pretty dumb things

to Joss Whedon and for Dr. Horrible

It’s no secret that Joss Whedon has, on occasion, saved my life. All right, pardon the hyperbole, but more than once I’ve contemplated the thrilling surrender of death but sat on my couch and watched Buffy instead. I’ve learned my lesson; I’d never actually put those ghastly feelings into motion—I’ve seen the horror of suicide’s collateral damage, and I would never put my friends and family through that particular emotional grist mill. But even removing the temptation to actual action doesn’t keep me from laving myself in some high-quality suicidality. However, Buffy does.

There are reasons aplenty why I love Buffy with such a deep and infinite ardor (I love Firefly, and I like Angel quite a bit, until it gets to the super-creepy faintly incestuous part in season 3 and 4, but neither matches the deep visceral response that Buffy evokes). There’s the constant play in language, for one thing. The way that adjectives become nouns, as in “It gives me a happy.” The way that the characters invent new slang, as in “That’s the kick!” for saying something’s cool, or “Five-by-five” to say A-OK. The way that the show employs neologisms like “vampification” and “lesbidar.” The way that the show pokes fun at cultural idiom, as when Buffy refers to vampires as “undead Americans.” All of that flavor of lexicographical jump-roping makes me get a good-down low tingle.

There’s the constant nodding to high-brow, low-brow, no-brow and pop cultures. I love it when Buffy describes her principal-enforced tenure selling candy bars as “going all Willy Loman,” a moment I love as much as when Willow bemoans her SAT scores by exclaiming she’s “Cletis, the slack-jawed yokel!” I love the moment when, after Xander tries to say something profound about fear, he finds himself mired in a morass of elliptical platitudes and Buffy responds, “Thank you for the Dadaist pep-talk. I’m feeling much more abstract now.” I live for moments when I can trot out lines of Buffy dialog.

But all of that is nothing but the shiny. It’s the glittery tinsel bits of why I love Buffy—and therefore Whedon—with such an inordinately intense extra-flamey white-hot burning passion. Seriously, if I could meet one person in Hollywood, it would be Whedon, if only to inarticulately stammer out my appreciation for his oeuvre. And were he then interested in why I was so abjectly devoted, I’d get the opportunity to tell him, and that is this: he makes  a mess of gender stereotypes, and it’s a lovely trashing.

Buffy herself is the most obvious example of messing with gender. She’s blonde and tiny and ostensibly weak, but she is the chosen one. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer.

And yet.

More than Buffy’s sweet, sweet ass-kicking abilities, and they are prodigious and lovely, she is a complex internal mess. Sure, that the skinny blonde chick turns the tables on victimhood is already a gendered reversal, but there are plenty of booty-stomping cuties ready to open up a fresh can of whip-ass in the action/adventure/comic universe. What sets Buffy apart is that she has conflict about her destiny. She suffers. And she feels badly about suffering. She has a superiority complex and then an inferiority complex about her superiority complex. It’s a whole big thing. And it makes me identify with her like mad.

But it’s not just Buffy, see. Because suffering is an equal-opportunity sport. In fact, the mark of humanity is the ability to suffer in the Whedonverse. Whether it’s Angel, the vampire with a soul, or Spike, also the vampire with the soul and also a world-class pervert and so in the great mythical debate of which undead to bed you can guess my pick, or any of Buffy’s Slayerettes, or pretty much anyone one with a spark of humanity glinting brightly in the forest of the night, there is suffering. The mark of true evil is the inability to feel pain. I kind of love that.

Men and women are absolutely equal in the Whedonverse—that area of media conceived by Whedon himself, well, Whedon and his team of crack henchpeople. They fight each other and they don’t hold back (unless it’s Buffy who does hold back a little when she spars with Riley, her boyfriend the steroided-out Initiative guy). Men and women are equally strong and equally weak. They are equally needing of saving, and they are equal saviors (although Buffy is a bit more savioresque than anyone; she’s just a damn fine savoir). Finally, they are this: equally good and equally evil.

It’s this last point upon which I must hand it to Whedon and his team. Most media has a hard time depicting women as evil. There’s a Victorian restraint guiding the hand that draws the evil chick. She often gets a white glove treatment, wherein she gets all kinds of explanatory notes for why she’s so goddamned bad. Male villains rarely get the back-story. They’re just bad, and we the audience accept that. Cruella de Vil is motivated by her desire for the soft fur of pure Dalmatian puppies. Catwoman has a history of abuse. However ill thought-out, Poison Ivy wants to protect the environment. Male supervillains just have an endless, ambient hunger for power. ‘Nuff said. Supervillainesses, though, get the full narrative treatment.

Not so in the Whedonverse. Women, like men, can just be bad, and like the girl with the curl, when they’re bad, they’re very, very bad, while the men often are just bumbling. Whether it’s Glory, the God, who wants the end of the world, or Willow, when she goes all dark magics, who wants the end of the world, girls gone bad are girls gone pyrotechnically, supernovally, atomically bad. You have to respect Whedon’s willingness to draw these dark ladies with a free hand. I do.

There is, however, one area that Whedon doesn’t do well and that is sex. In all three series—Buffy, Angel and Firefly—no one can have sex very successfully, except for maybe the lesbians. Everyone else, which is pretty much just a bunch of heterosexuals getting their naughty on and doing it badly, but not in a good-bad kind of way, nor even a bad-bad kind of way, but really a rather lame-bad kind of way, get punished. The Whedonverse is pretty much a hotbed of sexual repression. Buffy loses her virginity to Angel, and he loses his soul. Buffy goes on a sex rampage with her boyfriend Riley, and a house grows vines. Willow gets frisky for Oz and he goes all wolfy. Buffy has some fine, fine nasty sex with Spike and she hates herself. Angel gets naughty with Darla and she gets pregnant out of wedlock with his son who then later, after spending time in an alternate dimension, has sex with Cordelia and brings about yet another apocalypse. Even Inara, the trained companion, can’t manage to seduce the eternally hard-up Captain Tightpants, Malcom Reynolds. Seriously, sex in the Whedonverse makes STDs look positively rosy. It will be interesting to see how Whedon copes with the sex issue in The Dollhouse, his project that debuts this fall.

The fleshy messiness of sex aside, Whedon does beautiful things with gender—and with genre. No one puts a little bit of horror, a smidge of comedy, a dash of satire, a heaping helping of noir, a soupcon of the Western, a fistful of Sci-fi in a blender, pushes puree and then tops it off with a musical number like Whedon. He mix-masters genres with such fluidity that it looks easy, and that’s the mark of a genius.

It is, then, with great excitement that I will view Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, his latest mixy thing, online tomorrow, when it will pop hot and fresh from the virtual oven. The fact that it stars Neil Patrick Harris and the eminently lickable Nathan Fillion (about whom I had a sex dream yesterday) is only icing on the Whedonverse cake. Watch it fast, because it’s not gonna last. I’ve no doubt it’ll be gender-genre-mixilicious. In any case, it’s Joss Whedon, and that’s got to be gender-bustingly good.

on hotel rooms and other fierce civilities

If memory serves, I’ve fucked eleven humans of two genders, several races, and many ages in rented rooms, be they hotel, motel, or bed and breakfast. In chronological order, the progression unwinds something like this: Marta, Ben, Eff,  C, The Goat Gatherer, Dave #2, Ernie, The World’s Fastest Threesome, the Married Man Who  Post-Copulation Would Walk Around Muttering “I’m Damned, I’m Damned, I’m Going to Hell,” and the Californicator. You know, just in case you’re keeping score with the home game.

Hotel rooms, as I’ve said before, are utopias. They don’t exist anywhere in time or space; rather, they seem to hang like mist, neither here nor there, neither home nor away, neither now nor later. Hotel rooms—at least American ones—strive to provide some simulacrum of comfortable familiarity. Real hotel rooms, such as the one I inhabited with my co-Californicator a few weeks ago, tend to the bland. They are the oatmeal of the interior design world. Sure, there are the boutique hotels that work hard to send you into a state of design shock and awe, but in general, large hotel chains enjoy their sheer ecru inoffensiveness, as much as superciliously smug, contented chains can.

I’ve stayed/copulated in a couple of the large chain hotels—rooms bigger than my apartment here in Gotham, sheets slick with astronomically high thread count, copious towels akin to Persian cats in that they were both fluffy and scratchy, and walls so dense a shrewdness of apes could gestate and nary a shriek would be audible. I’ve also fucking stayed in motels aplenty. Rooms whose decorators, such as they were, took their cues from 1970’s rec rooms—all rust/beige/avocado plaid and faux wood paneling. I’ve also bedded others in the quaint eclecticism that defines bed and breakfasts. Rooms with canopies or captain’s beds, rooms where seashells are a defining motif and the shower goo comes in capacious, expensive bottles. The common denominator of these rooms is less my having sex in them than that all of them undoubtedly were home to jism stains.

