quizzical pussy

I would like to think that emotions can usually be controlled. That’s not to say it’s easy. And maybe we can’t always keep them in check… not like actions, but often we can. Emotions follow thoughts, thoughts acquire speed, lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. Or something like that.

But I also can’t get past the fact that it’s all biology. Hormones and neurotransmitters and shit. It’s kind of humbling how little control we have over these impulses that can blindside us. A chemical imbalance can compel you to injure yourself; a surge of dopamine can make you instantly giddy… or it is giddiness, I’m not even sure. I was a liberal arts major.

Even when we want to think that we have control, a chemical signal can fuck that right up. Sex is a perfect example: Penises wax rampant at awkward times, or you suddenly feel inconveniently bonded to that person you were just using for sex.  The honeymoon phase of a relationship often wears off predictably at the precise moment that the natural swoon stimulants runs dry. And (I love this one) you can take a tiny little pill to trick your body into thinking it’s already got a little zygote passenger on board so you can have crazy monkey sex with reproductive impunity.

I started a new birth control pill last month. I liked my old one just fine, but my insurance dropped it and not getting knocked up is pretty expensive when it’s not subsidized, although it’s nothing compared to getting knocked up.

So I switched to something that was still in my formulary. When I say “new pill”, that’s a little misleading because it’s actually the same one (Ortho Tri Cyclen) I started on when I was 19, until I was put on a lower hormone dose (Ortho Tri Cyclen Lo) a couple years later because the lady at Planned Parenthood said it was better.

I was more nervous than I would’ve been with an untried oral contraceptive, though, because I couldn’t help but remember being miserable for nearly every single day that I was on regular Ortho Tri Cyclen. The only exceptions were the bright patches that coincided with the months when I was off-again with my abusive boyfriend. Oh, also, I was miserable for roughly a year before I started taking any contraceptive pill, which eerily began a few months after we started dating, when I found out he was OMFGcrazy. But despite all this, I asked myself: what if the misery was all down to the hormones making me crazy? What if I’ve vilified him in my memory to rationalize that crazy? What if my female hysterics made him hit me and do other not-so-nice stuff? Or what if the hormones contributed even just a little to the whole accursed business? I didn’t want to go back to any part of that.

I knew these questions weren’t rational (I was irrationally afraid of becoming irrational! Can you stand it!?). The difference is literally 0.01 mg of fake estrogen a day. That might make a subtle difference, but it’s probably not going to make someone’s emotional well-being unravel entirely. But however absurd, I was trepidatious about going back to the higher dose. My Ortho Tri Cyclen Lo had been like a grisgris, a talisman protecting me from the dark, ominous mysteries of female hormones and their mind-bending wiles.

It is profoundly sexist that I was swallowing any form of “estrogen makes you crazy” line. I realize that. I don’t think that estrogen makes people crazy, irrational, or emotionally fragile. I don’t even think that fake estrogen does. I was just a little worried, in the back of my mind. Because of internalized sexism, obviously. And beaten girl syndrome. Thanks, patriarchy.

However, I certainly wasn’t going to let all this stop me from taking an oral contraceptive that I could actually afford, so of course I sucked it up, filled the new  prescription and started taking it. I enlisted Laramy to alert me to any strange, “crazier than usual” behavior. He agreed to tell me the absolute, brutal truth, as long as I wasn’t holding anything sharp at the time.

A month in, no perceptible emotional changes have surfaced. I feel vindicated. I was never hormone crazy. I was just abused, and that probably made me depressed, but that’s a fairly natural and sane reaction. I have noticed some physical changes. I was a bit nauseated for most of the first month, which seems to be abating, and my boobs hurt more than usual before my last period started, but that’s fake-out pregnancy for you.

On another hormone tip, I recently adjusted my thyroid medication and I’ve been masturbating like crazy all week and humping the furniture and shit. Which I guess we should call “back to normal” for me. I love science.

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?

I’m massively creeped out by the purity movement and abstinence culture. You know how religious parents and teenagers– mostly daughters–buy into virginity in a big way with purity pledges, purity balls, purity rings, and… I dunno, probably chastity belts? That’s creepy.

I’m not even going to get into how I hate the fact that we’re teaching young women that their worth depends on their ability to withhold sex and/or to provide an unsullied sexual vessel to some schmuck in the future. I’m not even going to mention that. Well, barely.

What specifically makes my flesh crawl is the concept that somehow fathers are supposed to be the custodians of their daughters’ virginity. The implication that a man can more or less own his child’s sexuality at all is unspeakably corrupt, and giving her a little extra attention in the form of jewelry and dressed-up dancing doesn’t sanitize the concept or make it any easier to swallow. It’s still creepy as hell.

