quizzical pussy

If you verbally abuse someone, I don’t trust you. If you break things in anger, especially to intimidate or otherwise send a message to your partner, I don’t trust you. You can say it a million times: “I would never raise a hand against anyone!” “I’m not the violent type.” “I know not to cross the line.” Yeah, sorry. I still don’t trust you.

When I was a kid, no one sat me down to lay out the List of Unacceptable Behaviors. I honestly didn’t know that breaking things and punching holes in walls right next to me were red flag activities. I thought that if a guy didn’t hurt me, I wasn’t really allowed to complain. I didn’t understand that when a partner takes steps to try to isolate you from your friends and family, it’s time to dump the motherfucker already. If he told me he cared about me, well, that meant he did! Why would anyone bother to lie about that?

Yes, I was naive like the cosmos is big: beyond imagining.

I can’t blame anyone for my lack of education here. My parents certainly didn’t expect their daughter to find herself in an abusive relationship as a teenager (or ever, probably). In fact, I’m sure they thought I’d meet a nice Christian boy who would agree with my dad and treat me like a treasured helpmeet, and we’d get married young (the most reliable way to prevent premarital sex) and bless them richly with WASP grandbabies approximately nine months after I finally discovered on my wedding night what a penis looked like. They may or may not have also expected me to learn to speak in tongues, but this was merely implied, never discussed.

But despite my parents’ peculiar and inaccurate prophesies concerning my romantic future, I think they were deceptively typical: few parents want to plan for the worst, and perhaps fewer see the looming specter of an asshole on the horizon. I wonder how many parents ever give the List Of Unacceptable Behaviors talk.

Do people pick the list up from pop culture, peers, mentors, or their own common sense (of which I’ve never claimed adequate amounts)? The chilling answer is that far too few of us do until we’re taught the hard way. Far too many of us learn what’s unacceptable by accepting the unacceptable until we reach a crisis point. For me, the crisis point occurred with Reginald Sleeth after he broke things, after he called me names, after he hit me, after he choked me, after he threatened to kill me, and after so many other Fucking Well Unacceptable Behaviors.

I’m not a therapist or any other kind of expert in abusive relationships, but I have spent a lot of time processing and examining my experiences and the stories of other abused partners. Often there seems to be a pattern of escalation. An abuser might test to see if he (or yes, she) can get away with throwing something across the room so it almost hits his victim. If he liked the response from that, he might smash something right next to her, seeming almost about to strike her with it, and scaring her even more. After that, he might start shoving. Just a little. And so on.

The Slippery Slope is a fallacy because it does not logically follow that circumstances will inevitably escalate. But neither does not logically follow that an argument’s automatically invalid if it notes a process of escalation. When a person self-justifies abusive actions shrewd to provoke fear and grant him control over someone, he can’t be trusted to adhere to higher frequencies on an honor code spectrum he’s already breaking. Not all verbal abusers and object-violent abusers graduate to hitting their victims. But many do, and those who don’t are still abusive and still patently Unacceptable. And if no one’s ever told you that before, I’m damn well telling you now.

(image source)

I endured ever-escalating physical and emotional abuse from Reginald Sleeth for over four years. I remember being literally afraid to move sometimes, whether he was watching me or not. I was hobbled by the knowledge that I could do something unexpectedly wrong at any time, and earn a harsh and ugly punishment. It wasn’t like walking on eggshells; it was like the air itself purred with the promise of invisible razor wire, hidden anywhere and everywhere.

I wanted to fade away, be smaller, tiny, unnoticeable. I wanted to disappear. I wanted to somehow become insignificant and non-threatening enough that he wouldn’t need to hurt me anymore. This was living in a kind of poverty of self. Nothing about me seemed to have substance in those years. Everything was transient and flimsy as his ever-changing moods.

When I finally left him, do you think it was because I’d dug down deep and found strength from a vital, indomitable place? Do you think I finally howled “ENOUGH!” to the universe, myself, and that floppy-haired sadist, showed him my back, and slammed the door on the terror that consumed me for so much of my youth? I wish. Want to know why I finally left him? Want to know what the real final straw was? I wasn’t getting enough sex.

Kind of.

I love sex. My sex drive is nigh maniacal. It was the one part of me that I couldn’t shut off, even when everything else was floating. Reginald, on the other hand, didn’t seem too interested in it beyond his ability to control me with it, which was considerable. He was my first everything: my first kiss, my first non-masturbatory orgasm, my first attempt at anal. Until I was well into my twenties, he meant sex to me, and that’s a powerful thing to a horndog like me.

Abusive relationships often function like an addiction, really. The euphoria of the love fable is followed by the punishment phase, which is like a withdrawal or a crash, like coming down off a high. It’s an ugly cycle that hooks you with the highs then slams you against the bottom. While you stay in your broken relationship, you try to get back to the high of feeling loved. I was a fragile, naive and sensitive teenage girl with the hormones of a teenage boy when I met Reginald, and to me the euphoric crest of our wave was always, from the very beginning, wrapped up in sex.

