs. Is this what I’ve signed up for the rest of my life?

There’s this theory (I think I made it up) that if a partner refuses to accommodate, or at very least consider, your requested fantasy early on (minus a “getting comfortable together” grace period) it is very likely never going to happen. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe relationships get an experimental second wind. I hope for your sake they do.

Another theory of mine is that if your partner doesn’t accommodate your safe, reasonable sexual needs, then that partner should either be willing to negotiate ways to let you pursue those needs further afield, or be willing to let you move on. But only you can decide if getting fucked is a sexual need or something less urgent.

I am a married woman, mother of multiple children, straight-identifying but, I kissed a girl and, yes, I liked it.

Notice that this isn’t necessarily a secret from this woman’s partner, but Quizzical Pussy does take her liberties. Anyway, every girl I’ve kissed so far is a wonderful kisser. I think there might be such a thing as beginner’s luck, but I’m secretly hoping that we women hold the keys to the kissing kingdom.

Now it’s your turn to fess up to something you’ve been hiding from your lovah. Or from anyone else. Secrets go here.

On ConTuesday last week I posted an anonymous internet confession about a person whose boyfriend’s sex drive has begun to lag behind hers*. I didn’t have enough energy to address this confession on Tuesday, when it appeared (at that point my energy was firmly at cut, paste, and collapse levels), but now I’m feeling slightly perkier and I can write what I wanted to at the time. It’s not advice, really. I guess it’s more akin to relating.

I’m afraid sometimes that I’m literally insatiable. If I’m attracted to you, I pretty much never don’t want to fuck you. I can have half my body caught in a giant bear trap, and if I can still part my legs it’s on like Donkey Kong. And hey, I finally found a use for this stuff!

But I’m aware that most people don’t work like that. Someone can be attracted to me and like fucking me and not want to fuck me right this second. My awareness of this phenomenon is mostly academic, though, because I still haven’t gotten past the part where I feel like it means something whenever someone doesn’t want to have sex with me (e.g. I’m a troll and not worth touching). I know that’s (usually) not it; it usually has nothing to do with me. I hope. But it’s hard not to take rejection personally.

Now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t think I’ve ever had a relationship with someone who quite matched my ridiculous sex drive. It comes close, sure. There was even a period there while I was seeing Edwin where I had no sex drive at all due to a health condition, but before and after that my sex drive outstripped his, though probably not by much. But sometimes it’s a huge problem, a deal-breaking problem. Not because I want to dump you if you can’t service me seventeen times a day, but because I genuinely start thinking you want to dump me if we’re not having regular sex.

Sometimes sex drives seem hopelessly unbalanced, though. Sometimes you just never seem to have any sex. I’ve been in this situation a time or two, and I can’t deal with it. I cannot be in an exclusive relationship that provides no orgasms. It’s not even a conscious weighing of pros and cons; it’s a bare and grimy fact. I can’t sustain it. I feel completely uninteresting and unloved. And if  I’m not getting sex from the person I’m with, I’d damn well better be welcome to pursue it further afield.

Guys seem excited, intrigued, when they begin to discover my sex drive. There’s so much promise there:  never having to feel like a supplicant to get laid, being able to count rather than gamble on having sex, not worrying if she’s into it or not, trying new things because the basic needs are finally there, satisfied. It can be a bright, shiny lure, a woman’s nymphomania. But I wonder if it doesn’t become tiresome for them after a while. Even if I never say a word, does it seem like just sitting there, my body, a pleasure-greedy monster, is somehow demanding things? It might get to be a source of stress after a while, and that’s not exactly the sex amusement park I’m pitching in the beginning. It’s more like, well, working at an amusement park.

*I’m assuming this person is a woman because of the “other women” reference in the confession, but I apologize if I’m incorrect.

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My ex Edwin and I have been talking a bit lately. I specifically don’t want to be the type of person who can’t be friends with exes, but the fact that I have a history of dating douchebags doesn’t help my cause there. But forgiveness is divine, I heard one time, and I can totally be divine if I set my mind to it.

