quizzical pussy

Better late than never.

QP, this isn’t a confession, but please, PLEASE tell us how you met all your awesomekinky friends. I so want to live this life. I feel like I’m wasting mine – live with my parents, never had a long-term relationship, masturbating so much my clit is officially pushing up the daisies… I’m fucked-up and kinky and interested in all sorts of cool things and I want to meet other fucked-up kinky interesting people! With blue hair!

Tips? Should I get into theater or something? Should I move to Seattle? I heard Seattle has a great poly/kink scene. I dunno, probably I’m just stereotyping people and I need to be more open-minded. But I still can’t help thinking I want to find a cute butch girl and fall in love and use a feeldoe. How does one find other people who might be interested in such things?

My greatest talent may be recruiting amazing people onto my team. Okay, I actually can’t take a lot of credit for this because most of the time I don’t know how it happens or how I could have possibly deserved it. I can tell you, though, some of the major things I changed in my life between having a lot of the problems you have and now.

So, you’re trying to build a ridiculously awesome phalanx of glorious freaks. Here are my tips for you.

1. Become the kind of person you want to hang out with. Ideally, this will have the primary benefit of making sure you’re always in marvelous company, even if you’re alone. As a side benefit, the kind of people you want in your life will sense that you’re their kind of people. Interested in cool things? Do as many of those cool things as you can. Like people with killer style and flamboyant hair? Maybe you’d like yourself with those things. And if you don’t already, figure out how to love yourself.
2. Find the others. The internet will help you immeasurably here. I have friends and loved ones that I met at events I found on Fetlife (sign up if you haven’t, and don’t look for people as hard as you look for local events), through OkCupid (sign up if you haven’t, answer lots and lots of match questions, and pay attention to match/friend/enemy percentages. They aren’t perfect, but they’re indicative of like-mindedness and compatibility), and through mutual friends. If you’re a fan of something (particularly gaming or science fiction) try to find a convention you can go to; geeks are very often deviants. Some of my kinky friends I’ve known over a decade; some are recent additions. Some grew up a few miles away from me; some were born a continent away. They’re everywhere, people like you. We’re hiding everywhere in plain sight.
3. When you find people like you, be open. Share yourself with them, be interested in them. Care about them. Help them and accept help. Be an awesome friend to them because you’re lucky to have found each other.
4. Live life as much on your own terms as possible. If you feel that your current living situation is restricting you and it’s in your power to change it, do so. If you’ve explored what counterculture your current area offers and found it lacking, go elsewhere if you can. Go to Seattle if that idea speaks to you. Try new things. Take chances. Experiment a great deal. Look like an idiot sometimes.

Anxious-type confession.

Today was a day I was pretty damn bad at the sexy. Messed about in the shower this morning and couldn’t manage to please the penis of the penis-owner with whom I was messing about. Hands didn’t work (I pulled. Like accidentally HAULED on that sucker.), mouth didn’t work (I am ashamed to admit that I unintentionally bit), slippery soapy grinding, nope (kept staggering, having various limbs in uncomfortable positions etcetera). It made me sad.

And on top of that I’ve taken my first-ever birth-control pill in preparation for my first round of PIV sex so I will not be making of the babies, and I’m freaking the fuck out about all the horrible things that the hormones might do to my body… or worse, my libido.

Insert kinda sad face.

I hope your body likes the hormones and the penis pleasing is coming along nicely and happy face.

So, not terribly juicy, but I have had a crush on a certain someone since I was too young to know what a crush even was. First person I’d ever thought about kissing, and even throughout a very happy marriage to somebody else, extremely attracted and all weird with blushiness whenever we spoke.
FINALLY, after 26 years of waiting, in a position to maybe start a relationship, and he took up smoking.

What a colossal WASTE of TWENTY-SIX years of anticipation, because all that attraction gone.

Dear smokers: I’m starting to suspect you’d have more fun if you quit.

Love,

Quizzical Pussy

I’ve recently discovered that nothing turns me on faster than having my partner pin me down while he fucks me. During sex, oral, even masturbating by myself, it’s just… damn. I’m not a very muscly person, and generally speaking, having concrete evidence of how much stronger than me somebody is kind of freaks me out. But for some reason, with him it just makes me feel completely safe and loved. Also short-of-breath and tingly in the nether regions, but that almost feels like a side benefit.