Before we had penis-in-vagina intercourse, he was an enthusiastic partner and lots of orgasms were had. But when we finally “did it”, it seemed like something shifted. I don’t know if he resented me for deflowering him or if by then he’d realized my will was broken down enough that he could control me in non-sexual ways, but little by little the sex dried up.

That’s when I started feeling like my sex drive was disgusting. That I, as a sexual being, was disgusting. Reginald told me as much, and in those days I believed what he told me. When I masturbated he accused me of “raping [my]self” and threw tantrums. I was base, mammalian, and greedy, and I was no longer worth touching.

The guilt was overpowering. I still shyly asked him for sex, but never pressured him into it. I didn’t want him to do something he didn’t want to. But even just wanting sex, I was suddenly repugnant. I even tried going on Prozac, chiefly to dampen my libido, but also because I sort of wanted to die and thought maybe I should do something about that besides, well, dying. But eventually I woke up one day and realized my high was gone. That was how I started gathering the strength to get away.

Despite therapy and personal reflection and triumph of the human spirit and being a basically happy and functional person (I like to think) I still have a few hangups. Maybe, possibly more than a few. I’ve mentioned before that I can’t flirt, don’t ask for things in bed, have trouble admitting that I’m attracted to someone, and am basically a great big chicken. I’m realizing that I’ve never really gotten over the feeling that my sex drive is disgusting and that I, as a sexual being, am disgusting. It’s so deeply internalized I don’t know how to shake it. Maybe I’ll always try to hide my sexual interest from people until they unmistakably initiate. Maybe I’ll always feel like I’m getting away with something when someone appears to be attracted to me. Maybe I’ll never really believe I’m worth touching. Maybe it’ll never be okay to want things.

And lately I’m getting really fucking sick of it.

Laramy and I had a brief conversation recently about fucking other people. We decided early on that we’d keep our relationship fairly open, but it’s always good to communicate and check in about these things. Yep, still open. Glad we cleared that up.

I was thrilled when I first learned that Laramy wasn’t the jealous type, not just because it potentially meant MOAR SEX for little nympho me, but also because it was so new and completely divergent from my relationship history. I had dated guys who ranged from forbidding me to have male friends to being uncomfortable when I wanted to play wingman for my single friends but stopping short of  attempting to forbid it. This is the first time I’ve ever dated someone who didn’t even seem to be on the jealousy spectrum. It’s pretty neat.

The question of whether we as a species are capable of monogamy doesn’t capture my imagination. It’s just not all that mysterious. Some people seem to do fine with it, others fail every time they try. I think the more intriguing question is why it’s important (or not) to be monogamous today, and what motivates the choice to be or not to close a relationship.

When my dating adventures began, I was almost comically oblivious as to why I should mind what a guy was doing when he wasn’t with me. I now realize that it drove Reginald Sleeth crazy because he kept trying to make me jealous and it never worked quite like he wanted. Of course it was gratifying when he told me (obviously true) stories about how throngs of modelesque girls threw themselves at him and he told told them, “Narp, I’m in lurrrrrve!” but beyond that I didn’t really give it much thought. It didn’t occur to me to feel threatened or affronted that he was chatting up girls. Later, when I found out he’d cheated the deception wounded me, but I didn’t feel jealous, exactly.

But after some time, I found he’d trained me to be jealous. It was the weirdest thing. He’d pick huge fights over my lack of reaction when he talked about his run-ins with aggressive women or when he mentioned that female friends had propositioned him. He expected some kind of explosive sturm und drang from me, so I learned to provide it. And, just like how you automatically get happier when you force yourself to smile, eventually my displays of jealousy became more and more genuine. Of course I never came close to his impressive pyrotechnics (e.g. throwing me to the floor, holding me down by the neck and strangling me when a completely platonic male friend called me on my phone to see if I wanted to come hang out with him and his girlfriend), but in a few years I’d become about as jealous as the average monogamously inclined person.

Having been out of the hell that was my relationship with Reginald for almost seven years now, I’ve left a lot of those learned behaviors behind, and I’m much closer in a lot of ways to who I was when I was 17 than who I was when 22, or even 24 and still dealing with the aftermath of all the fuckwittage. I’ve come to realize that for me, jealousy is a direct product of insecurity. When I’m feeling down on myself I tend to feel like I’m inferior to everyone else on the planet, and in that mindset of poverty you really don’t feel much like sharing. But that happens less and less as I get more emotionally healthy. Go figure.

When it comes to someone I care about, I’m not wondering anymore how best to stop him or her from touching any especially fun body parts that don’t belong to me. Why the fuck would I want to stop someone that special from wringing every drop of joy out of life? As Laramy put it once, life is too damn short. There might be some remnants of “…does this mean I’m obsolete?” feelings when my boyfriend shows interest in someone new, but they’re manageable, and I’d much rather overcome them than entertain them.

