quizzical pussy

I did not expect the air hunger to come back.

A few years ago when I was first started getting my stupid fucked-up illness I had this weird, deceptive shortness of breath. I knew I was taking air in because I made a point to draw ponderous diaphragm breaths all the way down, pushing my stomach out with each inhalation. Also, I demonstrably wasn’t dying. But it didn’t feel like my breaths were working. It felt like I was suffocating.

This is the kind of thing that seems like it would accompany a panic attack or something, but anxiety was never a factor… except, you know, the what-the-fuck-is-happening-why-am-I-not-breathing-right? thing that kept coming up somewhere in the middle of feeling like I wanted to tear my lungs out to expose them to open air directly. It’s something neurological, and it’s really disturbing. Fortunately I haven’t had to deal with this air hunger in a while. It went away for a few years as my back-stabbing body moved on to focus on other symptoms.

It came back tonight out of nowhere. While I was masturbating, actually. So here are my thoughts on this situation:

1. It kind of ruined my jack-off session and I’m pissed.
2. It is incredibly hard to sleep through these respiratory shenanigans.
3. (a corollary to #2) It is so terribly late that it is in fact early, but not that early.
4. I want to tear my lungs out and expose them to open air. Good idea?
5. I’m worried that this is not going to be an isolated, aberrant setback.
6. I’m so sleepy. And my hands and lips are tingly.
7. I hope this doesn’t happen next time I’m sleeping over at Laramy’s. That could be super annoying for everyone.
8. I had more orgasms in me, dammit.
9. I would like a trade-in body that works, and preferably has a really nice ass.
10. There should be ten things, since I was already up to nine.

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

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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.”

Does this happen every year?

The day after Valentine’s Day my laptop broke out in a rash of news articles and blog entries about sexual violence. Maybe it’s because sometimes rape feels like the other side of the sex coin that Valentine’s Day embraces, or maybe there was a coordinated effort/awareness day that I didn’t know about. Maybe the day-after-Valentine’s Day thing is a red herring and President’s Day is the real culprit. Maybe it’s Zeitgeist. I suck at Zeitgeist sometimes.

Breda got a day-early jump on the trend when she wrote about a video that was posted on ManUp, a campaign whose mission is to stop violence against women. The video’s original source is Omnipeace, “a humanitarian fashion brand that donates 25% of all profits to charities promoting peace, education, human rights and ending extreme poverty in Africa by 2025.” The video, which I’m going to call the iRape video, uses violence against women as a trope to call attention to ongoing violence in Eastern Congo over conflict minerals (tin, tungsten, titanium, and gold ore). The video isn’t just about rape, really. Rape is one “weapon” being used, and it’s not the only intolerable thing happening there: Omnipeace uses rape in the iRape video because sexual assault is especially visceral, horrifying, and to many the rape of a pregnant woman (which this video depicts) is even more so. The overarching issue is that electronics manufacturers (and by extension, consumers) are fostering violence (definitely including rape) when they buy these minerals from the wrong people and out of the wrong mines in the Congo. The escalating war crimes, the unchecked violence, and how corporations are providing economic motivation for them to continue, are the larger issues, and rape is but one really, horribly disgusting aspect of all that.

The iRape video does the job it was designed to do. It communicates the problem and even appropriates pop culture images culled from the once-ubiquitous silhouette commercials for Apple’s iPod. Surely Apple is one of Omnipeace’s biggest targets here, if only because it’s emblematic as an industry leader. In the sense that it presents information about conflict minerals and violence in the Congo, it accomplishes a lot in ninety seconds.

But it raises some issues. Some of us…well, I… think making rape into a cartoon/parody is just a shade tacky. Even the “iRape”… “iSuffer” copy in the video is so flippant it kind of makes me sick knowing that they don’t mean it as a joke, they’re only accidentally presenting it as one. When you use rape as a supporting argument or an attention-grabber you’ve just invoked something complex and rife with emotion– sometimes raw, throbbing pain. I also think it’s worthwhile for organizations to make it very clear when reposting and sharing the iRape video that it isn’t about rape in general. It’s pretty specifically about rape as a war crime, and to me it’s more successful at highlighting a regional conflict and its related atrocities than it is at saying anything about violence against women in a broader sense.

