quizzical pussy

Yesterday, while cleaning out a cupboard, I found an old journal I kept while Reginald and I were together. We were living in separate states at that point, and we agreed to write journals for each other so we could read them when the long-distance ordeal was over. This seemed more romantic than simply keeping in touch via chat and email, I suppose, which we did anyway. We were always looking for the most romantically dramatic way to navigate our relationship, including crying uncontrollably whenever completely unnecessary.

I wrote in mine faithfully a few times a week for about a year and a half. I think he wrote about two or three entries total in his. I remember how that hurt and confused me. Understandable, because it was somewhat telling as to the nature of our dynamic by then, about which I was even more clueless.

I wasn’t a girlfriend at that point; I was a supplicant. I prayed. I mooned. I counted the days between us like a rosary and I’d never even been Catholic. Reginald was my false and golden god. A blond god with floppy hair. I wrote florid fantasies that seemed to long for his pity and love in equal parts. Even if we were to ignore the fact that this man was abusing me emotionally every day, and each time I visited him he’d physically abuse me, everything I wrote  was desperate, needy, and absolutely starved for even the meanest scraps of affection. It is frankly disgusting. I’m so glad I never put that shit up on the internet.

I didn’t have much time to devote to reading that old artifact, but I felt a mild nausea flutter through me as I skimmed it. I wanted to reach back through the pages, grasp the wrist of that little girl as she spilled herself across them, and tell her exactly what she was wasting. So many years– her college years, which could have been a fun adventure. So much dignity. Her very self.

And truthfully, she probably wouldn’t have listened to me. She seemed to think that mortgaging everything she was and everything she could be was a small price to pay, when really she just wanted to be loved.

Teenage girls are so pathetic when they’re me. Honestly.

I wrapped the journal in a plastic bag like a thing that stinks and shoved it in the dumpster. Exactly where it belonged all along.

You always hear that rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power. And that probably holds true if you look deep enough, but why in the world would a rapist do that? On more casual reflection, I think that dictum has the potential to allow people to easily deny that what they did was rape. A lot of times, in their minds, it was completely about sex. They weren’t paying particular attention to consent, but they think they probably got it, more or less. And besides, they weren’t trying to take anyone’s power away. They weren’t being violent. They were just trying to get laid, man.

I believe that it’s easy for people to think “Rapists are monsters. I am a person. Therefore, I must not be a rapist. IT’S LIKE MATH.”

Piers Vitiard liked to bike and play lacrosse. He knew about Classical mythology and was good at Soul Calibur. He thought everyone should see Donnie Darko and the entire Godfather series. He was a pretty nice guy. He also raped me.

Reginald Sleeth dreamed of being a filmmaker. He always wove intricate stories in his head, but rarely wrote them down. His voice got louder when he was self-conscious, and he spoke in a fake Scottish accent when he wanted attention. He worried about getting fat. He thought that orange striped cats were the best kind. When he gave you a compliment you tasted it for weeks afterward. He was emotionally, physically, and sexually abusive.

They weren’t monsters, they were just people who did some fucked up things. And people don’t let themselves feel like abusers or rapists. They might have moments when they realize that they’ve done some fucked up stuff, and even feel guilty, but the homeostasis of the mind demands that our thoughts move on from there. We need to justify, rewrite history a little. We need to slant events in such a way that allows us to be the heroes of our own stories.

And along a similar vein, I’m no righteous, innocent victim. The choices I made were monstrously wrong, if I really examine them. I played into Reginald’s abuse, responding to his manipulations as if he’d scripted them and I’d memorized my part. I let our dysfunction teach me what it meant to be in a romantic relationship. Every chance I had to stand up to him, I folded; right up until I found the strength to leave at the very end. I excused Piers after he violated me, and made a point of trying to make it seem to both of us like what had happened wasn’t a big deal. That was unfair to me, to him, and to the next woman he got alone in a room. He learned nothing from what he did to me.

I got it all so wrong. I denied myself the protection and respect that were mine by right. I told them it was okay to disrespect me, harm me, use me. I allowed myself to become inhuman. Maybe I didn’t feel human in the first place. I do now, though. I know better now.

