quizzical pussy

It seems to me that virginity is one of those things that you pretty much get to define for yourself, like cheating or happiness. Other people, institutions, even laws may have their opinions, but when you break it down enough any definition of virginity seems arbitrary at best. Virginity is so confusing that some people don’t seem to know whether they’re talking about it or not.

I’m about to don my pedantry hat for a minute. Also my seldom seen, but very jaunty, theology hat. You’ve been warned. Immaculate Conception doesn’t mean what most people think it means. In common use, it’s become confused with virgin birth and used synonymously, but it’s never meant “conceiving a child while one is a virgin”. Immaculate Conception is an explanation by the Catholic Church going back to the year Way Long Ago A.D. as to why Mary (the mother of Jesus Christ) was good enough to carry and bear God’s son¹. They decided that Mary, unlike regular non-god-bearing people, had been conceived without original sin (a legacy from Adam and Eve) and was thus pure, immaculate. Later Mary conceived a baby while she was a virgin² and gave birth, but her Immaculate Conception was only a distant prelude to that virgin birth, and has very little to do with virginity whatsoever.

My personal theory is that people use the wrong term because it sounds fancier. People are suckers for fancy. Hold on for a second. Removing hats.

There. That’s better. Where was I? Oh, virginity. I don’t know what the fuck a virgin is. I don’t really know when I was one. My hymen broke twice, but neither of those were the first time I had an orgasm from someone penetrating me. And then it was still two years before I had a dick inside me. Except my mouth. Are we counting my mouth? Suffice to say I lost my virginity, if it was even a thing, but at this point I don’t really know or care when.

But when Laramy commented the other day that he’s never fucked a virgin, I’m almost positive he meant someone who’s never had penis-in-vagina intercourse. That seems to be the most common definition, although I can only imagine how gold star lesbians feel about that. Anyway, he’s mentioned it before.

“Is that one of your goals?” I asked him, curious, but smelling trouble from where I sat. Now, at our age virgins are getting a bit thin on the ground, so it wouldn’t be terribly easy to find one without actively hunting. And a casual, drama-free deflowering with one older, experienced partner who already has a girlfriend and one partner who doesn’t remember that pogs were once a thing can happen, of course. But it feels like it would be asking a lot of the universe.

“It’s not something I’m actively looking for, but it might be interesting.” One interesting thing about Laramy is that he says this about virtually all forms of heterosexual sex he’s not having at that precise moment.

“If you’re that interested, I’ll just get one of those fake hymens³,” I shrugged.

“That’s a thing!?”

Of course it’s a thing! Because sadly, some people still buy into one of the weirdest definitions of virginity: the intact hymen. And there are still places in the world where a woman’s future might depend on her ability to fake that, whether she’s a virgin by any other definition or not.

But I guess it could be a sex toy too. If you’re not too cautious with your mucous membranes.

(image source)

1. The later Protestant explanation is that she quite simply wasn’t, just like no one on Earth was good enough for a god to die for. This is probably why it took a Protestant to write “Amazing Grace”. [↩]
2. Or as a young, unmarried woman, depending on how you like to translate ancient texts. [↩]
3. Just for the record, I was in no way serious. I have no idea what’s in those things, but I can guess it’s not all medical grade silicone and hypoallergenic red lube. [↩]

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

Have you ever played “I’ve Never…”? If not, you have to take a drink now because that’s how the game works.

And oh, here are some anonymous internet confessions that may be related…

I’m a 25-year-old male virgin, and I’ve seriously considered hiring a prostitute to change that. The strange thing is that I know that it would not be particularly difficult for me to put myself out there and get laid the way everyone else does, but hiring a professional is oddly appealing to me. Perhaps because there is much less risk of rejection? I think it’s more complicated than that, but I may be rationalizing. The decision has been a source of some anxiety for me lately.