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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A friend asked how long Laramy Fuquerton and I have been together now.

“Well, I mean…” I tilted my head thoughtfully, “It really depends what you’re counting as ‘together’…” We started fucking about a year ago, but we’d been making out for a month or two at that point. We sort of sauntered casually into “seeing each other” and lingered there a while until we finally admitted we were “boyfriend and girlfriend” about six-ish months later (our friends-in-common were all pretty amused when we finally figured that one out.) But we still didn’t say “I love you” until months after that. And we started being “in a relationship” on Facebook a while later.

It’s possible that we have commitment issues. Either that or he’s just been incredibly understanding of the ones I know I have. Which really aren’t that horrible. It’s just the swift, jarring kind of commitment that scares the shit out of me, so my tendency is to take it to the other extreme: the laughably obvious kind of commitment that gets lapped by molasses-flavored glaciers.

As a result, Laramy and I don’t really have an “anniversary”. In fact, anniversaries confuse me for the reasons stated above. They’re so arbitrary. I understand wedding anniversaries. A wedding is a finite date that you can point to and say “something started here”. But short of that, it’s murky: the kind of relationships I have don’t have inaugural ceremonies. I have never, in my life, thought I was on a “first date”. Of course, you don’t need a first date. You can use any of the following milestones as your anniversary:

• first awkward pat/hug
• first kiss
• first grope
• first manual sex
• first oral sex
• first intercourse
• first penetration with produce (not advisable, btw)
• first fight
• first time you met each other’s friends
• first time you met each other’s parents
• first time you had to apologize for asking to meet your new paramour’s parents because s/he’s an orphan

…and the list goes on and on. If a bunch of these things happened to occur on the same day, that makes it easy (note: I did not just call you easy), but otherwise it ends up being, like I said, pretty arbitrary. Then, some people have the grand idea of celebrating anniversaries for every little progression in their relationships, which for me would feel much like the:

• first time I wanted to die.

Seriously, that would suck.

Edwin Pomble, my boyfriend previous to Laramy, was more pro-commitment and pro-fanfare. To give an example, he told me he loved me the second time we had sex, when we’d known each other for a month, tops.  (I’m not saying that’s a bad idea in general, only that I sure as goddamn found it alarming.) He and I were together for four years, and I never quite got the hang of when our anniversary was (or what, precisely, it commemorated).  I was pretty sure it was in a month ending in “ber”, but I never advanced beyond that. If I’m being honest, I wasn’t very happy in that relationship and it’s possible that I actually just didn’t find it particularly worth celebrating. So my brain passive-aggressively refused to remember the date, which was a dickish move. And it bothered him that I couldn’t be arsed to keep track of which day in which “ber’. It should’ve been a clue to both of us that it was time to move on.

So I don’t know exactly how long I’ve been with Laramy. A year-ish. A really great year-ish, during which I’ve gotten to get closer and closer, at my own pace, to a person who amazes me and complements me and tolerates me and makes me happy. I’m incredibly lucky that way. And we’re worth celebrating, but I honestly think we do, constantly, in our own ways.

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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.

Sometimes I go on Facebook and notice that my little teenage cousin has once again changed her relationship status. She’s openly gay, except for a brief interlude with a boy during which she was “interested in” women and men, but then switched it to women a week later.

Every time her status switches back to single again I do a little internal wince for her because I know breakups are hard. Every time it swings back to “in a relationship” I grin because I know that starting a new relationship is exciting and heady, and I like to think that’s what she’s feeling.

I don’t talk to her much. I don’t even Facebook chat with her. It’s safe to say that I would never learn about these little ins and outs of her personal life if it weren’t for the magic of social networking.

I came a little late to the Facebook party. I graduated university shortly before it launched, and considered it a college thing when it first started getting popular (you know, cause it kinda was).  I saw no reason to join until my little brother stopped answering emails and phone calls and it became increasingly clear that the best way to reach him was through Facebook message. That’s when  I folded and signed up.