This is not to say that if you value monogamy you have low self esteem or don’t want the best for your partner or anything like that. These are just things I’ve noticed in myself. Some people are wired for monogamy, some people excel at nonmonogamy. People like me, we can go either way. I’ve never cheated on anyone and I don’t need to sleep with multiple people, but I do appreciate and enjoy some freedom. The total lack of the control and pressure I’ve known in the past is one part of why I’m so thrilled with my current relationship. So, like, wanna do it?

I ended my relationship with Edwin Pomble when I finally got the courage to tell him that I’d been raped years before, and he probed relentlessly for more information, making me relive the event in excruciating detail for over an hour until I couldn’t stop crying, then screamed at me and told me I must’ve liked it.

Don’t ask me why I tried to be friends with him after that, but I did. I extended myself until I unraveled, trying to show him that although I couldn’t trust him enough to have the relationship we once had, I still cared about him and didn’t want to “throw him away”, as he put it.

It took him all of two weeks before he stopped apologizing and started resenting me for not taking him back. Sometimes I wondered: was I being too hard on him, being a bitch about the whole thing? He certainly thought so. But when I actually considered being together again I couldn’t stomach the thought. It didn’t matter how perverse and unyielding I was being, the breakup event had forever fractured the way I saw him, the way I felt about him. No part of me wanted him back.

So we tried the friendship thing. I made an honest go of it, but I don’t think he did. To him, our friendship was a purgatory he had to suffer through until I finally came to my senses and begged him to be my bride. The longer things went without that happening, the more resentful he became, and the more he pressured me to give him his way.

…

It is a frigid Saturday night. We’ve been broken up for a few months. The hemisphere has spun into a biting post-holiday winter gloom. My illness has been unkind to me for all of the newborn year so far: my headache raging and my joints complaining. I’ve been stuck indoors for a week, lonely and bored, feeling just better enough today to be restless. Edwin calls and invites me out to a karaoke bar a few blocks from his apartment, to come hang out with few of his friends. Great, I think. I can socialize with Edwin in a friend-type way on neutral territory with witnesses, all the post-breakup planets aligning perfectly for once. Plus, he’s been alluding recently to one of his friends being interested in him. I hope maybe it’s one of the chicks that will be at the bar that night. We can all hang out together and I can give them my unspoken seal of approval. I decide to get in non-pajama clothing for the first time all year and meet them.

10:30 PM. It shouldn’t be a shock that the bar’s crowded, being Saturday night and all. But Edwin seems to freeze up as soon as he sees how many people are there. He declares his intentions to leave. I want to stay, and tell him so. I damn well came to sing karaoke and have fun, not to go to Edwin’s place and sulk together, or whatever. So I stay and sing and have fun with a bunch of people I barely know.

But then he calls and leaves me a voicemail explaining how he had really been worried about me and that’s why he’d wanted to leave, and he wouldn’t have left if he’d known I was okay with it (note: we did talk about how he wanted to leave and how I wanted to stay before he left, so I suspect he’s trying to manipulate me somehow. But I’m pretty easy to manipulate, as we will see). But I start feeling like a bit of a prat. Maybe it was rude of me to stay at the bar when he didn’t want to. I don’t really know. So despite my “being alone with him” misgivings, I leave after a couple of hours of karaoke and stop by his place to prevent being a total jerk.

As soon as I climb the stairs to his second floor flat it’s clear he wants to have sex. With me. He’s really, really adamant about it and I in turn am really, really adamant about not wanting to. I tell him I don’t think of him in that way anymore, that I want to be friends and nothing more. Yes, I, sex fiend, am refusing sex! I try to leave. He grabs me, presses against me, then, rebuffed, starts going on about how horrible the rejection feels. He’s getting more and more passionate, getting upset, maybe getting angry. This flips a sort of switch with me. I can’t explain it very well. I tend to have problems putting my feelings above a guy’s feelings (especially if his feelings resemble anger) in a disagreement like this because for years any disagreement meant I was in major, violent trouble (see: my entire relationship with Reginald). Edwin seems angry to me, and my will collapses.

Fear crackles through my body, a response to things that have happened before as much as anything happening in the present. Adrenaline pumps into my bloodstream for no reason, I feel far away and small. The protests I was making moments ago seem like they came from someone else now, like I was reading from a fantastical script that I could never hope to really live.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. If you want, we can have sex,” I hear me say. The words are mechanical. I sigh as I say them. It is clear to us both that I absolutely do not want to.

He says, “Are you saying that because you think you’ll lose me if you don’t?”

“No,” I tell him, “I’m saying it because I don’t feel that I have the right to say no.” And that’s the simple truth. In that moment, I’m afraid not to give him his way, although I don’t really know why.

So he makes a big show of how he doesn’t want that. How he isn’t that guy. I’m still frightened, but I’m thankful. It’s exactly what I was hoping would happen if I told him the truth. I haven’t figured out yet how to not feel this fear but it’s not going to win tonight. My body is nominally mine for now. I head for the door. I hit the bottom of the stairs. My hand is on the door knob.

A split second before exiting I hear him say, “I’ve changed my mind. Come back .”

It feels like my blood’s been flash frozen and my skin’s been slapped with something cold, dead, ugly. I don’t know why I do it. I don’t know why I scale the stairs and numbly follow him into his bedroom. For some reason I don’t feel I have a choice.

