quizzical pussy

I’m not a fan of Christmas. Christmases are my Mondays.

Things were not always thus. As a child, I’d spend wakeful nights and gun-jumped mornings wondering what lay beneath all those garish reams of wrapping paper and spangly bows. Even after I learned to sleep in, I loved the family gatherings. I loved shopping for people (still my favorite part of the holiday by far). I loved singing Christmas carols, even though I didn’t really buy into all the Jesus stuff. I even liked the candlelight services on Christmas Eve.

I think the turning point was when my Grandma died on Christmas morning a few years ago. I didn’t consciously change my mind, but Christmas lost a great deal of luster after that. Like with a restaurant where you’ve gotten food poisoning, the menu never looks the same again.

I play along, and I enjoy that other people enjoy The Winter Holidays, but I no longer feel the magic. While I consider it an insult to everyone involved to fake an orgasm, I’m not above faking a holiday here and there.

On a seemingly unrelated subject (but I bet I tie it all together by the end, don’t you?), I started following The Bloggess when Lilly generously compared me to her on this review I wrote, and I’ve since learned what a compliment that was.

(Of course she wasn’t on my radar until someone made it about me, why do you ask?)

She is funny, witty, snarky, interesting, and very successful as a blogger, so please compare me to her whenever you get a chance, even if it makes no sense. You can even say I have her eyes; I’ll take it. But recently her blog has transcended comedy, incisive commentary, and slices of her clearly awesome life. Now all of a sudden it’s making me think that maybe these Holidays we insist on having every winter really are a little magical.

And this time, it’s not grandma-killing magic.

Earlier this month, The Bloggess offered twenty $30 gift cards to commenters in need (itself an incredible gesture) in the spirit of holiday warm fuzzies, and when she got more than twenty people asking for help, her readers stepped in and started offering. And offering. And offering: gift cards, paypal donations, toys for kids who otherwise wouldn’t have any presents to open this year.

How big did the orgy of giving get? According to this tweet, over 600 gift cards have been sent as of sometime today. Everyone who asked for help has been matched with a donor. The Bloggess wasn’t trying to organize this; she and her readers are just that awesome. She started out just trying to help twenty strangers, and that one act of giving exploded into a great big gang bang of human kindness.

This doesn’t mean I love Christmas or anything, but Holy Baby Mithras do I love people.

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…because it doesn’t fucking matter?

Today, the Senate voted to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. As I understand it, this repeal needs to get certified by the President, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Secretary of Defense to actually mean something, but things are looking good, if you don’t count the 17 years* of prejudice and systematic oppression.

I read this the other day, a letter from a gay soldier about to leave for Afghanistan. It’s very worth reading whether you’re for or against DADT. He is gracious, he is polite, he is angry, and he is absolutely right.

To members of the United States armed forces, of all sexual orientations, genders, races, religions, and political beliefs: Thank you, thank you, thank you for your service. To those of you who have suffered the most under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (because I’d argue that it’s done damage beyond its intended victims): I’m sorry we made you choose between serving your country and living authentically, without fear of exposure. I’m in awe, grateful, that you chose the choice you did. I look forward to the day you can serve openly, if you decide to do so.

Today was a good start.

*Meaning the 17 years when DADT was law; not the 17 years since people started being assholes to gay people, because that’s been going on for approximately 17 bajillion years.

Last night’s threesome taught me an important life lesson:

1. Hákarl is fetid shark from Iceland. It apparently tastes of ammonia and broken dreams.
2. A Hot Carl is something altogether different (and honestly, you probably don’t want to click this).

This may be an important distinction to make someday.

There was also prodigious fucking! It has to be said.

ConTuesday is upon us! Read on for anonymous confessions from denizens of the internet.

My partner and I have been together for almost three years (our anniversary is in a few days) and have been experimenting with opening our relationship in various ways in the past year and a half. Yesterday, I found out he broke several of the rules of our ”open arrangement” and then lied to me about it–I feel really hurt and betrayed by this dishonesty, and I feel like I was cheated on.However, I’m really afraid to talk to any of my friends about this, because I feel like people will blame the nature of our relationship (”Oh, open relationships never work, etc.”), even people who knew about it already or who we’ve fooled around with before. I feel like putting the blame on open relationships in general shifts it from where it belongs–on my partner, for lying.Mostly, though, I just feel really horribly upset and isolated and alone.

