pretty dumb things

bodies in time and space

This August, I’ll have lived in Gotham twenty years. In those twenty years, I’ve lived in eleven apartments, though I’ve spent fifteen in the one I’m typing in right now. I moved around a lot my first five years, which is pretty typical for new New Yorkers, actually. In those eleven apartments, I’ve lived with four men, with collective whom I shared around eight years, to make a smeary approximation. Add to those eight the five years or so I’ve spent with assorted other dudes (including the three-ish years I spent with Donny) and for a total of thirteen years, give or take, the cavalcade of my dating life has been traipsing through Gotham.

There are many bodies that hang like asteroids in my one-score chunk of Gotham time and space. There are bodies who throb and glow like pulsars, and others who lie dead and dormant like white stars. There are none whom I’d call black holes, thankfully. But they’re all there, somewhere. Spend enough time in a city, date enough people, and the landscape becomes dotted with relationship remembrances, a ghostly breadcrumb trail that pulses with meanings invisible to any other naked eye.

Taking a cold empiric if necessarily hazy accounting, I’ve spent only seven years on my onesy, and yet it feels like I’ve spent ever so much more time alone than partnered. I am, of course, single now and feeling fine about it. I suffer an almost rosily nostalgic glow when I see couples performing couplehood, which couples do as much to express affection between themselves as to express their bond to the world. Ah, I think, I recall holding hands. Yes, I know of having a wisp of hair brushed from my forehead. I can recollect that specific canting of torsos, the one that implies shared intimacy, emotions and bodily fluids.

I remain able to summon a vague cloud of dating interest, a romantic nebula. It’s a pretty sight when I let my mind drift into that telescopic view. I see the sparkles and the lightning flashes and that ethereal glow intrinsic to the happy clashing of two separate people who spontaneously unite into one hot element. I can visualize that moment and feel it resonate with that pleasurable bassy thrum that bounces between my solar plexus and my svadisthana, to drift a little old-agey prose-wise. I can see it, but I can’t touch it, and I’m not sure I want to.

Which is all to say that at some point in the past few years a seismic change took place. Something major shifted, almost without my notice, and the landscape of my interior life changed, possibly irrevocably. I used to feel a mad desperation at being alone. I felt oppressed by singularity, disfigured by it, strange and crazed and wild at my single experience. I dated in a frenetic rush. I flagellated myself with my own undesirability when I wasn’t dating. I felt the press and crush of my own romantic failures with gravitational force. I nearly broke myself with my own pressure to date. Without a man, I was nothing. I didn’t cease to exist—that would have been a step up in emotional health actually—rather, I turned antimatter, a singularly horrid and shadowy incarnation of my dated self.

Now that wild compunction is past. I put my eye to the romantic pinhole and see the expansive glory that can be a romantic relationship, but I’m still nonetheless aware of what lies just outside of the rim of my vision. The unavoidable disappointment, the uncomfortable sleeping, the pain and the fear and the meeting of parents and other family, the boredom and the sports watching. The apparitional specter of Xs and the weighty baggage that every human accumulates after adolescence. The bad smells and the anger and the stuff that drifts gently away like so much space detritus.

 I hope some day that I’ll be able to put these two views together—the rosy macro and the lurid micro—and finally put the “real” in “relationship.” Neither one view nor the other is valid, though neither are they false. And yet, even a contented spinster such as myself can see the value in the coupled state. Plus, I would really rather enjoy someday having sex. Bodies in space are nice, but bodies in bed are nicer.

Or, faint as the morning star, so I seem to recall.

parts and wholes, frankensex and murk

If, like kids today, I’d gotten my nascent ideas about sex from heat-n-serve, hot-n-cold-streaming Hi-Res porn, my ideas would have been a lot more complete. Which is to say they would have been just as incomplete, but in totally different ways. But in the 1970s, porn was not as easy to come by as it is today, and I had to glean sexual crumbs where I could and then mash them together in my head until they formed some sort of cobbled-together whole.

