“Well, I mean…” I tilted my head thoughtfully, “It really depends what you’re counting as ‘together’…” We started fucking about a year ago, but we’d been making out for a month or two at that point. We sort of sauntered casually into “seeing each other” and lingered there a while until we finally admitted we were “boyfriend and girlfriend” about six-ish months later (our friends-in-common were all pretty amused when we finally figured that one out.) But we still didn’t say “I love you” until months after that. And we started being “in a relationship” on Facebook a while later.

It’s possible that we have commitment issues. Either that or he’s just been incredibly understanding of the ones I know I have. Which really aren’t that horrible. It’s just the swift, jarring kind of commitment that scares the shit out of me, so my tendency is to take it to the other extreme: the laughably obvious kind of commitment that gets lapped by molasses-flavored glaciers.

As a result, Laramy and I don’t really have an “anniversary”. In fact, anniversaries confuse me for the reasons stated above. They’re so arbitrary. I understand wedding anniversaries. A wedding is a finite date that you can point to and say “something started here”. But short of that, it’s murky: the kind of relationships I have don’t have inaugural ceremonies. I have never, in my life, thought I was on a “first date”. Of course, you don’t need a first date. You can use any of the following milestones as your anniversary:

• first awkward pat/hug
• first kiss
• first grope
• first manual sex
• first oral sex
• first intercourse
• first penetration with produce (not advisable, btw)
• first fight
• first time you met each other’s friends
• first time you met each other’s parents
• first time you had to apologize for asking to meet your new paramour’s parents because s/he’s an orphan

…and the list goes on and on. If a bunch of these things happened to occur on the same day, that makes it easy (note: I did not just call you easy), but otherwise it ends up being, like I said, pretty arbitrary. Then, some people have the grand idea of celebrating anniversaries for every little progression in their relationships, which for me would feel much like the:

• first time I wanted to die.

Seriously, that would suck.

Edwin Pomble, my boyfriend previous to Laramy, was more pro-commitment and pro-fanfare. To give an example, he told me he loved me the second time we had sex, when we’d known each other for a month, tops.  (I’m not saying that’s a bad idea in general, only that I sure as goddamn found it alarming.) He and I were together for four years, and I never quite got the hang of when our anniversary was (or what, precisely, it commemorated).  I was pretty sure it was in a month ending in “ber”, but I never advanced beyond that. If I’m being honest, I wasn’t very happy in that relationship and it’s possible that I actually just didn’t find it particularly worth celebrating. So my brain passive-aggressively refused to remember the date, which was a dickish move. And it bothered him that I couldn’t be arsed to keep track of which day in which “ber’. It should’ve been a clue to both of us that it was time to move on.

So I don’t know exactly how long I’ve been with Laramy. A year-ish. A really great year-ish, during which I’ve gotten to get closer and closer, at my own pace, to a person who amazes me and complements me and tolerates me and makes me happy. I’m incredibly lucky that way. And we’re worth celebrating, but I honestly think we do, constantly, in our own ways.

(image source)

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)

Today's post isn't really about sex. But this makes up for it, no?

I was born in the United States, and that’s where I live. Today is Independence Day here. It commemorates not any victory or truce, but simply the intention to stop being a trodden-upon colony. This is kind of like celebrating your anniversary with a paramour on the day you first admitted you wanted to fuck each other rather than the day you actually did for the first time. Which is fine, really, just an interesting choice that becomes completely meaningless unless there’s some decisive follow-through. Which, in the case of the Declaration of Independence, there was. It was called the Revolutionary War.

I’m somewhat conflicted as a U.S. citizen. It always feels awkward that there’s not a proper word for us. “American” is desperately broad and kind of pushy, as if the manifest destiny myth gives us the right to claim ourselves the sole possessors of all flavors and varieties of Americas, some of which are entire continents. Sure, “America” in this case is just shorthand for “United States of America”, and no one else seems to need it as much as we do (try saying United Statesian. It just doesn’t work), but it bothers me anyway. Other things bother me more profoundly. Our country was never, even once, all integrity and liberty and pie. The United States government and its citizens systematically slaughtered and displaced the people of sovereign native nations to get us where we are today. They enslaved and exploited those people and so many others for generations. No ends justify those means.

