quizzical pussy

I did not expect the air hunger to come back.

A few years ago when I was first started getting my stupid fucked-up illness I had this weird, deceptive shortness of breath. I knew I was taking air in because I made a point to draw ponderous diaphragm breaths all the way down, pushing my stomach out with each inhalation. Also, I demonstrably wasn’t dying. But it didn’t feel like my breaths were working. It felt like I was suffocating.

This is the kind of thing that seems like it would accompany a panic attack or something, but anxiety was never a factor… except, you know, the what-the-fuck-is-happening-why-am-I-not-breathing-right? thing that kept coming up somewhere in the middle of feeling like I wanted to tear my lungs out to expose them to open air directly. It’s something neurological, and it’s really disturbing. Fortunately I haven’t had to deal with this air hunger in a while. It went away for a few years as my back-stabbing body moved on to focus on other symptoms.

It came back tonight out of nowhere. While I was masturbating, actually. So here are my thoughts on this situation:

1. It kind of ruined my jack-off session and I’m pissed.
2. It is incredibly hard to sleep through these respiratory shenanigans.
3. (a corollary to #2) It is so terribly late that it is in fact early, but not that early.
4. I want to tear my lungs out and expose them to open air. Good idea?
5. I’m worried that this is not going to be an isolated, aberrant setback.
6. I’m so sleepy. And my hands and lips are tingly.
7. I hope this doesn’t happen next time I’m sleeping over at Laramy’s. That could be super annoying for everyone.
8. I had more orgasms in me, dammit.
9. I would like a trade-in body that works, and preferably has a really nice ass.
10. There should be ten things, since I was already up to nine.

Watching a guy play with himself fascinates me. But I’m not interested in a long, lingering, self-conscious tease that acknowledges that I’m watching and attempts to give me a show. I like to see how a guy gets himself off normally, without frills. I revel in the businesslike, perfunctory action; I like noticing the parts of his penis he focuses on and the places he ignores. I want to understand what it means for him to possess his genitals, to spy on his relationship with them. And sometimes, I find myself relating to him as much as I’m turned on.

And this is why I bought my Feeldoe. I wanted a cock of my own. Specifically, I wanted to jack off. It did occur to me– casually– that I might want to fuck another person at some point. Also, that it would be hot to slide my pretty purple cock between a set of lips, provided I could find someone to agree to give me a blowjob. But I wasn’t holding my breath or my order for any such opportunities to emerge: they were like the wacky roadtrips you might envision when you get a new car, but you’re really getting it for your day-to-day driving. Basically, I got it for day-to-day wanking.

A few of my male friends have remarked that buying the ingenious strapless strap-on to jack off with is perhaps the purest and most excellent reason to get one. It’s always nice to get unique compliments. I’m pretty sure my reason is simply the most penis-envious. Of course, if I were male I’d likely consider penis envy pretty pure and excellent myself.

I adore my pussy. I love my small-but-mighty clitoris. I write poems about my G-spot. But a cock is a beautiful thing to have, as an accessory, and I picked an especially good one.

About a year ago I was looking at strap-ons online and thinking how none of them really seemed all that tempting. I could see how the act of penetrating someone could be kinky and erotic and all, but I couldn’t imagine any harness/dildo combo feeling all that good from the fucker’s end. There’d be some clit stimulation against the harness, but it probably wouldn’t be all that different from dry humping, would it? But then. Oh, then! Then I saw the Feeldoe.

Naive as I was, to me a double dildo was a long, straight, two-headed phallus used only in porn and Darren Aronofsky movies. But this was different. This was brilliant. “Surely,” I declared to myself, “a woman designed this marvel.” Turns out, yup. It has a bulb that the top puts inside her pussy so she can feel every thrust she makes with the external dildo, and ridges that press enticingly against her clit. I could imagine the Feeldoe propelling me toward real, joyous fucking, compelling me to push faster and faster into my fuckee like a man in the grip of his impending orgasm. I also immediately realized that if I had this wondrous device I could jack myself off, and that possibility made me dizzy with longing.

I tried to reason with myself: there was no point in spending all that money on a two-person toy if I was only ever going to use it by myself. I might not even enjoy wanking like a guy, maybe I just liked the idea. But the image of stroking my own cock kept creeping into my brain, eventually camping out as a persistent fantasy. I couldn’t explain it: I wanted a cock. It didn’t matter if I never penetrated a single orifice with it, I wanted it and I would make my own fun.

So I decided to stop being a jerk and to let me have my penis. And when it came, all my wildest dreams came true. Not about fucking with it, or even getting a blowjob, because none of that has happened yet. But jacking off with my Feeldoe is fabulous. The ridges that work my clit (which I consider the major tell that a woman designed it, by the way) feel amazing when I pull on the shaft, both ends of it feel great inside me, and the little bullet vibe is a mind-blowing enhancement when I want a little something extra.