Breda linked to iRape via ManUp, “a global initiative to engage youth in preventing violence against women”. Theirs is an admirable goal, and I haven’t a clear enough picture of them yet to say whether I agree with their politics and methods or not. But clearly their mission isn’t specific to the Congo. So the fact that ManUp has the Omnipeace iRape video as the lone offering in the “Media Center” section of their globally-minded website seems like a counterintuitive decision because it depicts a very specific type of rape in a very specific context–with little surrounding explanation–on a website that has a very diffuse goal.

In war-torn Congo, rapists are certainly often armed. Non-combatant civilian women have no practical means to defend themselves nor access to legal justice. The details are far removed from what many of us might experience in other parts of the world (and in this and many other respects we are so damn lucky). Here in the United States, for example, that isn’t what rape usually looks like.

Breda’s point that self-defense knowledge and preparation (particularly access to and training with firearms) are key to preventing violence against women is an important one. Her declaration that “…the only way to stop violence against women is to make it a very, very risky endeavor,” is nothing more or less than absolutely true. There are dozens of ways to educate and mitigate and hope the bad guys stop being bad guys, and some of these can help, but they’ll never eradicate sexual violence. Only a culture that tolerates no rape and gives women the tools to enforce that standard would have any chance of existing beyond the threat of sexual violence. I’d be thrilled to see more organizations focusing on teaching women how to defend themselves, and spreading the message that it’s completely appropriate to do so. We shouldn’t be expected to leave our protection solely in the hands of men/authority figures/social change campaigns.

But it bears repeating that “you can fight back!” is not the same thing as “you should’ve fought back”, because I think sometimes people conflate the two. You can’t tell a rape victim she (or he) should’ve been “better” at being assaulted and violated. Well, obviously you can, but if you do, you’re an asshat. Empowering women to stop sexual violence dead in its tracks is good; expecting women to claw, shoot, gouge, or maim their way out of every such situation, and wondering what’s wrong with them if they don’t or can’t, is just another way of blaming the victim. Blaming the victim really needs to end, people. Rape isn’t just a physical fight, and even if it were, not everyone has the strength or reflexes or equipment to stop it. Sometimes sexual violence isn’t exactly what you expect it to be, and if we don’t have a clear and realistic picture of what diverse scenarios rape can include, we definitely can’t stop it, decry it, loathe it… in fact, we’re in immediate danger of tolerating it in many of its more insidious forms.

Ladies, are you prepared to fight whenever you’re on a date? Are you prepared to claw your best male friend’s eyes out at a moment’s notice? Would you kill your husband rather than succumb to forced sex with him, or might you take the abuse, and maybe even blame yourself for it? If you’re an average American silhouette woman bopping around to your iPod in Everytown, USA, the armed soldier bogey is probably not what you need to worry about. The scary shadow you need to keep your eye on is the inky outline of the devil you know.

I’m not saying that all the men in a woman’s life are potential rapists. I am saying that 77% of rapes are committed by non-strangers, and sometimes it’s hard to see these coming. If you’re a man and just felt a glimmer of umbrage reading the examples I gave at the beginning of the previous paragraph, your reaction should provide one flash of insight as to why women might have a disincentive to remain ever-vigilant and prepared against acquaintance rape. Often men want and encourage us to be on our guard with every guy… except with them, of course.

Britni posted a great piece on marital rape and the mythical gray area it presents. I want to address some of the things that occurred to me while reading it, but that will be its own blog entry (Soon, my pets. Very soon…) because I’m not writing a goddamn dissertation here. I’m just some chick on the internet who happens to be not so fond of rape.

I was born into an attractive family. My parents had about a million kids, and in the looks department they mostly range from “pretty cute” to “damn, girl!”. But I’ve always felt like a spectator in this particular sport. Early on, a family friend informed me that I was not the best looking of the litter, and that’s been reinforced in countless ways over the years. I’ve been described as “the smart one”, “the funny one”, and occasionally “the talented one”, which are honestly pretty awesome titles, maybe even preferable to just looking hot. But it still rankles that I was never, even if everyone else was knee-deep in an awkward phase, “the pretty one”.

I’ve always felt like I have to rely on my personality to attract people. I can (hopefully) get you to forget the bump in my nose or my too-round face by being charming and making you laugh. If I can rope you into a real conversation, I may have a chance at intriguing you, winning you over, and then maybe you’ll consider boning me. I do not feel confident that I can do this on looks alone. Without the personality factor, I’d probably still be waiting to go on my first date.