I’d been in an exclusive relationship with Edwin Pomble for a few years at that point, but when filling out my profile info I just left the relationship status blank. I wasn’t “single”, I wasn’t “in a relationship”, “it” wasn’t “complicated”… it just wasn’t anything. It wasn’t like I was planning to use Facebook as a dating site, and all six of my Facebook friends had met my boyfriend, who wasn’t even on Facebook himself. So I figured, what was the point?

Part of me automatically tries not to fall into the trap of defining myself by my relationship status. It’s probably a fairly common and natural reaction after being in a relationship where one has lost one’s identity (see: Reginald Sleeth). I want to be me first, and then someone’s girlfriend or whatever. I’ve gotten that very wrong in the past. My feminist side influences this too, demanding to know why it should make any difference to anyone whether I’m single or seeing someone. I’m the same person either way, dammit!

The wincing and grinning that I do when I read my cousin’s announcements aren’t meant like that, though. I don’t think she’s worth more when she has a girlfriend; I just sympathize with the feelings that likely come along with her status changes. I think most people are the same way. I could easily have been overthinking this “stop telling me I’m nothing until someone loves me in full digital view!” stance. In fact, I probably was.

But, my decision to leave my relationship status blank wasn’t all political. I didn’t even pretend to myself that it was. See, I also wasn’t very happy in my relationship with Edwin. Even as I was signing up and not disclosing my relationship status I felt very relieved to be avoiding the inevitable change when I finally successfully ended things with him in the future. I felt more and more comfortable with my choice as our relationship disintegrated. Meanwhile he signed up for Facebook and several of his friends friended me, and still my status was blank. When we finally broke up I didn’t have to change a thing in cyberspace.

Did I avoid Facebook drama altogether this way? No. When Edwin decided months later that he didn’t want to stay friends or remain in any kind of contact I unfriended him on Facebook. It seemed the thing to do. But he called me, very upset, as soon as he saw, and told me he’d changed his mind and wanted to try to be friends after all. Ironically, I guess Facebook had just made it all too real.

I actually kind of met Laramy Fuquerton through Facebook. We had tons of friends in common but hadn’t met yet when he friended me and we started chatting. After we’d been properly introduced and had been hanging/making out a little while, he joked “We should be each others’ ‘it’s complicateds’,” referencing the old xkcd (see above).

But we didn’t do that. Months passed and my relationship status didn’t appear and Laramy’s didn’t change.  Now, I’m not so afraid of commitment I can’t tell the internet I have a boyfriend, and I don’t actually feel like I’m pandering to some patriarchal standard if I disclose my relationship status. But part of me felt like I’d taken a stand that relationship status wasn’t important, and I should stick to that.

But lately it occurred to me that I wanted to be “in a relationship” with Laramy anyway. No, it’s not important if you tell your second cousins and coworkers of yore and people you were sort of friends with in 8th grade that you’re dating someone. But all my close friends know me as someone who avoids commitment and tries to steer clear from all the sentimental trappings that can creep into the room while you’re just trying to fuck someone. And this was one of the most decisive gestures I could’ve made to indicate that it’s different this time. Because this time I’m really, really happy with someone rather than just tolerating his personality to get some sex. I know, I’m such a romantic.

So we talked about it, and he was into it, and we did it. We became boyfriend and girlfriend on a website rather than just in boring old meatspace. And a few people whom I’d mentioned Laramy to several times were all like “congrats on ur new relationship! ^_^” because apparently the status change had a lot more impact than actually saying the words “my boyfriend”.

More and more we’re hearing that it’s not official until it’s on Facebook. Horsefeathers. But still, sometimes it seems that way. Now that I’m in a relationship that I really don’t mind being official, it seems like there really just might be a point in broadcasting it.

Sex tips are an odd institution. They’re like body mass index or the census: not necessarily useful for individuals. They’re often more just rough indications of averages, helpful tools to know what to expect in the general population. But despite what I may have said in moments of anger, I’ve never had sex with average. No one’s tastes ever perfectly match all the sex tips you’ll find. Hell, not even all the sex tips match up with one another. It’s confusing.