The only problem is that when I come especially hard my pelvic muscles tend to contract and push out whatever’s inside me, be it warm, pulsating flesh or slick violet silicone. So I have to concentrate on keeping it in if I want it to stay put. But the beauty of a detachable penis is that you can take it out and put it back in with ease. I do so love having it all.

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.

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.

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of male sex toys. I think they’re every bit as good an idea as their female counterparts, and those are canon in Quizzical Pussyland. I even want a Fleshlight of my own so I can fuck it with my Feeldoe. Is that meta or what?

I say I specifically want a Fleshlight because I’m a little wary of some of the other toys out there. Like with any partner, I have some standards for my sex toys. I’m not saying that my masturbation aids have to be charming, witty, and have pretty eyes. I’m saying that they need to not creep me right the fuck out.

Fleshlights are cute, with a range of neat little orifices and inner textures (lotus, twista, ultra tight, vortex…), many of which seem appealing. The coin-slot “stealth” orifice is the closest these things come to being creepy (I can’t help but think it’d be like fucking a Barbie piggy bank, if there were such a thing), unless you find the hilarious “Succu Dry” vampire-toothed mouth off-putting.

Another  masturbator that seems pretty cool is the Tenga Flip, which looks like a hyperbaric chamber for your cock, or possibly something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It might seem a little sexless and sterile for some people, but since I have a well-known robot fetish I’d have no trouble putting my equipment in this docking station. Hopefully the tech wouldn’t revolt and the ending wouldn’t be totally inscrutable.

There are other sleeves and masturbators that seem pretty great. But there are many, many toys for guys out there that seem like catastrophically bad ideas. They’re designed oddly, marketed awkwardly, rendered patently unattractive, or just seem weird somehow. I realize that a vulva or a mouth is more aesthetically complex than, say, a penis, and that might account for some of the problems I’ve seen. But let’s face it, it doesn’t explain away all of them. Let’s examine some of these issues a little more closely:

Terrible Marketing Copy

The Super Head Honcho Masturbator has the following quote in its description: “It’s as good as a blow-job. Women will be dancing in the streets.” You know what guys like to think about while they’re masturbating? How much chicks hate giving them blowjobs! If my boyfriend had one of these and we were about to have sex, I’d definitely just hand him his Super Head Honcho Masturbator and a bottle of lube and tell him, “Enjoy your foreplay! Let me know when you want to fuck. I’ll be on the couch playing Pokemon.”

…Except how I like putting cocks in my mouth and the Head Honcho doesn’t have anything to do with that. That quote is just reinforcing the “Hey, consumer, you can’t get a woman to blow you, so you’d better buy this!” stereotype that I already mentioned I hate. This also seems like a rather dim marketing strategy.

Hilarious Details

Some guys are turned on by a full bush. I’ve had zero real guys complain that I shave mine, but I had a phone sex client who would always treat me to a diatribe about how I was hurting my “poor little peach” and crippling my sexiness whenever I forgot his preference and told him my character was smooth. So there’s a market for pubic hair.

The Full Bush Vibrating Cyberskin Pussy isn’t just a clever name: it was clearly meant to cater to the bush-loving demographic. But I can’t help but think that something went wrong in the execution. Something about it seems a little… off. I don’t think that pubic hair grows the way they think it grows. I vote we rename this “The Swedish Cleft”.

…which brings us to…

Dealbreakingly Embarrassing Name

The design could be absolute genius, the orgasmic promise superb. Still, I just don’t see myself buying a Flip A Sister Over or an ATM (not referring to banking) masturbator. Where I come from we try to keep our masturbation devices classy, thank you very much.

Resembles Something Deeply Troubling

I may never learn why anyone would choose to give the Kinky Virgin Masturbator a scalloped detail around its gaping suggestion of a vulva, but I hope they realize that it gives the toy an eerie vagina dentata/hookworm flavor to it.

However, I don’t have time to worry about The Kinky Virgin. I’m too busy praying to Paul Verhoeven Almighty that the My Cocoa Stroker isn’t hiding under my bed. I can confidently state that this is NOT what pussies are supposed to look like. Why why why would anyone put a body part inside something that looks like the brain bug from Starship Troopers? I loathe the people who brought this abomination into the world and I hate everything they stand for.

WHAT?

The reviews for the UR3 Pocket Ass are really good, and maybe I’m missing something, but does the disembodied finger tugging open its “life-sized” anus add something positive to this toy, or is it just really, really funny?