I’ve never received oral sex. I’ve been in one relationship and my gf just was never into the idea of it enough to give it a try. She’s my ex now and after we split, I started testosterone to make a gender transition. I love what testosterone has done for my genitals. They feel and act like my brain says they’re supposed to. It makes me want oral more than ever. But I don’t know how to explain my anatomy and I worry that I’ll never get someone to go down on me b/c what I’ve got is unusual. I think it’s quite sexy myself, but I’m aware there’s a lot of myth and prejudice floating around about trans bodies, and orientation and kinkiness (or lack thereof) don’t seem to make a difference in the level of transphobic BS. Worse than that, I’m afraid that getting a blowjob is somehow going to make me dissatisfied with my cock, either because my size will compromise the experience or because my partner says or does something interpetable as dislike or pity. I don’t want pity. I want someone who’s as into my cock as I am. I don’t know how to find that and I sorta think that admitting how good I feel about myself will come off as crass because it’s cliche that men are all about their dicks, right? And no one wants to hear about that. But I really, really, really want a blowjob!

Sounds like you’re proud of your body without being a narcissist, which is sexy. And chicks like me abound, and we love giving blowjobs to sexy guys. Thus, I find it hard to believe this story isn’t going to have a happy ending. Please let me know how your first blowjob goes!

I haven’t had sex in five years and I’ve never dated. I’m almost thirty and I have no idea what I’m doing! I thought this was only supposed to happen to religious fundamentalists.

I frequently lie about my sexual experience (pointedly the lack there of). To myself I count the times I had sex as one, but he didn’t get his dick all the way in before he came so I’m even lying to me about it kind of. The real confession is that I read sex blogs and pretend I have the bloggers sex lives when I’m talking to my friends.

Calling all firsts, lasts, fantasies, lusts, fables, and laments: send me your secrets here.

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.

Many of the women in my acquaintance have remarked to me that they’ve given blowjobs to a lot more guys than they’ve had penis-in-vagina sex with. Some of them insist that their “number” doesn’t include blowjobs, but if it did they’d be dangerously close to the “slut” category.

I’m not in this camp. First of all, I see no problem with a higher-than-average “number”. I love sex, and I figure that anyone who would judge me for having had the amount of sex I’ve had would be someone who I’d either a) not tell (e.g. family members, employers), or b) not care if it bothered (e.g. people I’d rather know sooner than later that I oughtn’t date). As a nerdy chick who’s never been wicked popular in the romantic arena, I actually feel like kind of a stud each time my number goes up (it’s at a whopping, debaucherous eight now, if you care). Secondly, I’ve had vaginal intercourse with six guys and given blowjobs to six guys, although one guy was intercourse without any blowjobs and one was blowjobs without any intercourse… still, it evens out. Thirdly, though, I think that oral sex is sex. To me there’s no real ideological distinction, although there sure as hell are other distinctions. But I just can’t see my way to “not counting” oral sex if we’re counting sex partners. Am I just going to not count people I had awesome orgasms with? Am I going to not count women because neither of us has a (real, flesh) penis? Horsefeathers.

But that’s not to say that blowjobs are in every way equivalent to vaginal intercourse. That’s not true at all. I enjoy giving blowjobs, yes, but not in the same way that I love have a cock plunge into my eager pussy. While both can give me orgasms (giving head can be that much of a turn on, yes), the latter has a much more direct and reliable mechanism with which to do so. I’m more finicky about the former. If I don’t particularly like you, I might consider using you for sex but putting your dick in my mouth won’t appeal to me at all. So (perhaps predictably) when a relationship is going downhill, I tend to avoid giving oral sex but still want to fuck. Yeah, I’m pretty much a selfish jerk that way.

Oral sex is very intimate and personal, and that’s part of why it’s so sexy. It’s completely devoting your attention to someone else’s pleasure. That intensity turns me on like crazy. Which, paradoxically, makes me want to fuck. So, while it’s hot to suck cock until hot semen gushes down my throat and all, at times there’s a (big) part of me that feels like a little kid whose ice cream fell off the cone and onto the cruel, hard ground. To wit, it feels like a waste of a perfectly good erection that could have been pleasuring me. Again, yeah. Selfish.

So the best of both worlds is certainly to have a blowjob segue into intercourse: in hooker speak, the ever popular half-and-half.