This is why when I write about sex I talk a lot about myself: what sex is to me, what I like, what I think and feel about it all. It isn’t my narcissism (okay, it could partly be my narcissism) so much as the fact that I can’t realistically say “guys like this” or “girls like this”. I often feel uneasy declaring “Laramy likes this” or “Edwin liked this” because how can I get a good enough grip on these things to be comfortable saying I know them to be true from my outside, insecure, biased-as-fuck perspective? I like “Laramy seems to like this” or “Edwin said he enjoyed that” better.

This doesn’t mean I’ll never write a “How to Succeed at Reverse Cowgirl Without Really Trying” manifesto, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to take myself seriously enough to pretend it’s going to be widely useful.

Which brings us to blowjobs. A specific thing about them, really. From time to time I’ll run across a list of oral sex tips or some guy’s account of what makes a blowjob great for him, and often you see the same things come up again and again: lots of saliva, using hands, engaging balls, stroking the perineum. These are all things that have usually enjoyed warm receptions and glowing approbation from my barely-random-at-all sample of the population (read: guys whose dicks I’ve had in my mouth). Often, though, I pause when I read what may be the least-sexual all-star highly agreed-upon oral sex tip ever: eye contact.

I have no problem kissing, fondling, or fucking with eyes open and clamped onto my partner’s. Eye contact can add to the experience. It’s intimate, but doesn’t have to be emotional; sometimes it’s just deliciously intense. But for some reason I feel completely weird about establishing much eye contact when I’m giving head. For a moment of “this is fun, isn’t it?” camaraderie? Sure! But eyes locked on his for a substantial portion of the fun? It seems awkward to me. I’m not saying it should; it just does. I hope it doesn’t make me a bad feminist. I hope it doesn’t make my oral skills too inferior.

Here’s how I see it: I enjoy giving blowjobs, and part of why I like them is because they’re so entirely about pleasing the guy I’m with. I get off on how I’m making him feel in addition to the sensory pleasures of actually performing fellatio. But the point is mostly that I’m focused on him. That’s what many guys appreciate about it (although I’ve heard rumors that it feels kind of good also).

This might be way too neurotic, but I feel like in that sense I should be almost invisible. Or at least unobtrusive. If I keep pulling his attention back to me I’m intruding on his blowjob, even though I’m the one giving it. My mission is to turn my lips, my tongue, my hands, my throat, my larynx, into a chimeral machine of pleasure. This is not the time to make it about me. It’s not even the time to make it about “us”. It’s about him and his cock.

Also, I wouldn’t want either of us to feel bound by this eyelock thing. Looking down at me might get tiresome when maybe he wants to close his eyes and enjoy, or at least stop straining his neck to look at me. And I’d rather concentrate on what I’m doing, frankly. I want to be able to choose position and trajectory based on things like comfort, pleasure, and accessibility, not visibility.

Eye contact personalizes oral sex, of course. It might be a huge turn-on for a guy, seeing the dilated pupils, the raw cocklust pulsing in the eyes of the face with the mouth that’s currently housing his penis. Maybe it makes blowjobs romantic and sweet to extremes they otherwise seldom reach. I don’t know. I’d feel presumptuous. I don’t want to decide how personalized a blowjob needs to be. Maybe he doesn’t like me all that much; maybe he’s closing his eyes and thinking of England and the last thing he wants is me looking up expectantly, all like “aren’t we sharing quite the moment!?”

Now, if a guy tips my chin up gently and instructs “Look at me,” the whole thing becomes insanely sexy and I will fucking lock eyes like it’s my prime directive in life (until such time as the blowjob ends, at which point I go back to my usual prime directive, which is [classified]). But otherwise, eye contact’s not even on my radar.

Sofia: I’m preorgasmic.

Jamie: Does that mean you’re about to have one?