Real Dolls are arguably kind of creepy, but their anime-inspired Boy Toy line is far creepier. “Hey, Dawg. I heard you like the uncanny valley, so I put your sex doll in the uncanny valley so you can be unsettled while you fuck fake women.”

And don’t even get me started on ROXXXY. Robots are keen, but I’m with Holly on this particular one. I wouldn’t touch this “companion” with a ten-foot arc welder.

In closing, dear god what IS this thing?

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.

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?

When I started second grade one of our first assignments was to draw pictures of our families. I drew my parents and sisters and hamsters and even my goldfish, but I forgot to draw my brother. Maybe I “forgot” to draw him. I don’t think it was intentional, but he’d been born a year and a half before, usurping my title of “baby”, so it’s possible that I just tacitly edited him out of my picture because I secretly hated him, not even admitting it to myself. In fact, that’s probably exactly what happened.

My parents encountered my artwork at Parents Night, and my dad wrote me a little note that said “Please remember that we love your brother and do consider him part of the family, even if he isn’t as important as the hamsters.”

Whoopsies.

Likewise, I feel like kind of a jerk not having written yet about my most trusty and loyal implement of orgasm. He is the unsung hero of my toybox, and even though he isn’t quite as important as the hamsters (I just made it too weird, didn’t I?) I still adore him and owe him about five billion orgasms that I know I can never repay.

Rabbit-style, or dual action, vibrators are a cliché for a reason. They’re really, really good at doing a really, really good thing: namely, providing clitoral stimulation and penetration at the same time without any outside assistance. They’re an amazing way to masturbate if you go in for that kind of thing.

The Impulse Jack Rabbit is the only one of its caste that I’ve tried, but I think it’s more or less representative of the genre. You’ve got a dildo with an intriguing bulb of rotating beads mid-shaft. The dildo itself also rotates independently of that. And of course there’s the adorable little animal-encased bullet vibrator that stimulates your clitoris delicately (but not weakly) with its ears. Similar vibrators have hummingbirds, elephants, butterflies, dolphins, or more abstract clit buddies, but the idea remains the same as the standard rabbit. The rabbit works well because the flickering ears are almost like two tiny and talented tongues. Rabbits are also cute, and fuck a lot.

The design is meant to be ultimately non-threatening. Although the slightly more badass Impulse Jack is all chrome and red where its cousins are often pink, white, or lavender, it’s still decidedly cute. It mimics the shape of a cock while doggedly resembling one as little as possible. The dildo even has a little smiley face where the frenulum would be. See? Not a scary penis. A happy penis! The animals evoke a simpler time when we all just humped stuffed animals, I guess? I’m not really sure, but this is an approachable sex toy.

But it’s also, as I said, awesome. The first time I fucked myself with it I knew my world would never be quite the same. There was so much going on! In my pussy! Things were happening texturally, vibrationally, rotationally… it was marvelous. The variations were unreal: 6 rotation speeds, 7 vibration routines utilizing three different ear-flickering speeds, the carousel rows of beads whirling inside the spinning phallus. Bliss. We fucked and fucked and fucked like, well… you know. Bunnies. And then, just like that, the honeymoon was over.

One of the very early problems that emerged was the fact that this thing burned through batteries. The clit vibration and shaft rotation functions are controlled by different buttons, and the latter was a huge drain. Like, a four AAs in ten minutes kind of drain. I understood. Relationships are give-and-take, after all. But then, after a couple months, the rotation gave up the ghost completely: there was no more shaft movement whatsoever. It was a sad, sad day. Apparently this is a common issue with this and other rabbit-style vibes of similar design. The same thing has happened to several other chicks I know, some of them not even as insatiable as I.

That said, my jack rabbit is still my go-to toy. I use it so often I should probably be embarrassed. And the orgasms are still amazing. I’m actually not big on insertion masturbation, although I absolutely love penetration as an institution. Clit play is just easier. I tend to start masturbating before I’m turned on, just because it sounds like a good idea (dopamine? Don’t mind if I do!). Can I be bothered with lubing up? Nope. Do I necessarily want to do lots of cleanup afterward? Nope. Generally, day-to-day, I just go for the clit. And for what I like, I’ve never found any clit stimulation that compares to that little bullet in its rabbit-shaped sleeve attached to its smiling, now-inanimate dildo (which still feels good, obviously, but no longer life-changing). I actually tried buying a stand-alone toy that’s just a bullet in a sleeve, but the ears weren’t quite right: too skinny and floppy and insubstantial. Impulse Jack Rabbit, it’s still you.