It is the worst sex of all time, and I’ve had some bad sex. I just want it to be over. My cunt feels arid then raw. I hate how his sweat drips down on me. The condom breaks and he doesn’t notice until after. I can’t even make myself care. For some reason I just want to know that there aren’t any pieces of it stuck inside me. It’s all that matters now. As I ask him if they all came out with him, I choke the words out. He tells me it’s all there. The thin veil of senseless panic leaves me and I’m flooded with nausea. I excuse myself to go to the bathroom and quietly wretch into his toilet. As I leave, Edwin says he loves me. It sounds far away.

…

The next day I found a small, round scrap of latex inside me and snapped from numb to livid. Not even at him, really just at myself.

Prom dates Julia and Maddie of Victoria, British Columbia

… And why Constance McMillen shouldn’t have to miss hers.

I started dating Reginald Sleeth my senior year, second semester. He’d already graduated from our high school a couple years prior.

I remember the chick he took to prom that year. I was a 10th grader in the seventh circle of my awkward phase who was secretly pining after him although we were only friends. She was a rich, skinny blonde from the rival school who had bought a strapless dress in his favorite color and wore long opera length satin gloves. They looked so good together their picture showed up in the local newspaper. Shortly after his prom, he moved in with that girl and disappeared from my life for a couple years.

I wasn’t jealous, mind. I didn’t have the self-esteem to feel robbed because a guy I had a crush on was with someone else. I just saw that full-color pic on the cheap newsprint and knew that it would never be me. I was neither rich nor skinny nor blonde. Prom wasn’t made for people like me.

I went to Homecoming dances a couple times during my high school career, but I never had a date. All my friends usually had multiple options, but no one ever seemed interested in going with me. And I would’ve sooner died than ask someone! Junior year Homecoming, a female friend’s “just going as friends” date asked me for one dance, and she made a point to come up to me and tell me how nice it was of him. I had to agree, of course, but those things sting.

I’m not sure why Reginald decided to come back into my life. He’d already dated many of my friends and acquaintances, he’d cultivated a mythos at school as an accidental rake. It always seemed like women pursued him and he was powerless against it. It wasn’t that way with me. He hunted me. He got my aim screenname from a mutual friend and messaged me one night out of the blue. He begged for my friendship back. Then slowly, methodically, he insinuated himself into my life and seeped into that “boyfriend” slot I’d never had filled before, never thought would be filled by anyone.

I had what I’d longed for both those years ago. Reginald Sleeth, former high school Lothario, claimed to be head-over-heels for me. Before long there were signs of the manipulative, abusive hell our relationship would become, but they were subtle. He tried to isolate me from my friends (most of whom thought he was sketchy or whom he’d already dated and dumped with glorious apathy), he freaked out when I was too friendly to his male friends. He cried a lot whenever he wasn’t getting his way, and threw things. As a result, I was in a relationship with someone I’d had a crush on for years, but I wasn’t really enjoying it.

I made the tough decision not to go to my Senior prom. Reginald, who would of course be my date if I went, had so much negative history with my classmates and friends, that I didn’t want to deal with the guaranteed drama. It just wasn’t worth the few bright patches it might possibly provide between all the bickering and moping.

Reginald was livid, petulant. He accused me of being ashamed of him (which was partly true, I suppose), and of not taking our relationship seriously (because no partnership means anything until there’s been at least one awkward updo and a corsage has changed hands, naturally). One day, as we approached the fatal night, he even wept, “I wanted to cover you in orchids and show you off to everyone! Now I can never have that!” But in this I remained strong. He could push me around in a thousand little ways, but I wasn’t going to budge on this. We weren’t going.

Instead, if I remember correctly, we hung out at his place and he gave me my first rimjob. Romance.

With my prom, I took what felt like the path of least resistance. Sure, Reginald was pushing me in one direction, but even worse was the thought of dealing with so much upheaval (probably most of which would’ve ultimately been coming from him, the drama queen) just because I’d brought a polarizing character to my prom.

But what if the only polarizing thing about my prom date had been her gender? What if I hadn’t wanted to bring my asshat boyfriend? What if I’d wanted to take my girlfriend, and cover her in orchids (…is that creepy or is it just that Reginald was creepy and he happened to say that? I honestly can’t discern one from the other sometimes…), and run my fingers gingerly through her updo?

If that’s a problem in and of itself, I call bullshit. Bringing a perfectly sane girl shouldn’t put someone in the same position that I was in having a shitty person as a potential date. But in reality bringing a girl is sometimes much worse. Sometimes a young woman who wants to take her girlfriend to prom doesn’t get to decide whether to go or not. Someone else decides it for her by, oh, say canceling prom.

So let me get this straight… I could have easily taken my evil boyfriend to my prom if I’d so desired, but brave Constance McMillen, who is young, gay, and out in Mississippi, not only can’t take her girlfriend to her prom, but school officials at Itawamba Agricultural High School have decided to encourage her fellow students to hate her by canceling the event altogether! “Sorry, kids, no prom this year. The lesbians killed it.” sort of thing.