I’m not saying that everyone is going to like me for what’s inside: some people think I’m annoying, don’t find me funny, and wish I would shut up so much. But I have a fairly distinct personality that some people are drawn to, and I think that’s been responsible for whatever social and romantic success I’ve had.

Maybe that’s why I find humor, kindness, and intellect so central to what I find attractive in others. I actually find that these affect my evaluation of physical merits. This sort of thing probably happens to most people: you meet someone who seems sort of so-so at first glance, but as you get to know this person’s mind-blowingly cool personality, he seems to get better looking each time you see him. Or, conversely, your first impression of someone might be “Wow, she’s stunning,” but you learn that she’s hideous inside and it’s not just that you’re turned off by her personality, she actually seems to get uglier right before your eyes.

The latter is what happened with my first boyfriend, Reginald Sleeth. When we started seeing each other I thought he was beautiful. It wasn’t just me. I had a picture of him up in my dorm room at university, and girls would sometimes pass through, stare at it, and gush about how gorgeous he was. But by then he’d already flashed his true nature as controlling, abusive, and venomously angry down to his bones. Those girls could say what they wanted; I didn’t see it anymore. Sometimes I could barely even bring myself to touch him, he’d become so unattractive to me.

A less traumatic example occurred in the elevator at a recent Sci Fi convention I attended. Laramy and I stepped on from the twelfth floor, and we both noticed a chick with great tits and a cute face wearing a corset, flying cleavage like a banner from the back corner of the elevator. We both smiled appreciatively to each other; we generally check out the same women, and it’s wonderfully bonding. But within seconds she opened her mouth and started loudly complaining that no one was complimenting her boobs, and she wasn’t getting enough attention. Her aggressive griping continued through three stops on the way down and all the way to the first floor. By the time Laramy and I had reached the lobby we were completely irritated and turned off. She actually went from fetching to repulsive inside of five minutes.

So while looks matter, they’re not everything. I’d rather have someone interesting, witty, sweet, silly, and funny. Okay, and adorable. And I’ve had the good fortune and excellent taste to get more than my fair share of genuinely pretty people into bed. But sometimes adorable comes later, after all that other good stuff, and that can be pretty awesome too.

I was up way too late, but the Sci Fi convention I was attending had negotiated extended pool hours with the hotel. I couldn’t resist the temptation. I had to check out the hot tub.

I like cons. They’re silly and exuberant and many of my nerdy friends are there. But there are also all these… other people around. Some of them are the “friends you haven’t met” kind of strangers, indubitably, but there are also the “that guy that talks like a robot just farted on me in the elevator” kind. So conventions are admittedly a mixed bag.

Another thing about geeks: they’re often (not all of them, mind, but probably more than average) starved for attention, kinky, and accepting of the social quirks of others. I love this about them, but it puts a little extra pressure on me to be tolerant of quirks I don’t enjoy.

Take, for instance, bad breath. I have nothing against you if you have bad breath. I think you’re, like, fearfully and wonderfully made and stuff, and I’m sure your gorgon breath has nothing to do with dental hygiene and everything to do with a medical condition you can’t control. I’m not saying it’s your fault or that it reflects on you as a person (although I am totally judging you) but I’m still going to want a significant space between your face and mine. I would like you to stay outside the breath bubble, had I my druthers.

…And that’s just one example. But it often comes back to the personal space thing.

But I was talking about general acceptance before I was talking about my raging olfactory hatemongering. Acceptance is good. It’s freeing. Watching some of these people, it’s like a metric ton of societal pressures have been lifted off their shoulders for one weekend and they tool around frenetically, being who they wish they could be every day, in a gentler world.

This is all just a very round about way to say that as I entered the pool enclosure, 90% of the people there were stark naked.

Fandom is populated with some legitimately hot people and a host of other people that aren’t… I mean, that are more… well, people I’m sure are beautiful on the inside. I’m speaking for me here, since everyone finds different things attractive, but I’m going out on a limb and saying that there were three naked people tops at that highly attended pool party who would be considered above-average looks-wise.