I sneakingly read my uncles’ nudie mags; I squirreled away pieces of the letters to Penthouse, the better to line my erotic nest. I took sexy scraps and amatory orts from whatever novels or movies would offer them up to me: a scene from Oh, God; a limpid nude scene from a Bertolluci film; the flash of thighs and chests from Dukes of Hazard or Love Boat. I even pilfered the soundscape of my parents’ sex, a recollection that today fills me with thudding horror. When you’re twelve or thirteen, you’ll do whatever you need to do in order to flesh out that mute, yowling need.

I remember being around twelve or thirteen and, having just discovered the secret garden that is masturbation, taking the Frankensteinian erotic monster of my own creation out to play. Often, that monster would take the form of a local boy, this kid I’ll name Lance Irish, because it’s the closes approximation of his name I can come up with.  I remain certain that Lance’s phallic name had as much to do with my picking him as anything else. Lance was a chimera. It was upon his body I projected my inchoate desires.

Lance himself had a kind of annoying greaser patter. He had the affect of an unsuccessful snake oil salesman. Today, I’d grant him the metaphor of selling off-brand Viagra, but Viagra didn’t exist in the mid-1970s, Viagra—like cellphones, personal computers, post-it notes, and Hot Pockets—had yet to be invented. So Lance had the unpleasantly slick manner of a huckster, a mountebank, but he was only fourteen too. He would have been a mini-mountebank. He had black hair and a tender sprinkling of freckles over the bridge of his nose. His lips were wicked red (that’s how we talked then, and there, in mid-70s Vermont), and he had these skinny hips. He had a pervert’s air, and I imagined his body white and whippy, interestingly tufted with that black, black hair, and I even gave myself permission to almost imagine Lance’s lance.

Lying in my bed on dark winter nights, or sunny summer afternoons, anytime, really, I would think of how to get Lance to have sex with me. I’d imagine calling him and being all like, Hi, Lance…so, like, do you want to have sex? Or I’d imagine being somewhere and being all coy and flirtatious, rolling double-entendres like spit balls and lobbing them at him until the idea stuck to his skin. I would imagine us somehow, magically, improbably alone, in the same empty place at the same empty time, with too much time on our hands and too many hormones coursing through our bodies. I imagined nature taking its course, even if I couldn’t quite grasp what nature would do.

Unsurprisingly, that place would sometimes be on the flat moor-like plain cresting the hill behind my house. It might be smack in the middle of the fern patch fed by the crick running down the length of the mini-mountain to the right of the moors. It might sometimes be the high and dry sandy ground of the graveyard; I envisioned Lance leaning casually on the blocky mauve carapace of a grave and somehow being improbably suave, and then I imagined us a tangle of limbs in the strawberry-scented air. Sometimes I even imagined him in my own narrow blue bed.

But while the urge was strong, it was not stronger than sense, and I didn’t follow through with any of my rococo and painfully unlikely scenarios. I mean, obviously. Part of the problem was that while I had the Frankensex shambling about in my head, it was missing bits. I knew how sex worked, and I knew that I seemed to want it, but while I could define the act of copulation in a stunning array of biologically correct terms, and while I had a vague idea that people engaged in a whole bunch of activities between the kissing and the copulation, and while I could even tell you some of the Latinate terms for those activities, I couldn’t for the life of me fathom how they worked. And, of course, the other part was that the very concept was absurd. Even at thirteen I knew the value of fantasy.

I’d only kissed my first boy at twelve, and I was stunned to find out that the pink slippage of tongue made it exotically French. The magical genie who could make manifest, even in the privacy of my imagination, those other activities was still locked tight in the bottle. And so I was stuck between the hard place of stampeding libido and the vertiginously swirl of my own incomplete knowledge. The sex need pressed itself upon me with enough weight to conjure Lance Irish naked, tufted and indistinctly assertively male, but I couldn’t make a whole out of the parts, nor could I make anything corporeal out of that murk.

These days, I have to range far and wide in the lecherous fields of my mind to come up with anything as eldritch as those amorphous Lance fantasies. My years of experience have licked the erotic lump into a fully formed baby bear, and that bear has itself grown up and given birth. It’s nostalgic to think of those times when alone in my narrow bed, I gave a long, if borrowed, leash to my sex, and I didn’t know where, out in the darkness, it led.

to pee or not to pee, or freud had a point

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.