The jism stain in the hotel is like the ghost of pleasures past. These stains—pellucid and pale and visible only to under the scrutinizing blue lights of those kits wielded by CSI detectives and those bent on discovering spousal infidelities—unite every hotel room I, or for that matter you, have ever stayed in. There’s something about hotel rooms that makes one want the naughty, sweaty, funky monkey fucking. The naughtier, the sweatier, the funkier, the monkier, the better, or so goes my thinking when ensconced in hotel rooms, anyway.

Perhaps it’s that I don’t have to clean up the mess—whatever mess it may be. Perhaps it’s that a hotel room, untethered as it is to any ostensible reality, lends itself to acting out fantasies. Perhaps it is that this space for transients, for a hotel room is really nothing more than a place for people who neither here nor there to sleep, gives me the big Hall Pass to enjoy things that I might not otherwise readily enjoy, but there’s something about hotel rooms that makes me want to transgress.

A mud shark might be over the line, but pretty much everything else seems to color inside it.

The woebegone thing is that while I’ve certainly been in plenty of hotels/motels/bed and breakfasts with plenty of humans, I’ve not ever really done much that transgressed. Dave #2 ate a pint of vanilla ice cream off my ass in a charming bed and breakfast in Truro, Mass, a place whose proprietor made biscuits that could make an angel weep, but even that act was fairly tame. Sure, I was part of a land-speed record-breaking threesome in this strange hotel in midtown that seemed locked in 1954, like it was in a perpetual episode of a profoundly prurient Twilight Zone, but even that forty minutes of fevered activity felt oddly civil.

I find myself longing for some seriously kink-encrusted sex in a bland, anonymous room. Something that makes the insides of my eyes flash with Hades red and Stygian black. Something that involves acts I can’t spell. Something that leaves marks and makes my breath catch like the zipper on an old down coat. Something so baroque I can’t quite will it into imaginary being.

Hotel rooms lend themselves to such erotic musings. In a hotel room, I’ve made syrupy Sapphic love to Marta; with my mouth, I’ve made then-young Ben come seven times consecutively just because I could; I’ve experienced the kind of celestial sex that realigns planets and recreates worlds and escapes language with C; I’ve stolidly suffered sex with Ernie (and I enjoyed the post-coital viewing of VH1  Behind the Music: Savannah even more); I’ve lain on my back, lapped a lovely girl’s pussy, and gotten a flea’s eye view of her being fucked as I did so; and most recently, I’ve been spread with the salve of some fine, fine sexual healing indeed. I’ve not yet experienced anything that makes me sing the call of the farouche. I’d like to feel a bit of the old primeval in a Hyatt Regency. That’s all I’m asking.

And while I’m not sure exactly what it is I want, this erotic state that sits just out of linguistic fashioning, I feel somehow certain that in a hotel room—that fantastical space that hangs improbably parallel to the real world, the quotidian world, the world where I make my own bed and find my own towels and rise to my own circadian rhythms—I could find it.

slut? or redefining the self, again

A friend of mine used a quote of mine on her blog recently to illustrate her affection for the word “slut.” Here’s what she quoted of my thoughts about the word:

I have no desire to redefine [“slut”]. To redefine would divest these terms of their erotic charge for me. I like to be a slut because it transgresses. Because it brings to the forefront of my memory of sucking a hockey player’s cock on the school bus. Because I did and because I did it because I was—and am—a slut.

I’d quite completely forgotten writing this piece, and reading my friend’s quote gave me that vertiginous feeling of automnesia—that nearly Proustian sense wherein the piece of writing is the Madeleine: as you bite into the piece you wrote, you recall the memory of writing it, and you also recall the feeling of when you wrote it.

The day that I wrote this particular piece, I was still adjusting to the concept of being monogamously attached to my X, Donny. I wasn’t doing it particularly well—monogamy was still more of a concept than a reality. Things were in flux, and I was betwixt and between the heady exhilarating freedom of sluttiness and the comforting solidity of commitment. I’d not picked a side, not figured it out, not come to any sense of peace, and I remember writing this post with a raging tumescent double-ended dildo of ambivalence pointing in at least two directions with vengeance.

Of course, one need not be monogamous to be in a committed relationship. There are lots of people who serve as living, breathing illustrations that polyamory works (and many of them seem to keep blogs). I admire these people’s frontier spirit. I don’t know how well I could construct a relationship that flouts so completely so many cultural mandates. I’m not saying that I’d never be open to some flavor of poly; I’m merely saying that it would take a tremendous amount of work on my part. I tend to want to bond heavily and intimately with one person, and so I think I’d have a hard time wrapping my head around the reality of my lover wrapping his arms around another human. But I suppose it’s a possibility.

What all of this speculation, recollection and rumination adds up to is a sense that—once again—things have changed for me. I’m not sure I’m not a slut, but I’m not sure I am one either (I am, however, completely sure I once was one). Today, when I take a cold and appraising look at my emorotic self, I’m not sure I can freely fuck with joy. Granted, I just spent a weekend with a friend in a beige hotel room having caring sex amidst a lot of laughter and conversation, but I’d be hard pressed to recreate that experience any time soon with anyone else. I see discernible limits in my fuckbuddiness right now.

And that’s fine, of course. I’ve always maintained that sexuality is fluid—it’s absolutely a Heraclites-style river, where anytime we step into it, it’s never the same, for both we and the river have changed. But it’s hard because I’d really like to be able to fuck for fun. I think about the abstract concept of having noncommittal sex and it seems awfully fun. I read about other people’s experiences with it—especially my friend Debauchette’s, whose prose is incendiary—and I yearn to recreate their actions with my own flesh. I recall my past and, well, I feel ambivalent. I can remember the giddy high of new lovers, but I also remember how often it just wasn’t all that.

I realize something about myself and that is this: I don’t do casual sex casually. My natural tendency is toward intimacy, not away from it. Sure, there are the exceptions, my recent sunny Californication fling a case in point. But in general, I yearn for emotional passion that is bound up with—and not separated from—physical passion. I can sometimes do the latter without the former, but I prefer the combination so much that I will pound the square physical peg into the round emotional hole just to force the two to mesh, even when they don’t, or won’t, or can’t, or shouldn’t.

Which, at the end of the night, probably makes me a very bad slut. Or perhaps one who is just a little limited, if also one who is a little confused. Or perhaps one who wants to figure out how to draw a new definition without repudiating the old.

re: regrets

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with a young friend. He’s a smart guy, whip-smart, sharp as a scalpel, altogether too clever, dark and skinny-hott, topped with unruly hair and lots of highly creative facial hair. He’s so young that I can look at him and appreciate his impressive assets without feeling particularly invested in them, or him. Looking at him is more like looking at a different species than it is looking at my own, yet I recognize this boy’s unquestionable hottness.

The boy in question had recently been to a Cat Power show. He was incandescent with the discovery that as he’d stood and undoubtedly swayed significantly in the front row, Cat had been into him. He described meaningful eye contact with the singer. He told how, at the end of the show, when he’d reached out his hand for that show-trophy of a song list, she’d giving him the international one-finger sign for wait a moment, then had gone to retrieve a list from one of her backing musicians and placed it into his hand, as she punctuated the experience with yet more meaningful eye contact.

So, I asked the boy, did you try to hook up with her?

“No way,” he said, “she’s like 36! She’s twice my age!” he said, aghast at the contretemps.

I sat and smiled. Ah, it’s better to regret the people you have done than the people you haven’t, I may or may not have said at the time. I like to think I did say it, but it may be merely esprit d’escalier, or something like it. If I didn’t say it then, I’m saying it now, and I’ve certainly said it a few times in the past couple of weeks, making it all real enough for me.

Since I’ve decided that I did in fact tell the boy that I experience more regret for the almost than regret for the actual, I’ve spent some time deciding whether or not it’s in fact true, and not just a really good, if racily modern, aphorism. I’ve come to the solid conclusion that these are words I’ll stand by, and not only because they sound like something Oscar Wilde or Truman Capote might have said. I’ve decided that I’ll stand by them because in my considerable experience, they weather veracity’s mettle.

I’ve fucked a lot of men, and I’ve fucked a handful of women. Of all of them, all of that multi-hued, heaving, steamy mass of humanity who have known me in a biblical way, if occasionally in a Sapphic one, there are very few I remember with anything approaching regret. I suppose I regret losing my virginity as I did if only because I didn’t exactly forthrightly choose it. I would have preferred doing it for the first time not completely hammered on PBR and with a guy I really neither liked nor respected. In an ideal world, there would have been less beer and more amity.