Yeah, it’s shitty that my brain made evaluations about which naked people were pretty and which weren’t. They were just hanging out (ha) and not necessarily asking to be stared at and graded by shallow sex bloggers. But guess what? I’m human and I’m anonymously honest on the internet, and my brain probably didn’t do anything yours wouldn’t have. So there.

I wasn’t actually there to gawk at naked or to be naked. I was there to relax a bit in the hot tub before bed. If I flirted with some hot people (naked or clothed) so be it! But personally I’m a little naked shy, so I stripped down to my bra and knickers and grinned at my own cleverness having selected dark colored undies that day.

The sunken hot tub was crowded, but I found some space next to my (betrunked, if you’re curious) friend Crispin Hijanx. We chilled out and maxed, relaxing all cool, trying not to stare directly at anyone’s fun bits. It was all of two minutes before a naked (not ugly, if you’re curious) guy I’d never seen before came up and started small-talking me. I made some fairly bland, exhausted answers, failing in my attempts to not watch a curvy girl with an awesome ass ascend the hot tub stairs and dive into the nearby pool. When she was safely submerged, I turned back to my nameless naked companion.

“So,” he said, now that he had my attention, “you’re not going topless?”

I looked down at my bra “No. No, I guess I’m not.” Actually none of the women there were topless. They were naked or suited. But I guess Nameless Naked Dude thought boobs would be a good start.

“Why not?” Hmmmm. I’d never had a stranger ask me why I wasn’t showing him my tits before. His tone creeped me out: like he wasn’t mad, just disappointed. Like I was cheating him out of something. I suddenly felt oddly exposed. With all the flesh in that room he was feeling petulant that my breasts (probably the smallest pair in the room, even) were going to remain a mystery.

The cute thing about carefree light-hearted nudity is that no one makes that a big deal of it and no one solicits it. Everyone’s enjoying it, sure. That’s natural. But I don’t think that a hot tub needs an Ambassador of Naked. I didn’t have to flash Crispin the “save me” eyes or anything, but the whole exchange did convince me that the best way to get me to keep clothes on is to creepily request that I remove them. Maybe that was Nameless Naked Dude’s cunning plan all along: to keep me covered and hasten my departure. If so, his naked fu is very good.

I got food poisoning over the weekend. Or I guess it could’ve been stomach flu. Either way, there was overmuch puking and misery.

I was at Laramy’s when it hit. Our New Year’s Eve/Day had been grand, involving a party with friends, video games and merriment, kissing at midnight (which tradition I had never participated in before, for whatever odd reason), and, upon our arrival home, the kind of amazing, three-orifice sex that seemed to augur well for the coming (no pun intended) year.

Then, Saturday dawned and brought with it what I can only assume was the most treacherous grilled cheese sandwich ever to grace a plate. The fallout wasn’t pretty. You’re actually not here to read the painstaking details of my digestive system’s overthrow, so I’ll stick to what’s relevant. I was completely bricked, to the point where I couldn’t drive myself home (I live over an hour of freeway driving away from Laramy) and had to stay over an extra, unplanned night.

This is the kind of situation I loathe. Of course I hate being acutely ill — everyone does. But specifically, visiting Laramy and suddenly surprise! trapping him with a sick and woebegone me is pretty much a nightmare. I hate hate hate putting anyone, much less someone I care about, in that position.  In my religion, if I had one, imposition is one of the seven deadly sins, along with being boring and driving like an asshat.

It’s sometimes hard for me to fight that “okay, I’ve gotten you off, so I guess I’ll just flee immediately before there’s any chance of me being in your way, if you could please hand me my pants” impulse after sex; many’s the time I’ve practically fallen all over myself trying to make sure I wasn’t overstaying my welcome. I consciously try to be a low-impact partner: never in the way, never a burden. I want to keep things light and fun and never box anyone in. This habit may be a throwback to my first, abusive relationship and trying hard not to do anything too noticeable, but instead recede into the background whenever possible, which was the surest way to avoid unpleasantness… but that’s just a theory. Like evolution.

This weekend, there was no alternative. Laramy was stuck with me, and my shuddering, groaning presence was quite noticeable. I was more than willing to try to stay out of his way as much as possible, but he wasn’t having any of it. He cuddled me, helped me to the bathroom, ran to get me ice cubes. If I’d had long enough hair he probably would’ve held it back for me. He also forbade me from apologizing for inconveniencing him or fretting about the possibility I might’ve passed something on to him (I don’t think I did, happily), which I didn’t observe very well at all. But he was perfectly sweet throughout everything, and even said he was glad that if I had to get sick I’d done it with him around to take care of me.