You can be a real person, even a normally decent person, and fuck up big time. You can be weak. You can collude against yourself in the sickest ways imaginable. You can be a rapist. You can be an abuser. Maybe you didn’t mean for things to happen that way, but motive isn’t everything. Sometimes what actually happened is important too. And you’re allowed to forgive yourself, but that really sort of requires admitting it to yourself first.

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When you work as a phone sex operator, you are often essentially being paid to pretend you believe bullshit.

Yes, of course your penis is the exact dimensions of a foot-long meatball sub.

You’re talking to me while a Victoria’s Secret model is sucking your cock? Wow, Mister. That is really something!

So let me get this straight: You have interacted with real, actual people before? In public? Unsupervised? Oh, baby, that’s so hot.

I was uniquely suited to this task because I am naturally straight-off-the-bus gullible. When I was younger I somehow didn’t grasp the concept of lying to impress people. I loved to invent stories with fictional people, and I’d lied for self-preservation before, but it had never in my life occurred to me to prop myself up with false claims, and somehow that left me blind to it when others did it.

This led me to marvel at how that nice Mormon girl I knew in eighth grade had managed to join a gang of drug dealers. It also left me wondering how Reginald Sleeth, my first boyfriend, had managed to ghostwrite so many songs for indie bands without ever getting paid for it!

I have since learned to be a bit less credulous, but it’s still embarrassingly easy to lie to me sometimes. And this serves me well when people are lying to impress me and I’m supposed to seem duly impressed.

But this one guy took the cake.

I think one customer was single-handedly keeping the struggling phone sex company I worked for afloat. He called in almost every night I worked, and the dispatch ladies told me it was far more often than that.

As far as I could tell, he really did just want to talk.

I never heard any panting, quickened breathing, or sloppy slapping sounds. He never wanted to talk through his fantasies, he never wanted to talk dirty. He just wanted to talk.

Sure, it was usually about sex. He liked it best when I was playing a naive, innocent character and he could explain things to me. He’d tell me about his countless sexual exploits, and his preferences in women, and almost shyly describe his prowess. He loved to make a woman come over and over.

And I might have believed him, too, if it weren’t for the train story.

He’d traveled extensively, he said, in the days when that was as likely to mean great trains gliding across the country as airports and flying machines. And he had found women everywhere he went. This is a potentially true thing, since women are indeed just about everywhere. I have heard that scientists recently found a woman in Antarctica.

Once he was on a train and made his way through the observation car to the very back, where he could cling to the rear railing and get some fresh air.

As he took in the scenery of the tracks unraveling behind his mount, he smelled an unknown but intoxicating ladies’ perfume, and felt someone approach behind him, close, closer, pressing lightly against his back. He felt warm breath play at his freshly barbered neck, and then a soft kiss: a flutter, really. Lips on him, and then a gloved hand covering his eyes.

He felt his meatball sub of manhood stir, as the mystery woman’s hands reached around to unbuckle his belt and undo his pants.

And then they had sex, he told me. He never saw her face.

“Wow, that must’ve been really hot for… wait, you couldn’t see her face through the whole thing?” Trying to keep my voice giggly and shrill.

“She was behind me the entire time,” he told me, wistfully.

“But you had sex? Like, penis-in-vagina intercourse?” Completely breaking character now.

“Oh, yes. It was,” my customer concluded, “the most erotic experience of my life. She was the most beautiful woman I never saw…”

Oh god. Anatomy. Mechanics. Just… impossible. Hand over mouthpiece. Cackling. Gasping for air. Deep breath. Smile. Now. Give him what he’s paying for. Give him buoyant.

“Wow. That is really, really hot. You have had such an exciting life!” Give him brainless.

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It was probably ten years ago at this point, or nearly. Reginald Sleeth, the ex boyfriend by which all my other ex boyfriends come out looking pretty good, and I were sitting in a little sushi bar in Santa Monica. If we were between fights it was no more than a momentary break in the clouds, and the sun was not peeking through. The mood was heavy. Pop music played in the background. Our conversation was stuck at lull as we waited for our food to come out. I listened to the music for a minute, nothing to say.