I guess absolutely regret Todd, or Taaaaahhhhhhhhd, as my mind always calls him. I regret getting involved with him at all because he was a cruel, stupid man who did his utmost to make me feel badly about myself. I regret not merely fucking him; I regret staying with him for ten months. My pigheaded commitment to this man testifies loudly to my pitiable self esteem at the time. I knew he was an ass, and even though I had this voice that announced to me repeatedly Taaaaahhhhhd’s extreme assholery, I chose not to listen. La, la, la, I sang to the voice, hands clapped over my ears, as I sallied once more into the ass fray. I regret that whole ten-month period.

I kind of regret fucking that jazz pianist who didn’t like to kiss. I’ve never been intimate with a person who didn’t like to kiss before, and that was a singularly odd experience. I don’t know if I full-out regret it, however, because as weird as it was, I really haven’t experienced any deleterious effects from that short-lived silliness. Also in the category of semi-regret, I guess I kind of regret Armand, the guy who tried to make me feel badly about having particularly juicy genitals. There are a couple of other dudes I’d throw into the slumgullion of semi-regret, but as I slept with them at most once or twice, it hardly seems worth the effort.

And yet, real, panging regrets, while I have a few, they have not been too few to mention. There are, actually, three, or maybe five. They are, to a one, a person who gave me the opportunity to intimacy, and yet I did not avail myself of it. One is Vlad, the Would-Be Impaler. I fervently wish I’d responded to his attempts to seduce me. I could, even now, bang my head against an unyielding surface for not recognizing that when he was sucking my toes in the hot tub, Vlad was trying to bed me. I could bang my noggin twice as hard when I recollect that he tried again that time he massaged my fingers in the dance club. I don’t know what kind of somatic aphasia I was experiencing during those two evenings, but I don’t believe I’ll ever forgive myself for my complete lack of reaction. I might as well have been a girl in a coma for all my response. I really regret that.

I regret too not continuing to date Malik Yoba when I had the chance. My regret has nothing to do with his later celebrity (he’d only been cast in Cool Runnings when we dated; he had not yet made the film), and it has everything to do with the fact that once more I failed to recognize a man’s inherent sexy motherfuckerness, and that I chose a lame worm-boy over the tall and stalwartly virile Malik Yoba. I regret that decision. I can, as I’ve said before, be a complete doofus.

I regret not dating this gorgeous brunette who’d I’d met in a Lansdowne Street dance club on girls’ night in Boston in 1984. I gave her my phone number, but when she called, I was inexplicably rude to her; I really regret not giving her the proper time of day along with a heaping side dish of my pussy. Similarly, I regret just sitting in her car and not putting the mad moves on My Michelle that Wasn’t, another gorgeous brunette. I wish I’d enjoyed the physical and emotional experience of both of these women, and I kick myself with passion for foregoing them, even if it’s a metaphorical kicking.

There are a couple more people I regret not having done and known when I had the chance to do and know them, I’ll keep them to myself. I like to hold a couple secrets close to my bosom, if only so that I can take them out later to look at in wonder at my own lead-headedness.

Looking at this roster of hads and had-nots, I stand by my putative statement to the boy. It’s better to regret those you’ve fucked than those you have not. Or, as another wise person once said, It’s better to have loved and lost than to have done eleven loads of laundry. It might have been Salvador Dali, but what do I know? I never fucked him either. I kind of regret that.

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Don't you regret not entering the contest to win a My Buddy boudoir set. Just give me a comment or send me an email telling me why you should win. Winners will be picked by the powers-that-be at My Buddy headquarters, and you have until noon on Tuesday 11 March to enter.

question from a reader: foreplay, please?

Every once in a while, a reader emails me for help with some kind of relationship/sex/dating issue. Being a generally altruistic kind of chick, and loving to be perceived as an expert even more than an altruistic one, I do what I can to help out.

The most recent question comes from a woman who is having trouble getting her boyfriend not to directly pass Go and collect the fucking $200. She would like him to slow down and enjoy the fornicating journey a bit more, but he seems to wave off her requests like a road-worker with an orange flag. Here’s what she said:

for a variety of reasons, i waited for a loooong time before either having sex or dabbling in basic foreplay. the man im with now is the one i lost my virginity to, and generally speaking, our sexual communication is great.

until we had sex. once we began having sex several things happened:

thing 1 - he stopped paying attention to the rest of my body. sure he goes down, i get a few nipple pinches, kisses etc, but really? hes completely preoccupied with cunt. even when hes licking me, i feel like screaming, 'hey! sir! i have an entire body that is NOT my vagina!"

thing 2 - when i try to focus on him, he humors me for a second, maybe 3, before flipping me into position and... see thing 1.

thing 3 - our communication is ineffective. i asked for more time enjoying process (which before he also enjoyed), he agreed. things 1 and 2 continue to happen regardless. i asked if i could spend more time focusing process on HIM, he concurred, and things 1 and 2 spoiled the fun.

a part of me wonders if i am just THAT bad at the extracurriculars. since im not that experienced, i figured i needed direction to make it better for him. asked for that direction, got none. asked again, still got none. before we ever started a relationship he told me that he doesnt really go for oral. i happen to LOVE giving head, can perform a few decent tricks (very well controlled, nearly non existent gag reflex), take it slow to tease and build anticipation... and still. he lets me play for a few minutes and then stops me so we can start having sex.

what gives? what should i do? im tired of asking for direction on what needs to happen to make foreplay good for him and not getting answers. im also tired of being a vagina. i want to be legs, arms, back, knees, neck, face...

sigh.

suggestions?
Tired of Being a Vagina

Dear ToBaV,

This is a problem I myself have encountered in the past, when in the past I was having sex. It’s sad to lose the foreplay. Every once in a while the thunderfuck can strike like lightning and feel just as awesome, but that’s the exception rather than the rule.

So the first thing you need to do is to sit down and talk like an adult with the boyfriend, if you’ve not already done so. People can be incredibly sensitive when you're trying to discuss sex with them, unto the point of hearing things you don't even say; therefore I urge you to begin the conversation with a bunch of compliments. Tell him what he does well and why you like it, and use that positive reinforcement as a segue to telling him that, gosh, you really miss foreplay.

In my mind, you need to have a clear end in mind when you bring up topics to discuss with your mate, whether it's more kissing, or more time with the girlfriends, or more parity in household tasks, or more bondage, please. However, not merely do you need a clear end in your mind, but you also need an idea of what you're willing to do if the partner doesn't follow through with what he or she says. Which means that you can't bring things up over and over, get an assent from the partner, find his or her ass is unwilling to cash the check the mouth has written, and then stay in the relationship. You need to be willing to walk if the partner doesn't hear you and at least take measures to meet you half way. Only you know what your limit is, and you'll know when you've had enough of not getting what you want.

That said, talking isn't always the answer in bed. You might want to make a game out of it. Tie him up. In short, take the upper hand here and put him in the position wherein he has to do what you want or he doesn't get what he wants. Feed him your nipples. Kiss his mouth. Blow him. Alternate all three. But take the upper hand and take control of the sex. He can't get his way all the time. It's boring for you. So fuck him, literally.

You might also take control short of tying him up. Get into bed fully dressed. Remove an article of clothing only when you get the attention you want. Or don't let him move below your throat, breasts, belly, whatever until a certain number of songs have played. Or tell him to kiss you in certain places and not to move on until you give him permission. Let him know that he'll get the cunt when you're good and ready and not a moment before. If he's not willing to play along, you kind of have your answer.

My theory about sex tends toward the psychological. I feel that men get flipped by what they perceive as too much intimacy, and so they have a tendency to take it out in sex. They often have a hard time seeing the woman they love as the chick they want to fuck, so they compartmentalize in one way or another. It's entirely possible your dude is going through a similar intimacy overload. That doesn't make it ok, but it does help you understand it.

To that end, you might also try talking with him about his relationship issues. This territory is much murkier than merely talking about sex, and that itself is a fraught swamp. However, if you really, really like this guy, and you really, really want to see where you two can go in your relationship, you might want to try to push him to discuss things he might feel uncomfortable about. Sometimes talking about fears can lead to a sense of freedom that gives both of you the emotional space to be more intimate and playful. It’s a risk, but “fortune favors the brave” and “the greater the risks, the greater the rewards” wouldn’t be clichés if they weren’t also true.

Best of luck. Maybe my readers can give better suggestions than I; they’re a pretty savvy group.

nine relationships even worse than yours

I wrote this piece a couple of years ago for the Valentine's Day issue of a magazine that has since gone under. It starts out kind of predictably with your usual suspects like Joey Buttafuoco and John Bobbitt, but stick with it to the end and you'll read about kings and queens and a hot lead butt plug and a little disemboweling between incestuous Roman parents. It's all a good time had in the name of love...

