quizzical pussy

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.

A while ago my friend Penelope Svelterwald jokingly asked me to have a threesome with her and her husband Max for his birthday. I believe my response was something dorky like “Well, now! I had a feeling today was going to be my lucky day! Har har har.” and we all laughed and went on with our lives.

Obviously, the threesome did not happen (still waiting for that first FMF to come my way). Penelope and I did end up fucking a couple months later, and that’s an interesting story that I should tell you about sometime, but it was largely unrelated.

The thing is, she was joking (or half joking, or mostly joking) about the birthday threesome, but that doesn’t make it a crazy concept. Another female friend of mine was a birthday present for my friend Crispin Hijanx from his girlfriend in a similar-though-far-less-theoretical manner. Crispin had mentioned that he’d been in threesomes before but had never been “the focus” (aside: I’m not sure what happened in these past experiences that made him specifically feel that he wasn’t– or even had to be– “the focus”, but I kind of prefer a three-person sex=three-person focus paradigm. I’m pretty sure the only way one out of the three people involved can get lost in the shuffle is for things to transfigure irretrievably into a twosome. So I’ll admit I’m confused by this part of the story, but I guess we’ll never know. Unless the subject comes up again and I ask.) and his chick sweetly secreted him off to a hotel rendezvous with a mutual friend who also happens to be a fetching redhead. And a good time was had by all.

Now, I’m not sure if people have always been doing this and I’m just now catching up or if it’s a fad/zeitgeist/what the hip kids are doing, but more and more I’m hearing about people-as-gifts scenarios. And I want to go on record as saying that the more I think about it the more it actually sounds really hot.

I’m being a bad feminist here. I get that. Women are people. People aren’t toys. And, thankfully, you can’t strictly speaking give a person as a present this side of 1865. These things are certain. But who’s to say people can’t play toys recreationally? Because I’m a woman and a person and I kinda wanna. With the right people, naturally (obviously I’m not volunteering to fuck anyone and everyone with a birthday and a dream.)

There haven’t been many moments in my life when I’ve gotten to feel like a treat. And by that I mean I can’t really think of one ever. I’ve felt like prey, a possession, a playmate, and a respected partner– a couple of these I even appreciate. I think, though, that it would be neat to occasionally feel like someone was giddy enough to touch me– even if it was only just once–that I actually rated up there with other awesome and highly anticipated birthday presents like PS3 games and robot kits. I’d like to feel like I’m the dessert someone is looking forward to, sitting glistening and toothsome at the end of a long and glorious meal. I want to be the fucking mochi ice cream for once, instead of just a bowl of miso soup or those carrot shavings on the salad. It’s exciting to be exciting!

Yes, I realize that all I’m accomplishing here is saying I’d like an ego boost. But there’s more to it. The birthday threesome could be giddy and gleeful, full of enthusiasm, and extra fun because at its essence it’s a celebration and a gesture of friendship and lust and adventure all at the same time. This is all assuming that no one gets buyer’s remorse or starts having rampant attacks of jealousy or goes into sugar shock, or whatever. But I’m arguing on potential, understand.

I’m not sure I’d want a threesome as a present myself, though, because I’d never be entirely free from the specter of worrying that one or both of the other parties would never have fucked me without factoring in the “well, it’s her birthday… might as well throw her a bone” card. It turns out that catalysts for self-loathing paranoia probably don’t make the most thoughtful gifts, after all. But a birthday threesome where I’m not “the focus”? Wrap me up, bitches!

I love my friends. Sometimes I even love my friends, if you know what I mean. But that’s another entry or four.

The feeling seems to be universal among us. Sometimes I’ll get home from a party or from hanging out and someone has tweeted or blogged it; sometimes it’ll be expressed aloud in the moment. It’s always that exact sentence: I love my friends.

And it doesn’t just mean that we’re always there for each other, or that we share important life events, that we work on nifty projects together, or that we always have plenty to chatter and laugh about. When we say it, it means something slightly more specific. When we say it, we’re saying “Thanks, you guys, for being such big, dirty perverts.”

There’s this whole disapproving world out there where most of us are expected to be reserved about sex, to behave nicely and not paw all over each other in the glaring light of day. I mean, there are social niceties, sensibilities! Won’t somebody please think of the children! And that’s cool, I guess. I have this really convincing innocent face that I need to keep in regular circulation, lest I forget how to use it. And I do have many rich and wonderful friendships with people who don’t need to know that I’m obsessed with sex; that wouldn’t get it if confronted with it. And that’s cool too.

But it’s great to have people in my life that do get it, and are possibly close to as fixated as I am. I love having a close group of friends who can invite one another to participate in threesomes without making things weird. I love that I can give my male or female friends lap dances while their partners watch, and we all get a little turned on but mostly just giggle. I love the fact that I medaled in Saturday’s great impromptu Totally Huge Dildo™ suck-off (I didn’t get the gold, sadly. Maybe guys really do give better blowjobs, after all…) and came home with a sample of throat-relaxing gel, because friends share.

I feel privileged to have seen some of their come faces. It feels comfortable and oddly poignant that I know the exact expression the slightly reserved and delicate brunette in the corner makes when she’s being spanked (it’s thoughtful and appreciative, like a person who brings her notebook to a wine tasting), even though I haven’t seen her naked (yet). It’s fun to teach my boyfriend how to tug a girl’s hair on the scruff right where her hairline meets her neck, and watch him practice on a lovely nymph with freckles on her shoulders.