Take a look at this sample purity pledge, culled from the Hollywood Purity Ball’s website:

I (Name) pledge my purity to my father, my future/husband and my Creator. I recognize that virginity is my most precious gift to offer to my future husband. I will not engage in sexual activity of any kind before marriage but will keep my thought and my body pure as a very special present for the one I marry.

…Okay, I’m not trying to be a dick here, but what business is it of this girl’s father, future/husband, or Creator to care so damn much about stifling her emerging sexuality? These three guys are heroically falling all over themselves to bellyflop on some catastrophic grenade, but it’s actually just this poor girl. Now that she needs a training bra she might want to think about sex at some point and do other things associated with puberty. The pin has been pulled! Horrors! “Save yourself, Creator! Future/husband and I have got this. You have other virgins to make.”

And as “precious gifts” go, I think that if I were a guy I’d value other things in my future wife above her absolute lack of experience. Some examples that spring to mind:

1. An awesome sense of humor that still manages to pretend I’m funny from time to time
2. Compassion
3. Wit
4. A terrific ass (I’m an ass guy)
5. A sense of adventure in and out of the bedroom
6. Unfuckingbelievable blowjob skills
7. Independence, self-agency, and the ability to make up her own mind instead of just listening to her daddy all the fucking time
8. A good DVD collection
9. A ravenous intellect
10. A ravenous sex drive

If you don’t know what you’re doing or what you like, you should date and have some fun figuring it out. Being clueless isn’t your cue to go get married. Maybe it’s okay to give some virginity to your husband as a very special present, but for heaven’s sake, it shouldn’t be yours!

My official position on penis envy is that it’s utter tripe, the wishful thinking of flimsy-headed men who ascribe an almost numinous significance to the possession of a phallus simply because they were born with dicks and want to feel important without exerting actual effort. There’s no reason any woman anywhere should care that she lacks a penis. Doesn’t she have a vulva and a vagina, not to mention a uterus? And don’t even get me started on fallopian tubes: ancient bastions of power.

My unofficial position on penis envy is that I have it like Magic Johnson used to have AIDS.*

It isn’t that I want to be male. That doesn’t appeal to me. Although I identify with guyness in significant ways, I embrace being female. I love having all the accouterments of femininity, and there are times I’m tempted to wish I had more of a certain sort (see: boobs). In my experience, having a pussy is spectacular. Ladyparts are more versatile than a pocket knife, more surprising than the troposphere, and more fun than six roller coasters. If you don’t have a vulva of your own, see if you can borrow one for a few hours and then try to tell me they aren’t cunning little contraptions.

But still, there’s something about a penis. It’s not necessarily that I’d rather play with a penis than a pussy, because both are enticing. It’s just that they’re so… external. They’re cool in the way having a tail would be cool (not in the “I’m a furry” sense, but in the “fucking admit it: having a tail would be cool” sense). They’re a fidgeter’s dream. I can’t imagine looking down my torso, seeing a cock, and not wanting to play with it every blessed time. It’s similar, I guess, to the varying-but-never-absent urge I have to play with my tits. External sex organs are enticing “PUSH ME” buttons, right there on your body, daring you to ignore them and knowing your human frailty won’t allow it.

And then there’s the whole arousal aspect. We’re talking about an appendage that advertises its intentions like a slutty, slutty beacon: ostentatious, risky, unequivocal… all things I admire, but tend to lack when it comes to sex. A hard-on, although I can think of ways it could go embarrassingly wrong, is hypererotic because it’s so damn unapologetic.

Wetness is the best female analog I can think of. In either case, discovering arousal that I may have contributed to usually makes me feel like sort of a stud. The difference is that you have to be farther along in the petting to get tactile feedback on what you’ve accomplished with a girl. To wit, I have to already be in your pants to get the payoff. Usually. And that’s not inferior to the timeless “gun in your pocket or…” question, it’s just different. Occasionally, when faced with an either-or choice a sex enthusiast can’t help but come down with a decisive and resounding “both!”. Hence, penis envy, because it’s the option I currently lack.

Notice, please, that in my discourse here I haven’t mentioned power, or Electra, or any of the stages of psychosexual development. I also don’t think I need one in order to fuck girls, although having that option would be another perk. Sometimes a penis is just a penis: another toy it’d be fun to experiment with from the other end of the shaft. Admittedly, I totally covet the experience of having a penis, but I lament your lack of imagination if you’re male and haven’t gotten around to coveting my multiple orgasms.

*I know: he never had AIDS and still has HIV. Yes, you’re very smart. Shut up.