I don’t believe our founding fathers were infallible or indefatigably noble. I don’t think that they necessarily planned for “all men are created equal” to mean seriously fucking everyone someday. They were, as we are, products of their era and culture, and that means they had some pretty shitty ideas about plenty of subjects. Instead of perfect intentions and godlike wisdom (or even the moral high ground), though, they gave us wonderful promises and forged them into law. That’s their beautiful legacy.

What I love about my home are the promises it was built on. Those flawed men gave us the framework to grow into an honest, fair, and free society, or as close as we’re likely to ever get. I intensely believe this, and it makes me grateful and yes, proud.

But just because those promises were made doesn’t mean they’re automatically kept. I don’t just think, I observe that we’re not as free as we think we are in this country. Votes become increasingly difficult to verify as paper ballots are phased out. Appointing corporate lobbyists to White House cabinet and advisory positions has become de rigueur. People are lining up to hand in their reproductive rights, relinquish free speech (funny how limiting someone else’s rights also compromises your own), and to thwart the one provision in the Constitution that seems designed to give us a fighting chance if everything goes irretrievably to hell. We’re losing cherished friends, family, and compatriots in two interminable wars that most of us don’t seem to believe in. Our president, who was stridently opposed to the Patriot Act while he was campaigning, recently extended it by a year, and was met with precious little outrage.

The government can do bad things. It will sometimes try to do them in secret. There are recorded, admitted instances where this has happened in the past. So I have to ask, has any government in history ever cleaned up its act and restored its integrity on its own, without a coup, a war, or at least the undeviating insistence of an incensed public? What makes us think a government that, for example, covertly performed mind-control experiments on many of its citizens without their informed consent mere decades ago can be trusted today?

And yet, apathy thrives. Helplessness encroaches.

I realize that everyone has a different vision of the ideal America (mine has a lot of naked frolicking). I don’t know the answers to everything, and I’m not pretending to. I just feel very strongly that no good can come from a nation’s citizens having fewer rights and sitting idly by while more important promises are broken. Even if you’re not using all your rights or you don’t particularly like some of them, aren’t they… I dunno… kind of nice to have? Just in case?

My fellow United Statesians, have a great Independence Day. See fireworks. Grill meat (or tofu, if you’re kinky like that) over fire. Celebrate your state’s relaxed sodomy laws. Do something outdoors. Our nation is beautiful and you have every right to love it. But today I feel bound to remind myself that freedom isn’t something you’re necessarily born with and get to keep. That’s the way it should be, in a perfect world, but in reality freedom can be taken away at any time. That’s when you have to decide whether or not you’re going to declare your intentions to fight for it. And then, fucking follow through.

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 wish my girlfriend would fuck someone else a few times. (sounds a bit crass when put that way) We were both virgins when we first decided to share our bodies, but the problem is that she still acts like a virgin despite the couple of years that we’ve been together. It’s impossible to experiment, even dirty talk still embarrasses her, and she has no real sex drive and can’t seem to tell me when she wants sex. Coming from someone with exactly the same amount of experience this may seem presumptuous, but I really think she might change if she stopped thinking of herself in the same virginal light.

I give myself enemas all the time. Sexually. It’s awesome. I have no poop fetish, I don’t get off on the poop part, (in fact I have to fastforward past the “expulsion” scenes in enema porn) I just love the feeling of my ass being completely filled up. I wish I had a bigger enema kit so I could give myself HUGE amounts of water.

I’m in a polyamorous relationship with my wonderful fiance. We each have a couple secondary relationships that are completely above board. He thinks that this is the first time I haven’t cheated in a relationship, but he’s wrong. I’m maintaining a secret affair with a guy he really doesn’t like. My fiance would be stressed out if I told him about it because he doesn’t trust my lover, but it wouldn’t be a dealbreaker and he’d never give me an ultimatum. I could be honest. The thing is, I just love the rush of doing it in secret.

The worst part is, I know the fact I’m lying would devastate him.

Psychologists say that paraphilias often evolve from phobias, which in my case is totally true, in that lately I have been so turned on by pregnancy: the thought of getting pregnant, being pregnant — I’ve even been looking at pregnancy porn! In real life, I only want to actually have maybe two kids, but that doesn’t stop me from masturbating furiously to it.

I use the web site Nookist to keep track of my sex life, just for fun. If you go a certain length of time without updating, they send a message asking you where you’ve been. I always feel like it’s adding insult to injury – I’ve been a long time without sex, and now the internet is mocking me?! Trust me, I know I haven’t had sex in a month. I know that well.