But today I heard something rather disturbing. My friend Miriam Spiralti has great sex with her fiancé, but they aren’t entirely compatible in terms of drive. As she told me a few years ago, “When we were seeing each other once a week, we fucked once or twice every day… for two days straight. Now that we live together I want exactly that amount per week, and he wants exactly that frequency.” He especially wants oral sex daily, and she likes giving it, but it’s getting to feel like an obligation. And here’s the kicker… it “doesn’t count” if it transitions into sex. It also “doesn’t count” if it’s a short session, and he tries to make the spectacular “I’m getting my cock sucked” feelings last as long as possible. So Miriam ends up feeling burned out on marathon blowjobs and feels more and more reluctant to give them, and her man feels frustrated and unfulfilled. Not a great situation.

I blame this “it doesn’t count” mentality. What’s with all these rules about what counts when it comes to blowjobs? They don’t count as sex, it doesn’t count if they’re not done to completion, etc. I mean, there are no stone tablets I’m aware of that give us the Articles of Head, but to my mind, if I’m sucking your cock you’re pretty much getting a blowjob, and I should probably list you as a sexual partner. Just saying.

Anyway, I jokingly suggested that Miriam tell her fiancé he gets 30 minutes of oral sex a week, and can break it into six 5-minute blowjobs, three 10-minute blowjobs, or one half-hour session…his choice. “That’s actually a really good idea!” said she. If she actually implements this plan I’m pretty sure I’m going to have a hit out on me in the near future, so this blog might get very assassin-run-in heavy all of a sudden.

Oh, man. Some people are not happy about the new Candie’s Foundation PSA featuring Bristol Palin.

The Candie’s Foundation, founded in 2001 by Candie’s, a shoe/apparel/fragrance brand, was started to “shape the way young people in America think about teen pregnancy and parenthood.” and “…educate America’s youth about the devastating consequences of teenage pregnancy.” My snarky side can’t help but wonder if this foundation carries an air of overcompensation about it, considering the fact that Candie’s has drawn heat over racy ad campaigns in the past, such as a print ad photograph of Jenny McCarthy sitting on a toilet, and this fragrance ad (see right) that had to be modified to a “tamer” version for certain publications by removing the condoms and butt crack (because, you know, depicting an unsafe sexual situation is much tamer), but remains hypersexual and (to some) disturbing in either iteration.

I don’t disagree with the Candie’s Foundation’s purpose. They state on their website that the “only 100% way to avoid pregnancy is to not have sex. If you do have sex, you need to use protection every time.” And guess what, urban legends about semen-laced bullets notwithstanding, they’re right! Their discourse is abstinence heavy, but stops short of advocating abstinence-only education. I have no problem with promoting abstinence to a point. After all, many teenagers aren’t ready for sex, and it’s perfectly okay to try to encourage them to wait until they are ready. Candie’s Foundation has used spokeshotties like Hayden Panettiere, Beyoncé, Usher, and Hillary Duff, people that their target audience might look up to, as well as famous cautionary tales like Jamie Lynn Spears and Bristol Palin, to drive this point home.

One aspect I dislike about the Candie’s Foundation’s methods is that they promote a “Don’t be a slut! Be a tease!“ message. This is not their only message, but it is very well-represented in their campaigns. They offer t-shirts and tank tops that have “I’m SEXY enough… to keep you waiting.” emblazoned on the front. I don’t think it’s wise, helpful, or empowering to pressure young women to try to be sexy (i.e. an object of someone else’s desire), while telling them that if they actually act on their own sexual desires they’ll be devalued.

The foundation’s new PSA features Bristol Palin, daughter of Sarah Palin and single teenage mother of some kid with a name that’s just about as weird as hers, saying “What if I didn’t come from a famous family? What if I didn’t have all their support? What if I didn’t have all these opportunities? Believe me, it wouldn’t be pretty. Pause before you play.”

I’m assuming that “pause” here means to either stop and obtain birth control or stop and think, inclusive. I don’t interpret it as a strict “no sex until marriage” message, but you can watch it below and come to your own conclusions.

It’s ConTuesday! On Wednesday. Remember, please, that a day late is not always a dollar short. Which basically just means that I think we have a good batch this week.

I think Lemon Party is kind of cute. I’m not attracted to the men in question, I’m just happy to see those old dudes having fun and getting it on in their declining years. It gives me hope for the future. I honestly don’t get why people are so horrified by it.