Sweet Horus, I love being pinned down (by the right person). I’m not sure “safe” and “loved” are my key words on that one so much as “aroused”, but this is adorable.

I love it when I drag the ridge on the corona of my cock against her G spot as I’m on the upstroke. When I first started sex, I thought that the upstroke was a lost stroke, only good for getting some negative space to fill, and grind that clit with my pubis.

Now? I know that the Out stroke is as good as the In stroke, near enough.

I feel like I just learned something about having a non-silicone penis.

So I’ve recently figured out this whole squirting thing, and am pretty sure I could adequately direct a partner to get me to squirt. Problem is, I don’t want to. Know that whole “ladies you feel like you’re going to pee but that’s just your orgasm building up” business? Welp, for me, it’s not just the orgasm. Sometimes a dribble of urine comes out on the first orgasm. I have no way of telling when it will happen. And I really don’t want to gross out any of my primary partners.

Squirting is novel at first, and the orgasm is really good, yeah, but–urine or not– some of us still prefer not to make that huge of a wet spot. I mean, I get that it’s not a choice for a lot of people, but for me it mostly is, and I don’t try for it very often. My body my choice, dagnabbit.

While my boyfriend and I were getting ready to go to bed, like we do every night, he started crying because he was half-afraid I was a dream and he would wake up. I grabbed a box of tissues and held him until he stopped shaking.

And I realized neither of us give a fuck about gender norms.

I have this theory that giving a fuck about gender norms really limits the amount of soul-crushingly cute one can be. This is my impression of you and your boyfriend:

Hey. Confess stuff.

Share/Save

Did you know that today is International Transgender Day of Remembrance? I want to talk for a moment about how much transphobia sucks, but I don’t know firsthand exactly how much, to be honest. I know it’s worse than I can comprehend. I know it kills people. Actually, no, it’s cis people doing the killing– making the active choice to harm human beings for no other reason than their gender expression.

I want to remind cis people that we have privilege. I want the violence to stop. I want us all to stop not loving one another.

Trans* people, I can’t wrap my head around how hard it is to experience gender dysphoria, or transitioning, or living outside the binary, or transphobia, but I know it probably surpasses diamonds on the Mohs scale. I know I have some trans* readers, and some trans* confessors– maybe more than I’m aware of because not every confession discloses those kind of details, nor does it need to. It’s just another cis privilege to assume that an anonymous confession is coming from another cis person unless otherwise specified.

Now. Here are some confessions.

I have always been extremely sensitive to touch, texture, etc., to a really ridiculous degree. This results in a huge amount of pleasure for me (my favorite piece of clothing is a bamboo shirt, because it just feels SO good to wear it!) but can also be very annoying. For most of my adult life, I was so sensitive that sex was often difficult. Being touched too lightly tickled terribly. Being touched too hard HURT. Cunnilingus was impossible – almost painful. Touching my nipples without having me yelp and hit the ceiling was something that only two people (out of about 25 sexual partners) ever achieved. (It was so bad that in order to wear clothes during my period I had to put tape over my nipples). Orgasms with other people were very rare, because I just overloaded.

A few years ago I hurt my back, rather catastrophically. I’m now in chronic pain, which sucks, but it has also had an unexpected side-effect! Two years ago, I was put on a medication called gabapentin, which relieves neuropathic pain. It definitely helps with the pain, but it has also de-sensitized me somewhat, and opened up a whole new world!

Now people can suck on my nipples, stroke my belly, even lick my cunt, and I love it! It’s no longer insanely ticklish or almost painful – it’s amazing! The difference is staggering. My lovers don’t have to be ultra-careful anymore, I enjoy sex without the constant slight anxiety that I’ll be tickled at any second, I come much more easily, more often, and I’m suddenly having multiple orgasms (7 is my highest count so far). DAMN!

It’d be nice if my back stopped hurting, it really would, but I never EVER want to go off this med. I’m having more sex, with more people, and enjoying it far more now that I’m disabled by pain than I ever did when I was healthy. Chemistry for the win!

Sometimes even chronic pain has a silver lining. Mine is called “encyclopedic knowledge of nutrition and supplement esoterica”, and it seems a lot less sexy than yours, I must admit.

I have a gay friend who hates it when men ask him if he’s close. It kills his boner, well for me I hate it when people ask me if things make me wet, it kills my girl boner.