“I kind of always knew I’d end up your ex girlfriend,” I announced calmly.

“Why would you even say that?” he demanded, angry. “That’s not fair at all. What a disgusting thing to say.”

“Ummm the No Doubt song that’s playing? Right now? Those are the lyrics.” Given, it wasn’t exactly the height of comedy to repeat the words to the song playing, but I thought it’d lighten the mood or something. Nope.

“Oh.” Icy.

To be fair, we were basically always on the verge of breaking up. It was probably in poor taste. But I guess on some level I did, kind of always know. Just like the song says. Maybe I meant it.

Here are some confessions that feature exes.

My ex boyfriend is internet famous, and rightly so because he’s talented… annoyingly so. We still get along okay, I consider him a friend. But guys my type ALWAYS turn out to be humongous fanboys of his. After we have the past relationships talk they have a million questions and want me to introduce them. So I either have to lie or live with the fact that I’m less interesting to heterosexual men than my ex boyfriend.

I figure for every fanboy you’re attracted to, there’s a similar, also-your-type guy who thinks your ex is just a little overrated. Unless your type is specifically your ex’s worshippers, which honestly would be worrisome for those of us that care about you and want you to move on.

Also, you realize you can skip over all identifying information when you have that past relationships talk, right?

I had sex with my ex (who is dating someone else) and it was fantastic. I missed fisting him!

I don’t know if this is in a sneaky or ethically open context, but either way it never ceases to amaze me that people can fit fists in their butts.

My boyfriend got drunk tonight and kicked me out of his house. I don’t even know what I did and he wouldn’t tell me — said he didn’t like me anymore — I was asleep and he sat me up roughly, sent me outside, called a cab and gave me 40 bucks to pay for it.

At least he was a gentleman enough to give me some cash for the cab. I called a dealer I used to know, bought some awesome coke, and don’t feel the least big guilty about the drugs because all I feel right now is peace and understanding — and I know that it’s over once and for all. I don’t even feel sad. It’s just over.

And here’s the sex part — I’m going to keep fucking him. Best sex I’ve ever had, and I’m not about to give that up. I’m just not going to be emotionally involved anymore. I’ve given up a lot of offers for sex while I’ve been with him — and it hasn’t been a sacrifice — but I’m going to start looking up those offers and offer him FWB. He’ll take me up on it, and I’ll have great sex with him, variety, and none of this bullshit anymore.

Yay. Thanks for the high dood. I’ll be calling you next time I’m hard up.

Every time I’ve ever had a no-strings-attached arrangement with an ex there were oh so many strings attached. But that’s just me.

Who the fuck wakes someone up just to dump them?

We only had sex once, it was bad bad bad because we didn’t know what we were doing because we were so young, and I got pregnant (miscarriage). But I think about my first love every single day. I miss him.

But I know for a fact that he wasn’t a good person, and he’d probably treat me like shit if I tried to get him back. Yet I pine.

Not to make assumptions here, but have you talked to someone about how having that miscarriage affected you? Maybe your first love, who sounds like a much better ex than a boyfriend, is more or less incidental to this story.

A couple of weeks ago I confessed that I missed my exes beautiful penis (not the size one) well I’ve found a new man who may not have the world’s most beautiful penis but uses it better than anyone I have ever met. I have had my faith in the world restored, and also think I may be the luckiest girl alive.

The original confession appears here. I’m very glad you’ve found a penis (or at least a penis user) that you can get excited about again.

Also, if this new guy would like to offer any sex tips to my penis-using readers, that would be just super.

Reginald Sleeth and I had been dating for all of two weeks. Our dates usually consisted of me driving the half mile to his house and rushing upstairs to his room where we’d make out furiously. That night, though, he handed me a tightly folded piece of college ruled paper first.

I knew it was a poem. He’d given me several already. Reginald liked to write love poems to girls. Years later my friend Miriam, who also dated Reginald for a while, and I would go back and compare and realize that some of the heartfelt verses given us looked shockingly similar. Kid must’ve kept master copies somewhere.