It may be that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, but it is equally true that nothing soothes those scorch marks like the cooling unguent of schadenfreude. In the spirit of making our relationship woes seem like cute little animals by comparison, do allow me to present the top nine worst relationship moments in history.

on orgies, amusement parks, and cheese

I myself have never been to an orgy. I have also never been to an amusement park. Sure, I’ve had the odd threesome here or there, and, yes, I’ve ridden the Cyclone at Coney Island and the Zipper and some Ferris Wheels at state fairs, but both the full-on and complete climactic experience of an orgy or an amusement park—or, for that matter, the trifecta of an orgy at an amusement park—eludes me.

Orgies and amusement parks have a lot in common, when you stop to think about it, and I have. First and foremost, both orgies and amusement parks hold implicit in them a big, shiny blank check for fun. There’s not much of a reason to habituate either orgies or amusement parks if you aren’t willing to give in to the pleasure of the experience. I suppose one could go to study either venue, and in a cold and calculating way, dissect the experience into small and analyzable bits, but I suspect that one would find one’s self being sucked into the whirling vortex of fun that both orgies and amusement parks presumably provide. Those blinking lights can be mesmerizing even to the most stalwart intellectual.

The fun of both orgies and amusement parks is primarily somatic. In essence, diving into the wet pool of group sex and strapping yourself into a padded seat to take on a few G’s are both experiments in the physical extreme. They’re like parties for the bodies; whatever pleasure the mind registers—and in both settings the psychological pleasure is probably in excess and relatively unnoticed—gets overshadowed by the fleshy fun. Intrinsic to both is the inextricability of the risk from the thrill: You simply can't have one without the other. To manage that thrill/fear dynamic, both orgies and amusement parks often have themes, restrictions and rules: You must be this tall to ride! No single men! Hands must remain inside! Creative black tie!

And both orgies and amusement parks come with a specific passel of expectations on the parts of both the participants and the organizers. There’s a code of behavior required for both that is largely unspoken and includes a fair portion of patience, uncommon civility and a clear restraint from puking. Puke doesn’t go over well at either orgy or amusement park, though I have to imagine that it happens at both. After all, there’s so much jostling going on, so many strange things being slurped down willing and possibly unpracticed throats, and so much nervous energy.

I’ve been invited to both amusement parks and orgies, however separately. I have friends who are enthusiastic aficionados of each, and even some who are aficionados of both. My friends’ invitations have felt largely empty, like they were being curiously polite, and neither invested in my attending nor unwilling to accompany me were I to take them up on their kind offers. As yet, I have not given much more than a non-committal assent, like, sure, some time, I’d love to ride the [insert name of super-roller coaster or man here]. And let it lay.

See, I have  a few reservations about actually going to an orgy or an amusement park, even as much as both intrigue me, and they do. In the Venn diagram of reservations, some overlap; others do not. And all of my reservations stem from prior experience with orgies and amusement parks, some actual and some cinematic.

When I think about amusement parks, I feel a fear of puking. I have a history of public puking in general, and puking on park rides in specific, and as much as my friends assure me that today’s roller coasters bear little resemblance to the Zipper, I fear the hurl. I don’t so much fear upchucking at orgies, though now that I’ve considered it, I probably will.

I fear my body at orgies. More specifically, and to borrow from Groucho Marx, I fear that the orgy I’d like to have wouldn’t have me. Unfortunately, I’ve been scarred by my past with orgies. I once attended a sex party with my friend Becky Sue, and short of getting my toes sucked and penning a haiku about the experience, I have nothing good to say about it. It was the lamest party ever. They had cheese cubes. In Manhattan. I don’t think I want to party with people whose idea of hors d’oeuvres include cubes of cheddar. Call me elitist, but I like my cheese in block form, especially at sex parties.

I was additionally damaged by two cinematic representations of orgies. One was this documentary called, I think, The Lifestyle. It focused on a horde of late-middle-age swingers fucking on plastic tarps and in hot tubs, inexplicably and continually surrounded by crock pots of melted cheese goo. In one particular scene, one balding gentleman shouted encouragement to a friend who was busily fucking this fifty-ish woman in a swing.

“Give ‘er hell, Harry,” he shouted as his friend pumped away. I fear sex talk that surrounds our thirty-third president, even if he was a democrat.

The other cinematic orgy that has stricken fear in my nethers comes from the television show Nip/Tuck. I am simply not beautiful enough to attend that orgy. I have far too Renaissance a figure. I would have to train to go to that orgy, which is something I could see myself doing. I’d be at a dinner party. No, thank you, no brie en croute for me, I’d say, I’m in training, for an orgy. And then, when the orgy date arrived, I’d still be worried that I’m not in top orgy form. I’d be all like, do you think they’ll let me come if my ass is over 36”? Are my thighs too fat for this orgy? What do you think? And then crushed in paroxysms of  dysmorphic anxiety, I’d forget how to orgasm.

But if there were an orgy that was as good as the orgy inside my head, an orgy good enough to make me open up and take the ride, it would be in Paris. It would be this orgy, I’m sure. If they would have me. I feel secure that at this orgie en français, I wouldn’t have to fear the cheese cubes, though I might have to fear the language. Those French, they have a different word for everything.  Yes, I might like my first orgy to take place in Paris.

But no force in the ‘verse will ever get me to go to Euro Disney.

on death and love in Gotham

The thing that always hurts me the most about breaking up with a boyfriend is the way that one day  he’s your best friend and you can call him any moment of the day for anything and the next day he’s nothing, a stranger, or worse. He’s a ghost. This is the thing that always bothers me the most about break ups. There is no way to be in between: You’re either lovers, or you’re dead to one another. And all that intimacy, all that emotion, all that stuff that you know about him (or her) and that he (or she) knows about you is just—poof—gone, like smoke, but even less than  smoke, because once smoke dissipates and you can no longer see it, the scent lingers.

Whether stubbed out violently or near-silently burned to the quick, relationships when they end, unlike  a cigarette, are gone without a trace. Once you throw away the tender debris of photos or CDs or clothing or toothbrushes or whatever, once you wash the sheets, once you finish the temporal and internal housecleaning, there is only memory.

i ask, you answer, and other ass-hanging meditations

Since I put up my post sending out a query to you, my gentle readers, about what you men would like to see more of in bed, and what you women are reluctant to do, I’ve found myself on quite the journey of edification.

Discounting the replies I received from women for the moment, I’ve compiled a quick breakdown of requests from men. This sample is far from scientific, being that I gathered it from about ten or so emails and fifteen or so comments, but I find it rather interesting. When looking at the list, be aware that for simplicity’s sake, I lumped activities as disparate as watching a partner flirt with other men, watching a girlfriend masturbate and watching a girlfriend with another lover under the broad heading “voyeurism.” Similarly, I classified a man’s wish that a partner play with his junk whilst driving, a dude’s desire for a partner to ride his face, and a guy’s hope that a girlfriend would just “surprise” him under the general subheading “Female more active,” so some of the terms may be a bit wide for strictly scientific purposes.

Without further ado, here’s the list:

• Sissification 1
• Bukkake 2
• Flogging and/or BDSM (of men) 2
• Flogging and/or BDSM (of women) 2
• Female more active 6
• Anal (women receiving) 4
• Anal (men receiving) 6
• Shaving (of women) 2
• Threesome (any variety) 5
• Dirty patter 3
• Piercing nipples (of women) 1
• Voyeurism (of women) 5
• Blow jobs/deep-throating/face-fucking 5
• All-nighter 1
• Public displays of affection 2
• Menstrual sex 2
• Watching/making porn 1
• Gentle instruction 1
• Toy use (for women) 2
• Having left nipple sucked (of male) 1

There are a few things about this list I find completely unsurprising, and a few I’m really rather shocked by. First, color me a robust and stalwart flesh shade for my complete lack of shock that more men want to enjoy more anal sex (woman receiving) and get more blow jobs. Anal is the final frontier, the last great taboo in monogamy that you can enjoy without stepping into polyamory or buying gear. Plus, anal gets a lot of good press from the male’s end, as it were. And everyone {hearts} blow jobs, so the fact that four men expressed a wish for anal from their girlfriend and five a desire for more, better head, leaves me breathing regularly.

What does cause me some small astonishment is that six men have expressed a wish to be anally stimulated themselves. And what causes me yet more shock is that the same number of men have stated a desire for their partners to be more proactive. To be honest, the latter causes me more surprise than the former. It’s not all that shocking that men want their p-spot stimulated, given all the press and other exposure that pegging has received lately. I only had to watch Road Trip once to make me wish I had a prostate. On the other hand, I’m frankly thunderstruck that men continue to complain about their partners’ unwillingness to seduce and amaze them. I truly thought we’d reached an age where women felt free to express themselves sexually with an impresario’s flair.