As a recently post-op trans-woman I haven’t learned yet how wet it’s even possible for me to get. So being asked means I try quantifying how wet I am as if there’s some ratio of how wet per units of horny. The math does not work!

So the confession and the lovely bit. I love it when I hear the wet sloppy sound of fingers, toys, genitals in my new vagina. I’m learning more about it every day and while I can’t tell how wet it is, I’m over come with excitement when I hear that it’s wet… very wet.

The math works for no one. The Pussy Wetness Unit (Imperial) is not the standardized metric of horniness. Even the horniest people sometimes need lube. But! ::Internet high five:: for the lovely bit.

I have bright-fucking-pink-hair and 50-inch hips. I’m plus-sized and have struggled with loving my chub-tastic-ness ever since I can remember.

And I have to say, waking up to my husband’s fingers kneading my lovely rolls and burying his face in my hair while telling me how much he wants to fuck me is the most empowering feeling ever.

This makes me smile, and not to be creepy, but I bet you’re sexy as fuck.

I’m going to miss my girlfriend’s dick once she transitions. A lot. I am, of course, super excited to have all kinds of crazy new sex and figure out how to have our old kinds of crazy sex in new ways and I love her and I love her body no matter what it’s shaped like. I’m not that enthralled about pussy, no matter how much I love women, but I suspect her pussy will convert me (in the same way that I wasn’t much on dick until I started fucking her.)

But OH MY GOD, HER DICK, IT IS SO PERFECT. It is the best dick in the entire world. It was made for my vagina. No one else will ever get to fuck that dick except me, and I will miss it until the day I die, in the same way that I get teary thinking about summers when I was a teenager driving with my friends with the wind in our hair, I will reminisce about her dick that way. I feel like a huge jerk. Like I’m not supporting her enough in her transition/identity, regardless of every other single thing I do to care for her and love her. Because I love her dick so goddamn much.

I have this feeling that you’re really going to love her pussy. Spoken as a total queer girl, I know…

I’m in a nonexclusive long-distance relationship with a beautiful woman. We met and had awesome sex before we knew about each other then names and where we’re from and sometimes I think we fell in love there and then, although it took a while for our brains to realize it.

She has two lovers, one of which she has a BDSM thing going on with for a while now. While I like a bit of kink in my sex, I use it as a spice. I’m not a BDSM person, whereas she enjoys it very much.

Because of that, I was a bit nervous and felt somewhat intimidated at the idea of her having a BDSM lover, fearing to become jealous about him giving her things I can’t give her and so on. But at the same time I felt secure enough in the relationship, and in our ability to communicate our own and respect the others feelings that I wanted to give this a try.

(If it hurt me or made me feel sad, I knew I could talk to her and we would work at a solution.)

Two days ago, she had her first Date in a while with that lover, and I was curious and excited (And nervous as hell.) to hear about it. When she told me yesterday, I realized I wasn’t jealous.

At most, I was envious, because the things she told me about made me so horny and excited, I wanted to fly to her right then and there, grab some restraints and toys on the way and do all kinds of kinky, naughty things with, and to, her. Hearing about her being dominated by her lover, and about her dominating him, gave me loads of ideas of things I’d like to try with her.

While I worry that there’s some competition thing going on there (Which I very much don’t want.), I’m still happy that, instead of feeling all jealous and hurt, I can be happy for her and excited about it instead. It makes me realize that I have grown as a person and gives me a good feeling for this still very new relationship.

Now I just need to find a way to see her more often (FU, long-distance relationship!!!) and oh what fun we will have! ^-^

Congratulations, you may be in a healthy open relationship! They’re not incredibly rare, but they take serious work and skill. You rock and your partner rocks.

I have this weird feeling in me all the time. Like there’s so many lovely people around me, and I want to do something with them, like some people I just want to watch while they’re nude, some people I want to touch or taste…

But I’m so afraid of people touching me or seeing what I look like without my clothes. It’s gotten so bad that I can’t wear thongs because they make me really, really horny, and I don’t even go to the beach anymore because I hate the way I look so much.

It’s like the more I know that I’m unlikely to ever do anything with anyone, the worse I feel and the more yearning I have.

