quizzical pussy

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.

Laramy Fuquerton and I had just finished having holy. shit. sex. The kind that makes you want to update your facebook status to “just had 14 orgasms! (hi, mom)” right after you collapse and die. It didn’t seem exactly polite to collapse and die on top of Laramy, though, especially since he’d been so unfazed with what I’d done on him moments before when his cock caught my g-spot exactly right. So I swung one leg out of my cowgirl straddle and promptly tipped over, right off the bed, after which we both cracked up. A lot.

It wasn’t a big deal to either of us, and it certainly could’ve happened to anyone, but it’s the kind of thing that happens fairly often to me, and not just in bed. It can happen at any time in my world. Often if I’m standing for a little while unsupported, I’ll lose my balance and start to topple. This is one of the reasons I normally use a cane, along with having joint pain and being a total pimp.

There are times when you really can’t forget that you’re disabled. I focus much harder on the fact that someday I want to be able-bodied again, but right now I have numerous limitations. I got sick several years ago with an illness that often manifests as an invisible disability (there is usually pain, energy loss, and cognitive dysfunction, to name a few), but it’s caused mobility problems as well in my case, so it’s a little more, well, visible. Sure, occasionally on a good day someone will ask me “do you need to use that cane or is it just a fashion statement?”, and it’s nice to know that I can “pass” if I need to, but back when I needed a walker (or even currently when I’m having a not-so-good day) there was no ambiguity: when people looked at me they knew I was messed up somehow.

I’ve been asked if I was born this way or if I’d been injured. I’ve been talked to with very loud voices, the kind obnoxious people use to talk to immigrants, or that you sometimes have to use with the elderly. I’ve been stared at. People in the mall have been completely unwilling to meet my eye. I’ve been genuinely grateful when men and women have opened doors for me, or even just gave me a friendly smile. Because sometimes, when it’s clear that my cane is not just a fashion statement, I have felt absolutely invisible.

Sometimes I’m too exhausted to move, let alone fuck; there have been times when my hips or knees or head have been in so much pain I’ve had to stop in the middle of sex, even if I desperately want to keep going. It’s embarrassing for me to try to explain to a partner that I can’t put in the energy that he (or she) deserves. It sucks to have your libido roaring and a willing lovely ready to go, and your body just punks out. But there’s that other, sneakier part of being disabled and horny that has probably hobbled me far more than any real, physical limit: since I’ve been disabled, I’ve had some trouble feeling like a sexual being. I went through a phase a couple years ago in which I could barely convince myself I was human. I actually saw myself more as this limping, shuddering, twitching chimera of pain, failure, and decrepitude. The looks, the avoidance I saw on people’s faces proved that I wasn’t a real person anymore to them, and my disappointment that I could no longer do the things I expected of myself made me doubt that I was even me anymore.

I’d begun seeing my boyfriend at the time, Edwin Pomble, about a year before I got sick, and he stayed with me while my health degenerated. I was both thankful to him and resentful that I should have to be thankful. Every time someone said to me “you’re so lucky he’s sticking by you through this” or “he’s definitely a keeper: not every guy would stay” I was vaguely irritated. I agreed with these statements– I was lucky, and wouldn’t have expected him to tough it out, but I also disliked the implication that all I could rightly ask as a sick and disabled woman was for someone that wouldn’t leave. No one, not even I, took the time to wonder why it wasn’t reasonable for me to ask for more. It didn’t matter that Edwin and I had dismal intellectual chemistry or that we had incompatible goals in life. He wasn’t dropping broken, disabled me, so it was inconceivable that I could ever leave him.

So when I finally did break up with him I felt tremendous guilt because I knew I had no “right” to do so. It wasn’t my place, as the damaged one, to reject him. And he agreed with my self-loathing logic, saying “I didn’t stay with you through all the bad times just so I could end up cut off from the good times ahead…” …you know, the good times in my speculative able-bodied future. Essentially, he felt that staying with me was like waiting for an investment to pay off, and that the time with the disabled me was more or less a tax write-off.

Single again, I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t be dating much until I was well. If I ever got well, that is. It was difficult for me to imagine anyone wanting to build any kind of relationship with me. Sure I could still have sex, since a girl who can’t walk unassisted is about as non-threatening as females come. There will always be, I theorized and hoped, someone out there willing to use you for sex when it’s obvious that even you don’t think you’re worth a call afterward. But for someone to care about me? That seemed fantastical. After all, I’d lured Edwin into my life when I had been perfectly healthy; now I had no bait with which to perform a comparable bait and switch.

But I have the kind of friends who tend to drag you out to into civilization after a break-up. You know, the good kind. And a weird thing happened when I started going out more and meeting more new people. People noticed my cane, but sometimes they also noticed my eyes, my ass, and my sense of humor. They noticed that I’m pretty much always laughing and having fun, and all of this together– including the cane– intrigued some people. Still others didn’t really care about the cane either way. The bottom line was that most people cared far less about the fact that I was disabled than I ever expected.

Socially, I’m much more comfortable with my cane and my poor coordination than I was even just a year ago. What used to mortify me is just a part of my life now: My hair is a vivid shade of crayola, I’m wearing a garnet pendant, kicking off a pair of pumas, popping my prescription meds. My cane is propped beside me, ready for action. And all that’s just what I’m like, for now. It would be nice if some of those details changed, but none of them make me less of a person or even less of a sexual person. My self-image is better than it’s been in a while, and I’m having regular, scorching-hot sex with a guy who cares enough to ask how I’m feeling today and never acts like he’s doing me some huge favor by not treating me like a moped (fun to ride, but don’t let your friends catch you). It still sucks when I’m too sick and tired to go out and I end up missing fun (and that happens a lot), but I know that disability is more of a detail than my identity. It took some time, but I can brazenly look anyone in the eye, and if people have a problem returning my gaze, that’s their issue to cope with.