It wasn’t the way he or I wanted to pass the weekend, but it could’ve been worse, considering. Also, we had no sex in the midst of me feeling completely awful, but we fucked– gently– as soon as I was reasonably sure the worst was over. Twice.

“Another reason we didn’t work… I think I’m a little kinkier than you.” There. I said it. It was a step away from admitting that my sex life with Edwin Pomble had been on the boring side, sometimes.

We’d been broken up for months, and we still had these periodic conversations about why he thought we should get back together and why I disagreed. I was willing– even anxious, for motives that have all but escaped me now, to try being friends. But I couldn’t date him. Not ever again. The reasons were manifold: they covered energy-sucking dealbreakers like his propensity for creating drama out of thin air, and his hobby of always making everything about him. There was the intellectual and educational deficit that echoed between us, parroting back his plaintive “I don’t know what sanctimonious means, so it doesn’t do any good to call me that.” There was also the fact that he’d said incredibly ugly things when I admitted to him that I’d been raped back in college, which made me loath to trust him. Maybe I didn’t even want to forgive him. Somewhere in the midst of all of it, I suppose I sort of stopped liking him. But also, as a little side issue, there was the boredom.

I have no problem with plain old vanilla sex. I love it, actually. Vaginal penetration, maybe a little foreplay beforehand– I’d never want to give that up. The problem is that it gets boring when the feeling that there’s never going to be any experimentation beyond that “no frills” plain sex insinuates itself. Because frills are such amazingly wonderful things. Even splendid traditional sex seems kind of oppressive when you start wondering if it’ll be the only thing on the menu until time beyond knowing. And that had been my relationship with Edwin. When we had plain old vanilla sex it was often good: his penis was just about as big as I could handle, and he often described cunnilingus as his favorite thing to do– many women would be ecstatic with this combination. He wasn’t very imaginative, though.

Whenever I brought up trying new things he never had a single solitary idea. I understand that sometimes these things are hard to talk about, but I don’t think he was hiding any dark fantasies; I really just don’t think he had any. He did mention that he was open to trying new things with me, though.

Once, I asked him to be aggressive during sex: quite aggressive, actually. We all want to be thrown around a bit and called a dirty little slut from time to time, right? Well, I do! I don’t want constant or erratic, unrequested aggression from a partner, but sometimes in a purely sexual context it’s a game I want to play for a little while. He seemed confused by the request, but he tried it out and did surprisingly well. He actually got quite into it after the first couple moments of uncertainty. I got off many times, he got off, and I felt heartened. It seemed a resounding success! “That was awesome,” he breathed. “Yeah,” I agreed. As we held each other in the dark afterward, waiting for sleep to seep behind our eyes, a new optimism flooded me. Maybe this was the beginning of something. Maybe we could start experimenting more. Maybe I’d underestima…Edwin interrupted my reverie with “If all rape was like that, they wouldn’t call it rape, amirite?”

Um. No. Fuck! Way to make it go from zero to creepy in one sentence, buddy. It kind of made my skin want to flip inside out just to get farther away from him.

I’m not going to say I never discussed trying new things with Edwin after that, but I always kept the discourse hypothetical: I never asked for another damned thing. It wasn’t the first bad experience I’d had sharing a fantasy, but I was determined that it would be the last time with him, anyway.

It helped that I didn’t need anything specific. My kinkiness isn’t very exact. I guess I want to try (mostly) everything: I want to take charge sometimes, get used as a fuck toy others. I want to play with an exaltation of toys, roleplay to make myself dozens of different people, and give and accept pleasure in a thousand different ways. As long as it’s safe, sane, and consensual, sex should be rife with boundless and varied possibilities. That’s the way to keep the game fun, I feel sure.

