I’m inclined to give Edwin a pass for a few different reasons, but the largest is that he really is so self-centered and socially clueless that he almost certainly never meant any harm, even when his behavior left a great deal to be desired. While I don’t want to date or fuck or even be close friends with prohibitively self-centered and socially clueless people (socially clueless is sometimes endearing to a point, but there are limits), I don’t mind a casual friendship with one here and there.

It’s weird to talk to an ex after a long period of no contact. Sure, he’s called me a few times sporadically on some pretext or other, but we stopped talking regularly last Fall, and now we seem to be inching toward a casual friendship point again. I guess. There’s something awkward about not knowing what you’re supposed to talk about, what’s going to open up old wounds or just plain be too personal. I pay attention to these things; I’m not sure he does.

In just a few conversations he’s mentioned a lot of odd and personal things, including but not limited to the following:

• He can’t go to the club without being hit on by all the ladies. (He’s mentioned this one on at least three separate occasions.)
• He lasts longer in bed than he used to.
• He’s so damn good-looking.
• The shower in his new residence is perfect for fucking in.
• He wants to find a Halloween costume this year that will show off his damn good-looking body.

It’s not that I have an issue with intimate disclosures (duh), but it all seems a little over-the-top, considering. Maybe he still harbors some resentment about the break up and wants to “[tell] me what I’m missing”, or maybe he thinks these are the sorts of things I’d be interested in because we’ve always been pretty candid in the past. Whatever the reason, these tidbits read as slightly off coming from an ex. Or possibly anyone else: I don’t want to hear anyone go on and on about what it’s like to be insanely fetching. Who even says that? It all ties in perfectly with his ongoing self-centered, socially clueless shtick.

I’m not exactly worried that he’s trying to entice me back or anything. Well, maybe a tiny bit, but I’m not vain enough to assume it. For now I’m just going to call it curious, funny, and slightly off-putting.  Still well better than our relationship when we were dating, though!

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I’ve never (literally never, which is probably weird at my age and player level) given nor solicited a phone number at a random pick-up spot. Flirting from a stranger always shuts me down right away. I know it’s terribly rude, but I don’t mean it that way. I’m just a shrinking violet. Really, ask anyone! (Okay, not really. But I really do hit a brick wall when it comes to flirting.)

But the fact is that with the cell phone number of a near-stranger I’d be tempted to send disturbing, creepy text messages, like “You’re painfully beautiful when you sleep,” and “We’re almost out of milk.” Because at that point in the possible courtship you really have nothing to lose and can really fuck with someone. And I’m afraid that it would seem like a perfectly good idea at the time!

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Hopeless tool of the patriarchy that I am, I just don’t like having very much pubic hair. I’ve been shaving to various degrees since I was sixteen, even though no one was helping me enjoy it until two years after that. It’s a tactile thing: I like feeling smoothness when I play with myself; I don’t want hair dampening sensation. To me, a shaved pussy doesn’t look much– if at all– better, and as long as I can sort out what’s where I don’t mind other people maintaining a healthy bush themselves.

But I’ve always had different standards for myself than I have for others. That’s why I feel confident saying you’re a degenerate for reading this smut.

In the realm of pussyshaving, though, you know what I hate? Razor burn. I hate it with the passion that we reserve for those who disagree with our politics and cut in front of us in line. It itches, and looks ugly, and sometimes even hurts (especially if you try to shave over it). I’m going out on a limb and guessing that every person who’s ever seen me naked, and not mentioned a razor burn that I had at all, didn’t exactly swoon over it either. I only fuck the brave, oblivious and/or polite, apparently.

Because, you see, I tend to get it a lot. Those chicks with gorgeously naked genitals swathed in silky, flawless skin? I’m not sure what they’re doing but I suspect they’re not shaving. Or maybe they are, and my skin is even more sensitive and fussy than I thought. Or I’m a Oh God I’m a freak of nature, aren’t I?

Bikini Zone cream has always helped the issue, but I accidentally transferred it from my hands to my lips after applying once, and the taste is not something you want on your pussy unless you’ve utterly despaired of getting oral sex that day. So there went that solution.

It’s actually been a lot better lately because I’m following the rule of only shaving with the grain of hair growth, which I used to think was for pussies. It turns out that it really, truly is, and should be observed accordingly. I’m also shaving a little less often (mostly because I’m exhausted and therefore not as precious about my bush these days), and conscientiously applying coconut oil after shaving.

Still, based on the recommendation of some head-shaving friends, I’m wondering if a safety razor is actually a gentler, superior shave, or just makes them feel like fancy gentlemen. Also, if this stuff works.

Oh god, no.

This…

…is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.

I’m so sorry, guys. I cannot take her anywhere.

This feeling informs very little of my behavior during actual sex (I have convinced myself, and dearly hope is true), but it dramatically influences–nay, dominates–the way I flirt, or even interact with my friends and the people I fuck. A great example of this is that fact that I do not, will not, can not send anyone sexy/risque/flirty/myspace profile/whatever pictures.