That’s not just unfair, it’s downright cruel. Even if you don’t agree with Constance’s dating decisions, you likely wouldn’t have liked mine either if you’d known the details. But you wouldn’t have had anything to say when I tried to purchase prom tickets, would you, Itawamba? Hetero privilege is so stupid and arbitrary.

Constance and her girlfriend should have been able to go to their prom this Friday. Instead, they’ll go to a formal dance being put on by supportive local parents. A federal judge has ruled that her constitutional rights were violated, but has not ordered Itawamba to restore the prom.

Help spread the word about Itawamba’s unconstitutional and punitive actions, and you might win a $100 Eden Fantasys gift card! Constance’s courage has inspired tonic.com and talk show host Ellen Degeneres to offer her educational scholarships. Congratulations, Constance! Hopefully yours will be the last generation to have to deal with this sort of prejudiced nonsense.

On a more hopeful note, see adorable lesbian prom pictures here! Some schools aren’t run by jerks, apparently.

I do a lot of sharing on this blog, probably bordering on oversharing, but if that’s not what sex blogging is all about, I misread the charter. This forthright honesty doesn’t come naturally to me. In real life I’m totally comfortable talking about sex all day as long as I don’t have to get emotionally vulnerable about it. I revel in the abstract and avoid getting personal. It’s easier, for instance, to talk to my friends about the horrors of unbirthing than it is to admit to having a crush on someone, or discuss what I like in bed.

I’ve always tended to be even more reserved with the people I’m actually fucking. My first romantic relationship was a huge cat-and-mouse game, where eventually I hid as much as possible from Reginald Sleeth, unsure which things were going to set him off. This got to be a habit with me. I don’t lie anymore now that the threat of violence is removed, but I’m also not as effusive or direct as I’d like to be.

In my blog I try to push these limits. It’s difficult because a small handful of people I know in real life read this, my boyfriend among them. So being open here actually translates to being open with them, and with him (OMG scary). But I’m finding that I can better discuss things with Laramy face-to-face because of what I write here, whether he reads it or not. Honesty begets more honesty or something. It’s a weird way to approach relationship communication, sure, but it’s helping me get better at it.

I still have some secrets, though, from pretty much everyone. Not necessarily things-which-must-not-be-named; more just things that don’t come up, and yeah, that in some cases might make you think less of me. Like:

• When I made out with my friend’s little brother after he told me he’d broken up with his girlfriend, I kind of knew there was a chance he was lying. Now he’s married to her, and she must never find out. Also, I really like her now that I’ve met her, and lying to her makes me feel like kind of a jerk.
• I’m in favor of safer sex. But giving blowjobs while using condoms does nothing for me and at that point I’d rather just fuck instead. Sorry.
• I tried to convince myself that even though Piers Vitiard forced his penis inside me while I was saying “no” and begging him to stop, it didn’t really count as rape because my reason for choosing not to fuck him wasn’t all that good in the first place.
• After reading that post-sex dopamine supplies fade about two years into a relationship, I’m worried that no one will ever have a reason like me for longer than that. And yes, I do know that’s a silly oversimplification only loosely based on real science. Still.
• I’m not sure what the difference is between a woman being good in bed and just being really enthusiastic. What if I’m only the second and not at all the first?
• According to a friend who lived with him after I moved out of our apartment, Reginald likely beat the girlfriend he had after me. He has yet another girlfriend now and I wonder if he’s hurting her. It haunts me because I never called the police on him.
• At the same time, I have to admit I wouldn’t like knowing that I alone summoned that violence from him, like I somehow turned him into something ugly that he’d never otherwise have been. It double haunts me that any part of me is even a tiny bit relieved that he might be torturing another woman.

So many little secrets that I just tuck away while I try to present as clean, sane, pretty. You probably have some too.

That’s why I’ve just launched the Sex Confessional. This is like a lazy, less artistic version of Post Secret: I’ve put up an online form (linked on my top menu bar) where you, I, or your mom can anonymously post sex secrets. I’ll receive a form-generated email with your sex secret, but that email won’t have your email address, name, IP address, or any other identifying feature. When I collect a decent number of them I’ll put them up on my blog and we can all gawk at them in comfort and safety. Trust I have a few horrible ones of my own left to sneak in, but hopefully they’ll be impossible to suss out in the swarm. So get confessing! And spread the word because I want to read absolutely everyone’s anonymous dirt.

The following personal story can be seen as a supplement to my series on rape and consent, although I didn’t set out meaning to write it. I started relating the experience as a brief example in an upcoming entry and it got longer and longer until I realized it was its own piece. To be clear, I’ve never called this incident rape; I’ve never known what to call it. It was a bad experience, though, so if reading it will upset you, read about tentacle dildos here instead!