After our breakup, Edwin was angry and had a lot to prove. He talked about wanting to change for me, but I never wanted that. I didn’t want a different Edwin; I just didn’t want Edwin period. He figured if he could convince me that he’d transformed into a creature that contradicted all my stated reasons for not rushing back into his waiting arms, he would never have to feel rejected again. A few weeks after our conversation about kink, we decided to do the “hang out as friends” thing people often seem to try after deciding they were a big fat mistake together (dating-wise) but before deciding that they’re a big fat mistake together (any-wise). He reminded me of what I said with a smug little grin on his face. “You may have underestimated me,” he divulged. “You think I’m not kinky, but lately I’ve been researching a lot of new sexual positions. Don’t you want to try them out with me?” Aww, honey.

An expanded repertoire of ways to have no-frills vaginal penetration? Wow, somebody call the kink police immediately. Also, no. I do not want to try them out with you. I can actually find sexinfo101.com on my own, thanks.

My flirting skills are roughly on par with T-Pain’s singing ability sans Auto-Tune. I’m aware that I recently described performing lap dances for my friends, so I should probably clarify. I can flirt recreationally– purely for the joy and play of it all, but when the flirting might have a purpose (i.e. testing the waters for imminent sexin’), I suddenly have no idea what I’m doing. I can easily come on to people whom I feel sure aren’t a sexual possibility, when I feel safe with them and I know that they’re not going to read too much into it. But with strangers, I freeze. I don’t turn diffident or timid, understand; I’m just completely non-sexual. I’m practically one step shy of calling any potential suitor “bro”.

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Example:
Interior. Restaurant. Evening. Quizzical Pussy enters and sits down. An attractive gentleman caller saunters up to her table. Things are about to get pretty fucking uncomfortable, folks.

Gentleman Caller: Hi, I’m Roger Jollylad. I saw you when you walked in and thought you looked like lots of fun.

Quizzical Pussy: Ohai. I’m Quizzical Pussy. I try to bring the party, whenever possible. It’s kind of you to notice. (offers high five, like a tool)

Gentleman Caller: You’re cute.

Quizzical Pussy: My favorite dinosaur is Parasaurolophus. What’s yours?

Gentleman Caller: Do you want to maybe hang out sometime?

Quizzical Pussy: Ummmmmm. I’m going to go fight those guys in that booth over there. I’m pretty sure they’re assassins or something. Peace,  bro.

___________________________________________________________

It’s especially bad with guys. I think it’s because it’s so much easier to assume (because of statistics about sexual orientation and stuff) that women aren’t going to take pleasant recreational flirting seriously. Often, when a male comes up to talk to me in a bar or some other “let’s pick someone up” type of venue, he’ll end up asking me if I’m not into guys, because I’m just that neutral.

I’m not opposed to something coming of the “safe” flirting. It’s not a matter of teasing to get a jolt of power or control. Normally, for me, this type of flirting is about showing affection– not withholding it, and unexpectedly finding that playful flirting has transmuted into serious flirting is often a welcome and sweet development. Thing is, I’m not nearly as worried about people wanting to touch my naughty bits as that they will think I’m assuming that they might want to.

See, I’m concerned about being attracted to people without permission. About offending them for presuming that they’re viable conquests. I have no idea where I got this, or if it’s common at all. Maybe lots of people feel this way and no one admits it because it’s kind of silly. Rationally, I realize that most people aren’t going to backhand me for daring to see them as sexual possibilities. Even if not interested, chances are they’d be flattered by a little attention, right? It’s not because of logic that I’m so wary of imposing my libido or interest on people who haven’t invited it. It’s something else. Something stupid. Something I have the hardest time shaking. It’s so bad that I won’t allow myself to admit (even to me) an actual desire for someone until orgasms have come into play, or at least a vigorous make out. I can think you’re objectively pretty and even say you’re attractive in a general sense, but I won’t feel or express actual lust until I have the go-ahead that only physical interaction provides. And even then, I’m so very careful.

For someone who’s kind of a sex fiend, this is slightly obstructive. If I flirted a little more, a little better, judiciously, I bet I could get way more laid.

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.

“I want to visit a swingers’ club one of these days, just to see what it’s like.” I was sprawled out on Laramy’s bed chattering away, which is one of my newer hobbies. Laramy Fuquerton and I have been fucking for a few months now, with sterling success.
“Are there even any around here?” he wondered.
“Of course there are. They’re everywhere!” I said in the authoritative tone I save for bullshit. “…Well, I heard about one once.”

