quizzical pussy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quizzical Pussy: WTF????

Sometimes I wonder if we awkward-phasers who were unpopular in the dating department early on all have trouble mustering up “romance” from our misanthropic hearts, or if it’s just me.

As a literary genre, I can get behind romance (in the old school sense; I’m not talking harlequin here): high adventure, quests, Camelot, and fucking up bad guys are all pretty awesome in my book. Or Latin-based languages, those are fine. It’s the other kind of romance that trips me up: flowers, and the thin line between grand gestures and restraining orders, and… flowers? I don’t really even know what else people consider romantic. But that part where you’re supposed to declare your emotional attachment and minimize your sexual lust for someone? Obviously that wouldn’t be my strong suit.

When I was sixteen all my friends seemed to be single on Valentine’s Day for once, and we decided to wear black and purple to school to commemorate the Saint Valentine’s Day massacre. I guess it was something to take everyone’s mind off not having a date to focus instead on historical bloodshed. I wore the purple and black with them but I didn’t feel all giddy and “sticking it to the system” like everyone else seemed to. It never occurred to me that I might be doing something different with my day. This is partly because it had never occurred to anyone else to ask me out on date at that point. A big part of being anti-romance is admittedly sour grapes.

A year later I was in the early stages of semi-dating a cute little Mormon boy (semi-dating because I never get the “we’re more than friends” message until there’s kissing, and he wasn’t allowed to do that because smooches make Joseph Smith cry). He hid a heart pin in my locker, then later that day showed up at my after-school cashier job with a bunch of mylar balloons and a huge, puppy-dog grin. I knew it was a very sweet, “romantic” thing to do, but I was so embarrassed I wanted to die. And then puke. And then die again. I had no basis for understanding how to deal with this type of treatment. As a result, I didn’t really like it. Maybe I wouldn’t have liked it anyway. Maybe it just isn’t me.

Ever since that day, even when I try to make a Valentine’s Day or any other sort of romantic gesture it falls flat, mostly because I don’t understand what I’m supposed to accomplish. I don’t know how to be “romantic”. I’m up for all kinds of boning (to me that is romantic) or giving a “thinking of you” present to try to show the people I care about that I’m happy they’re in my life, but the kind of weird frenzied gestures that people expect each other to make? I can try to ape those sometimes, but it never feels right and I’m pretty sure I always suck at it.

Reginald Sleeth used to leave love poems under my windshield wiper while I was at work or while I slept, and after months of this I finally got the picture that he probably wanted that from me. So I wrote some of the worst poetry in history (although his may have actually been worse than mine, to be honest) and obliged, but it felt silly and forced. It was just another way of keeping the peace with him, really, and in that way it was always calculating and pragmatic, never romantic at all.

Part of me is always going to think that the best Valentine’s Day present is scandalous amounts of sexual intercourse. And all the other parts of me will always admire that part of me for being so infuriatingly clever and sensible.

Or: Let’s all have a chuckle at my needlessly intricate self-loathing!

When I first started masturbating with mens rea and intent to get off (rather than my earlier preteen system, which was basically “Wow, neat! This feels cool! I wonder if other people know about this!”) I ran into a slight problem when it came to fantasizing.

I hadn’t discovered the wonders of visual aids yet, so all I really had was my libido and my imagination. I would lie alone in bed in the silent, friendly dark, thinking about sex. I only had a rough idea of what sex was at this point, but I could feel the vague promise of it purring down between my legs. I wanted to pretend it was more than that, though. I wanted to think about what it would be like to share that lust and that dark with someone: another body, a counterpoint breath weaving through mine. But there was this difficulty, you see.

I couldn’t figure out an honest way to fantasize about sex. I could not realistically conceive of anyone actually wanting to have sex with me. No one had ever told me that boys only wanted one thing from me, but if they had I wouldn’t have believed it for a second. I was shy, undesired, awkward, unattractive, uninteresting: being invisible was the best I could hope for. Being admired was something that only happened to other girls. How was I going to pretend I had a willing partner? My suspension of disbelief just wasn’t that good. I’d start composing a story in my head about some attractive guy from school touching me and my brain would jump in, “Wait wait wait. Are you delusional? Every girl he goes out with is stylish and thin and decidedly unhideous. This fantasy is ridiculous!” And pop! I’d lose the budding narrative. I was usually too disgusted with myself to try again.

I wouldn’t even let myself imagine an anonymous guy. “Nope. Not buying it. No one would ever want to touch your boobies.” I had to admit I had a point.