No part of me projects these self-judgments onto other people who take, send, and share sexy pics of themselves. Oh, not by any means. Please feel free to test me on this.

Over the weekend I went to a party at the local goth club. Objectively speaking, I can get pretty tarted up as long as I’m convincing myself that this is “just for fun” and not anything remotely close to trying to be sexy. I do tend to give myself the benefit of a doubt when it comes to dressing. It’s similar to my completely sense-making habit of enjoying wearing cute underwear but being terribly embarrassed whenever I’m found out. This particular night I put on a short skirt, high (as I can manage with my walking issues) heels, a t-shirt I assaulted with a pair of scissors, and these adorable striped thigh highs. And a good time was had by all.

Laramy wasn’t able to come out, having had kind of a shitty day. So as I got home and started to strip off my sweaty clothes, he was on my mind and I had a dramatically uncharacteristic thought process:

1. These thigh highs are kind of cute…
2. Laramy’s mentioned a couple times that he likes my legs…
3. He’s had a super bad day…
4. I never send him pics of me…
5. Ergo… maybe it would cheer him up if I emailed him a picture of my legs in aforementioned thigh highs!
6. I’d better hurry up and do it before I think this through any further.

And I wasn’t even drunk or anything! I’m not going to say that what I produced in the following moments using a camera phone, specialty hosiery, and an inexplicable lapse of inhibition was a “sexy pic”. It really wasn’t. The whole thing was supposed to be a silly “thinking of you” gesture, I guess. But after I sent it, I realized that it was hazardously close to a “sexy pic” attempt. The more I thought about it the more I started neurotically wondering if it was going to come across as entirely pathetic or just mostly pathetic, and by the time I got up the next morning I was grimly expecting the worst.

To his great credit as a gentleman, Laramy’s reaction via instant message was a lot more “I like the thigh highs” than “You preposterous creature, what’s with the flailing abortion of a jpg in my inbox?” But it was a bit of a struggle to resist asking, “So like, that picture is pretty much an embarrassment to everyone involved, right?” I felt kind as if I was watching myself in horror as I proudly brought roadkill pie to the cool kids’ sushi and sake party. My stoicism through all this was an inspiration to both of me.

Mere minutes later, I kid you not, a friend sent me a genuinely super-sexy pic of her amazing bare breasts, asking me to forward it on to Laramy. Which I did, gladly, content that I had actually found a way to at least help brighten up his morning in a much more productive way than my previous attempt.

“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.

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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.

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Last week’s FWB confession made me want to confess this: Sometimes I hope that my former FWB’s current girlfriend will leave him after the kid is born… they’re only together because she’s pregnant, and I really miss his dick…

In relation to your post on penetration. I’m a guy who enjoys the occasional “pegging” by his girlfriend. And I do not feel particularly dominated by the experience. I asked for it, the first time we did it, and it always feels like I’m perverting her, that I am, in essence, controlling and dominating and corrupting her; she never gets off on it, although she comes close. It’s not the case, though, as she quite enjoys it; this had been a fantasy of hers for almost precisely the reasons mentioned in the article – the idea of domination. So we’re both feeling like we’re dominating and corrupting the other. The more confessional part? I haven’t really told her how I feel about it because I’m pretty sure it would lessen her enjoyment of the experience that I’m still feeling in control of the situation.

I’m challenging myself to send in 1 confession a week, even if it means creating adventures just to have something to send in each week.

You’re pretty much the coolest ever.

That doctor who chopped up little girls makes me sick, but Truth: my girlfriend’s clitoris is too big for my taste. I’ve not mentioned it to her,  I definitely don’t want her to be self-conscious about it. It still weirds me out and effects my attraction level. I know part of loving someone is realizing that those details aren’t important in the big picture, but it’s a turn off anyway. And I feel bad about it.

Why don’t you go have an adventure and then tell me about it?

While I like to name things as much as the next sexual deviant, naming my genitals would feel too much like dissociating myself from them, and that’s the last thing I want to do a) because that’s where I have a great deal of my fun and I have no wish to start living vicariously through my own body parts, and b) because if they got to have opinions they’d probably be very disappointed in me just now because I haven’t been keeping up on my caretaking duties (read: masturbating) lately.

I have jokingly given my tits names before, patently unsexy names that I throw out at really inconvenient times.

INT. SOME RANDOM COUCH – NIGHT

Groping is happening. Groping moves in a booberly direction.

Quizzical Pussy (indicating left breast): Ooooh, see that’s Statler.

Confused Dude: Huh?

Quizzical Pussy: The other one’s Waldorf. Now back to the balcony, kiddo! The old boys aren’t quite done with you!

Confused Dude: You sicken me.

Quizzical Pussy: Ah ah ah I lahve eet!

…This sort of thing is really great fun until I run out of people willing to fuck me. That’s when the laughter stops.