There are people who get this weird feeling around you. Like you’re so lovely, and they want to do something with you, like see you nude, or touch you, or taste you. They want to reach inside your thong and hear your moans of pleasure. Believe it. Believe it. I assure you it is true.

Confess things!

Share/Save

Pushing, testing, annihilating your own boundaries can be awesome. Not so much when someone else– anyone–decides you need this done for you. Whether it results in irritation, full-on trauma, or something else, I’m not sure it ever ends well.

I have always had lots of rape fantasies, especially date rape scenarios where I’m too drunk to make a decision. I also really like getting fucked while I’m asleep. A couple years ago I did get date raped while I was asleep and I woke up halfway through (side note: I still don’t know whether to consider it date rape since the guy was as drunk as I was… although he did have to be sober enough to move, while I didn’t). It was traumatic for a bit but I still have the same fantasies and they’re better than ever! They never involve that incident and I don’t think they’re even connected…

The boundaries between fantasy and reality can be really difficult to resolve for rape survivors. Giving up control voluntarily is totally different from someone taking it away, or from being in a position where you had none.

The more I reflect on being semi-kinda date raped, the more confused I get. Yes, I was too drunk to consent; but he was too drunk to realize that and stop. And I did get too wasted to go home at his house knowing that he might wanna fuck me. Isn’t there any space between blaming the victim and accepting responsibility? Does putting all the impetus on men make women seem passive and pathetic (at least in my situation, where there was no threat of violence)? Is there a way to think about this without secretly wanting to feel like a victim, or conversely feeling like I’m too tough to be a victim? And how does being penetrated change it? If I had secretly sucked his dick while he was passed out would he have felt as violated as I did? And does any of this matter since it was a long time ago and I’m not traumatized? Most of all, is it wrong that we’re still friends (I yelled at him about it at the time)??

Although the details and the experience of being raped can vary widely, I think most survivors grapple with these questions. I can’t answer them. I really can’t. I can tell you that I tried to be friends with the guy who raped me afterward. I don’t think it was wrong, but in my case it was kind of more a way to punish myself for what I “let happen”. It wasn’t because I actually wanted him for a friend. But that’s me, not necessarily anyone else.

We’re going to deal with slightly less devastating boundary issues for the next couple. Because damn.

I’ve been following a blog for months, thinking that the person writing it was just another friendly sex blogger. Today I suddenly realized that she’s actually someone I’ve known since high school, and I’ve been reading about her sex life all this time without realizing it! I feel awkward…

I’d like to officially not apologize to anyone I’ve ever met in real life who has stumbled across this blog. You’re the ones reading it, you perverts.

So, I recently found out two things about a friend: she probably has a crush on me, and she has supremely deft fingers.

Item #1 is seriously putting a pit of dread into my stomach. I don’t know how to deal with it and I feel like I shouldn’t have to.

Item #2? Well, let’s just say I’ve rediscovered an old favorite from literotica. Super-butch masseuse blackmails seduces/rapes femme girls through blackmail and the power of her hands. It’s so poorly written. I cast myself as the poor hopeless girl and my friend as the rapist.

So while I’m coming to the thought of her hands on me, I’m also ignoring her texts: “night sweetheart,” “come to the park and read poetry with me.” Cognitive dissonance.

Okay, really we most of us have some cognitive dissonance percolating in the shadowlands between our fantasies and reality.

A few years ago, I decided I liked not wearing a bra during the steamy summertime. I have small, rocking’ tits, so it’s totally comfy to do so. I began to like being proud of my AA boobies, hanging out, free.

I was walking into a Big Boy, one afternoon, and this middle-aged guy held the door open for me. As I walked past him, saying ”thanks,” he said, in a very loud voice ”Damn, those are THE biggest nipples I have ever seen.” He said it to nobody in particular, just the air, and just the bunch of people within hearing distance. He said it with a very obvious tinge of disgust.

Mortified, I ran to the restaurant bathroom before even getting seated. I stared into the mirror for about ten minutes. I didn’t want to go back out there. I didn’t want him or anyone else to see me.

Yes, those nipples were huge. But did it need an announcement?

And…until that moment, I had thought that the silhouette of my breasts looked beautiful. I suppose if I had been in Manhattan or some other spicy, Cosmopolitan place, nobody would have shamed me like that. But I live in Northwest Ohio. But the real questions were and are: Why was I so surprised? Why was I suddenly so afraid? And how could some overweight sloppy man in overalls make me feel, suddenly, so dirty?

