quizzical pussy

Gay marriage is now recognized in six states (and Washington D.C.). Right now I feel like my country is 2% more reasonable than it was this time yesterday. And that ain’t nothing.

To all the New Yorkers who’ve been waiting too long for this, I wish you all possible joy! To everyone still denied the right to marry their sweethearts, we’ll get there. I really do believe it. Eventually, we’ll even get Utah.

In the meantime, last night was a good night.

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?

I once had an orgasm from someone touching my hand the right way. They don’t tell you about that sort of thing in those books full of sex tips because it’s not a normal sort of thing to expect from life. However, I was there and it happened. Confirmed: I’m, like, Sunday morning easy to get off. Nevertheless, I may be becoming a bit of a toy snob. And the more toys I try, the less and less I’m willing to fuck around with the ones that don’t do it for me. Why am I wasting my time, I think, when I could be finding someone to touch my hand?

So when I end up saying “meh” about a sex toy, it’s not because it didn’t bring me to orgasm. Let’s face it, it probably did. However, I’m reasonably sure I could get off by slapping my vulva with a wooden spoon.

Hrm. Brb. Yup.

For me to like a toy, though, it has to live up to my increasingly picky standards. And right now that means I have to at least want to use it again, ever.

Having said that, my opinion on Vibratex’s elastomer Rabbit Pearl? A resounding “meh”. Actually, I can go one further: I was actively disappointed.

I am far from anti concerning rabbit-style vibes. Didn’t I enjoy my Jackrabbit until it squealed uncle and then disintegrated from overuse? But the Pearl seemed like a huge step backward in power and detail. Maybe there’s a good reason for that: it is “the original” after all.

The Rabbit Pearl is famous, bitch. This you must realize. The packaging wants you to understand that it was “Featured in HBO’s Sex and the City”, and that this was the first dual action rabbit-style vibrator on the market. This might be a case of mistaken identity, though, because Babeland is telling me that the actual T.V. star toy is the Vibratex Rabbit Habit, but yeah. I don’t really care about all that. I just want to get off, and none of those Sex and the City chicks is really my type, so I’m not concerned with what they put in their pussies.

The Pearl is made of elastomer, a phthalate-free, latex-free, material that’s safe with silicone or water-based lubes. It’s soft and rubbery. The eponymous pearls are plastic beads that create textural interest as they move around the rotating shaft of the dildo portion of the toy.

Oh, and funny story: This thing takes three C batteries to actually work. If you go out and buy AA batteries it will not magically take them based on your good intentions and desire to get off now. This is, admittedly, not a shortcoming of the toy.

The Rabbit Pearl’s control system is different from the rabbit vibes I’m used to. Instead of buttons on the base of the toy, there’s a separate (also dildo-shaped, so don’t get confused) control console connected by wires to the shaft. The controls are simple:  there are two dimmers the console, one to control each type of action: shaft and vibrator. The separate console makes it a little more versatile and accessible for partner play, but considerably less one-handed. I found it difficult to click and close smut-infested tabs while changing the intensity of my Pearl.

This toy, like all rabbit-style vibes, boasts an insertable shaft that rotates (with the beads adding interest), and an attached rabbit-skinned bullet vibe. The latter’s ears, soft and floppy, are meant to flicker over the clitoris. The vibrations get reasonably intense at their height, and are never disruptively loud; the rotation is basically always quiet and uninspiring. The shaft/bullet one-two punch has made many, many women happy over the years. Me, I find that when the shaft is inserted the rabbit ears don’t line up quite right with my clit. This makes the whole dual-action thing more like pick-one-action for me, at least. Do I have odd pussy-to-clit proportions? Possibly.

But honestly, I suspect even someone with a perfect Fibonacci’s vulva could do better. I’ve had better vibrators; I’ve had better dildos. I suspect there are better combos. Overall, I wouldn’t bother with The Rabbit Pearl with all the other amazing toys that exist in the world.

Thanks, Babeland!

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.

My new strategy for dealing with all types of intolerance, bigotry, and prejudice:

“Aw, honey, you’re just going through a phase. You’ll grow out of that.”

Foaming at the mouth because a mom’s putting pink (pink!) nail polish on her son? Because that somehow tells him it’s okay to be gay or transgender or something, and that’s somehow bad? Happens to lots of people your age. You’ll settle down once you mature a little.

Think you get to hold personal court over every woman who says she was sexually assaulted to decide whether she’s right about that or not? My cousin Denny went through the same thing (Denny’s always been a little off, truth be told), but he got over it and you can too. Not to worry.

Think you’re better than one fucking person on this planet? Feel innately more correct, important, or that you occupy a moral high ground over any one group of people based on sex, age, weight, race, religion or lack thereof, sexual identity, orientation, or, hell, political affiliation? Bless your heart, all toddlers think they’re the center of the universe! You’re just a tiny bit behind, darling. Once you grow up a little you’ll let go of that and be a normal, healthy person.