But this was the first poem I ever unfolded to discover blood smeared all over the paper.

Reginald looked rather like a cat who’d dragged his freshly killed bird onto the porch. I reacted rather like that cat’s owner.

“What, I just don’t even… I mean what happened here?” Beat. “…It’s a very nice poem.” Nice save.

Reginald proudly showed me his hand. There was a distinct gouge. Then he produced a blunt decorative knife. “I designed this years ago to one day spill my blood for my love. And now it’s yours; I have no more need of it. It has done its job.”

I’m not even kidding. He seriously talked like that.

I figured that perhaps my sense of the romantic was underdeveloped. I liked Anne Rice as much as the next little demigoth, but I was more creeped out than moved. Of course my (most) fatal flaw kicked in at this point and told me that I must be the one who had it wrong.

It soon became clear to me, though, that Reginald expected me to perform the same gesture. It was supposed to be some kind of sacred lovers’ ritual conceived in Reginald’s head at some point. That was more or less why he gave me the knife.

I just wasn’t going to do it.

Understand, I really thought I loved Reginald at this point. The bloodletting had meant something to him, clearly, and I didn’t want to ignore that. But seriously? No part of me was happy that I had his blood on a piece of notebook paper, and I wasn’t jazzed about the idea of following suit.

And if I ever did, I knew it wouldn’t be with his Renaissance Faire knife. Thing was fucking letter-opener-dull! And coated in his blood.

In retrospect, this should have tipped me off. This wasn’t ever going to be a healthy relationship. Yes, healthy relationships can involve exchanging blood or playing with letter openers, but they’d at least require a little prior communication. And less peer pressure.

As for my dilemma, one morning I nicked my ankle in the shower shaving and I realized I’d solved my own problem. Well, one of my problems. The other one I kept around for a long, long while yet.

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Happy Lady Porn Day!

Fun Porn Fact: My first exposure to porn was when I started working in the industry.

That’s weird, right? I grew up in the age of the internet. I should’ve been sneaking around finding all sorts of ascii boobies in my single digit years, and going up (or down) hill from there. As it was, I was nineteen and I’d never seen a single scene from even so much as a stag film.

And the story should be lurid, I realize. Or at least dramatic. Something about sliding from innocence into prurience. Fanny Hill in the 21st Century.

Yeah, not so much. My then-boyfriend Reginald Sleeth had moved out to Los Angeles to work in movies, which ended up, as these things sometimes do, more like landing in the San Fernando Valley to work in porn.

He signed on with a very fratboy-centric porn studio, doing photography, video editing, and website content. He told me and he told his mother, and we each asked conspiratorially if he was planning on telling the other, while being perfectly fine with it ourselves.

The website had an erotic fiction feature, and Reginald was responsible for providing the stories. For about two weeks. He really wasn’t much of a writer, and he decided to have them hire me to write weekly smut. It wasn’t until then that I finally had full access to the pay site and started discovering the joys of porn.

This will sound hopelessly hackneyed, but I was a fairly hackneyed teenager: The women seemed so empowered! So in charge. I was already obsessed with sex, but the concept of being seductive was miles ahead of me (still is). I was entranced with the confidence I saw in these women. I wanted to be them, but I was afraid.

“You’ve got it wrong,” Reginald told me flatly. “All our girls are either dumb as bricks or on drugs. Or pressured into it by suitcase pimps.”

Maybe he was right. A lot of mainstream porn isn’t actually about empowerment. That’s probably why so many performers left the industry as soon as they could. They got married or went home or dropped off the face of the Earth. A few found Jesus, and decided he wasn’t cool with porn.

A few months after my porn career started, I visited Reginald in L.A. for the summer, and I was invited to work alongside him at the studio.

It sat in a huge white corrugated warehouse, hidden in plain site between two other (less reputable, I was assured) houses of porn. One end of the space was a set for photoshoots and an editing booth. On the other end were the computers, couches for meetings and interviews, and in the middle was a halfpipe.

I was scared to death. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just wrote the stories. I was a technical virgin, for Hymen’s sake! I didn’t know anything about being in a porn studio.