As long as we have bodies and people have eyes, loved ones and strangers alike are going to have opinions about our bodies. It would be nice to get to the place where one didn’t give a shit what anyone thought: compliments are nice, but they feed nothing; comments that shame or sexualize us are as the quacking of ducks or the susurration of a distant freeway.

It would also be awfully nice if people kept the latter category of comments to themselves.

Something squicks me out about actually having sex with someone who does unusual things with gender. A woman with a dick won’t do it for me. Nor will a man who wants to wear frilly underwear. I like macho men and femme women, and anything in between kills my ladyboner.

This makes me feel incredibly mean because I have a trans friend, love her like a sister, and she complains about not being able to find partners. And I’m thinking, guiltily, “maybe most people are like me, and just can’t get over the the gender thing.”

We each get to have our own boundaries of whom we’re attracted to. It’s actually good to know what these are. It’s not so good to be hurtful toward or dismissive of people who don’t match our orientation (and as a suggestion, I probably wouldn’t use the word “squick” when talking to them), but we owe no one our attraction. For what it’s worth, I don’t think most people are necessary oriented as you are. There are a lot of people who are attracted to trans women, and I suspect there would be a lot more if we could collectively manage, as a society, to stop being horrible to them as a general policy.

A while ago, I shared a bed with a friend, who touched me in ways I didn’t really want him to when I was half asleep.
It took me a while to say no and stop him, partially because I was too tired/dozy to work out was going on, partly because I felt awkward because we were good friends, did he feel I’d lead him on, did I for some reason owe him this? But also because my body was responding to the touches, even though my mind did not want it to happen. When I snapped out of it and realised I had made it clear that we weren’t that sort of friends, and then he did it again even though I said no, I stormed out and we didn’t make up for a long time. I felt used and like our friendship had been chucked away because he thought I’d be easy.

I don’t know, anymore, what I feel worst about – the fact he took advantage of me in such a weird situation, or the fact I was so angry with him for it considering I semi enjoyed it.

As much as we owe no one our attraction, a thousand times more do we owe no one our bodies. He was violating your boundaries. Your reaction gets to be as complicated as it is, but it doesn’t change what he did or how fucked up it was.

Which is VERY.

Confess things here.

Share/Save

Porn rockstar Drew Deveaux recently linked this disturbing, uh, thing, on twitter. It presents an email conversation between a lesbian activist and a trans activist. In summary, the lesbian activist asked the trans activist what the “cotton ceiling” was. The term, which was entirely new to me, deals with the concept that trans women are welcomed into feminist/lesbian spaces, but they are largely ignored as potential sexual partners in these spaces. Think the feminist concept of a workplace “glass ceiling”, but with panties. I’ll admit that I’m biased against any glimmer of transphobia, but to my eye, the conversation quickly descended to the lesbian activist more or less asking the trans activist “Why are you trying to force me to acknowledge you as a woman and touch your penis!? Eeeeww!” Of course, this is just my interpretation, but here’s a direct quote:

Lesbians are sexually attracted to females. This does not include trans women with penises.

Hold the fuck up there.

First off, hasn’t feminism– especially queer feminism– been dealing for over a century with how fucked up it is that other people try to define “correct” womanhood for us? Distinguishing between “female” and “woman” here may seem deceptively okay because “female” refers to sex and “woman” refers to gender. But sex is so much more than genitals, and I cannot imagine feeling comfortable telling anyone else what their sex or gender is. If you feel comfortable doing that, please spend the next month speaking as little as possible and concentrating hard on listening to the people around you. You are not the boss of the planet: you can certainly say that women with penises aren’t female, but your simplistic view of bodies and selfhood and reality is not fooling the rest of us.

Second of all, and I can’t believe there’s even a remote possibility that this is going to blow anyone’s mind: Some lesbians want to have sex with women who have penises. Yes, really. Accept it now. I’m a queer woman. I love women. I am absolutely open to dating and fucking trans* people, including trans women. You don’t get to dictate to me whom I am attracted to. You don’t get to tell me what girl love means. I realize that my bisexuality might cloud this issue, but let me assure you that there exist full-blooded lesbians who feel the same way. Let’s put it this way: I can also have completely male-free lady sex involving a penis at any time with a cis woman. It’s called a strap-on. A penis doesn’t make someone male; I speak from a place of experience here.