When I was a teenager, I used to stick my tongue up my boyfriend’s nostrils and sometimes I’d pull his nose hairs out with my teeth. I thought it meant we were very intimate.

(When I was a teenager I thought my boyfriend leaving a surprise  context-free dog collar on my car for me to find the morning after a sleepover with my girlfriends was weird until he explained that it was romantic. Not why it was, just that it was. Ah, to be young again.)

My friends host porn parties sometimes where we have a potluck and mock the porn story lines and techniques. I mock the porn, too… but secretly some of it turns me on.

(Porn turns me on too, buddy. We should start a support group.)

One of my best friends in the whole world has been in love once in her life. She’s over 30 now. She was dating a guy who was a bit dickish. I was friends with him too, but he was a dick. He talked behind her back about how she wasn’t right for him and he felt trapped. He started off using her for sex but it got out of hand and he didn’t think he could ever have feelings for her.

One night him and I were hanging out while she was out of town and he tried to kiss me. I dodged it and told him he was out of line. I never told her about the kiss that almost happened. He dumped her about a month after that. I told her she was better off, but I’ve never brought myself to tell her that he tried to cheat on her with me. I think it would destroy her.

I still masturbate to nekkid pics of 2 of my exes. They think I’m destroyed the digital images, but those are really hot women were talking about. Deleting them is worse than smashing a priceless painting. It’s a mite shady, but I’m being the gentleman considering I could have them all up on the internet right now.

I laugh louder than anybody at homo/fag/gay jokes…unless my gay friend who’s dick I regularly suck is listening. My girlfriend thinks I’m being sensitive, but really I don’t want him to be offended and stop our secret ‘movie nights’.

I tweeze the stray hairs around my nipples religiously. When I move in with my boyfriend I’m going to have to be very sneaky about my tweezing, because he always talks about how his ex had nipple hair and how grossed out it made him. I always carry tweezers in my purse in case we get trapped on a deserted island.

I had a girlfriend for a while who was both kinky and had self-esteem problems. And was religious. I could hit all her buttons and make her forget all of that and do whatever I wanted, whatever she wanted… and then she’d come off the endorphin high and wallow in regret, and come back to me so I could make her feel better again. I don’t know if it was rape. She said yes after she said no, does that make it okay? After her brain chemistry changed because of things I was saying or doing, and she was willing to do things she explicitly told me not to do, is that rape? She didn’t think so, my friends didn’t think so, my psychologist didn’t think so, but something inside me keeps saying it was. But if it was, why don’t I feel bad about having done it…

My college boyfriend didn’t want to have sex before marriage, but I convinced him that oral sex wasn’t sex (something I don’t really believe) and, after he said no more oral, that it didn’t count if I gave him a handjob and he only finished in my mouth. I feel kind of bad about it, but mostly I’m just annoyed that he didn’t want to have sex with me.

…These last two confessions are particularly interesting in juxtaposition to each other. Without clarifying details, they could easily be describing very similar situations, but one confessor’s partner was female and the other was male. Was one of these more disturbing to read than the other? I’m really curious what everyone thinks.

Anything you’d like to confess? Anything with which to shock and amaze this corner of the internet? Lay it on me.

You know what’s frustrating? Entitlement. Or, I guess I should say a misguided sense of entitlement. I don’t like it when I run into it on the freeway or at the grocery store, and I sure as goddamn don’t like it when it burrows into my sex life.

A sense of entitlement, in my experience, can be the biggest distinction between a date and a rapist. It often transforms a partner into a bully, a disappointment into a snit, and if it doesn’t let up your sense of entitlement will make me want to stop touching your naughty bits, without fail.

Not too terribly long ago I used to mess around with Clifton Overmangle. He proved a challenging playmate. If we interacted on a purely platonic level, we were fine. Mostly. Sure, he mocked my voice, my clothes, my mannerisms, and my lack of coordination ruthlessly, which wasn’t totally fun, but tolerable. When bathing suit areas come into the equation, though, mockery became one small element in a constellation of issues. His only two settings were “not touching me” and “hurting me”, omitting all the luscious possibilities that lie between. Sure, roughness has a place, but more importantly it has a time, and that time is not always. Additionally, his interest in my pussy was conspicuously outstripped by his involvement in my ass. I’m absolutely up for anal play, but I hate feeling like my genitals are either going to be neglected or considered a chore.