I think I’d feel exactly the same way. Violating your negotiated rules was cheating. It just sounds like it wasn’t the kind of cheating your friends would understand, which indeed sucks.

He drove over 90 miles to have sex with me and at the time I was mildly flattered but not overwhelmed or anything, now he has a girlfriend and purely because of this he’s the only thing I can think about. The harder I am ignored the more I am determined to get my own way.

So unavailability is sexy again? I can’t keep up. Very well! None of you may have me!*

I had an ex who used to drink red wine and smoke when we got together. I loved the way it made her smell and taste. I’m not a smoker, but the combination made her taste like vice, like sin, like a bad habit. Made the sex that much better.

I’m turned on by beer breath, for some reason. I don’t think it’s an association thing so much as the fact that beer smells yummy.

The idea of him watching me masturbate and getting turned on by it turns me on, but I don’t have the guts to actually do it much less ask to watch him, the idea of which also turns me on.

Asking for things is a skill, and it’s worth learning. Do as I say; not as I do.

I’m in a fantastic, loving and highly sexual relationship for really the first time. I’m so, incredibly happy, but my family is dedicated to the idea that I’m a sweet, innocent virgin – and I’m stuck lying about my weekend whereabouts, hiding my interest in sex (for example, your blog), and of course hiding my condoms. I just wish my happiness was enough for everyone else!

It’s awesome that you’re having so much fun! Sometimes families just don’t get it. Maybe yours will eventually, maybe not. But I wouldn’t (and don’t) let that stop me.

Do you have something to share? Right here, champ.

*Is it working?

I had a dream that I started working at a brothel. Not as a janitor. I think there might have been a murder mystery somewhere in the plot, but brothel. That’s the part that stuck with me.

It was a rather low-rent, dismal establishment: one of those seedy brothels rather than, you know, the mind-blowingly classy ones you generally picture. In my dream, I wasn’t anxious about embarking on a life of harlotry, but rather the fact that this wasn’t one of the nicer cathouses in town. “If I start out here is that going to hurt my chances of getting into a better house?” I remember asking one of the girls turning me out. She assured me I could move on to bigger and better operations once I’d learned the game. I like to think we both knew she was lying, but I’ll never know for sure.

Strangely, this was all fairly realistic. The sketchiness of the brothel really is what I’d worry about, to the exclusion of loftier moral issues. If I’m getting paid to fuck, I damn well want to be a hetaera, not a pornai.

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There are several reasons you might not be getting sex at any given time. Right now I’m not having sex because my boyfriend lives several towns over and I haven’t yet organized an elite, round-the-clock Fuck Quizzical Pussy Squad yet. YET. Historically, various other reasons have come into play. Some of these have included, but were never limited to:

1. Just had sex. Mumbledamn refractory periodumble.
2. No one likes me; eating worms instead.
3. I am eleven.
4. Hell, I’m seventeen.
5. Long-distance, monogamous relationships For The Lose.
6. I’m too sore. (This has happened. Twice.)
7. I’m more-or-less oblivious to flirting, declarations of interest, and outright propositions, so I’m often unaware that I have actual offers on the table.
8. Someone wants to fuck me, and I know about it, but it’s an icky someone.
9. I’m saving myself for marriage. (This one never really happened.)
10. The person I’m trying to fuck foolishly wants to do other things, like “going to work”, “eating”, and “living a healthy, balanced life”.

I could go on, but you’re with me, right? There’s never-had-sex, long-term not-having-sex, short-term not-having-sex, and extremely short-term not-having-sex (my favorite of these options, also known as taking-pants-off time).

But one could argue that there’s a particular torture inherent to being in a serious romantic relationship and still not getting any. Like, ever. Laramy would chime in here to say that there’s a word for this phenomenon and it’s called “marriage”, but I can’t see my way to being quite so cynical or quite so hopeful. Involuntarily sexless relationships can arise whether you’re married or not, whether you’re straight, gay, or queer, and whether you see it coming or not.