A nice blonde producer handed me a vampire porn DVD and a Kama Sutra Weekender kit. “You can review these while you’re here and later this week we’ll try you on some photo editing. Just color correcting and stuff.” She pointed to a room with a DVD player and television.

“Ooookay. I guess I’m just going to go watch porn now…” I said the opposite of nonchalantly. So we were just going to assume that we were all mature adults comfortable with our sexuality then, huh? Oh good…

For the record, I would learn later that week that I suck at color correcting.

That summer, I saw Eastern European girls nervously ask their swear-I’m-not-their-pimp what double penetration meant. I saw Midwestern ex-cheerleaders have meltdowns before their scheduled camshows. One day, Reginald and I went to Chili’s, and our waitress was a girl I recognized from the website. She blushed and pretended not to know him. Overall, there was a decisive lack of glamor and a dearth of empowerment.

I don’t know if that’s why I’m generally not turned on by mainstream porn, but it may well have something to do with it. I tend to gravitate toward performers who seem to really love the industry, or amateurs who seem to be scratching an exhibitionist itch. Truth is, though, I’m not exactly a connoisseur.

So I’m opening it up to you, readers! What’s your favorite porn? I’m looking for joyous, sincere fucking. I’m looking for that spark of what I thought porn was back when I was so naive. Extra points for featuring genderqueer performers, kink, laughter, rough play, and ReallySexyPeople™ of different body types.

A friend of mine is specifically looking for kinky/fetish porn that’s not too dungeony or scary: more light bondage and playful D/s.

Share your links! Share your turn-ons! Love your porn!

Read more about Rabbit Write’s Lady Porn Day here.

Join the conversation on twitter: #ladypornday

I don’t give it much thought anymore, not in the present tense. It’s always “Oh, that wacky Reginald Sleeth used to do the craziest (evil) things!” in my head. My conscious mind has moved on from all that, put it in the past. Unfortunately, the rest of me hasn’t caught up yet.

I’m still a beaten girlfriend somewhere deep down.

I’m realizing how profoundly affected I really am by it all, to this day. My self-esteem was never great to begin with, but staying in a physically and emotionally abusive relationship for years trained even that scant confidence out of me. And while, believe it or not, I’ve scraped a fair amount back for myself, if we’re making comparisons, I can’t escape the learned worthlessness that was my liturgy for so long.

I wonder if I’ll ever let myself feel like an equal in a relationship. If I’ll ever feel entitled to ask for things or even make demands. If I’ll ever believe that I was chosen, that my partner is with me out of desire and not just kindness.

Will there ever be a time when, after I’ve said something stupid and made someone I care about angry, I won’t slip into that old numbness and terror? The cold tingle that comes when the mind spins in a loop of self-loathing and the body feels heavy and wrapped in moss.

This might be one of those things that’s hard to understand unless you’ve lived it, and I hope you haven’t lived it.

I’m afraid that the legacy of a really poorly chosen first relationship will be that I can never behave like a truly healthy partner. And with the amount of hate I have and show for myself, can anyone reasonably be expected to not develop contempt for me?

I want a do-over. I want my first boyfriend to be that nice Mormon boy who hugged me like I was made of lava.

On a lighter note, Bangable Dudes (and Dames) in History: for when the living just aren’t cutting it, but the undead have inexplicably turned sparkly.

I don’t know exactly how concerned I should be that someone recently tried to access my personal Facebook account from the city where Reginald Sleeth now resides.

I should add the caveat here that it is a large city.

Reginald and I haven’t seen each other in over seven years. At least, I believe this to be true.

I saw him three years ago.

It was Christmas Eve. My grandmother was dying, and my sister and I had been visiting her in the hospital. She hadn’t woken up all night, even to look at us. I’d never seen her megawatt blue eyes dim before that week, and now there was nothing, and the later it got the more nothing eclipsed her. Her time was coming and the thought of it made my solar plexus ache. Eleven thirty we finally left. Eleven thirty and there was nothing at home but ingredients to eat. Eleven thirty, and we were drained and hungry and defeated.