I’m not pretending I’d be visiting a swingers’ club strictly as an anthropologist, or a journalist, or to gawk at the sideshow freak adulterers, or as ambassador from Finland. It’s just that to participate in playful, no-strings sex with strangers (which I’ve never done, not even having had a single one night stand) I’d have to feel both comfortable and interested in record time. I wouldn’t rule that out, but I also wouldn’t bring an economy-sized tub of lube in anticipation. So yeah, really. I actually just want to see. Sometimes in a person’s sex life an idea presents itself that appears to have equal potential to be either hideously awkward or kind of neat, and sometimes you gamble on neat, because it’s a new experience. Barring actual trauma, the alchemy of time usually softens awkward to hilarious anyway.

One of the cool things about Laramy that I’m coming to understand more and more is that he’s very game. If I said “Hey, I’ve been thinking lately that it might be fun to try naked judo-style grappling, but in an igloo,” I’m starting to think he’d say “How do we make this happen?” and start researching how to avoid frostbite (stay tuned for the upcoming entry on how that went [you should probably know I'm lying]). Maybe it shouldn’t seem especially odd that a guy would respond with at least a tinge of interest to the prospect of going to a sex club, but his total lack of hesitation signifies a willingness of attitude that’s all too rare, in my experience. Anyway, he pulled up a listing of clubs in our state and we got down to business.

Not wild monkey sex business. Reconnoitering business.

I conspicuously didn’t say I haven’t a single anthropological bone in my body because that would’ve been a blatant lie and I never lie on the internet. Swingers as a subculture are fascinating. I want to ethnographize the shit out of them. Like most groups, they have their own little shorthand language. Of course it has many cognates in BDSM, regular sex-literate culture, and the sex industry, but some elements are idiomatic. Hard swap (two couples switching partners for full-on intercourse) vs. soft swap (switching that’s limited to oral play), for instance, is something I’ve never come across outside of swinging parlance because really, where else would you have opportunity to invoke these concepts but in (as they say) The Lifestyle? Swingers’ clubs are either on-premise or off-premise, which essentially means you can play on site or you can’t. Many of these seem to be more like Fight Club-style organizations that only exist when they’re in session rather than brick-and-mortar nightclubs. They all claim to be “upscale” and “drama-free”, and will likely repeat both these terms several times in their About Us pages and FAQs. Most will try to keep things innovative with woefully unsurprising themes: wet t-shirt contest, leather and lace, bad boys and naughty school girls, and so on. Some of them even use those wrist band sex codes of urban legend, which probably teeters on the line between whimsical and tawdry, but I think comes out on the adorable former side after all.

We waded through a lot of these clubs’ websites, and something happened to us that may happen to real anthropologists in the field: we came up against a cultural difference that seemed almost insurmountable. The website design was uniformly terrible. No. It was really, really terrible. It looked like the bastard child of 1997 and a terrible animated flash ad had thrown up all over a geocities account and then beat off to its death throes. I have no right to be, nor am I, too much of a web design snob. I don’t demand anything too marvelous when I visit a site, but I do ask that it be clean, legible, and proofread within a reasonable margin of error, or else unflattering thoughts about the author start to insinuate themselves, unbidden. I guess it’s like looking at someone’s profile on an internet dating site and noticing that the owner can’t grasp the difference between “you’re” and “apple”. Sorry about your illiteracy and all, but damned if I’m going to fuck you.

Is it because swinging is a throwback to the seventies and attracts an older crowd than I’d anticipated, and maybe they’re a little out of touch? Is it because they’re too busy having naughty school girl fun to bother to spend any time or energy on web presence? It is a mystery! The first terrible page we went to made us laugh. By the fourth the trend was becoming worrisome. When the tenth had a bad animated .gif of a woman in a sparkly bikini, it seemed like it was time to quit for the day. “Seeing a website like this makes me determined not to have sex with the person who made it,” said Laramy.
“I’m actually turned off now,” I agreed.

Swingers’ clubs: I’m not ready to give up on you. I’m still curious. I’m still hoping things will work out between us, but I need you to meet me halfway. I just want to be able to read about your toga orgy parties and masquerade balls without getting queasy. I mean, aren’t ANY of you geeks? Please say that there are geek swingers and nerd swingers and dork swingers, and maybe even a bookworm swinger or two. I know this sounds terribly xenophobic, but in this specific sense I think I really do prefer to have sex with my own kind.