Apparently, not so much.

Less easily categorized under these broad headings is the general subtext present in many of the emails and comments that as relationships go on, the sex gets more lackluster. This phenomenon may be something I’m projecting because it seems to be my current experience—my boyfriend certainly seemed freer to enjoy himself in me when he didn’t love me so much—but committed-relationship malaise seemed to run like a slogging current through many of the emails.

This makes me sad. I wonder how much we limit our sexual passion when we find ourselves emotionally tied to others. Maybe it’s because, as I experienced with my X known here as Ernie, that we find ourselves so inextricably tied up with this other person that sex seems redundant. Or maybe, as is the case with my boyfriend, the risk of profound physical intimacy seems ameliorated when it’s not amplified by the keening need of love. Or maybe it’s that when we get so involved in the quotidian drudgery and tender debris that makes up every day life with another person, we find it hard to see him or her as the primal keening beast we want to see in a lover. Or perhaps it’s some combination thereof or something else altogether.

I kind of have to feel for that one dude who  just wants his wife to give him more head and suck his left nipple (concurrently, not simultaneously, I suppose, unless they have an exceptionally nimble family). I have to wonder what keeps him from asking, or if he’s asked , what keeps his wife from complying. I wonder if it’s just the fear of the risk—of stating obliquely your secret desire, of setting it out naked and bold in the bright light of mutual scrutiny, of feeling the visceral twist in the request—and the fear that if turned down, he’ll feel like his ass is out the window, bare and hairy and faintly disturbingly comic.

It would be an ideal world if we could ask for what we want without the ass-hanging fear, and if we could also say no, or maybe, or later, without feeling the unpleasant squelch of guilt. I’m too skeptical to put stock in a prelapsarian world, a utopian society where people act like our favorite swingin’ 70’s Swedish free-love parties, where everyone can happily do anyone and there’s always a crockpot bubbling with cheesy goo in the corner. For one thing, I think we humans are hardwired to enjoy some aspects of sex because they are outright taboo, or even mildly scandalous. For another, the idea of a prelapsarian culture of swingers swinging and goo bubbling gives me willies.

But if I could teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, we’d at least be able to ask for what we want without the flesh-prickling fear of our asses being hung out in the breeze for all to point and laugh at, even if only metaphorically.

query for you, my gentle readers

I'm currently writing my fourth article for Penthouse, and I need some help. Slated for publication in April, this article centers on helping dudes ask for what they really want in bed in a way that will help them get it.

Here's my specific rub: being the flavor of woman who will do just about anything if my lover asks nicely and says please, I don't know what guys want that chicks won't do.

So I turn to you, my gentle and helpful readers. What kinds of things do you men wish your women would do? And to what requests are you women disinclined to acquiesce? The piece is going to look at a full gamut of sexual activity, from the very simple (like getting a lap-dance from your girlfriend), to the very average (like how to get more head more often), to the very baroque (like how to get her to say yes to a sex club), so any specific suggestions, however quotidian or exotic, you want to give will be deeply appreciated by me. And feel free to be as anonymous as you wish in the comments, or simply email me at chelseagsummers@gmail.com.

thanks so much,
chelsea g

UPDATE: so far I've heard a plaintive cry for bukkake, a firm desire for roughing it up in bed, and a romantic hope for public kissing. What about the rest of you?

so a girl walks into a bar...

Generalizations give me a monstrous pain in the ass. In general, I find them pulsating examples of sloppy thinking. A few in specific especially bother me. For example, I hate it when people look at something bad that has happened, shake their heads, and say, “Well, it happened for a reason.” I have to wonder why no one ever hears about something good that has occurred and has the same response. Does nothing good happen for a reason? Is every serendipitous event entirely illogical? And how does that thinking serve us?

It doesn’t, as far as I can see.

Not unsurprisingly, it really twitches my skirt when people apply generalizations to sex and relationships. It causes me physical pain when I consider the paucity of logic behind many accepted sex truisms. Why do we continue to believe that having sex on a first date is the relationship equivalent of walking under a ladder while crossing the path of a black cat? Why in the face of mounting scientific evidence to the contrary do we continue to accept that men’s sex drives are higher than women’s? Or that men can more easily have sex without emotions? Or that some sex acts are inherently degrading to women? Or that women, especially “good” ones, don’t like porn, or if they do, it’s only the kind steeped like tea in rose-colored emotion?

The perpetuation of these truisms says an awful lot about us as a culture. We are really, seriously invested in gendered ideas of sexuality wherein real men are randy, real women are reticent, and only real romantic love triumphs over beasty biology. We really, really crave rules, however craven, and however progressive we want to believe ourselves to be. Why else would people who consider themselves to be feminists worry about categorizing some sex acts, giving some the big stamp of approval, while others get marked with a big red X?

(I have to wonder, what sex acts would a devoutly hard-line feminist heterosexual couple—those who feel, for example, that fellatio is inherently anti-feminist—enjoy? Cunnilingus, certainly. I suppose they could fuck woman-on-top, and maybe, just maybe flanquette, because it suggests parity. Can a real feminist do it doggystyle? What about take it up the ass? Can a feminist ever be a buttfuckee? One would expect that the people who bother to quibble about the intrinsic political value of cocksucking would have no issue with a chick strapping it on and being the buttfuckee, though perhaps I’m wrong.)

The generalization that really bothers me today, and mostly because it arose as the basis for a comment to a recent post of mine wherein I lamented my recent lack of sexual activity, is this: that women can always get laid, whereas it’s ever a challenge to men.

thoughts on morality, manwhorishness and the confluence thereof

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about manwhores. It started when I began writing my second piece for Penthouse, this guide for men who want to be moral manwhores, and then as I was embroiled in avoiding rewriting the piece and then submerged in reluctantly revising it, the subject sort of slogged to the forefront my frontal lobe, crawling slowly as a nocturnal creature out of its dark recesses and into the light. Now that I’ve just cashed the check for the article, it seems like I can’t not talk about it.

Just to set up a base line understanding, I don’t have any problem with manwhores. In my mind, a man is as free to fornicate freely and wantonly as dolphins in the dating pool that is life. I don’t believe that monogamy is the answer for everyone, nor even for any one person his—or her—whole life. I am not the kind of person who would take the time out of her day to castigate a person for rambunctious sexual activity or exuberant sexual desires. If you’re a man who wants to put notches in your belt until it falls apart and fragments into a thousand leathery strips, rock on with your bad self.

Same thing if you’re a chick, by the way.

(I should also take this moment to say that I’m not the kind of person to chastise those chaste people who choose to remain virgins until marriage or forever. I may not understand it, but I’m not going to say that my way is the only way, and people who do opt against having sex have a right to have their decisions respected, even if I can’t fathom doing it, or not doing it, as it were. While I really, truly don’t understand people who are virgins and don’t masturbate—and I know some—I do respect the decisions of those who remain incomprehensibly abstinent.)

I do, however, have an issue with people who don’t fuck morally. I’ve fucked an awful lot of men. More than your average chick admits to, anyway. Some of those sex acts I’d relive again in a heartbeat; some of them I would gladly have eternally erased from my spotty mind; and most fall into the giant crevasse between sublimity and horror, wherein I feel neither the need to lave myself in their reminiscence nor the desire to scourge myself in their memory. But looking back at those various and sundry sex acts, or as many of them as I can recall,  and arrayed before me they form a prodigious and sweaty lot, I have to say that what separates the fucking wheat from the genital chaff often has less to do with the sex than it has to do with the partner, and how ethical that man (or woman) acted.

I myself have cheated. I have also fucked men who were cheating. I can understand why people cheat. Sometimes people, flawed beings that we are, put our feelings into actions, not words, and sometimes those actions include frottage, fellatio, cunnilingus, coitus, and other Latin terms. I also don’t for a moment suggest that cheating—the act of having sex outside a committed relationship without the express understanding of both committed partners—is moral. (I take a more grey area on the person who is the cheated with—to me, if you’re fucking a person who is cheating, you should know what you’re getting yourself into, but you are not responsible for the actions of the person you’re fucking. I think far too much attention gets thrown at the cheated with, when it’s the cheater who has made the choice. But I do understand these are debatable concepts). There is no way, however justifiable, a cheating person is a moral person because he or she choosing not to honor a commitment.

But, really, cheating is the least of it.

