quizzical pussy

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.

“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.

Laramy Fuquerton and I had just finished having holy. shit. sex. The kind that makes you want to update your facebook status to “just had 14 orgasms! (hi, mom)” right after you collapse and die. It didn’t seem exactly polite to collapse and die on top of Laramy, though, especially since he’d been so unfazed with what I’d done on him moments before when his cock caught my g-spot exactly right. So I swung one leg out of my cowgirl straddle and promptly tipped over, right off the bed, after which we both cracked up. A lot.

It wasn’t a big deal to either of us, and it certainly could’ve happened to anyone, but it’s the kind of thing that happens fairly often to me, and not just in bed. It can happen at any time in my world. Often if I’m standing for a little while unsupported, I’ll lose my balance and start to topple. This is one of the reasons I normally use a cane, along with having joint pain and being a total pimp.

There are times when you really can’t forget that you’re disabled. I focus much harder on the fact that someday I want to be able-bodied again, but right now I have numerous limitations. I got sick several years ago with an illness that often manifests as an invisible disability (there is usually pain, energy loss, and cognitive dysfunction, to name a few), but it’s caused mobility problems as well in my case, so it’s a little more, well, visible. Sure, occasionally on a good day someone will ask me “do you need to use that cane or is it just a fashion statement?”, and it’s nice to know that I can “pass” if I need to, but back when I needed a walker (or even currently when I’m having a not-so-good day) there was no ambiguity: when people looked at me they knew I was messed up somehow.

I’ve been asked if I was born this way or if I’d been injured. I’ve been talked to with very loud voices, the kind obnoxious people use to talk to immigrants, or that you sometimes have to use with the elderly. I’ve been stared at. People in the mall have been completely unwilling to meet my eye. I’ve been genuinely grateful when men and women have opened doors for me, or even just gave me a friendly smile. Because sometimes, when it’s clear that my cane is not just a fashion statement, I have felt absolutely invisible.

Sometimes I’m too exhausted to move, let alone fuck; there have been times when my hips or knees or head have been in so much pain I’ve had to stop in the middle of sex, even if I desperately want to keep going. It’s embarrassing for me to try to explain to a partner that I can’t put in the energy that he (or she) deserves. It sucks to have your libido roaring and a willing lovely ready to go, and your body just punks out. But there’s that other, sneakier part of being disabled and horny that has probably hobbled me far more than any real, physical limit: since I’ve been disabled, I’ve had some trouble feeling like a sexual being. I went through a phase a couple years ago in which I could barely convince myself I was human. I actually saw myself more as this limping, shuddering, twitching chimera of pain, failure, and decrepitude. The looks, the avoidance I saw on people’s faces proved that I wasn’t a real person anymore to them, and my disappointment that I could no longer do the things I expected of myself made me doubt that I was even me anymore.

I’d begun seeing my boyfriend at the time, Edwin Pomble, about a year before I got sick, and he stayed with me while my health degenerated. I was both thankful to him and resentful that I should have to be thankful. Every time someone said to me “you’re so lucky he’s sticking by you through this” or “he’s definitely a keeper: not every guy would stay” I was vaguely irritated. I agreed with these statements– I was lucky, and wouldn’t have expected him to tough it out, but I also disliked the implication that all I could rightly ask as a sick and disabled woman was for someone that wouldn’t leave. No one, not even I, took the time to wonder why it wasn’t reasonable for me to ask for more. It didn’t matter that Edwin and I had dismal intellectual chemistry or that we had incompatible goals in life. He wasn’t dropping broken, disabled me, so it was inconceivable that I could ever leave him.

So when I finally did break up with him I felt tremendous guilt because I knew I had no “right” to do so. It wasn’t my place, as the damaged one, to reject him. And he agreed with my self-loathing logic, saying “I didn’t stay with you through all the bad times just so I could end up cut off from the good times ahead…” …you know, the good times in my speculative able-bodied future. Essentially, he felt that staying with me was like waiting for an investment to pay off, and that the time with the disabled me was more or less a tax write-off.

Single again, I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t be dating much until I was well. If I ever got well, that is. It was difficult for me to imagine anyone wanting to build any kind of relationship with me. Sure I could still have sex, since a girl who can’t walk unassisted is about as non-threatening as females come. There will always be, I theorized and hoped, someone out there willing to use you for sex when it’s obvious that even you don’t think you’re worth a call afterward. But for someone to care about me? That seemed fantastical. After all, I’d lured Edwin into my life when I had been perfectly healthy; now I had no bait with which to perform a comparable bait and switch.

But I have the kind of friends who tend to drag you out to into civilization after a break-up. You know, the good kind. And a weird thing happened when I started going out more and meeting more new people. People noticed my cane, but sometimes they also noticed my eyes, my ass, and my sense of humor. They noticed that I’m pretty much always laughing and having fun, and all of this together– including the cane– intrigued some people. Still others didn’t really care about the cane either way. The bottom line was that most people cared far less about the fact that I was disabled than I ever expected.

Socially, I’m much more comfortable with my cane and my poor coordination than I was even just a year ago. What used to mortify me is just a part of my life now: My hair is a vivid shade of crayola, I’m wearing a garnet pendant, kicking off a pair of pumas, popping my prescription meds. My cane is propped beside me, ready for action. And all that’s just what I’m like, for now. It would be nice if some of those details changed, but none of them make me less of a person or even less of a sexual person. My self-image is better than it’s been in a while, and I’m having regular, scorching-hot sex with a guy who cares enough to ask how I’m feeling today and never acts like he’s doing me some huge favor by not treating me like a moped (fun to ride, but don’t let your friends catch you). It still sucks when I’m too sick and tired to go out and I end up missing fun (and that happens a lot), but I know that disability is more of a detail than my identity. It took some time, but I can brazenly look anyone in the eye, and if people have a problem returning my gaze, that’s their issue to cope with.