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Recently one of my Facebook friends posted the following status update: “Smile, it makes people wonder what you’re thinking.” It’s another quote in a long line of hackneyed “folksy wisdom” gems he’s read or heard somewhere, and just had to share. But even as folksy wisdom goes, this advice is really atrocious.

I can think of countless reasons to smile: a friend’s face, the sun on your skin, the elation of running and jumping and climbing trees, remembering that puppies exist, or getting a new sex toy in the mail, just to name a few. But just to get a reaction from people, to seem more intriguing? Booooooooooring. I can get behind smiling out of friendliness, or to put people at ease, but this stupid cliche goes a step too far. It’s “I want people to think of me in a certain way, so I’ll disingenuously alter my behavior.”

This, gentle reader, is why we can’t have nice things.

Cilfton Overmangle texted me out of the blue recently to ask if three days was still the customary amount of time to wait to call a girl after getting her number (I don’t know why I’m the person he asks, but whatever. I’m here to help, I guess…) I wasn’t trying to be glib in the least when I responded that he should simply call her when it was convenient for him to talk and he would care to have a conversation with her. Has anyone not heard of the “three day” rule? And doesn’t it seem contrived and a touch desperate-not-to-seem-desperate when you can tell someone has purposely waited exactly three days to call? I’m not the mayor of dating or anything, but even my commitment-phobic ass couldn’t muster up a speck of contempt for someone calling me on days one, two, or four, especially if a decent conversation arose from it.

It strikes me that conventional wisdom encourages us too much to fake things, to play games with each other for social rewards. The fact that there’s a “rule” of how many days to wait before calling an individual with a pulse and a mother and unique thoughts and experiences betrays such cynacism. And you know if Quizzical Pussy is calling you on your cynicism you’ve gone too far.

That’s my major issue with Pick Up Artistry: it couldn’t be less like art. Art is human, individualistic, all about sharing a unique and fallible perspective. It’s against homogeneous rules; it runs counter to a jaded, cookie-cutter approach to people and the world. Hell, even if an artist is expressing a misanthropic point of view, the act of creation itself is the opposite of cynical.

In fact, the “art” referred to in PUA is more just at odds with being “artless”, in the sense that has positive connotations of sincerity and being unaffected.

Instead of embracing the natural, PUAs (and girls that follow The Rules or whatever the kids are calling it these days, or other con artists) devote themselves to running through life like it’s a role-playing game. And the person you’re trying to date isn’t even the princess you need to save or a member of your party. Your “target” is just another monster to vanquish on your way to your goal. So if you don’t get results with one chick, you just need to beef up your stats, or else you threw the dice wrong and luck just wasn’t on your side. Either way, you’ll encounter lots of HB9s on this level, so you’re cool… you’ll get the next one. How is it a good idea to treat a potential partner like a non-player character? Like ultimately, they don’t matter.

There has to be a better way to deal with rejection than dehumanizing people. Can’t a person not want to fuck you, yet remain fully human? Can’t social interactions be more about discovery and less about achievements? Can’t you just relax and see where and with whom you fit naturally, without trying to force perceptions and opinions you can’t control? Can’t you just smile because you feel like it, call when you want to, and acknowledge that if you’re playing a game, we’re all in it together and probably actually all on the same team?

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The day I had committed to shave my head for charity I was so nervous I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t figure out where the nausea was coming from, because deep down I believe that I’m fearless. Deeper down– like in my stomach, I guess I know I’m not.

Outwardly, I was blasé about losing all my hair. It would grow back, I told people, myself. It didn’t matter. But really I was quite attached to my hair. For years I’d been bleaching it out and dying it outrageous colors: orange, pink, purple, blue. It was the first thing people noticed, and most people loved it. Little kids thought I was a muppet; old women thought I was brave. For me, crazy hair took no courage. I can honestly say, even looking back and in the searing light of day, that I was never rebelling against anything, and I wasn’t after attention. I just wanted to dye my hair crayola colors: it felt comfortable, oddly natural. It was me.

There were several reasons I decided to shave it off, but the main one was that I knew the only reason not to do it was fear. Fear wrapped up in vanity, which is perhaps the most repulsive kind. My philosophy supports doing anything that you’re afraid to do when there are no good, logical reasons to back up that fear. A dread of being unattractive just doesn’t count, especially up against raising money for charity. But I couldn’t help being scared that losing my hair meant losing a huge part of my identity. Maybe without awesome hair I wouldn’t be me anymore. Even worse, I might be really fucking ugly.

So my stomach was a mess underneath my cool “What is hair anyway, in the grand scheme of things?” exterior. But I didn’t back out. I sat through the dull-clipper-tearing-my-hair-out-instead-of-cutting-it stage, the these-replacement-clippers-hurt-much-less stage, the oh-dear-I-have-a-mohawk stage, each of these taking roughly five minutes. And then, after all that, I had a really short crew cut, more a faint suggestion of hair than an actual hairstyle.