It’s not being condescending. It’s being optimistic.

So I’m basically always sick; it is, after all, what my life has become. Woe, woe and thunderation. But today I’m extra special acutely ill with a fever and stuff. In honor of my awesome shiny new suffering, and in lieu of using my braised brain for thinking about sex, life, society, and/or my place in them, it’s linky time!

Evey, the ultra-endearing blogger at Voyeur on Display, has a shiny new site! I give you Eveybird.com.

My favorite Married Freaks went to a nudist dinner party. I never knew it until now, but I won’t be entirely satisfied with my life until someone invites me to a nudist dinner party.

Yesterday was Holly’s last day at her job! And this is an extremely good thing. Now she’s freed up to pursue a career that hopefully kicks almost as much ass as she does. I suggest TV exec.

If anyone has any fun or interesting links to share or shamelessly self-promote, leave them in comments! I’m certainly in the market for distractions today.

I’m going to make this really, really clear, just for the record: There’s nothing clever about violating a sex worker’s anonymity. Ever. This isn’t something that’s done for great justice; it’s not a public service, and it doesn’t accomplish anything productive.

Very simply, if I try to fuck with any sex worker’s real life, family, and/or identity, it’s my pathological attempt to punish that person, usually for the crime of representing sex or a related transgression (to me). That, or it’s a childish vendetta against someone who pissed me off in a more concrete way.

In short, there are no non-personal reasons for this phenomenon. I’ll go so far as to say that all anti-sex “crusades” are deeply personal. They’re never really for the social fabric, or for the children. They’re for one (or more) waylaid pervert’s thwarted kink and guilt-soaked lust.

One of the reasons it sucks doing sex work is because you get negative respect. You know why you can’t tell people when you get a job in orgasm assistance? Because it will very often irrevocably damage the way they see and interact with you. It will jeopardize your future career in other industries. It will inevitably break your poor mother’s heart (because if there’s one thing your mom should care about more than the gory details of your sex life, it’s what the neighbors would think about the method you’ve chosen of not being homeless). Even when you’ve got a shitty, thankless job as a fast food worker or in retail, you’re still liable to hear platitudes like “Well at least it’s honest work”. I’m pretty sure honest work is code for “not sex work” in a lot of cases.

So– because I’m clearly missing something here– why isn’t sex work honest? What’s dishonest about it? It isn’t always legal, and I’ll be the first to admit that the illegal forms of sex work especially abound with coercion, abuse, and outright slavery. But the legal, consensual kind? Even the illegal, consensual kind? The I’ll-provide-a-sexual-service-and-you-pay-me-and-we’ll-all-go-home-happy kind? Seems honest to me.

It seemed honest to me when I witnessed it working in the porn industry, it felt honest to me when I was a phone sex operator, and it seems extra super honest to me when I’m watching the obviously unfiltered, unsanitized look at legalized prostitution: HBO’s Cathouse. God, I can’t help loving that show.

Society (the one I’m entrenched in, but also pretty much all of them from where I’m sitting) has serious issues with sex. In fact, if Society were a person I would advise it to seek immediate, five-times-a-week counseling. But we don’t have to buy into all that baggage to the point where it makes us thwarted, guilty waylaid perverts, do we? Especially when there are so many wonderful, rewarding ways to stick to the straight and narrow path of perversion. It feels so good to embrace what Society “knows” is wrong, like slipping into a warm bath of anti-psychotics.

Fucking is older than Society, older than economics, older than humanity. Sex existed long before the first primate wiggled the first thumb, and then proceeded to stick it in an orifice.

Do you think it’s maybe time we relaxed about sex a little?

Because hysteria over sex workers, or gay people, or any normal, healthy aspect of human sexuality is really just an extension of freaking the fuck out about sex. There’s a tendency to deny sex workers personhood, making them either receptacles of our disgust or avatars–even deities– of sexuality. Sometimes both. But, much like Zaphod Beeblebrox, they’re just these guys, you know?

As long as we imbue their jobs with all this emotional, existential and philosophical weight, is it any wonder they want to remain anonymous? Let’s all treat sex work like the honest work it is, and then maybe sex workers will want to disclose their real names. Until then, we deserve to take all the puns and belabored alliteration they want to give us, and like it.

(image source)

Things people seem to like to compare same-sex marriage to:

• Pedophilia
• Zoophilia
• A Slippery Slope
• Counterfeit Money
• Incest
• Drug Abuse
• Polygamy
• Forbidden Clock Love
• Slavery
• Nazi. Fucking. Germany

With a couple exceptions (because I will never tire of Forbidden Clock Love), I think these chestnuts are getting a bit old. Yeah, yeah, marrying a consenting adult of the same sex is exactly like marrying a horse, sure*. But where’s the impact? And frankly, when we’re comparing it to polygamy, which even has a strong Biblical basis for the Christians to enjoy, not to mention a robust history of past acceptance, the argument conspicuously lacks teeth.