I’d say that sexless relationships (I’ll be concentrating on the ones where at least one of the partners does have an issue with it. If two people are enjoying the hell out of not fucking each other, well, there’s no issue to speak of, now is there?) fall into two categories: in the first, sex used to happen much more frequently. Something that used to work is no longer working. In the second, lack of sex has always been an issue, perhaps even to the point where the relationship is unconsummated.

The first usually has a cause-and-effect reason, even if it’s hard to admit and/or suss out. The most cut-and-dried example would be a physiological issue: one partner’s hormones go out of whack, sex drive plummets, and the sex dies. This can be the result of a medical condition, a medication, stress, menopause, andropause, or a whole host of other things you can talk to your doctor about. Sometimes the reason is emotional or attraction-based. People fall out of lust, or out of love. Sometimes the reason your partner isn’t sleeping with you is because he or she doesn’t want to anymore.

But for me it’s the second that’s a little harder to grok. I can imagine having a medical condition that affects my sex drive (because it’s happened) and I can imagine having a sex life that runs purely on lust take a nosedive when I realize I don’t really like the other person (also happened), but I can’t realistically imagine starting a relationship with someone I’m unwilling to bone.

And yet, even though I personally don’t get it, somehow it happens! And that is shocking. To me.

People will sometimes try to force themselves to be less shallow, and date someone they’re not really attracted to in the first place, and so might very simply not ever get interested in having sex with them. Some people physically cannot have intercourse for any of a wide variety of reasons.

But what about people who have literally never experienced, or only felt very low levels of sexual attraction for anyone, ever? At that point, although as far as I know it’s a self-identification so I’m not sure it’s 100% accurate, we need to start thinking about asexuality.

This subject is not my area of expertise, so I went to an expert. Well, a website.

An asexual, according to the Asexual Visability and Education Network (AVEN), is a person who doesn’t experience sexual attraction. Asexuals may or may not have an interest in romantic relationships. Asexuals may or may not experience sexual arousal; they may or may not masturbate. Asexuality seems to me just about as diverse as sexuality. And if your partner doesn’t seem to respond to you or anyone else sexually, it might be helpful to think about your relationship dynamic in terms of being an asexual/sexual union.

AVEN has a great FAQ about relationships and asexual people here, but even more compelling are the AVEN community forums, which have a section for Sexual Partners, Friends, and Allies. This section is invaluable because you can read accounts of people in relationships that may be hauntingly similar to yours. Observe:

We do have a sex life. A very boring one but we get each other off once in awhile. Maybe twice a month is it. Always initiated by me. And all he will do to me is finger me and sometimes perform oral sex. He lets me jerk him off and sometimes perform oral sex on him and I have to admit, if he didn’t ‘cum’, I would never know he did! He NEVER makes a noise, a moan, a sigh, nothing. I have never been with a man who is so quiet when he has an orgasm. Not that he has to be noisy, but a little enthusiasm would be nice. At least let me know!! – bluegal

Initially in our marriage we had sex on average 4 times a month. Once every Saturday or Sunday. Over the years adding two children into the equation it has gotten worse. Now we have sex twice a month. She has recently come to the conclusion that she’s asexual…I truly feel like I’m in a no win position. She doesn’t want me looking at porn (and I can honestly live without porn), but she won’t have sex with me, so I don’t have a sexual outlet. – mrroper

I noticed immediately that sex was awkward for him. He would do what he thought he should do, but, it was very clinical. There was no passion, no “I want to devour you” moments. He was not comfortable having sex. I knew this from the get go. He admitted to me that sex was not his “thing”. He told me that he was not very sexual. He said that he the mind was much more alluring to him. Okay… go figure. – kazzpurr

If you’re in a situation like any of these, go read those and other threads. The feedback from AVEN’s asexual members may be especially illuminating.

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Find Part One of the Fuck-crossed series here. There will be a Part Three, unless I get distracted by squirrels or blinky lights.