To be perfectly honest, I hadn’t showered in at least two days and my fatigue settled on my face like two black eyes.

There was a single restaurant open that night in our smallish hometown. A greasy spoon that never closes, where kids can go pad their pickled stomachs after last call. We were just glad to find a place to sit down and vacantly watch someone put plates of warm things in front of us.

Right after the waitress, brown ponytailed and shimmery lidded, took our drink orders, the door swung open, briefly staining the air with the outside chill. And in he walked.

I could see him perfectly from the booth where I sat. Reginald Sleeth. His hair was spiked high, garishly, as he used to do it when he was feeling especially self-conscious. And he had gained some weight, perhaps, but he still fit in his old winter coat. His stride was the one I’d memorized, casually hunched but hemorrhaging arrogance. He was distracted by the girl who’d moved in after I’d left our shared apartment four years prior, and another couple. They all sat down at a big corner booth, Reginald in the middle, holding court as he loved to do.

Reginald Sleeth was not even supposed to be in the state. I’d heard he’d moved far away. I’d heard his parents had moved even farther. My stomach recoiled on itself. Suddenly, I’d never been less hungry in my life. Terror had taken over my torso, from tensed shoulders to thumping heart to plummeting guts. I dropped off my seat and hid behind the table.

“Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck!” I hissed to my sister, “Reginald just walked in.” She twisted around to see. “Don’t! Don’t look over there. I don’t think he saw me.”

“Are you okay?” She asked. See, I was crouching in abject horror on the floor at a greasy spoon diner, hiding from the person I feared most in this world. P.S. My grandma, one of my favorite people ever, full stop, was off dying in a hospital room down the road. ‘Okay’ was not a valid guess here. Hurriedly, I told her I was leaving. I was really sorry, but could she explain things to the waitress and follow me as soon as she could? I snuck a couple dollars onto the table and slithered out of there as quickly as my crippled limbs would carry me.

I don’t think he saw me. To this day I choose to believe that.

I choose to believe it partly because those were not the circumstances under which I was supposed to see him after all that time. What was supposed to happen, I’m sure, is something more like this:

I’m on a gorgeous, 16-hand Friesian stallion who is also a cyborg who can fly. Having just published my first international bestselling novel, I am riding through the countryside, looking inexplicably like Twin Peaks-era Sherilyn Fenn and wearing the coolest pair of sneakers in the world (because no fantasy is complete without great sneakers). Reginald is in a ditch, bawling because his life has collapsed like a house of cards. He is wearing flip-flops and has zero cyborg horses. I coolly observe Reginald from my high vantage, “You hurt me,” my eyes tell him. “I am a terrible person and you deserved better,” his say. A single tear rolls down my face and falls to the ground, where it becomes a beautiful blossom that will never fade nor die. That beautiful blossom sprays a toxic mist onto Reginald’s face, disfiguring him for life. Then I turn my flawless, porcelain doll face homeward, where I go have earth-shattering sex with diamond-studded nerdcore rappers who are also professional water polo players.

Is this so much to ask?

The other reason I’m pretty sure he didn’t notice me that Christmas Eve was because he didn’t acknowledge me or try to contact me soon afterward. And Reginald tries to contact me every so often. Sometimes to say he misses me, sometimes to say he’s sorry, and sometimes to be fucking creepy. Once he emailed me (at an address I never gave him) to cryptically tell me that he prays… every day. As far as I know he’s still an atheist, so I don’t even know what that means!

It’s been a while– over a year– since his last try. I hope I’m off his radar. But whenever something weird happens, like when, say, someone tries to hack into my Facebook account, I have a moment of panic. In a twisted, fucked up way, it’ll never be completely over with him, and I will have to live with that even after my cyborg Friesian ship comes in. But every time I don’t respond to whatever shit he’s trying to pull, he doesn’t win, and that’s something.

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I think a lot of us live in fear that the sex will dry up for us, and we’ll be left horny, frustrated, and humping furniture. Or maybe it’s just me. My first relationship set a precedent for that: at some point Reginald Sleeth just stopped wanting to touch me, and that damaged our longevity and my self-esteem almost as much as all the abuse did, if indeed in our case one can completely separate the two.