My jack rabbit is getting older and even feebler. His vibration is less trustworthy as time goes on, and battery efficiency– even without the energy-draining spinner–  is laughable (probably a combination of sex toy entropy and the fact that rechargeable batteries are an imperfect system that may always work best in theory). I know it’s only a matter of time before even his trusty rabbit ears fall silent. I think I’ll end up getting the rechargeable version to replace him, and then his shaft rotation will die, and I will still love him long and well and often anyway. That’s just the circle of life.

I already tweeted about this, but I couldn’t leave it alone. When I was a kid I used to chew on the inside of my cheek when I got anxious or bored. The skin would start to get ragged and then it would be even harder not to gnaw on, and it became this vicious cycle of livid pink injury. That’s pretty much exactly how I feel about My New Pink Button. And by that I mean it seems a product of anxiety and boredom, it appears completely pointless, and I just can’t leave it alone even though (or maybe because) I already touched it.

My New Pink Button™ is labia dye. Did you ever think you’d see labia dye? Because honestly, I didn’t. Sometimes, it seems, a woman’s labia change color over the course of her life. According to the product’s website, “Yes, it’s perfectly normal and there are many factors that can contribute to this. Ethnicity is a big factor, also age, hormone change, surgeries, childbirth, sickness, health, diet, and medications can all contribute to a change from “Pink” to “Brown” in a woman’s genital area.”

…So, what you’re saying is that it’s perfectly healthy and normal for women of different ethnicities, ages, and states of health and reproduction to have different colored vulvas? And there’s nothing wrong with it that at all…

…that a little cosmetic dye won’t fix?? Awesome!

I’ve never really thought about pussy colors before. I have noticed different pussy colors, but I haven’t really thought of them as having any sort of a hierarchy. I mean, if you want to dye your labia, have at it! The more things you can dye, the more fun and interesting life is. What bothers me here is that while My New Pink Button™ offers four different colors for your labia-dying needs, all four of them are pink. Does that seem right to you?

The four different shades range from a light baby pink (called Marilyn) to a rosy burgundy pink (called Audry). The other two, Bettie and Ginger, are also– you guessed it– pink! If I’m going to dye my vulva, I want more options. I want a crayola box full of labia possibilities. I want an alien pussy, is what I’m trying to say. That’s what I will pay you $30 for: an alien pussy or nothing. Got that? Also, I slightly resent that this product is suggesting that my labia are supposed to be a certain color. Why is pinker better? This is probably the one thing to hate about my body that hasn’t yet occurred to me, and My New Pink Button™ is trying to fuck that up! This is just like the discussion I had with several male friends last summer where I learned that all of them consider large clitorises (did you know “clitorides” is the other plural form of clitoris, by the way?) amazingly attractive, and I suddenly realized– without ever considering it before– that my tiny clitoris is inadequate. And now maybe my labia aren’t “Bettie” enough? Are you just fucking kidding me?

Yes, I’ve gotten out the hand mirror before. Which of us has not? But never specifically to scope out color. So I immediately brandished my trusty mirror and went to studying my naughty bits:

• I’m not familiar with the etiquette involved, so I’m not sure if it’s obnoxious to say that I think my labia minora are kind of cute. They’re not exactly symmetrical, but they fold together like two little petals of a delicate budding flower. I literally just looked at them and said “awwww” out loud. (I suspect my attraction to them has a lot to do with the fact that they’re mine and we’ve had countless orgasms together, which is very bonding.)
• My clitoris is really, terribly small. :(
• Looking at my pussy makes me horny. Is that normal? Oh well. Don’t care. (brb. fapping.)
• Oh right. Color. I guess my labia are pink. I’d say they’re just about EE9572 in hex; fairly close (though not quite so ZOMG pink!) to the My New Pink Button™’s “Ginger” shade. But my skin is so candescently pale that it doesn’t really “do” brownish.
• Are my labia pink enough? Sure. They’re labia, not my sixth birthday party.
• Would I be dismayed if they suddenly became less pink? Maybe even (doom!) browner? I’m trying to imagine this bothering me. I really am. Look, I have trouble walking most days. Kittens are born without homes. Somewhere, someone is mistaking “its” with “it’s”. I have a minuscule clitoris. Please understand, I have enough problems. I really just can’t care about the color of my labia right now.

But some women apparently care, which is why this product exists and has five whole testimonials! And if this makes them feel better about their bodies or lives in any way, that’s awesome and I’m excited for them. However, if “labia must be pink!” is the new “labia must be small, smooth, and even!” I’m about to get grumpy. Although, come to think of it, I much prefer silly pink dye to drastic elective surgery. But can’t it just be time yet to decide that pussies are sexy just the way they are, and natural variety is part of what makes them so? No? It can’t? Didn’t fucking think so.