I’m going to start out ConTuesday today with a non-anonymous confession of my own: sometimes I become seriously emotionally unhinged. Like, wearing bologna as a shirt and screaming “YOU DON’T LOVE ME!” in between spitting fountains of paint thinner through my front teeth mentally deranged. And I wish I could control this 100% of the time, but sometimes I just let it gallop away from me where it ends up devising huge, elaborate theories about how everything that has ever happened in my lifetime converges to prove that I’m worthless and should stop making eye contact with human beings. And then I cry. And Laramy, my boyfriend, listens to me, and dodges the paint thinner, and tells me none of it’s true, and loves me anyway. And I feel incredibly lucky, and also embarrassed.

He knows all this because I said it to his face yesterday, but I want everyone to know that he is seriously amazing. Also that I’m trying to cut back on the crazy.

Now here are some real confessions from people who aren’t me and may even be stable!

Never believe Nice Guys when they say they can’t get laid. My friend who plays WOW for hours every day and owns 1.4 terabytes of anime has no fewer than three girls pursuing him, and still hasn’t managed to get his first kiss.

“Nice Guys” often do and should have trouble getting laid, but that’s another matter entirely. Actual nice, geeky guys are totally worth pursuing, though. I highly recommend them to any inquiring readers.

My new boyfriend is new to being naked with a woman. I love his excitement about the whole thing. I also love the feeling that I can pretend I’m corrupting someone innocent, somehow taking advantage of them. I don’t think I would feel like this with a woman because I’d feel like I was buying into something misogynistic, but somehow his being male makes it feel okay.

I’d feel okay corrupting an “innocent” woman, if she was into that sort of thing. If you find any, feel free to send them my way.

The secret to a happy relationship is keeping the other person more in love with you than you are with them.

This seems like it would be a hard thing to calibrate.

Sex in the woods, while romantic, is hell on the knees. I’ve been scratching bug bites for weeks.

It’s even worse when the boyscout troop happens by. I really, really wish I were just kidding about this one.

I always thought I had escaped the death grip of Catholic Guilt. I thought of sexual experience as being akin to job experience, the more the better. I’ve never felt any qualms about masturbating and have only felt monetary guilt over buying sex toys. However I still feel the need to tell my boyfriend ”I’m sorry” when I watch a movie purely because I think someone in it is hot, or when fantasize about dating and fucking someone I’ll never meet. Somehow I’m fine with the practice, just not the theory. How the hell did this happen?

Maybe part of this is the fact that sometimes it’s hard to convey to a partner: “I love lusting after this person to a perfectly reasonable and healthy degree, but please don’t take that personally or let it affect your confidence in my ravenous lust for you, okay?” and it’s easier just to feel guilty for being a horndog. This is only a guess, though, because I was raised Evangelical Protestant.

Do you have things to say about sex and love and life that just don’t seem to fit anywhere? Why not say them here?

Last night, in the middle of an otherwise satisfying fap, I realized with not inconsiderable horror that it’s been I-don’t-even-know-how-long since the last time I squirted. It must be months. Months and months. One hell of a lot of months, at least.

There was a time in my life when I could barely use a vibrator for fifteen seconds without my pussy producing an enthusiastic dribble, and threatening much more. That time is gone, apparently, at least for the time being, and now I need to apply more time and attention in order to ruin my sleeping arrangements with puddles. Which really is probably for the best from a logistics standpoint because I need my beauty rest and prefer it non-soggy, all else being equal. Female ejaculation can be such a polarizing subject, even if we’re just talking about my brain.

But I miss those geyserly orgasms. They were so intense, so joyous. Of course a woman can have an amazing sex life if she never ejaculates, or even thinks about it. There are manifold ways to get off, and no single physical mechanism of orgasm is objectively better than any other. They’re created equal, like mankind. But also like mankind, once you get to know and love an individual in that created-equal group, you get attached and would miss it if it were to move to Jakarta.

So here I am in the Western Hemisphere realizing that I just don’t have the grit these days to hike to Jakarta every time I take my pants off.

Squirting, come home. I would like to have to lay down double-thick towels more often, and then maybe curse you when you ignore them and soak right through. Those were the days.

I don’t know exactly how concerned I should be that someone recently tried to access my personal Facebook account from the city where Reginald Sleeth now resides.

I should add the caveat here that it is a large city.

Reginald and I haven’t seen each other in over seven years. At least, I believe this to be true.

I saw him three years ago.