I still don’t understand how it happened. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that everything Reginald found challenging and attractive in my personality had withered away by that point. Maybe he’d mentally moved on to his next victim. Maybe he’d been faking everything sexual with me and got tired of humoring me. Maybe finally having vaginal intercourse was too great a turn-off to recover from. Whatever made the sex die, I’m glad now that it did because it made it easier to walk away, but it was devastating at the time.

But my second relationship wasn’t exactly validating either, and brought up the question of whether it’s worse for the sex to dry up, or to have to keep wondering why it never got around to getting damp in the first place.

Perhaps Aldo Melastophilus and I shouldn’t have started dating. We were so great as friends. Our conversations popped with absurdity and hilarity in ample and equal parts. We could spend hours doing art projects together like six-year-olds, or have super serious time discussions about the sociopolitical wisdom that Opeth songs held for dinosaurs, if dinosaurs were to still exist and like death metal. We got along famously. It didn’t bother me that he was also very good looking. I’m open minded like that.

Then one day he walked me to my car after an evening together, and lunged forward to kiss me. Which was very surprising indeed, but I regrouped eventually and we kissed a little more.

Eventually we evolved into regular making out, but not significantly fewer art projects. After our early progress, it seemed like I was doing all the escalating. I was the one to introduce his hands to the concept of potentially interesting things being present under my shirt. Eventually I removed my shirt, and then later my bra. I put my hands down his pants. I put his hands down my pants. I may have given him his first blow job, and I could tell– like some kind of disappointed sixth sense– that I was the first girl he tried giving oral sex to. He didn’t seem to dislike any of these activities, but damned if they weren’t always my idea.

This sexually forward person I’m telling you about really doesn’t sound like me, does it?

The first time we tried having penis-in-vagina sex (on my initiative, naturally) it was awkward. His bed was lofted and he’s almost a foot taller than I am. Add inexperience squared to those key facts, and there was no immediately obvious solution as to how to configure our bodies to make our genitals match up correctly. I think we just ended up on the floor, or possibly his computer chair, which I remember us breaking somehow either then or on another attempt. He got inside me, but went soft soon after.

A word on losing your boner: it’s really, really not a big deal. Until it is. First time pressure to perform is just too great? Understandable. Stressed lately? These things happen. You swear this never happens to you? Let’s just cuddle. It’s really not the end of the world, although I would respectfully like to remind you that you still have fingers and I still have needs. But when it happens every time there’s a problem, and that problem is my ego.

Turned out, Aldo could keep wood all the way to orgasm when I gave him oral sex, but not so much when my vagina came into the picture. We just failed at having vaginal intercourse every damn time. I don’t think we ever rode that pony for more than a minute or two, tops, before his erection faded. And he never, ever came when we were fucking. After many failures I quite naturally concluded, as any reasonable person might do, that my pussy was repulsive and that I was probably also disgusting in every other way that matters. I slipped into a sadly resigned stone approach: forgetting about being touched; just trying to give him orgasms and abandoning any idea of my own.

Of course we were doomed. I’m not saying that stone/pillow queen relationships can’t work, but when I am part of us and that’s what we’re doing, we’re doomed. So very doomed. Doomed doomed doomed. He was embarrassed, I was frustrated, and eventually we just stopped calling each other. Much later he told me that he’d been slipping into a clinical depression at the time.

“It wasn’t you; it was me,” he confided.

“I can not believe you just retroactively it’s-not-you-it’s-me-ed me,” I disclosed. It was truly a time of healing.

Maybe it was just depression. Maybe I wasn’t repulsive. I really don’t know. Maybe Aldo just isn’t a very sexual person. For all the conversations we’ve had while and after we were dating, he has never once mentioned dating anyone other than me. Manifold nuances and forces could have conspired to keep his penis out of my vagina. All I know is that I’m still much, much less aggressive than I was back before Aldo and I became fuck-crossed lovers.