______________________________

Reginald Sleeth and I were having a fight again. We fought a lot: snarling, ugly fights. He’d threaten to kill himself, or to hurt me. I’d bawl until the salt from my tears formed little icicles on my lashes. Sometimes the battles started when I’d raised my eyes too high from the ground in public and looked another man in the face, which always convinced Reginald that I was hell-bent on fucking that visibly-faced man. Sometimes they started when I found out he’d been making promises to other girls behind my back again. Sometimes I didn’t even know what the problem was and the fight just seemed to start without me.

We sat on his futon. I was sobbing, and he was only getting angrier. I just wanted things to be okay; I apologized again and again, not really knowing or feeling why. I said the words “I’m sorry” so many times they stopped sounding like words and became a strange background noise interrupted by the gasps and hiccoughs spewing from my wailing, puffy face. The part of me that I considered my personality had been broken for a while, and whatever was left of me seemed to cry a lot.

His face got crueler and he looked more disgusted with every sorry I said. But I couldn’t stop. It was mechanical now; it was the whirring gears that kept me breathing. Finally, I said the “I’m sorry” that tipped him into a rage. His movement was so abrupt and violent that I assumed he was going to hit me, and I flinched. But he turned away–toward the door–not toward me, so then I thought he was going to leave me all alone in his apartment with no car, no phone, no self. That scared me too. I reached out to stop him from exiting, but I realized I was already being pulled, dragged to the floor by my shirt. He ripped it trying to take it off. He tore my favorite bra too but it clung, wounded, to my body. His grip was too tight on me. The air conditioning was suddenly too cold on my newly bared skin. I shook my head, tried to back up, struggled to regain the safety of the furniture, to get away. I was sure he was going to hurt me. Badly. Maybe he would kill me. He was stronger.

Reginald was on top of me, holding me down with his knees while he undid his belt and opened his pants. He was hard and I was terrified. His anger and his force and my misery transformed even the erection I’d always been happy to see into something frightening. He grabbed my hair and moved me around to my knees, facing him. I cowered as he loomed in front of me, and I couldn’t look at him. I pulled away but he had my hair and I was too afraid of him to really fight. I didn’t say any real, human words because I wouldn’t stop screaming, and then he slammed my head down and rammed his cock into my mouth, and it felt like my face was on fire. I choked on my tears as much as his thrusts. My mewling panic was muffled now, less shrill and more like a ragged, guttural hum. I wonder if the vibrations made it better for him.

It didn’t take him long. When I felt him release into my raw throat it was bitter and nauseating. I wanted a drink of water. I wanted to be sick. But then his fingers jammed into me between my legs, raking against the dry flesh there and now a new pain tore through me. I was afraid to tell him no and I’d run out of screams, but I shook my head again and whispered “please”, mute tears running down my cheeks. And he did stop after a minute, and I curled myself into a ball thankful he hadn’t killed me, all the while just wanting to die.

Why why why why why? It kept buzzing in my brain. It was punishment. I’d finally done something that bad, and I didn’t even know what it was. The amount he must hate me is unfathomable I told myself, like hovering at the edge of a bottomless pit.

Reginald sat on the floor with his back to the wall, looking away from me. His presence nearby was ugly, but no part of me was willing to move. I was still and he was still as I tried to ride the roaring whys in my head. It wasn’t until I heard him crying that I looked and saw that he’d covered his face with his hands. I don’t think there were any tears.

“I’m scared now,” he told me, in a shrill voice that threatened hysteria. “I’m scared because I thought you wanted that and now I’m afraid you didn’t like it.”

Of course I hadn’t liked it! What the fuck? I probably looked at him like he was speaking Icelandic, like he was a Martian teapot or a huge aphid-shaped gumball. Why would anyone want that?

“Remember?” he sputtered. “Remember how you told me you wanted that? I didn’t think I could, but I wanted to try. For you!”

Oh shit. It fell on me, a cold, dead weight. Months ago I had told him that I’d fantasized about “forced” blowjobs. I had wanted it to be like a game, defined sex play done in fun. Not like this. Never like this. How could a misunderstanding be so profound? But it had happened. He’d done it for me. He’d taken my throat while I cried, while I was terrified. And it was my fault because I had literally asked for it.

I unraveled myself from my fetal position on the floor and gestured toward him affectionately. I could not bring myself to touch him yet. I was fighting back nausea and shudders, and tears leaked silently from my eyes. I was so thirsty I couldn’t afford the tears, but they wouldn’t stop. “I’m sorry,” I told Reginald. My voice sounded tired and raspy, but I tried to make it soothing. I knew I had to say this or worse things would happen. “I’m sorry I made you do that, baby. I know it was so hard on you. It’s okay. You never have to do anything like that again.” I hoped like hell he never would. I stared vaguely at his cheap, stained carpet because I couldn’t look over at him and I couldn’t look down at me. I hated us both too much just then, as I kept purring my lies and his breathing quieted. “You were so good, baby. You were only doing what I wanted you to do, and it was very wrong of me to ask. But I’ll never, ever force you to do those things again.”

Sometimes I wonder if we awkward-phasers who were unpopular in the dating department early on all have trouble mustering up “romance” from our misanthropic hearts, or if it’s just me.