It was Christmas Eve. My grandmother was dying, and my sister and I had been visiting her in the hospital. She hadn’t woken up all night, even to look at us. I’d never seen her megawatt blue eyes dim before that week, and now there was nothing, and the later it got the more nothing eclipsed her. Her time was coming and the thought of it made my solar plexus ache. Eleven thirty we finally left. Eleven thirty and there was nothing at home but ingredients to eat. Eleven thirty, and we were drained and hungry and defeated.

To be perfectly honest, I hadn’t showered in at least two days and my fatigue settled on my face like two black eyes.

There was a single restaurant open that night in our smallish hometown. A greasy spoon that never closes, where kids can go pad their pickled stomachs after last call. We were just glad to find a place to sit down and vacantly watch someone put plates of warm things in front of us.

Right after the waitress, brown ponytailed and shimmery lidded, took our drink orders, the door swung open, briefly staining the air with the outside chill. And in he walked.

I could see him perfectly from the booth where I sat. Reginald Sleeth. His hair was spiked high, garishly, as he used to do it when he was feeling especially self-conscious. And he had gained some weight, perhaps, but he still fit in his old winter coat. His stride was the one I’d memorized, casually hunched but hemorrhaging arrogance. He was distracted by the girl who’d moved in after I’d left our shared apartment four years prior, and another couple. They all sat down at a big corner booth, Reginald in the middle, holding court as he loved to do.

Reginald Sleeth was not even supposed to be in the state. I’d heard he’d moved far away. I’d heard his parents had moved even farther. My stomach recoiled on itself. Suddenly, I’d never been less hungry in my life. Terror had taken over my torso, from tensed shoulders to thumping heart to plummeting guts. I dropped off my seat and hid behind the table.

“Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck!” I hissed to my sister, “Reginald just walked in.” She twisted around to see. “Don’t! Don’t look over there. I don’t think he saw me.”

“Are you okay?” She asked. See, I was crouching in abject horror on the floor at a greasy spoon diner, hiding from the person I feared most in this world. P.S. My grandma, one of my favorite people ever, full stop, was off dying in a hospital room down the road. ‘Okay’ was not a valid guess here. Hurriedly, I told her I was leaving. I was really sorry, but could she explain things to the waitress and follow me as soon as she could? I snuck a couple dollars onto the table and slithered out of there as quickly as my crippled limbs would carry me.

I don’t think he saw me. To this day I choose to believe that.

I choose to believe it partly because those were not the circumstances under which I was supposed to see him after all that time. What was supposed to happen, I’m sure, is something more like this:

I’m on a gorgeous, 16-hand Friesian stallion who is also a cyborg who can fly. Having just published my first international bestselling novel, I am riding through the countryside, looking inexplicably like Twin Peaks-era Sherilyn Fenn and wearing the coolest pair of sneakers in the world (because no fantasy is complete without great sneakers). Reginald is in a ditch, bawling because his life has collapsed like a house of cards. He is wearing flip-flops and has zero cyborg horses. I coolly observe Reginald from my high vantage, “You hurt me,” my eyes tell him. “I am a terrible person and you deserved better,” his say. A single tear rolls down my face and falls to the ground, where it becomes a beautiful blossom that will never fade nor die. That beautiful blossom sprays a toxic mist onto Reginald’s face, disfiguring him for life. Then I turn my flawless, porcelain doll face homeward, where I go have earth-shattering sex with diamond-studded nerdcore rappers who are also professional water polo players.

Is this so much to ask?

The other reason I’m pretty sure he didn’t notice me that Christmas Eve was because he didn’t acknowledge me or try to contact me soon afterward. And Reginald tries to contact me every so often. Sometimes to say he misses me, sometimes to say he’s sorry, and sometimes to be fucking creepy. Once he emailed me (at an address I never gave him) to cryptically tell me that he prays… every day. As far as I know he’s still an atheist, so I don’t even know what that means!

It’s been a while– over a year– since his last try. I hope I’m off his radar. But whenever something weird happens, like when, say, someone tries to hack into my Facebook account, I have a moment of panic. In a twisted, fucked up way, it’ll never be completely over with him, and I will have to live with that even after my cyborg Friesian ship comes in. But every time I don’t respond to whatever shit he’s trying to pull, he doesn’t win, and that’s something.

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