Fuck-crossed (Pt. 2)

I was excited to be in the first real romantic relationship of my life. The guy I’d had a crush on for years wanted me, we were “in love” and having fun, and I was sharing orgasms with someone for the first time. If I’d known the telltale signs to watch for that belie the bliss and give an ugly whiff of future abusive behavior I’d have run away screaming, but at the time I thought that things were going pretty well.

Not so Reginald. To him it was a persistent and serious problem that I wasn’t Lily. Almost as unbearable was the fact that he wasn’t, and never would be, Jack.

To me, Legend was a mediocre ’80s fantasy movie that I’d never heard of until the cute Mormon boy I had tentatively, hugs-only dated a couple years earlier had eagerly showed it to me. It was less dazzling than Willow, less imaginative than The Labyrinth and less captivating than The Princess Bride, I thought. But it seemed to have some sort of power over these two guys. It was Reginald’s favorite movie.

The protagonists, Jack and Lily, despite being portrayed (in my opinion) with all the personality of a sprouted mung bean and a pile of toenail clippings respectively, are fabulously happy together and can party with unicorns because of their unsullied innocence. Then things go awry because Lily decides to ignore Jack’s warnings about touching the unicorns, and then Tim Curry is awesome for a while. Then stuff happens and the boring people win, as they very often do in stories of this type. And there’s something about True Love™ conquering all at the end, I think. To be honest, it’s been a while.

To be really honest, I would like the movie more if it hadn’t been such a source of drama. As it was, their love, informed in the movie rather than shown, was a cynosure to him. It must’ve hit him in the exact right way at exactly the right point in his psychosocial development, because everything was compared to Jack and Lily. When things were going well, they were never going well enough because there were no unicorns asking Reginald and me to hang out with them. When we were fighting or he was bored, Reginald would literally cry because we didn’t have anything like the True Love™ featured in that Ridley Scott movie. Whatever we were doing, if it wasn’t accompanied by an original score by Tangerine Dream, it would always fall short.

In an essay entitled “This is Emo”, Chuck Klosterman basically says that he once had this girlfriend, until John Cusack stole her. Not even John Cusack, but Lloyd Dobler, John Cusack’s character in Say Anything. It seemed at first that Chuck had the edge, being both real and present. This girl was very likely never going to meet John and was absolutely fucking not going to meet Lloyd Dobler. But the fact was that he was never going to measure up to a movie, and she was never going to forgive him for it.

Love exists. It’s a beautiful, transformative force. It can inspire words and deeds and works of art. It can drive you insane or make you feel finally still for once in your life. It’s powerful, but it’s never perfect. It doesn’t look like the manufactured, scripted love you see on screens and read about in fiction. Real love is never True Love™.

When you’re in True Love™, exciting shit is happening all around. conflicting forces are in play, destiny is invoked, and everyone involved is a very special snowflake– not just to each other, but probably on a much grander scale. In a True Love™ universe, everyone gets one [1] soulmate. Or if everyone doesn’t, at least you sure do, you special snowflake.

Because that’s how stories work. In a story, everything is significant. Even throwaway details are symbolic of something important. People aren’t shown showering, or driving to work, or doing anything at all unless it advances the plot. There’s no filler, no tedium, no silences that aren’t meaningful and no dialogue that hasn’t been reviewed and tweaked and edited. A story, like True Love™, is an escape from reality, not an example of what reality would be like if all the slags around us would just cooperate.

Real love isn’t always breathtaking and spine-quivering. It won’t be all heady declarations and grand gestures. True Love™ would get exhausting; real love is comfortable and secure. There’s time for lingering in bed and cuddling because the fate of your world isn’t threatened all the time. You’re allowed to have problems individually or as a couple without it meaning that the relationship has failed. It’s okay that real love is imperfect because it’s between people, not ideals.

Having some kind of fantasy of what love is supposed to look like is responsible for more than just hurting one’s own relationships. It’s also part of the impulse to “protect marriage” from frightening homosexuals. It leads us to obsess about people we barely know rather than pursuing healthy partnerships. It makes you less adventurous, less interesting, less loving. In short, it makes your story duller and it makes you less of a hero in it.