As a literary genre, I can get behind romance (in the old school sense; I’m not talking harlequin here): high adventure, quests, Camelot, and fucking up bad guys are all pretty awesome in my book. Or Latin-based languages, those are fine. It’s the other kind of romance that trips me up: flowers, and the thin line between grand gestures and restraining orders, and… flowers? I don’t really even know what else people consider romantic. But that part where you’re supposed to declare your emotional attachment and minimize your sexual lust for someone? Obviously that wouldn’t be my strong suit.

When I was sixteen all my friends seemed to be single on Valentine’s Day for once, and we decided to wear black and purple to school to commemorate the Saint Valentine’s Day massacre. I guess it was something to take everyone’s mind off not having a date to focus instead on historical bloodshed. I wore the purple and black with them but I didn’t feel all giddy and “sticking it to the system” like everyone else seemed to. It never occurred to me that I might be doing something different with my day. This is partly because it had never occurred to anyone else to ask me out on date at that point. A big part of being anti-romance is admittedly sour grapes.

A year later I was in the early stages of semi-dating a cute little Mormon boy (semi-dating because I never get the “we’re more than friends” message until there’s kissing, and he wasn’t allowed to do that because smooches make Joseph Smith cry). He hid a heart pin in my locker, then later that day showed up at my after-school cashier job with a bunch of mylar balloons and a huge, puppy-dog grin. I knew it was a very sweet, “romantic” thing to do, but I was so embarrassed I wanted to die. And then puke. And then die again. I had no basis for understanding how to deal with this type of treatment. As a result, I didn’t really like it. Maybe I wouldn’t have liked it anyway. Maybe it just isn’t me.

Ever since that day, even when I try to make a Valentine’s Day or any other sort of romantic gesture it falls flat, mostly because I don’t understand what I’m supposed to accomplish. I don’t know how to be “romantic”. I’m up for all kinds of boning (to me that is romantic) or giving a “thinking of you” present to try to show the people I care about that I’m happy they’re in my life, but the kind of weird frenzied gestures that people expect each other to make? I can try to ape those sometimes, but it never feels right and I’m pretty sure I always suck at it.

Reginald Sleeth used to leave love poems under my windshield wiper while I was at work or while I slept, and after months of this I finally got the picture that he probably wanted that from me. So I wrote some of the worst poetry in history (although his may have actually been worse than mine, to be honest) and obliged, but it felt silly and forced. It was just another way of keeping the peace with him, really, and in that way it was always calculating and pragmatic, never romantic at all.

Part of me is always going to think that the best Valentine’s Day present is scandalous amounts of sexual intercourse. And all the other parts of me will always admire that part of me for being so infuriatingly clever and sensible.

When I try to talk about marriage I feel like a little girl dipping into her mother’s makeup and clopping around in size eight high heels. I’ve been in relationships with people who had marriage designs, but I’ve never been able to take it seriously. I’m too immature, or something. I haven’t felt those “lifetime commitment” kind of feelings yet. To me, although I’m old enough that most of my peers are getting engaged and married, it’s still something that, well… grown-ups do. Also, husbands have cooties.

There’s one thing I do know: if there was nothing but a tissue-thin shred of common sense keeping me from marrying Reginald Sleeth, a man who hit me, when I was 20 years old, I think my uncle who’s been in a strong and monogamous relationship since I was four should be able to marry his boyfriend if he feels like it. His right supersedes mine if we’re going to start ranking whose rights are more rightier.

But people all over are being stupid and saying that men have to marry only women, and women just men. I’m not entirely positive if they think transgendered people should be allowed to marry anyone, and if so, whom. I suspect there’s about as much disagreement about that as anything else they can’t paint in black and white absolutes.

These people, the ones who are being stupid, may certainly indulge their feelings and freak out about same-sex marriage as much as they like. They can rail against it, publish hateful books and websites, and thunder “Yo butt ain’t made for that!” into the cold, unfeeling sky. Their freedom to speak their minds is just as valuable as mine. However, I refuse to let them legislate against same-sex marriage if I can possibly help it. What’s wrong with hating it while it’s legal? Isn’t freedom just another word for leaving other people alone? It disgusts me that they devote so much time and energy into fucking up nice things (for the sake of argument, let’s just agree that marriage can be one such nice thing) for people who are lucky enough to find “lifetime commitment” love.

I’ve often thought that if I found myself in the position where I wanted to marry a man, I’d feel pretty shitty about enjoying a perk that many of my friends (or even I, if I found myself in the position where I wanted to marry a woman) are currently denied. I’m not saying life is fair, but this is the kind of unfair that really sucks because it’s the kind we could avoid if we could just all stop being asshats. So it’s a quandary: how much would I hypothetically let my distaste for the unfairness intrude on my personal desire to get a free stand mixer?