So I, being a humanitarian at my core, decided to come up with some exciting new suggestions for gay marriage comparisons.

If I don’t see these proliferate throughout the news media soon, I’ll be disappointed. Try to forge new territory, people. Being cutting-edge gets hard when your belief system is older than your numeral system, I know. But that’s why you have to pay attention to the little things.

Now, I honestly don’t know why any of the following suggestions are like same-sex marriage, but I don’t really know why the old, cliched ones are either. I trust the pundits to figure out tenuous-but-alarming links for me. That’s pretty much their job anyway, right? So, without further ado…

Gay marriage is really like:

• Wearing sunglasses indoors.
• Letting Michael Bay marry explosions!
• The part in The Labyrinth when David Bowie turns into an owl.
• Impaling babies on narwhal tusks.
• Kicking the tires of a new car just because you’ve seen other people do it, but not really knowing what anyone gets out of it.
• Marrying cancer.
• Buzkashi, the cut-throat game of goat dragging.
• Riding a fixed-gear bicycle.
• Destroying all the cookies in the world.
• Licking doorknobs when you’ve got a cold and you know you’re still contagious.
• Throwing monkeys into turbine jet engines.
• Being in love with just, you know, being in love, man.
• Giving America AIDS.

I hope this gives the anti-gay marriage activists some new material to work with. You really need to flood the airwaves with as many of these comparisons as possible or people will start conflating gay marriage with marriage marriage, possibly at some point dropping the “gay” qualifier. That would obviously be disastrous to someone. I’m just not positive whom.

But I don’t want to see that tired bestiality thing trotted out yet again, okay guys? You’re better than that.

(image source)

* No.

Warning: This post contains description and discussion of rape and its aftermath, including victim-blaming.

__________________________________________________________

While you’re being raped, you don’t get to feel like a person. Your personality, your history, your passions, your mannerisms, your interests, your pleasure, your protests: everything about you gets shoved to one side so your rapist can get to a hole.*

The violence is eloquent: you’re meat. People get to decline sex, so you must be something else. You realize through the fear and the horror that in that moment you’re nothing more than a flesh frame for negative space.

And hopefully one day that feeling goes entirely away.

When people say that rape is dehumanizing, that’s usually what they mean. To rape is to perpetrate an inhuman act that denies a person human dignity. But that only scratches the surface of what it’s like to survive a rape.

After you’ve been raped, you don’t get to be treated like a person. Your experience, your story, your anger, your grief: they’re all messy and unpleasant for everyone to deal with. Won’t you please put them away?

You’re going to be a statistic now. You’re going to be a cautionary tale. If you speak out or press charges, you get to be “the accuser”, whom people will likely suggest is trying to ruin your poor rapist’s life. Above all, you’re going to be a case to study and analyze so everyone can explain to each other why you were victimized. Because that’s more important than anything else.

See, if people can somehow figure out a way to blame you for being attacked, they feel safer. If rape is a crime of two wrongs, it can be prevented by scrupulously making rights.

You? You were asking for it. Or unprepared to defend yourself, or maybe your lifestyle put you in danger’s way. Or whatever. Something like this just wouldn’t happen to everyone else, or everyone else’s loved ones. It happened to you for a reason. Had to. Otherwise things get uncomfortable!

Apparently this time-honored system of rape aftermath management holds rock solid even when the person who was raped is an eleven-year-old little girl.

A little girl can be gang raped by at least 18 men and boys, and people will point out that she dressed provocatively to look older than her age. They will comb her Facebook account trying to prove that she engaged in transgressive behavior. The men who raped this little girl can take video of the rape and share it at school and on the internet, and some fucked-up woman will have the gall to comment, “These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives”. I want to believe that she’s referring to the soul-rot and gut-burrowing guilt that should encroach after committing such a vile act, but I don’t. I believe she’s referring to their reputations and the legal fallout. I believe she genuinely feels more compassion for the rapists than the eleven-year-old girl they brutalized. And I feel sick about the human race.

The New York Times and other news outlets repeated this victim-blaming bullshit without comment. NBC news invited someone to come on a TV program to say that this child was a willing participant in her rape. The way this story has been treated isn’t atypical, it’s only more dramatic because how can you blame an eleven-year-old for getting raped ARE YOU INSANE??

When people say that rape is dehumanizing, do they realize how much we as a society help it stay that way? Can anyone truly be surprised when rape survivors choose to remain silent?

We couldn’t protect and care for a little girl. We couldn’t work together to keep her safe. We couldn’t create a world where those young men would be sickened at the mere thought of hurting her. That would’ve been too much to ask, certainly. But why in the goddamn can’t we admit that she did nothing wrong, and they did?

Are we fucking animals?

*The mechanics of rape do not always work this way. I want to be very clear about the fact that I’m drawing from my personal experiences to express a feeling I believe may be communal, or close to. I’m not saying that my specific experiences are universal. Not all rape involves penetration. However, I believe it always involves some level of being involuntarily reduced to a body.

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.