I don’t think the trans activist or anyone else was saying that all lesbians are transphobic meanies unless they go out immediately and find trans women to have sex with. Obviously, each of us has the inalienable right to be attracted to the people we end up being attracted to. At the same time, there’s a big difference between saying “You’re not the type of woman I’m into” and saying “I’m into women and you don’t count.” I suspect that the plea here is to fully acknowledge trans women in the queer community as women, as lesbians (if applicable), to acknowledge their partners as female-loving people, and to open up to the idea that female-on-female sexuality is more diverse than all vaginas all the time.

In short, stop trying to make goddamn rules about other people’s sex lives. Maybe even consider reevaluating some of the assumptions that led you to create rules for your own.

Feminism doesn’t get to be an exclusive club. Feminism is the anti-exclusive club. We will joyfully include everyone in our goal of equality– including men with penises, women with penises, marginalized groups of all kinds, and even people we don’t particularly agree with, or we’ve already failed. We’re either dismantling hierarchy or we’re just rearranging it.

(image source)

Share/Save

Whenever someone tells me that sexism is basically over and feminism is a relic (and trust me, it happens) my brain tries to do a spit take inside my skull. This is one of the stranger head sensations to experience, so the look I give these people isn’t so much anger or irritation as utter discomfort. Because my brain is doing really weird things in that moment.

Because they’re so infuriatingly wrong, see.

I get it. When you start examining sexism you often end up confronting not-so-fun subjects like abuse, sexual assault, workplace politics, pesky healthcare dilemmas, or that old “body image” chestnut that feminists trot out to try to get us to stop looking at women in bikinis. And if you really think hard you’ll find it hard to avoid looking at other unsettling things too: racism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. and then your whole day will be taken up having to think about how and why you’re privileged. Laaaaaaame.*

And very few people have all the possible privileges at once, so it’s easy to get caught up in the “Well things aren’t easy for any of us, little camper. But I’m doing the best I can with what I’ve got, and you should too!” fallacy and start arguing that, for instance, sexism doesn’t exist because you are a short man, and height discrimination is very real.

It all gets complicated and messy, you know?

But you know what’s not messy? Popular music! And you know what’s not complicated? Numbers! And you know what perfectly parries any claims that sexism is dead in Western culture? NME’s Greatest Singers of All Time poll! Observe.

On NME’s website, readers are asked to rate various singers of the 20th and 21st Centuries, mostly in the pop, rock, and R&B genres, from one to ten. The selection ranges from Art Garfunkle to Beyonce to Mike Skinner (the garage hip hop phenomenon The Streets) to Patti Smith to Al Green. There are more male nominees, but not overwhelmingly.

So far (as of Tuesday afternoon in my time zone) two women have made it into the top twenty. Monday it was just Aretha Franklin, but Tuesday morning I noticed Janice Joplin had made it to the #20 spot (so maybe by the time this entry posts we’ll have three women on the list). And I think that’s fucked up, not because I think Joni Mitchell should necessarily appear above Kurt Cobain (although one could certainly make an argument for that), but because 18-2 cannot be an accidental, random, “just the way things worked out” ratio. It has to mean something.

(as of Tuesday 6/7/11 1:00PM EST)

If a great preponderance of people agree that men are better at something that’s totally subjective and impossible to quantify outside of pure taste, it means we’ve basically just decided we like women less. We might not really even know why, exactly, but they’re just not as good. Does this seem freshly tapped from the very essence of sexism to anyone else?

There is a problem. Sexism is not over. It is not mass hysteria. It is not liberal brainwashing. And feminism is me, as a woman, wanting to not have to deal with that vague, visceral dismissal of my work, or body, or voice, or abilities. There is a problem. And which singers we all like best is really the least of it, yes, but it’s an easy thing to point out and say: “Now tell me more about this post-sexist world we’re living in, please?”

That said, I still can’t really think of a better singer than Freddie Mercury.

* You thought I forgot ableism, didn’t you?

Share/Save

Tonight is the finale of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 3. Who cares, you ask? I do. My latest brush with acute illness has left me with a lot of time on my hands. Did you know you can watch every single scintillating episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race ever produced right on logo’s website, tiny and pixelated beyond your wildest dreams? Well, you can.