That would be a damn depressing email to arrive in one’s inbox: “Ohai. We’ve noticed you’re not getting any. WHY NOT?”

I’d been dating a guy for about 8 months long distance. I was planning a trip to go to his place for a week over the summer. A few days before I left, my mom sat me down told me all about her bloody (seriously – she said she bled through the mattress), painful, awful virginity story to discourage my from losing my virginity… six months after I already had. I just kind of nodded and thought to myself, “Huh. Guess I’m lucky mine was good, then!” She still thinks I was “innocent” for months longer than I was.

Why don’t you send in a secret of your own?

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.

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.

They’re a middle-aged couple. He’s husky with a Van Dyke goatee; she’s short and slight and definitely shops in the juniors’ department. Often they have costumes on: a cowboy hat and loud print button-up for him, platform boots and mini-skirts for her. The first time I saw them they were wearing matching gold lamé outfits, so to me they’ll always be the Gold Lamé Couple. I can’t explain how intensely I adore them.

The thing you have to understand about the Gold Lamé Couple is that they take karaoke very seriously. The other thing you have to understand about them is that they are not strictly very good at it. Their singing isn’t anything to write home about, but they commit. You think you’re committed to karaoke? Do you bring your own CD case full of Black Eyed Peas and Lady Gaga karaoke tracks? Do you have a prop bag? Is there a harmonica for every conceivable key in your prop bag? Have you ever pulled out a whip and set a hula hoop aflame whilst performing “Circus” by Britney Spears? Yeah. Didn’t think so. The Gold Lamé couple comprehends all these wonders and more.

My friend Miriam likes to play a little game when she’s at bars. She looks around at the different couples and tries to guess what kind of relationship each pair has and how long they’ve been together. She’s either pretty perceptive or great at bullshit because she can usually back up the reasoning behind her guesses with details about  body language and other visual cues. She thinks the Gold Lamé couple found each other fairly recently, perhaps a second marriage for each. Miriam suspects they were tired of decades of boring relationships and their exuberance about karaoke mirrors their glee at finally finding someone to really cavort with.

Eloise, another friend of mine, surmises that they aren’t even together romantically but decided to form a platonic partnership, knowing that they had the potential to be a gestalt karaoke tour de force. They do it just for the love of performing…in front of thirty or so pub patrons. Their electrifying chemistry is limited to what they do on the mic. And with props. And the choreography.

The one thing everyone agrees on is that they probably practice their act for hours every week at home. You don’t mess with hula hoop fire without a trial run or six.

But I prefer Miriam’s theory. I want the Gold Lamé Couple to be a real couple. It makes me smile to know that maybe these two people have something beautiful and playful and oddly fearless. They don’t care what they look like to each other or the pub at large. They go balls out and have fun, wasting no time being self-conscious. If they ever settled for boring before, they certainly don’t anymore.

And if that’s what they’re like about everything, I think they might just have the perfect relationship. Life, and especially love, should be like music you don’t care if anyone else likes… and definitely like a motherfucking flaming hula hoop.

Stranger rape is kind of like a shark attack.

Can you always maneuver around these things? No. Albuquerque has an aquarium, and when an evil psycho wants to hurt someone he usually finds someone, and sometimes there’s not a lot you can do can make sure it’s not you.

When you get attacked by a shark, there may be a few people who say that you weren’t observing proper shark safety, or that you must’ve been dressed to look like a seal or something, but most people are correctly going to blame the shark.

Date/acquaintance rape is like a dog attack. There’s an adorable puppy in the park who looks perfectly friendly, and his owner says it’s okay to pet him. Everything seems okay, so you approach him and give him a friendly pat. Then, he tears your face off.

People will have a lot more opinions about a situation like this. You might hear a well-meaning “Did you let him see your hand before you touched him?” or a rueful “You should’ve known better than to try to pet a dog you didn’t know!”, even “You must’ve scared him!” It suddenly gets so much more complicated. Most people will be sympathetic, but a part of their minds may just work overtime to figure out how you were responsible because it’s scary to think that it could happen to them. And hell, they can’t imagine their dogs doing such a thing! Must’ve been something you did wrong. That makes it easier. But they’ll usually agree that you no longer have a face, that things went awry.