For me, a moral manwhore (or its feminine equivalent) is delineated by how upfront he is in a relationship. A moral manwhore is open about his manwhorish ways, and he lets the woman (or man) in question knowingly decide whether she (or he) wants to have sex with a man who is not interested in commitment. Some of us do, some of us don’t. It should be up to us to decide, openly and honestly, and not colored by the shiny Cubic Zirconia  gilt of false romantic promises, or fake identities, or other pointless and potentially hurtful lies. A moral manwhore, in short, puts the “man” in whore, and he isn’t fearful that he may lose out in lays because he’s honest.

A moral manwhore, too, is one who respects the woman he’s fucking. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been stood up when I was supposed to hook up. I can certainly understand how real life can intervene in the best laid plans. I can also understand how men sometimes change their minds. I cannot understand, however, how it is that my time becomes less valuable than his, nor can I understand why in this day of nigh-unto-implantable technological devices, it’s so difficult to make a phone call, write an email or send a text to say you can’t make it. A woman who is ready and willing to have sex with a guy is a woman deserving of common politeness.

Ultimately—and this matter is both the most fundamental and the most ephemeral—a moral manwhore knows why he’s a manwhore. The unexamined sex life is not worth living, as far as I’m concerned, and it’s even less worth fucking a person who has not examined his. A moral manwhore isn’t out to hurt women. He isn’t, like the Vampire I had the distinct displeasure to dally with, out to gather hearts, heartlessly. He doesn’t want to feed his ego on the tender flesh of a chick’s sexual permission. He doesn’t want to fool anyone; he just wants to fuck them. And he has looked at why he’s doing what he’s doing and come to peace with it.

Sure, there are other things. Moral manwhores always wear condoms, bring their own, don’t whinge about donning them, and dispose of them after. They don’t pick on, or pick up, women who are clearly damaged or too young and not currently able to make fully informed decisions. They call or email politely to end their dalliances. They don’t expect their fuckbuddies to do favors for them. They put down the toilet seat. They take no for an answer. And so on.

But really, what being a moral manwhore comes down to is just being a real adult. Treating other people as you yourself would want to be treated. Respecting others. Playing nice, Not running with scissors. And knowing not only what you want, but why you want it.

pokin' in the boys' room

You know something has passed “in” and gone around the bend to “out” once a Republican Congressman is discovered doing it, and yet what with all the current brouhaha over bathroom sex, I feel I cannot forbear writing about it myself.

What is it, I must ask, about bathroom sex? Is it the pull of shiny porcelain? The tug of circling water and its promise of easy clean-up? Is bathroom sex somehow more forgettable because its very surroundings seem made for erasing fucking’s physical remnants? Or does the bathroom’s strange ubiquity (all bathrooms, more than any other kind of room, resemble one another) somehow stamp its sex more indelibly in memory? Is it merely the voyeuristic thrill of being discovered in flagrante delicto in this most “privy” of rooms? Or is it that bathroom sex with its mixing of visceral needs—the offal and the sexual—intimate our own oft-denied bestial natures, that of fucking where we shit?

Most likely it’s some confluence thereof.

Susie Bright on her blog has taken an unofficial survey of people’s bathroom sex experiences. The responses make for interesting reading—unsurprisingly a full spectrum of Bright-blog-reading public have kissed/touched/sucked/and fucked in bathrooms. One would expect no less from Susie Bright’s readership, a group of people who most succinctly are united by their enjoyment of sex in all its glorious ruttiness. Odd, then, that these people find something in common with Sen. Larry Craig, other than, you know, a burning need for oxygen and the right to trial by jury.

I myself have had sex in bathrooms. I’ve had sex in bathrooms both public and private, though the latter far outweighs the former, and always with men, though I've had sex with both men and women outside of bathrooms. But then I’ve had sex with myself in bathrooms far more often than I’ve had sex with others.

in further consideration of virginity

If my recent foray into virginal advice-giving has taught me nothing, it’s this: what is good advice for the gander is most definitely not for the goose. As I wrote in my piece of 22 June I have received several letters from young men of some limited sexual experience. These letters could be most neatly filed under “angst ridden.” When I answered the most recent angst-ridden virgin dude letter here on my pretty dumb things, I did so intending to respond this specific demographic: young, male, and panicky.

I composed my response with a mindfulness of being reassuring. I’m not a particularly nurturing kind of woman. I don’t come across as being very motherly, not in person and not on the page, but if these guys were writing to me, they clearly wanted to hear from me, and not a sugared-down, palliative version of me. So I wrote to reassure, but I wrote in my usual straight-forward voice.

This post proved to be unusually provoking. While the lion’s share of the male commentators gave my post a fairly unmitigated thumbs up, several women commented and took me to task for being “patronizing,” “condescending” and “missing some essential” points about virginity, primarily that sex is a biological imperative and that not having it is tied up with intense loneliness and fear of judgment. Implicit in these comments was a sense that virgin women experience their virginity in a keenly emotional sense and, even more, that the voice I used to write about the matter, while fine with the men, was deeply upsetting to the women.

I have spent the last week or so reconsidering the advice I gave this particular nineteen-year-old man and how it might or might not be appropriate for a woman, especially a woman in her thirties. I have spent some time imagining myself a virgin at thirty and how I would feel. I have spent some time as well thinking about how I wrote about what I wrote about with the specific audience I had in mind: young, male and panicky.

I stand by my choice of voice for that specific audience. I have a lot of experience with men of this age because I teach college. I spend several hours every week with panicky nineteen-year-old dudes. I get them. And, clearly, they seem to get me, or they wouldn’t feel comfy writing to me and asking me for their help. However, I realize from teaching writing that what one writes to one audience is not necessarily effective for another, and I can see how my voice would rankle an older female audience.

Because it’s not just the voice that’s problematic: it’s the virginity. Women, caught as we are between the rock of virginity and the hard place of whoredom, have an apparently slimmer range of appropriate sexual behaviors. There is a tightly wrapped imaginary number of acceptable sexual partners for women, whereas men have a much more elastic set, and that imaginary number depends greatly, like beauty, upon the beholder. This culturally imposed dangerous sexual territory, wending as it does inscrutably between virginal paucity and sexual excess, puts women, especially women who haven’t had sex, into a strange and ineluctable position, because women, much more than men, have an invisible time stamp.

It’s only been pretty recently that the idea of spinsterhood has begun to die a long overdue death. While male virgins have been a site of gentle ridicule (think Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones or Judd Apatow’s The 40 Year Old Virgin), spinsters have been a site of vituperative disdain (think Great Expectation’s Miss Havisham). There is anger, I would argue, because there is power in the single adult woman. She is a continually reckoned to be old, bitter and shriveled with unfulfilled promise because she alone has illustrated that a woman can live outside the heterosexual economy. We can all rejoice that this trope is in the process of gasping its last, replaced instead by the Cougar, or the Power Bitch, who while still negative at least glimmer with potency.

Women, too, have the ticking clock that men do not. Sure, sperm slows down as a dude ages, but a man who has working sperm has a lifetime of chance to procreate. Women do not. Sure, science is making it possible for us to give birth into our fifties, but we privilege the “natural” over the “artificial,” and conception is no exception. Moreover, we women get many more messages from our hormones than men do. In our late twenties to early thirties, we get told with a piquant urgency that Motherhood Is Now, and it’s a claxon whose snooze bar is difficult to press. All of these factors add up to women feeling a lot more pressure virginity-wise.

They also help to illustrate why my advice, as well as my wording of it, might feel incomplete and dismissive to these female virgins. I am, obviously, a woman who left her virginity well behind her, who has rarely gone more than a couple of months without sex, and whose partners have been various, sundry and many. I represent a kind of sexuality that seems pretty swell from the outside; it, of course, is not; my problems differ from those of thirty-year-old virgins, but I have many of them. I can see how my advice that boiled down to relax, educate yourself and get therapy written in my usual frank voice would cause umbrage,  because female virgins have—and I think I can say this with impunity—a lot more than male virgins to cope with.

And yet, even if I need to change the words to fit the audience, I think the meat of what I told the men remains the same for the women, whatever their age. In fact, perhaps even more so. Because the hymen matter is simply more complex and therefore more possibility for pain arises.

Let me try to say it again, without condescension, with compassion, and with a desire to help the women out there who took me to task for what I said earlier.

If you’re a virgin, and you’re unhappy about it, I urge you to make peace with your self, your sexuality, your heart and your mind. I urge you to learn what you can about pleasing yourself sexually and that means reading books and buying toys and figuring out what you like and what you don’t. I urge you to give yourself a big blank check where it comes to sex and to let yourself experience the new, to make mistakes and  to forgive yourself afterwards. I urge you to get into therapy and find someone to whom you can talk about your pain. I urge you to find things you love in the world and about yourself and enjoy them. I urge you to realize that your sex-life doesn’t end until the day you die, and that it, like everything else, will change and change again and change some more, and I urge you to be comforted by this thought. I urge you to find a way to live that doesn't measure yourself, your life, or your experience against an arbitrary and imaginary cultural marker.