-Shortbus

The word for a woman who has never gotten off used to be anorgasmic, which isn’t very optimistic. The term preorgasmic is much more hopeful, but it seems like it might be a little too much pressure: like the universe is crouched in breathless anticipation, waiting for you to climax at any minute. All the time. And if you can’t hack it, you’re disappointing yourself, the word, the universe… everyone. Maybe it’s just my imagination running away with me, but I think I’d actually prefer to have a more desolate term and just let my body surprise me if it ever got around to coming. But I’m not much of an expert on not coming.

Laramy and I watched a movie over the weekend about a female sex therapist/couples counselor who had never had an orgasm, and not for lack of trying. What followed was a journey into a debauched New York City sex-drenched subculture, much like Alice in Wonderland if the White Rabbit were a hot chick with many tattoos and the flower beds were dozens of strangers engaged in joyous orgies. This is a world I’d like to live in. At one point Laramy asked “Are there really sex clubs like this?” and I replied, “I have no idea, but we should definitely open one.”

But it was hard for me to relate to the protagonist’s problem. Sure, at one point I was preorgasmic too, but I had to be eight years old or so at the time. I know women who’ve never gotten off, or whose sexual response is tricky and elusive, but I’ve never had any good advice to give them. I’m the opposite. There is no mystery in how to make me come. Of course you need some skill to get me off just touching my arm or back, but if you’ve found my clitoris or are penetrating me with anything more comfortable than a cactus, I’m not going to walk away frustrated.

There were ten months or so a couple years ago, though, during which I lost my orgasm. I had no sex drive, no periods, and couldn’t get off no matter what. I was dating Edwin Pomble at the time. He’d told me early on in our adventures that he hadn’t really cared for sex until we started fucking, and a lot of the change was down to the fact that he never had to worry that I was enjoying myself. He could just relax and have fun.

My orgasms are hard to miss. My pelvic muscles can contract with enough force to eject any cock. I usually cease my mid-sex caterwauling and get suddenly quiet. I stop breathing for a moment (a terrible habit). I make funny, blissed-out faces. If it’s an especially crazy one, my eyes roll way back into my head, which is super sexy…I promise.

I’ve noticed that the ease of getting me off sometimes goes to people’s heads. It did Edwin’s. Although he started out ambivalent about sex and self-deprecating about his abilites, by the time we’d been together for a while he would trot out the “I know I’m really amazing at sex, but is that all I am to you? An incredible lay?” card during arguments.

But all that stopped for a while, and poor Edwin didn’t understand what was happening any better than I did. Although I think part of it was the fact I was unhappy in the relationship, it turned out that the larger factor was a medical thing. When I got on the right thyroid medication things improved and eventually went more or less back to normal. But while I had this problem, I had zero interest in sex (which just goes to show how much we owe to biology, seeing as one of my dominant personality traits shut off one day because of hormones) so I didn’t really miss my orgasms all that much. It was troubling, but not really very frustrating. For me. I’m sure it was frustrating for Edwin, poor thing.

When my thyroid levels were still iffy, but rising, I finally got off by masturbating while doing deep breathing exercises, which I still find makes my orgasms more intense (this is why holding your breath is a terrible habit, by the way). A couple weeks later I had Edwin jack off against my clitoris, kind of slapping it with his cock. I don’t know why, but I absolutely love that. Would these methods help anyone else? No idea!

So while I had this little taste of what it’s like to have an orgasm block, I’ve never had to wonder if I’ll ever be able to come. I knew from early on what I like and how my body reacts. I was always confident that my climax issues were temporary. I still don’t know what it’s like to be preorgasmic. I’m lucky.

In fact, I’m so easy I worry about it. Later in our weekend together I flashed my left nipple playfully at Laramy while we were cuddling in bed. Guys are to nipples as magpies are to shiny things, so of course he started teasing it with his fingers, tonguing it, gently sucking. I had three orgasms from this inside of five minutes.