Also, he was a “virgin”, only interested in oral and possibly saddlebacking at some point. I’m not a fan of technical virginity in concept. Feel free to do whatever you like on your own timeline, but when you’re sexually active and claiming that you’re a virgin because of which orifices are involved, I have to ask, what are you protecting? A hymen you could’ve broken in a hundred comparatively boring ways? Some magical brand of virtue I’m unaware of that doesn’t tarnish when mouths and asses are substituted for vaginas? A pretend superiority over the rutting masses… you know, the ones who rut in a slightly different way from you? In addition to all the other ways that it’s silly, insisting that digital and oral sex aren’t real sex is tantamount to saying it’s impossible for me to fuck a girl because I have no penis. It’s an absurd construct, and I feel hypocritical enabling it.

Despite all this, we had some good times. On rare occasion, there’s some appeal to the prospect of having a few anal orgasms, getting bruised up all over, and ending up with a penis in my mouth. Eventually, though, the inarticulate rage that I sensed behind his roughness got to me: I became more and more convinced that it was coming from a hostile rather than a playful place. It felt like he was working out his internal choler on me just because I was there and physically weaker. When I tried to talk about it, he opined that I was a control freak and wanted to micromanage his behavior. When I explained that it was upsetting me, he argued that it shouldn’t. Yeah, well, it did. So I went on a Clifton sabbatical. This wasn’t an attempt to punish him by withdrawing sexual favors or acting out of pique; I just felt like our emotional tendencies were poorly matched. Anger distresses me, and he seemed consumed with it.

It wasn’t long before Clifton decided I could help him in another way. I should send him pictures: pictures of my ass, my tits, my feet, my pussy (even my pussy, of all things!). He reasoned that it shouldn’t be emotionally taxing for me, and he would be less bothered by the fact that we weren’t sexually interfacing anymore. It was, he asserted, the perfect solution.

Um no.

“With the glut of good porn out there, I’m sure you’ll manage without me,” I responded, unimpressed. I didn’t understand, he protested. He needed my help; I was more of a fantasy object for him than I knew. My body, my expressions, my blowjobs… there were times when he wanted to get off to me, and his usual porn was no help. He needed dirty pictures from me, and he needed them immediately because he was turned on now and it was getting late. These are arguments perfectly situated to thud against a skeptic’s mind with the true ring of bullshit. How can a fully aroused male not have a plan B? Especially when plan A hasn’t even admitted to owning a camera. Even if he was incapable of finding satisfaction without an image of me to wank to for some occult reason, that didn’t make it my problem. Invoking the already stupid fallacy of “You gave me blue balls, therefore you owe me _______.” at a distance of several miles insults everyone’s intelligence.

He was upset that I refused. I was selfish, arbitrary, cruel, unfeeling, and more willing to indulge my insecurities than help out a friend. For months he repeated his request, and this was the new complexion of our “friendship”.

There are people out there who enjoy trading racy pics over the internet with friends, strangers, partners, whatever. I’m not one of them. I’m not any kind of exhibitionist. When it comes to photographs, I haven’t evolved much past the loathing I cultivated during my adolescent awkward phase. I’ve spent entire years of my life avoiding cameras: I literally cannot provide visual confirmation that I was on this planet in 2004, and I’m okay with that. For me, giving someone sexy pics is a big deal, and it requires perhaps more trust than bondage would.

Now, it didn’t irritate me that he asked for pictures. It irritated me that he did not stop asking. He became pushy, plaintive, and disrespectful about it. I never understood when getting a picture of my ass became his inalienable right. When did desire become entitlement?

After literally hundreds of denials from me, he recently suggested we start meeting up again as a way to alleviate his preoccupation with pics. Circular? Not to be believed! In addition to the old problems, I didn’t want to physically deal with someone whom I routinely had to remind over and over in text that my body is subject to my choices, and that no means no. Even for a “virgin”, you’d figure this stuff is pretty elementary. Thus we found ourselves at a total impasse, and at that point each of us had a moment of crystalline clarity:

1) I realized that as much as I like to give people multiple chances before I cut off contact completely, I actually already had in this case, and things were only getting worse.