Finally, I urge you to find a way to love who you are—whether you are a virgin or whether you are not—because whether win, lose or draw in love and in life, the person you’ll be spending the most time with is yourself.

virgin territory, sexual colonization and an anniversary

Three years ago today, I met my boyfriend Donny. We met, as I’ve detailed many times here on my pretty dumb things, online, in the sleaze corner of a dating site. We met, as I’ve stated previously, during the sluttiest week of my life, a week whose sexual excess  still makes my stomach curl in shame, a shame tinged with only the palest wash of pleasure. It was a week that lives in history.

The promiscuous mixing of tenses in that last sentence is intentional; the written word creates the possibility for sempiternity, and while most of the unlively arts work to create a lasting and subjective history, writing being the most direct communication between feeling and thought does so most unabashedly and perhaps most effectively. Writing makes this historical week of SlutFest 2004 endure, for when Donny and I met with the ostensible purpose of a Dominant/submissive relationship, he instructed me to write down my experiences and I complied. I wrote them dutifully, and they lay, for the first time ever, below the fold, for those of you doughty enough to read them.

My decision to share this bit of writing has been a difficult one and one toward which I’ve been moving slowly. It’s less the sheer numbers of men—and one woman—whom I fucked or sucked; it’s more my knowing, even as I was embroiled in doing it, that what I was doing wasn’t making me feel good about myself. I don’t feel guilty about how much or how often or how many or in how many various configurations I’ve had sex: I feel guilty because I sometimes made the decisions to fuck in order to make myself feel bad.

I felt bad, that is, about some of the sex, not all of it. Because some of the moments I wrote about for Donny were joyful or curious or interesting or pleasurable or some mixture thereof. Some of them I’d do again, but not all, and therein lies the first layer of the conundrum cake.

There are, however, several more.

My writing about my private life (or the life of my privates) for Donny was a form of sexual colonization. In my writing, he was able to plant his flag and claim my experiences for his own. (I should acknowledge here that this metaphor isn’t strictly mine; I’ve borrowed it from my friend O, of Eros, Logos.) Of course, historically and literarily, there is nothing new about configuring the untrammeled land in the curvaceous form of the female body. “In Elegy XX: To His Mistress Going to Bed,” the metaphysical poet John Donne makes his speaker a kind of Sir Francis Drake, plundering his lover’s body:

Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O, my America, my Newfoundland,
My kingdom, safest when with one man mann'd,
My mine of precious stones, my empery ;
How am I blest in thus discovering thee !

Like Donny, this speaker makes himself conqueror and emperor of his lover by figuring her as a willing land, not an autonomous being. And while I could dredge up all kinds of explorers’ writings likening their new-found territories to virgins, I’ll forbear. Suffice to say that there is ample evidence to support how “virgin territory” became a potent cliché.

For like Newfoundland, like the Caribbean Islands, like the Americas, there is no question that I was not a virgin territory. Like any “discovered” land, I too had a history, I too had been existing, and often quite nicely, before this man came on my belly and planted his country’s flag. And like these lands and these peoples, I found that the man was taking me over and I wasn’t entirely pleased about it, even if I was greeting him with open arms and a giddy mouth.

At the same time, though, I must acknowledge that to have someone to tell all of this roiling mess was an intense relief. No one but I knew the fulsome oily slick of early June 2004. Other people knew bits and orts, but only I knew all of it. I was delighted to have someone to whom I could unburden my bosom. Donny became my confessor, even if I felt discomfort in the dramatic situation of the unbosoming.

Still, even with the SlutFestery and the colonization and the confession, even with all of these many layers, this slippery layer cake grows and teeters like Pisa in its multiple sloppy tiers. For Donny was not content merely to know what and whom I’d done (and how, and, especially, how relatively large their cocks were); he had to get off on his knowledge and, to a lesser extent, punish me for what I’d done. Which, frankly, I then felt I needed, though when I consider it all today, I feel I was quite up to the task of punishing myself. It was all a great, big seething mess, and Donny and I hardly knew what to do with—or to—each other.

We seem, somehow, to have begun to figure it out. We find ourselves less fumbling toward each other and more reaching out with steady hands. We punish less and reward more (even if sometimes flagellation is a reward). We put less emphasis on our individual past and more upon our future. We, like a zeugma, the word for a phrase that moves both forward and backward, find ourselves someplace new and interesting because we know where we’ve been. We have, however reluctantly, however shockingly, however ecstatically, become a “we.”

Our relationship grows mellower and more beautiful, and while it’s not consistently easy, it is predominantly healthy. We have grown to love each other, flawed and glorious creatures that we are, and I know that I have grown to love my flawed and glorious self too. The self-love and the other-love stroll hand in hand. Which is something I’d heard, but I’d never really believed until recently.

Here’s to three and counting, and here’s to more writing about my lover (and to him, though he never reads it), and here, of course, is to more love, for us, for me, for him, and for you.

Note: the language of a lot of the writing below is sincerely cringeworthy, if only because I abided by the linguistic convention of D/s writing, which, quite frankly, hurts me now, and not in a good way. I've not added any links, but should you choose to do so, you can search many of the names, all of which have been changed for the purposes of this blog.

what's love got to do with it?

This Friday, having some extra money in my bank account, and being struck by a small zigging bolt of inspiration, I marched to the nearest neighborhood purveyor of high-quality sex toys and I purchased a small, intricately knotted leather spanker. It looks a lot like those old-time rug beaters, though the hangtag attached to it informed me that the knot was nautical in origin, though Celtic in look, and was called “Josephine.” Though small, the spanker seemed whippy for its size, and it was undeniably cute.

Later that evening, I told Donny to sit in a chair and close his eyes. I draped my body over his knees, leaned on the window sill in front of me, offering my impertinent ass up and put the spanker in his hand.

“Wow,” he said. “Thanks.” And did nothing. My upturned ass twitched.

I looked at him. Well? I asked.

“Oh. Yeah.” Donny said, and then he swatted my right butt cheek once, announced he was tired and asked if I wanted to watch an episode of the Sopranos.

I let it go. It was only Friday night, we had all Saturday. I could wait fewer than twenty-four hours for the serious spanking and righteous dicking I knew I so richly deserved. I bided my time, held hands with my boyfriend, kissed him good night and looked forward to the morrow that I knew would dawn bright and lustrous with perverse possibility.

When Saturday night arrived, however, the spanker was nowhere to be seen.

“I want to lick your pussy,” Donny told me.

No! No! No! A thousand times no! I wanted to scream. For the love of all things erotic, for the love of sweet Pan on a pita and dear Aphrodite on paximathi, why? Because I knew what was coming. I knew that Donny would kiss me meaningfully on the mouth while haphazardly massaging my right breast, then dive with single-minded purpose to the fragrant lands of my cunt, lick me until I came a single yowling banshee-girl orgasm, and then climb aboard and fuck me until he came loudly in my ear.

This is our sex. Pretty much without variance. And it has been since the time late last summer when Donny learned how to make me come with his mouth. Since that time, we have sex I could plot out in an Excel spreadsheet. Occasionally, we buttfuck. Sometimes, if I take the initiative, if I change it up and throw him the curveball of fellatio, or if I throw a monkey wrench in the works and make the whole conga-train grind to a slow halt, then we’ll do some variation on the theme, but this, this is pretty much it.

And I have tried, I have tried and I have tried to get Donny to hear my complaints. I have mentioned how he used to tie me up and wasn’t that fun, wouldn’t he like a go at the old ropes again? I have said, wow, I really liked it when you dripped me with candle wax, whaddaya think, got a match? I have said, you know, I really enjoy being spanked. How about spanking me? I have insinuated, intimated, directly addressed, queried, said outright and asked point blank. I have done so for almost a year, and for almost a year, I have seen our sex life get more and more firmly entrenched in what I can only term in absolute honesty as a rut.

Saturday, I lost patience, and I kinda sorta, no really, let Donny have it. I told him that I was dissatisfied. I reminded him of the sex we used to have—long, languorous and perverse loops of time and experience where we held each other suspended in passion and occasional pain. I told him that I realized that this kind of sex wasn’t an everyday option, but given how rarely we do fuck, that I needed it to happen more frequently than it had. I told him, in short, that we were in a rut. I told him that I wanted out. Whether I meant the rut or the relationship was intentionally ambiguous.

“Well,” he said, a stricken look on his face, “when I met you and we did all that stuff, I wasn’t in love with you. But now I love you, and…” his voice trailed off.