To say that I lay in bed watching every episode would be a gross understatement. I also watched the extra catty web exclusives where you get to see the drag queen contestants bitch about each other backstage.

All in all, I’m excited to see who wins. I actually, really, almost and maybe even truly unashamedly am.

Part of this, of course, is research. Or maybe reverse research, because I’m actually a drag king. That’s right: I have exactly one performance to my masculine alter ego’s name (which I can’t share because I just know he’s destined to become a famous playboy and I still have a secret identity to play fast and loose with here). And I’m just a handful of days from another, if I can decide what song we’re lip-synching to.

It was once explained to me that to do your makeup as a king, you just reverse everything that queens are supposed to do. So while a man will put a white stripe down the center of his nose to make it appear narrower and create the illusion of feminine features, a woman has to draw a dark stripe instead to make the nose appear wider. I have no idea whatsoever if this is valid or not. I know exactly enough about makeup to have never bothered to learn anything and I own a book by Kevyn Aucoin that I don’t entirely understand. That’s pretty much all I can say for myself when it comes to makeup.

Really, the assumption in drag is that the genders are opposites, and have minimal overlap. If I walk like a woman I obviously can’t be walking like a man. In a recent episode of Drag Race, a queen advised a straight jock on his first flight dressed as a woman that “girls don’t point”. Like, at things, with our fingers. Which, I have to admit as a girl, I do. But what we’re dealing with in drag isn’t gender; it’s fantasy gender.

Which is why it’s so powerful and challenging and fun, really.

But this is also why there probably won’t be a reality show all about drag kings. It’s the same reason handsomeness pageants aren’t neck-and-neck with beauty pageants for popularity and scholarship opportunities. Same reason both men’s and women’s magazines have hot chicks on their covers. This is gender 101 shit. We more or less all fetishize the image and the fantasy of femininity, regardless of which gender/s we’re actually attracted to. In performing the opposite gender, women lose that double-sided edge we come to expect. We’re no longer universal visual shorthand for “sex object”.

It took drag to make me stop and wonder if guys don’t sometimes feel bad that they’re largely excluded from pretty.

Of course, I kind of also love this about being a drag king. Performing maleness I don’t feel any pressure to look sexy in the ways I’m used to failing at (big boobs, long hair, perfect figure et al.), and I think that’s why I suddenly almost feel sexy. Or something.

Or maybe I’m drunk with power because I have a big fucking packing penis.

Share/Save

Above: The Best Facebook Ad

I found the winner of the best ad on Facebook. You can all stop looking now.

See, the reasons this ad works so well are manifold (or possibly closer to twofold): First, Pell Grant eligibility is absolutely based on the sex of the applicant* rather than economic need, so saying “Pell Grants for Women!” isn’t at all embarrassing.* Second, a mudflap girl in a margarita glass is the perfect image to complement the concept of online education.*

It’s also important to point out that Academies of Burlesque do accept student loans.* I plan to minor in titty tassels.

*Lies. All lies.

Share/Save

The day I had committed to shave my head for charity I was so nervous I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t figure out where the nausea was coming from, because deep down I believe that I’m fearless. Deeper down– like in my stomach, I guess I know I’m not.

Outwardly, I was blasé about losing all my hair. It would grow back, I told people, myself. It didn’t matter. But really I was quite attached to my hair. For years I’d been bleaching it out and dying it outrageous colors: orange, pink, purple, blue. It was the first thing people noticed, and most people loved it. Little kids thought I was a muppet; old women thought I was brave. For me, crazy hair took no courage. I can honestly say, even looking back and in the searing light of day, that I was never rebelling against anything, and I wasn’t after attention. I just wanted to dye my hair crayola colors: it felt comfortable, oddly natural. It was me.

There were several reasons I decided to shave it off, but the main one was that I knew the only reason not to do it was fear. Fear wrapped up in vanity, which is perhaps the most repulsive kind. My philosophy supports doing anything that you’re afraid to do when there are no good, logical reasons to back up that fear. A dread of being unattractive just doesn’t count, especially up against raising money for charity. But I couldn’t help being scared that losing my hair meant losing a huge part of my identity. Maybe without awesome hair I wouldn’t be me anymore. Even worse, I might be really fucking ugly.