2) Clifton realized that I wasn’t going to give him naked pictures or blowjobs in the foreseeable future.

My insight made it a great deal easier to take the insults that flowed from his; I was done, he knew I was done, and now it was just a matter of hearing why I had been really, horribly, inhumanly unfair about all of this. I sat through it because I find that when you deprive a guy of his parting shot, he never feels quite fulfilled enough to leave you alone after that. And Clifton and I were at last on the brink of the exciting and glorious prospect of leaving each other the hell alone for good and all.

I’ve had to deal with this type of thing too many times: just because you’ve had or think you could have fun with my body doesn’t make it yours. I’ll decide what I want to touch, where I want to be touched, whom I want to invite inside me, and whether I want to send images of any part of me. If that’s selfish, then… fuck that. It’s not selfish. It’s my birthright. It’s non-negotiable and as true for me as it is for everyone else. To these few but precious things, I am justly and unquestionably entitled.

It was a while ago at this point, so I’m not entirely sure where it all went wrong. The idea was good. I would write erotic fiction for a semi-popular porn website and they would pay me $20 for each short story I cranked out. Not only was this easy money, but it presented an ideal excuse when it came time to actually do my homework. I was always on the lookout for novel ways to avoid homework.

The stories I came up with weren’t the worst to ever infect the genre, but that may be the best I can say for them. Once in a while I’ll linger over the old backup files because I need a good laugh, and will I ever laugh! At the two-dimensional characters fucking through showers of synonyms and tinny dialog (ex: “You geek, there’s no such thing as a superhero. I am, however, a super-human screw, if you care to try it out,” after which the character gives a saucy wink, naturally. Sweet Christ why did no one stop me?) At the more and more absurd scenarios I manufactured as paper-thin pretexts for ineptly written sex scenes. At how altogether silly they seem now. Occasionally, though–out of nowhere, I’ll find a sentence or two that’s almost hot… to me. Usually these sentences tend to somehow invoke the concept of tension.

I was still a virgin: a technical virgin, the most hilarious kind. Believe I knew tension. I’d fooled around with my oddly sex-adverse college boyfriend, but “sex-sex” was an odd taboo between us. Showing too much interest in intercourse was tantamount to spoiling for a fight back then. My inexperience may have thrown the wrenchiest of all the wrenches bogging down my fledgling erotic writing career. Of course virginity really never stopped anyone from writing about sex (I’m looking at you, fanfiction.net), but when a 10-year-old boy first draws two concentric circles and calls it a boob is it really fair to call that erotic art? And he certainly shouldn’t expect anyone to hand him $20 for his trouble. Getting paid to clumsily explore one’s sexuality is, of course, a pretty nice job if you can get it, but the results are bound to be awkward.

When I reread my old erotic fiction it occurs to me that although I knew the rudiments of orgasm, I didn’t really understand how sex works: the logistics, the sensations, the movements and blistering chemistry of bodies really overlapping. I also didn’t, DID NOT, understand attraction. It was all but impossible for me to navigate the murky waters between rawest acquaintance and bareback. All too often that transition was settled with a jaunty “wanna fuck?” proposed by one of the characters, usually the girl because the porn site was (brace yourself) targeted to men, and it seemed to me the kind of thing a guy might like, having a hot-as-only-fiction-allows female offer sex completely unsolicited. Come to think of it, my reasoning there was fair.

If I’m being honest, I still don’t have a handle on attraction, but we’ll revisit that some other time.

It’s odd to me that I never got any complaints from the client. They seemed perfectly happy with my work, although frankly, who reads erotic fiction on a pay site anyway? I could’ve gone on for decades. Maybe I would’ve hit some kind of stride, once I had a little more familiarity with my subject.

Eventually I just lost interest and stopped writing smut. One of the most frustrating things about writing for a glorified Girls Gone Wild porn site with a (for lack of a better term) frat boy demographic was the fact that as much as I didn’t understand my own sexuality I just absolutely,  7,000 times more, didn’t understand theirs. I mean, it’s possible… just barely possible… that that saucy wink I threw in really spoke to them. But if I knew that for a fact, I really couldn’t live with myself.