Which leaves me to wonder. What has love got to do with it? Why now that my boyfriend is in love with me and I with him, now that he takes care of me, now that he’s committed to me, why with all of that, does the nasty need to go away? Why can’t he fuck me like the little whore I used to be (and still am in my mind)? Why must I sacrifice the wild ecstatic pleasures to the domestic delights? Why do I have to lose my lover to gain a partner?

Why can’t I have it all?

Donny and I did fuck that night. He tied me up, elbows to knees, my body turtle-bound and bottom heavy, and me bound and splayed, he first licked me until he came and then he fucked me. It’s a start. Our conversation and our relationship continues. I hope fervently that we can relearn how to be beasty in the bedroom and keep the commitment. It’s a lot less easy than I thought it would be.

totally another greatttthotttesstt day everr!!!!

Dear Diary,

i know!!! It’s totally been like so totally from then to eternity since i’ve written. i should be like so completely spanked ;)!!!

so. ok. secrets time!!! i have to admit that i always thought those girls were like totally lying bee-yotches when they go all like, OHhhhh!!! i came and then i came and then i came again and oops! i came once more and then they are like, you know, totally cummming and cummmming like 17 times or something and always on like bar stools or couches or their boyfriend’s truck’s gear knob or something.

like i always thought they were so totally full of shit, pardonez ma French, you know? i just totally thought like either the dizzy-jizzy-ditz doesn’t know what a Capital-O feels like or like she had to be all fronting like “i’m so totally the complete sex goddess because i can cummmm like 42 times in a row!!! Hah! Hah! Hah! i’m like totally all Angelina Jolie and shit (without the creepy billybob tattoo)!!!”

you know? like they have to be all like more Jenna Than Thou by like totally pretending that every little clitflicker is like totally a full-on orgasm. Like, oh! i dropped my Bonny Bell Peppermint LipSmacker and came. And oops!! Oh my!! there goes my celly beeping and me cummmmming! & while my nail technician was gluing on my Swarovski crystals on my toenails i came at least eleventy-seven times!!!! And they’re all, like totally, for realsies, girl!!

i hate that, u know?

anyways.

so today was like totally the first day that i was feeling well after getting sick with MonO, the kissing disease. (Hah! Hah! Hah! kissing my sweet V-Stringed ass!!!) and so i went up to Donny’s house and was all like, so let’s so totally fuck and everything. & so when he went into the bathroom to wash up or take out his contacts or squirt binaca into his mouth or whatever it is he does in the bathroom i quick like a playboy bunny took off my orange hoodie and my “Worship Your Local Devil Dolls” t-shirt and my bra and my jeans and was all there waiting for him in nothing but my pink with tiny black polka-dot panties and my striped knee-high socks from Brooklyn Industries.

& then Donny came into the bedroom and totally pounced on me like he was a dog and i was a big juicy bone and started kissing me. OH MY GODDDDDDDD!!!!!! his lips felt so gooood! i totally got all squelchywett like right away just from kissing him. i knew it would feel good but like so totally ohhhhhmmmyyygoddddyyummmmyyyy….!!!!

anyways. so we were kissing and stuff and i was totally cupping Donny’s cock through his clown jeans (i call them that because they’re all baggy and not sexy like those Levi’s i picked out for him) and then he started licking my pussy through my panties and patting it with his open palm and it was so great i  totally thought i  was going to cummmmmm just from that.

but i didn’t.

instead i played with myself when Donny went and washed the njoy toy like he told me to, all touching my clit and my g-spot which was totally felt like eating that weird Caribbean tres leches sponge cake only in g-spot form. It felt that superhottfantasstic!!!! Then when Donny got on the floor & started licking me and pushing the big head of the njoy toy against me, i couldn’t hold back anymore & i came so hard my body like totally levitated off the bed and my left thigh totally cramped up.

so then Donny like totally fucked me really hard. & he was all like, so can i still come in side you? because it was totally my period last week & so i was like, yes, and he was all like, so can i come now?

& then i was like, can i ride you first and, like, maybe come again?

& so he was like, Sure! and flipped over.

so i started riding him, and like Missy Eliot was like playing on iTunes in the background, the one that starts with “Who’s That Bitch!” and i had one finger on my clit and Donny’s greatttthaarrrrrd cOck like totally buried inside me and then all of a sudden it started happening!!!

like, Pop! and then Pop! and Pop! Pop! and there it was, like me all like multi-orgasmic!!! i  felt like i was this surfer chick like maybe Michelle Rodriguez in Blue Crush or something and it felt so greattthottt superfantasmic & like i was surfing all pop-pop-pop riding this wave of one capital-O to the next. It was such a rush.

i didn’t come eleventy-seven times, but i did come about six in a row like pop! pop! pop! & then pop! pop! pop! pop-pop! i know!!!! i so totally couldn’t believe it either!!!  it was like crazy!

afterwards, Donny fucked me and came inside me and it was really great hotttt.

& dear Diary, that’s how i totally went from mono to multiple!!!! ;) 

kissykiss,
chelsea girl

quotidian sex and other tiny intimacies

The thing about it is this: it’s hard to tell the steamy hott truth of ordinary sex. When there are the literal ties that bind, the metal teeth that bite, the swoop and fall of leather hide, when there are toys and accoutrements abounding, when there is the blank cover of anonymity and mulitvarious limbs, it’s simply an easier story to tell.

When there are not, the story diminishes. No grand sweeping monologues of falling floggers, no arc of ache and delight, no taut narrative tension of unapologetic rope and tender wrists. No eldritch tales of anonymous sexual excess. Stripped of these sundry, tawdry, and pleasurably rococo embellishments, in bare face of all this absence, the story feels naked. It feels, somehow, less worthy of telling.

It feels, well, ordinary.

And yet, this the sex that most of us have most often. This is the sex, for example, I had today, bent over my spanky new still off-gassing memory mattress, my boyfriend behind me lapping at my split drippy genitals. This is the sex I have most often, these days, at least.

So the challenge raises its hoary head. How does one tell the tale of the less-tall and more-average fucking? How does one find the in to the narrative of the regular ins and outs? How does one make searing the story of sex that’s not so apparently pyrotechnic in its glory? How does one show the glimmer in the less overtly glamorous?

How do I?

Where do I begin? Do I begin at the beginning? Do I tell you that each and every time Donny and I fuck he begins in earnest by unclasping my two necklaces, stripping my neck bare before he removes any article of clothing? Do I give you this sterling moment that indicates to me more than a kiss, more than a touch, more than a look, more than a bulge, more than a dampness in the invariably cotton crotch of my almost always g-string panties, more than any or all of that, that this moment, this tender metallic clink! signals to me our immediate fucking and that my response is Pavlovian?

Or do I begin in medias res? My body spread across my bed like melting butter, my thighs flung asunder like a toddler’s toys, my boyfriend’s face buried in my pussy like he’s a salmon swimming dangerously upstream? Do I begin there?

Do I begin with me on my knees, boyfriend now behind me, his cock bigger than life, redder than Christmas, greedier than Midas, fucking me with slow and palpable precision? Do I begin there?

Do I begin with Donny holding my chin with one hand and commanding, “Look at me”? Do I begin with my looking down at him, his hands roving my breasts like hungry cattle and telling him, Pinch.

Or do I begin at the end, move implausibly backwards, like a slow-rewind film, my hand reeling Donny’s come back into his cock, the long white streaming spurts invisibly sucked off the flat plane between my breasts’ hillocks, his cock like a tiny’ elephant’s trunk, like an anteater’s nose implausibly snarfling  the pearly-white puddle up through time and space  and back into his turgid cock as my hand jerk jerk jerks on his cock?

Do I begin there?

Or do I begin yesterday, a day we didn’t fuck. A day we were witnesses to a couple’s vows in civil union (yes, it turns out, I do always cry at civil unions). Do I begin with my how my thoughts free-ranged to fucking Donny in the dank basement bathroom of an Episcopalian church? Do I begin with how I did not?

Do I begin with Donny asking me, “What do you want your wedding to be like?”

Do I begin with my answer, much like yours only funner. Do I begin with how answering him brought a fully formed and corporeal image of him above me, holding my two thighs tight to his chest as a plank to a drowning man, fucking me?

This sex, this everyday, ordinary, quotidian, prosaic sex. This amazing, exemplary, free, poetic fucking. How do I speak of it?

Or should I hold it close and tight in my mind, this unusually regular oyster’s pearl, unuttered and beautiful, a flaw growing silently perfect?

hung to hell

Ok, I drank too much last night, which wasn't actually all that much, but still enough to make middle-aged me feel like I was seventeen and suffering the painful tequila shooter excess of spring break.

On February 12 Donny and I celebrate an anniversary of sorts, and l