So my stomach was a mess underneath my cool “What is hair anyway, in the grand scheme of things?” exterior. But I didn’t back out. I sat through the dull-clipper-tearing-my-hair-out-instead-of-cutting-it stage, the these-replacement-clippers-hurt-much-less stage, the oh-dear-I-have-a-mohawk stage, each of these taking roughly five minutes. And then, after all that, I had a really short crew cut, more a faint suggestion of hair than an actual hairstyle.

Share/Save

This past fall/winter was truly a time of prodigious fucking. I say this because out of my friends and family, roughly 6,000 people have babies due this summer. It’s madness.

I don’t get the whole baby thing. My reproductive drive, my biological clock, is completely absent. I’ve never wanted kids; I’ve never even thought “maybe someday…”. I didn’t like to play with dolls as a kid (My Little Ponies FTW), I wish I were sterile now, and nothing has ever shaken my utter disinterest in baby-having. Which is weird considering that my baby-making (read: fucking) drive is insatiable and biologically you’d think those two things might be linked. I guess I just prefer orgasms to changing diapers. Actually, when you put it that way it’s not even slightly weird.

I realize that everyone is different, and evolutionarily speaking, I’m the one who’s broken here. I’m an evolutionary dead-end and all these happy mommies-to-be are passing on their genes. Still, it boggles my mind that there are people so enthusiastic about living my worst nightmare. But however hard it may be, I try to be polite when people are getting excited about their waxing bellies and baby registries and so forth, and I make an effort to listen to their thoughts on impending parenting challenges.

One of my friends (due in August, I think) is a feminist and an engineer. She’s unsure of whether she’s carrying a boy or a girl, but either way she intends to practice gender neutral parenting as far as practicality allows. Gender neutral parenting, as I understand it, tries to insulate a child from expectations to conform to gender stereotypes (e.g. girls wear princess dresses and play with dolls, boys get all the cool toys), allowing children the freedom to make up their minds about interests and preferences. This parenting style sounds awesome… idealistic, difficult, and probably frustrating at times, but awesome.

My friend mentioned several things, including the fact that she’s becoming more and more sensitive to gendered sayings like “boys will be boys”, and that she doesn’t intend to dress her child in the traditional pink or blue to denote her/his sex.

I don’t dislike pink, but I really, really dislike the practice of slapping pink on something (e.g. a cell phone, skateboard, or gun) and expecting it to automatically appeal to women. I also dislike the fact that little boys– hell, even men– are discouraged from wearing and liking pink for no good reason. Far be it from me to say that you can’t dress your little girl in pink or your little boy in blue. I don’t care how you dress your child. But I’m not sure I buy the suggestion that these are innate color preferences dictated by gender.

One study performed a few years ago by Newcastle University researchers reported that female test subjects tended to like colors at the redder end of the spectrum compared to men. Apparently because they found that this pattern was true for a handful of subjects born and raised in China, so the researchers concluded that the preference is biological. According to one of the researchers: “Evolution may have driven females to prefer reddish colours – reddish fruits, healthy, reddish faces. Culture may exploit and compound this natural female preference.”

I don’t understand how you get to exclude social conditioning and cultural impact as factors just because 37 of your subjects come from a non-isolated foreign country. That seems wildly assumptive to me.

In Western society, pink=girl blue=boy is a very recent phenomenon, emerging in the last hundred years or so. More interesting still, many sources suggest that in the past these colors were reversed, and many magazines and books listed blue as the correct color for girls and pink for boys. Blue was seen as delicate, pretty, and feminine, while pink was seen as the diminutive of exuberant, manly red. The current color standard definitely doesn’t date back to the earliest flickers of civilization.

It doesn’t really matter if women generally prefer pink to blue. Maybe they’re just taught that pink is for girls, or maybe their primitive minds really are seeking out ripe berries. Maybe it’s a little of each, or maybe there’s something else altogether going on. It’s intellectually worthwhile, though, to challenge anything that reinforces cultural stereotypes by saying “we’re just wired that way”. Reducing our behaviors and thoughts to the remnants of a simpler time when all humankind was interested in was eating, fucking, and raising young is lazy. It lets us just ignore thousands of years of social pressure, and countless other variables. It’s too easy, and it’s too easily manipulated. You can end up with lots of hilarious assumptions, but often not much science.

Share/Save

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.

Share/Save