I can talk about politics, petitio principii, and pony play with these people, and everything in between. Where else could I ever really fit in?

It’s kind of weird when you realize that you’ve been alone together with one of your sex partners precisely once, for about forty seconds, and that this time overlapped exactly none with the actual sex.

“I want to visit a swingers’ club one of these days, just to see what it’s like.” I was sprawled out on Laramy’s bed chattering away, which is one of my newer hobbies. Laramy Fuquerton and I have been fucking for a few months now, with sterling success.
“Are there even any around here?” he wondered.
“Of course there are. They’re everywhere!” I said in the authoritative tone I save for bullshit. “…Well, I heard about one once.”

I’m not pretending I’d be visiting a swingers’ club strictly as an anthropologist, or a journalist, or to gawk at the sideshow freak adulterers, or as ambassador from Finland. It’s just that to participate in playful, no-strings sex with strangers (which I’ve never done, not even having had a single one night stand) I’d have to feel both comfortable and interested in record time. I wouldn’t rule that out, but I also wouldn’t bring an economy-sized tub of lube in anticipation. So yeah, really. I actually just want to see. Sometimes in a person’s sex life an idea presents itself that appears to have equal potential to be either hideously awkward or kind of neat, and sometimes you gamble on neat, because it’s a new experience. Barring actual trauma, the alchemy of time usually softens awkward to hilarious anyway.

One of the cool things about Laramy that I’m coming to understand more and more is that he’s very game. If I said “Hey, I’ve been thinking lately that it might be fun to try naked judo-style grappling, but in an igloo,” I’m starting to think he’d say “How do we make this happen?” and start researching how to avoid frostbite (stay tuned for the upcoming entry on how that went [you should probably know I'm lying]). Maybe it shouldn’t seem especially odd that a guy would respond with at least a tinge of interest to the prospect of going to a sex club, but his total lack of hesitation signifies a willingness of attitude that’s all too rare, in my experience. Anyway, he pulled up a listing of clubs in our state and we got down to business.

Not wild monkey sex business. Reconnoitering business.

I conspicuously didn’t say I haven’t a single anthropological bone in my body because that would’ve been a blatant lie and I never lie on the internet. Swingers as a subculture are fascinating. I want to ethnographize the shit out of them. Like most groups, they have their own little shorthand language. Of course it has many cognates in BDSM, regular sex-literate culture, and the sex industry, but some elements are idiomatic. Hard swap (two couples switching partners for full-on intercourse) vs. soft swap (switching that’s limited to oral play), for instance, is something I’ve never come across outside of swinging parlance because really, where else would you have opportunity to invoke these concepts but in (as they say) The Lifestyle? Swingers’ clubs are either on-premise or off-premise, which essentially means you can play on site or you can’t. Many of these seem to be more like Fight Club-style organizations that only exist when they’re in session rather than brick-and-mortar nightclubs. They all claim to be “upscale” and “drama-free”, and will likely repeat both these terms several times in their About Us pages and FAQs. Most will try to keep things innovative with woefully unsurprising themes: wet t-shirt contest, leather and lace, bad boys and naughty school girls, and so on. Some of them even use those wrist band sex codes of urban legend, which probably teeters on the line between whimsical and tawdry, but I think comes out on the adorable former side after all.

We waded through a lot of these clubs’ websites, and something happened to us that may happen to real anthropologists in the field: we came up against a cultural difference that seemed almost insurmountable. The website design was uniformly terrible. No. It was really, really terrible. It looked like the bastard child of 1997 and a terrible animated flash ad had thrown up all over a geocities account and then beat off to its death throes. I have no right to be, nor am I, too much of a web design snob. I don’t demand anything too marvelous when I visit a site, but I do ask that it be clean, legible, and proofread within a reasonable margin of error, or else unflattering thoughts about the author start to insinuate themselves, unbidden. I guess it’s like looking at someone’s profile on an internet dating site and noticing that the owner can’t grasp the difference between “you’re” and “apple”. Sorry about your illiteracy and all, but damned if I’m going to fuck you.

Is it because swinging is a throwback to the seventies and attracts an older crowd than I’d anticipated, and maybe they’re a little out of touch? Is it because they’re too busy having naughty school girl fun to bother to spend any time or energy on web presence? It is a mystery! The first terrible page we went to made us laugh. By the fourth the trend was becoming worrisome. When the tenth had a bad animated .gif of a woman in a sparkly bikini, it seemed like it was time to quit for the day. “Seeing a website like this makes me determined not to have sex with the person who made it,” said Laramy.
“I’m actually turned off now,” I agreed.

Swingers’ clubs: I’m not ready to give up on you. I’m still curious. I’m still hoping things will work out between us, but I need you to meet me halfway. I just want to be able to read about your toga orgy parties and masquerade balls without getting queasy. I mean, aren’t ANY of you geeks? Please say that there are geek swingers and nerd swingers and dork swingers, and maybe even a bookworm swinger or two. I know this sounds terribly xenophobic, but in this specific sense I think I really do prefer to have sex with my own kind.