But horniness really is the slutty cougar mom of invention. It wasn’t long before I came up with an ingenious way for “fantasy me” to get sex without overburdening my skepticism and turning all my masturbation sessions into self-harangues about how ugly and worthless I was. I didn’t imagine myself thinner, prettier, or with better social skills. I did way better…I turned to Sci Fi.

I’d pretend myself into a dystopian society where as some strange ritual, everyone in my high school had to have sex with one of our schoolmates as determined by blind lottery. It was kind of like a Battle Royale key party. Each girl went into a cramped little chamber that was furnished with a bed, and there we waited for our surprise sex partner to enter. No one knew what or whom they were getting into until the door opened. Of course, my guy always turned out, through the magical luck of daydreams, to be whichever one I fancied especially at the moment.

Once my crush opened the door and realized it was me his face would fall (my hypercritical brain demanded this). Mortified, I’d immediately apologize for not being someone attractive, but he’d reassure me that it was really okay; he knew it wasn’t my fault, and besides, he’d always thought I was kind of funny. Oh good. Funny. And that’s when the fun could start. Then and only then would my brain allow me to fantasize about having sex. It was like the cheat code for my self-loathing.

I was so sure that no one would ever voluntarily fuck me, which is weird because I later found out that several of the guys I locked in that fictional sex pod with me would’ve had all sorts of sex with me in real life if I’d given the least encouragement. I’m so glad I eventually stopped being a teenager.

I’m no one’s sterotypist laureate or anything, but it seems to me conventional wisdom holds that men and women fap very differently. Some sources actually contend that women can’t fap at all, and that they only “schlick”, but that’s misogyny for you. Schlick isn’t even a word, and it sounds off-putting.

So let’s just all agree that girls can fap. And do. Some more frequently and enthusiastically than others. And perhaps it really is true that men and women tend to gratify themselves differently. Maybe men and women are from different planets, and those planets have very different masturbation rituals. Like…

“How men masturbate”

Let’s look at a fap in the life of your average bloke. He’s going to want a healthy clutch of porn, his hand, and ideally a bottle of lotion. A quick click animates the pretty naked things on the screen and his dick snaps to attention. He’ll graze on different porn scenes, flitting over whatever catches his eye and discarding it when it loses his interest, moving on to the next stimulus, and then the next. Alternately, if he’s in the shower or another place where porn isn’t readily available, he’ll use his imagination and fantasize about fucking his friends’ girlfriends or his wife’s sister or his squash partner. He focuses on the most sensitive spots on his cock with a fast and heavy, practiced touch. His orgasm is quick and workmanlike. He’s done this thousands of times and faps with efficiency, for results.

“How women masturbate”

Women don’t masturbate so much as make love to themselves. Women don’t like regular porn. They like “erotica”. There are special porn companies that make smut with story lines and character development and poignant portrayals of intimacy, but everyone knows that most women prefer their erotica in text, be it slash featuring anime characters or bodice-ripping plucked from the grocery store.

When a woman decides to masturbate, it is an event. She pours herself a glass of wine, lights some scented candles, and luxuriates in a bubble bath or lays back in bed with a favorite toy. And there she escapes into an erotic fantasy, becomes other people, slips into breathless moments and exotic roles. Her hands wander all over her body, teasing her neck, thigh, nipple– like a lover might, tracing circles that spiral ever closer to her sacred center. Finally, when she’s ready and she’s at an especially hot paragraph, she stimulates her clitoris or impales herself tenderly with a dildo. It’s spiritual, vital, powerful. It’s part of the process of falling desperately in love with herself. Hell, she might even have an orgasm!

…Yep. That’s definitely how men and women masturbate, respectively. But I’m such a special snowflake that none of it applies to me.

How I masturbate:

I’m actually much closer to the male stereotype when it comes to fapping, but I suspect that many women are. I can’t relate to its female analog. It seems too damn elaborate, like a lie that tries to cripple your skepticism with irrelevant details. I may need to put in a lot of work to seduce someone else, but myself? If I can’t be my own sure thing, we have a problem.

I think lots of women actually do like porn, and not just “girl porn”. Plenty of us like the really hot, exploitative kind. When I’m in the mood for video, I’ll watch mainstream, gay, or lesbian porn: hot people fuckin’, preferably saying derogatory things here and there.

But usually, I don’t just masturbate like a guy; I masturbate like a fourteen-year-old boy. I browse through pictures of hot naked chicks, my vibrator poised on my clit (or I’m actually jacking off, but we’ll cover that another time), eager eyes darting to the next picture, and the next, and the next. I’m not thinking about aught but the scandalous things I want to do to these women: there’s no grand backstory, no character development, just me-on-them action. In my mind’s eye.