To be clear, I’m not saying that stranger rape is worse than date rape, although shark bites might tend to be more damaging than dog bites. I’m also not saying that rapists are like sharks and dogs. They’re actually like people…horrible, horrible people, and they’re completely responsible for their actions in a way that animals aren’t. I’m talking about attitudes here: the similes are about peoples’ beliefs and reactions to these events. Got it? Cool. We’ve got one more…

To some people, partner rape is like a Bigfoot sighting. It’s a ridiculous myth, a concoction beloved of the media and hyped beyond all reason. No harm was done, nothing out of the ordinary actually happened, and only lunatics and members of weird fringe groups believe in it.

But in reality, partner rape is more like a bite from a disease-carrying mosquito, spreading something really nasty, like the ugliest kinds of malaria or West Nile Virus. It is very real, and it’s a global problem. It can be invisible to the casual observer. The victim may have reasons to minimize the event or even think it’s commonplace, but the fallout is devastating. It is also, like a mosquito bite, not the victim’s fault.

People often dismiss partner rape. They’ll call it a gray area, or say that it’s “crossing a line” or “not cool” rather than saying it’s “illegal and disgusting”. It’s hard for many to grasp that a person can be raped by someone they’ve already consented to sex with in the past. It’s hard for victims to grasp that (see: my reluctance to call this rape); it’s hard for many experts-of-everything on the internet to grasp it. It’s obviously especially hard for the rapists to grasp it.

But when consent is absent and sex is happening, that’s rape. Consent must be clear before sexual activity starts. Assume a lack of consent until you have a clear positive indication that something’s okay. That’s the way human beings are supposed to treat other human beings. If you have to wonder whether your partner consents to a sexual activity, you should ask rather than assume. Nonverbal agreement is very possible (e.g. enthusiastic involvement, affirming grins, decisive nods), but if it isn’t obvious, you ask. And for the non-initiator, if you’re the kind of person who thinks consent questions “ruin the mood” and you prefer aggression from a partner, please become an emphatic nonverbal consenter or confirm what you agree to before things start, because an occasional “is this okay?” is a good, sexy habit that I’d prefer you not go around squashing. Consent doesn’t kill the mood. I promise.

After you get to know someone, consent cues can and do get subtler. You can relax a little when you trust each other. But if there’s hint of a “no” signal– verbal or nonverbal– everything stops. It’s your responsibility as a sexually active adult to ensure that you have consent. Every time.

That’s why the old tropes of “wifely duty” and “frigidity” and “compromise” are red herrings in the partner rape debate. There are lots of reasons someone might consent to sex when he or she doesn’t necessarily feel like it. A relationship is sometimes about compromise, and part of that might be agreeing to fuck your husband when you’re exhausted or to bone your girlfriend when you feel too fat. Sometimes it means that the partner with the lower sex drive tries to meet the partner with the higher sex drive halfway. All these things are okay. When you’re part of a loving couple, you often want to take care of your partner’s sexual needs even when you’re not precisely in the mood for it. But consent still needs to happen to get to that point. Compromise never means that the person who wants to have sex gets to force or pressure the one who doesn’t. If the pro-sex person wants to enact a compromise, it’s called “masturbating in the bathroom”. Only the anti-sex person gets to decide that sex is on the compromise menu.

Another thing people tend to say is that false rape reports are common, especially when a woman wants to hurt or punish a lover or gain the upper hand in child custody battles. It never fails. If you talk about rape, someone will probably eventually bring this up. About 2-3% of all reports of sexual assault are false, which is similar to percentages of false reports of burglary and grand theft auto. Lying about being raped is never okay, but this is not exactly an epidemic.

Those who are anxious for the continued safety of partner rapists can rest assured that victims are still reluctant to bring justified charges against their rapists, especially in cases of partner rape. It’s obviously hard to tell how underreported partner rape really is, but very, very, very is a good estimate. Women who are raped by their boyfriends, husbands and exes have a lot of shit to wade through, and sometimes pressing charges is just one thing too many. In addition to all the physical, emotional, financial, and sexual legacies the rape can leave, the victim may be dissuaded from prosecuting even if the police believe her. And if she gets that far, what are the odds that she’ll get a conviction against a man with whom she’s had consensual sex countless times before? Unfortunately, while the myths of gray areas, compromise, and rampant false rape reports persist, the convicted partner rapist is sort of like, well, Bigfoot. Or at least the Barbary Lion.

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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.”