I came across this October 8, 2009 Savage Love column about hetero marriage. Dan Savage (a sex columnist who is gay, if you’re not familiar) recalled a wedding he’d recently attended, where the heterosexual couple chose the following selection as a reading in their ceremony:

Marriage is a vital social institution. The exclusive commitment of two individuals to each other nurtures love and mutual support. Civil marriage is at once a deeply personal commitment to another human being and a highly public celebration of the ideals of mutuality, companionship, intimacy, fidelity, and family. Because it fulfills yearnings for security, safe haven, and connection that express our common humanity, civil marriage is an esteemed institution and the decision whether and whom to marry is among life’s momentous acts of self-definition.

It is undoubtedly for these concrete reasons, as well as for its intimately personal significance, that civil marriage has long been termed a ‘civil right.’ Without the right to choose to marry, one is excluded from the full range of human experience.

Source: The 2003 Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage in that state.

Dan goes on to say that it would be wonderful if the passage caught on as a wedding reading. I agree. Sure, hetero couples can boycott, or move their weddings to states that have legalized same-sex marriage in an economic and symbolic gesture of support. But not many do, and maybe it isn’t practical to expect them to let even deeply-held political concerns influence their romantic commitments. That reading, though? I think it’s a perfect and fitting gesture, and I would love to see it become the new 1 Corinthians 13.

Sometimes when I didn’t want to do the things that Clifton Overmangle wanted me to (e.g. meet him for a quick blowjob when I was tired, let him give me hickeys, send him naked photos) he’d pull out the squirting card. “Well,” he’d say, “my intention to bring you pleasure overcomes my preference to not have you pee all over my sheets. You should be more giving and generous, more like me, and do whatever I want.” I can’t remember this rhetoric ever working, but it did make me feel self-conscious, so I guess no one won. Of course my solution that I’d tell him if I felt I was in danger of ejaculating and he could back off was completely missing the point, as he saw it. We should be making sacrifices for each other or something.

Two things:

1. IT’S NOT PEE!
2. This is not a good method of getting a chick to accommodate you in bed; it’s an excellent way of making sure she becomes determined never to ejaculate around you again.

I have a friend who squirted the first time she masturbated. She also freaked out, of course, because what the fuck just happened? When you’re not prepared for it, squirting/gushing/female ejaculation can be a slight shock.

I can safely say I had thousands of orgasms not realizing that there was such a thing in the world as a Skene’s gland. I was visiting my boyfriend Reginald in Los Angeles, and one afternoon he fingered me for what felt like hours, he rode through every orgasm as I bucked and bleated. I was in such a delirium of pleasure I fell off his futon, and he followed me down to the floor, his fingers still pounding and flickering, not missing a beat. He was concentrating mostly on the strange rough patch near the front on my vaginal wall, which I knew was the G-spot, although I didn’t know what was about to happen. I don’t know how long it took, but eventually something sprayed out of me in the middle of a searing climax. And I was absolutely mortified. I hadn’t even felt like I’d had to pee, but I was sure that somehow I’d just wet myself.

Reginald, who’d been researching a thing or two, looked very proud. “Do you know what just happened?” he quizzed me. I shook my head, miserable. My skin felt hot as the blood bloomed red in my cheeks. “You just had your first complete orgasm.”

Reginald was wrong about that. Squirting orgasms are definitely intense, but they’re just another type of orgasm. They’re not any more “real” or “complete” than a clitoral, vaginal, anal, or any other type of orgasm: believe me, I’ve had enough different kinds to know this. People can and do have favorites, but that doesn’t make those favorites any better or more orgasmy than any other type.

I don’t squirt with every orgasm, every time I have sex, or even every time someone stimulates my G-spot and clitoris together, which is normally how it ends up happening, although it can certainly result from attending to one or the other location with especially dogged resolve. Are the best orgasms always like majestic geysers? Not even always.

I think Reginald’s misapprehension about this, and any feminist distrust of squirting you might run into, is due to how damn analogous it is to male ejaculation. Sometimes a woman’s orgasm (not mine, but a woman’s) is a maddeningly subtle thing. A partner– hell, even the woman herself– can be left wondering if she actually got off. Guys are easier: semen comes out. Mystery solved. If women start doing that too, illumination! She definitely just came, and the wet spot just got a whole lot fucking wetter. Enjoy.

It’s messy. It can be inconvenient. It feels awesome. I’m not sure what’s in it for the person not impersonating a fountain. I guess it’s got to be the novelty and the extra emphatic proof of a job well done that accounts for the fact that very few guys have complained about it. Clifton was the exception, and I half think he griped about it only as a bargaining chip, considering that the first time it happened he was gleeful but a bit disappointed I hadn’t warned him so he could catch it in his mouth. Most guys are fascinated by it, and feel pretty cool when they pull it off.

Of course, I’m terrible about warning them. Squirting isn’t something that I expect or plan; it just happens sometimes. Plus, it happens more often during oral/digital sex than the actual penis-in-vagina playtime, so this is probably early in the saga of sexual exploration when “foreplay” takes longer, and I’m not totally comfortable yet talking about what fluids might come out of me. But I seldom account for the enthusiasm people can have for a new toy, and too often I’ve squirted with a new partner before I gave myself a chance to bring it up. This, as you might well imagine, is embarrassing. “It’s not pee…” I usually end up saying apologetically. I swear it isn’t.