“Does it get irritating how easy I am to get off?” I asked after a bit. I worry about this way more often than I bring it up. It’s particularly embarrassing when I’ve just had a blatant orgasm during a PG-13 second-date make-out, but it almost always makes me a little self-conscious.

“Why would that be irritating?” He seemed puzzled.

“I don’t know. Kind of like always having to play a video game on the easiest level. Like there’s no challenge to it or something.” I swear this makes sense in my head.

“That’s very silly. I never think, ‘Wow, this would be so much cooler if I had no idea how to get her off, or maybe if I had to apply the same super specific stimulation until my tongue was numb and my jaw ached and I gave up in despair and she was completely frustrated and unsatisfied.’ You don’t have to worry. I don’t think I’ll ever get sick of watching you come.”

…Which is good, because being hyperorgasmic is pretty fun for me.

I dated Edwin Pomble for several years, but I never understood his odd prejudices. One in particular that galled me, upsets me to think about even now, was his awful double standard about toys.

Excepting necessary concessions to propriety, if I’m acquainted with (nevermind boning) someone for any length of time, I’ll probably start talking sex toys eventually. People like to talk about their hobbies. I talk about the ones I love, the ones I lust after, the hilarious ones, and the ones I want invented yesterday. And I’m never shy about the fact that if I were a dude I would gleefully and unashamedly use masturbation aids, because I think they’re a lovely idea for all sexes, genders, races, and creeds. Edwin was tolerant of this only to a point.

“It’s fine for girls to use vibrators or whatever, but it just seems weird for guys to use anything… it’s so pathetic,” he insisted one day.
“Why is using a Fleshlight or something any different from me using my jackrabbit to get off? They’re both just simulated versions of genitals.” I pounced. I don’t like this weird idea that a guy fucking plastic is any different from a girl fucking plastic. It grates against my sense of fair play.
“Well…” Edwin was a slow talker. With a hint of conflict my conversational rhythm lapses into a staccato gallop, so this harmless idiosyncrasy always piqued me. “…it’s just not the same…” Another pause.
“Why not?”
“It just… isn’t. It’s sad when a guy does it. It’s like he can’t get a girlfriend so he has to use a pretend vagina.”
“That’s ridiculous. Why should you or anyone else care what someone does all alone and in private? If it feels better than your hand it’s a great idea: simple as that. And maybe it feels twenty times better. Have you tried it?” I challenged, setting myself up for a very easy “don’t knock it ’til” rejoinder.
“Well… my ex once…bought me… something.” Huh. Really? Now this was getting interesting.
“Cool! What was it?” I leaned into the question.
“It was like, a masturbation… thing. A sleeve or something.”
“And did you try it?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t like it?”
“It felt really good, but…then I felt bad about it. So I threw it away.”

He threw it away! He fucking threw away a perfectly good sex toy. That’s sad! In my world, it’s practically a capital offense. A lovely sex toy whose only purpose in life is to help you get off, that exists only to enhance your pleasure, deserves better than that.

It bothers me no end that most people seem to think that when a girl uses a sex toy she’s adventurous, empowered, and sexually aware, but when a guy uses a sex toy it’s depressing unless he has a female chaperone, and even then the toy must mostly be for her benefit. Even those who get behind the idea of a man using dildos and buttplugs on himself often still revolt against the idea of him using a male masturbator. In short:

Toy penetrates flesh = HAWT
Flesh penetrates toy = UR A LOSER LOL

…Why? I honestly don’t get it. I can’t even argue against this prejudice in any systematic way because I have no idea where it’s coming from. If anyone out there can give me a logical reason people arrive at this conclusion I’ll give you a jelly bean.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some horrifying male toys out there, which is exactly what Part 2 of Quizzical Pussy’s “The wank that dare not speak its name” series will be about. But really, anyone who doesn’t (and no one should) have a problem with my dildo collection needs to stop worrying about guys using sleeves or other sex toys. It doesn’t mean we’re beneath all standards for human contact; it just means that we’re occasionally eschewing our hands for a fancier option.