Sometimes I do this for literally hours. Because although I normally pride myself on my will of adamantium, once I start getting off it is really, really tough for me to make myself get back on.

It’s a relief to be able to admit this aberrant behavior now. I spent a long time lying to boyfriends and telling them I thought of nothing, absolutely nothing, or just them when I fapped. We’re all mature enough here to realize that our partners are lying through their teeth if they tell us that, right?

Of course, sometimes I will think about fucking guys, usually things I did with partners in the past, things I wish I’d done with them, or things I intend to do with them.

…Or I fantasize about fucking my friends’ girlfriends. Just kidding. Kinda.

One thing that may be more stereotypically feminine about my system is that I actually do prefer “tasteful(ish) nudes” when it comes to pics. I don’t really need the spread-eagle pussy shot; in fact, occasionally it just looks tacky to me and I move on to something with a little more mystery: a wall to scale, a thicket to penetrate.

Sure, I’ll fap to hot text sometimes: a well-crafted erotic story or a field report from a fellow blogger. Not often, but it certainly happens. I’ll also masturbate casually while watching TV or reading a completely neutral book: it’s like fidgeting, but much better. I honestly do masturbate too much, the more I think about it. But really, every single other guy from my planet seems to have the exact same problem, right?

Happy birthday to Jesus, Horus, Dionysus, Krishna, Mithras, and Rod Serling. You guys rock. Seriously.

It was a while ago at this point, so I’m not entirely sure where it all went wrong. The idea was good. I would write erotic fiction for a semi-popular porn website and they would pay me $20 for each short story I cranked out. Not only was this easy money, but it presented an ideal excuse when it came time to actually do my homework. I was always on the lookout for novel ways to avoid homework.

The stories I came up with weren’t the worst to ever infect the genre, but that may be the best I can say for them. Once in a while I’ll linger over the old backup files because I need a good laugh, and will I ever laugh! At the two-dimensional characters fucking through showers of synonyms and tinny dialog (ex: “You geek, there’s no such thing as a superhero. I am, however, a super-human screw, if you care to try it out,” after which the character gives a saucy wink, naturally. Sweet Christ why did no one stop me?) At the more and more absurd scenarios I manufactured as paper-thin pretexts for ineptly written sex scenes. At how altogether silly they seem now. Occasionally, though–out of nowhere, I’ll find a sentence or two that’s almost hot… to me. Usually these sentences tend to somehow invoke the concept of tension.

I was still a virgin: a technical virgin, the most hilarious kind. Believe I knew tension. I’d fooled around with my oddly sex-adverse college boyfriend, but “sex-sex” was an odd taboo between us. Showing too much interest in intercourse was tantamount to spoiling for a fight back then. My inexperience may have thrown the wrenchiest of all the wrenches bogging down my fledgling erotic writing career. Of course virginity really never stopped anyone from writing about sex (I’m looking at you, fanfiction.net), but when a 10-year-old boy first draws two concentric circles and calls it a boob is it really fair to call that erotic art? And he certainly shouldn’t expect anyone to hand him $20 for his trouble. Getting paid to clumsily explore one’s sexuality is, of course, a pretty nice job if you can get it, but the results are bound to be awkward.

When I reread my old erotic fiction it occurs to me that although I knew the rudiments of orgasm, I didn’t really understand how sex works: the logistics, the sensations, the movements and blistering chemistry of bodies really overlapping. I also didn’t, DID NOT, understand attraction. It was all but impossible for me to navigate the murky waters between rawest acquaintance and bareback. All too often that transition was settled with a jaunty “wanna fuck?” proposed by one of the characters, usually the girl because the porn site was (brace yourself) targeted to men, and it seemed to me the kind of thing a guy might like, having a hot-as-only-fiction-allows female offer sex completely unsolicited. Come to think of it, my reasoning there was fair.

If I’m being honest, I still don’t have a handle on attraction, but we’ll revisit that some other time.

It’s odd to me that I never got any complaints from the client. They seemed perfectly happy with my work, although frankly, who reads erotic fiction on a pay site anyway? I could’ve gone on for decades. Maybe I would’ve hit some kind of stride, once I had a little more familiarity with my subject.

Eventually I just lost interest and stopped writing smut. One of the most frustrating things about writing for a glorified Girls Gone Wild porn site with a (for lack of a better term) frat boy demographic was the fact that as much as I didn’t understand my own sexuality I just absolutely,  7,000 times more, didn’t understand theirs. I mean, it’s possible… just barely possible… that that saucy wink I threw in really spoke to them. But if I knew that for a fact, I really couldn’t live with myself.