pretty dumb things

my boyfriend shadow-dreams of anal

“I think I had a sex dream,” Donny said. “It was a little unclear. There were all these doors to these rooms in an apartment that was mine, but wasn’t mine, you know?”

Yes, I said, I know how that is.

“Anyway, so I kept on having this dream and at first you were just sleeping behind one of the doors. But then later in the dream, or maybe it was another dream, it was hard to tell, anyway, later on you were having sex with someone else behind the door, and I don’t know how I knew it, but I did and I found it really, uh, erotic. Somehow.” Donny said.

Uh-huh, I said. Ok.

“And then I had a dream that we were having sex and maybe there was somebody else or maybe there wasn’t but it was really hot.” Donny said and paused. “Anyway, I think we should have anal.”

Uh, ok. I said and laughed.

lube enough and time

“I’m really tired,” Donny says to me. He is methodically mashing canned dog food into dry kibble. “Do you mind if we don’t have sex?”

Really? I ask. I thought we might have anal, I say and bite the right leg off a gingerbread cookie. I pause, chew and say, I’m wearing a buttplug right now. I gave myself an enema, I add and smile.

Padding around Donny’s apartment, muddling time away while he does what he does so that we can do what we do, deep and hard and unhindered, with a clean conscience and washed hands, sitting on his nubby-slick bourgeois couch, the metal plug snug-comfortable in my ass, the television burbling insipid distraction, I think: How different this holiday season is from last year, and yet how much more different from the year before.

Last year, I spent Christmas with my family in Vermont, wrapped in the jangly steel wool cocoon that is my family. I felt half present and half absent, as I usually do with my family. They have a pulsating love and a flickering regard for me; I am, as I’ve said before, a hologram to them. For me to be fully there terrifies us all. And so I do what I’ve done since adolescence: I fixate on some boy, somewhere, and I let the great purple swell of my crush buoy me up and over the swell of my family bosom.

For the past two winter holidays that figment fixated boy has been Donny. Two years ago, we were in the off mode of our on/off/on/off relationship. After witnessing the cautionary tale of his parents’ marriage over Thanksgiving, he had summarily dumped me the Monday after, and so that holiday season I was despondently single.

Two years ago, I returned from Vermont and threw myself into dating new men. I dated the second movie fumbler. I dated the second Cat Man. I dated a couple of seconds, and by February, Donny returned to me, and I dated him.

Last year, Donny and I were engrossed in the slow and tender heart-smithy of forging our love together. We were banging it out. Heating it up, cooling it down, shaping and honing, testing and deciding whether it was worth it all, or if we should melt it down, start from scratch, or throw it all on the scrap heap. It was a highly distracting activity, this heart-smithy. While I was home in the grey Vermont Christmas, my parents tense, my sister absent, I welcomed it.

Last year, I returned from Vermont feeling red-raw with the inescapable pain of being with my family. I wrote about my need to be fucked back into wholeness by my much-missed boyfriend, and I wrote about how he finally did so. We spent last New Year’s together at a restaurant near his house eating an unspectacular meal and having an unsatisfying conversation. Then we drank champagne and played Jenga. I won handily, a fact that disturbs Donny to this day.

This year Donny and I ate dinner Christmas Eve at our favorite French restaurant. I spent Christmas with Donny’s family, an event notable in part for its happy chaos and intimate tedium and in part for its relatively low buzz of stress. This afternoon, Donny and I will board a plane and fly to Vermont, where he will meet my parents for the first time. We’ll be going to my favorite French restaurant for New Year’s dinner and then we’ll watch the fireworks. We’ll see how it goes.

And all of this emo-family-stress-love-scented context I provide for the assfuckery of the other night. Donny had phoned me from work. On the phone, he uncharacteristically told me how, immersed in the previous night’s insomnia, he had groped his way out by looking at a picture of me kneeling before him, his cock down my throat. That his cock is down my throat no one looking at the photo would know—all you can see is my kneeling naked form, the swoop of my back broadening into the generous curves of my ass, my hair hanging down around and Donny’s naked body rising like flesh obelisk above me.

Seated in his office, Donny told me in hushed tones how he’d looked at the picture and imagined fucking my ass, and that long minutes later, hands covered in lube, he came to the silent-movie assfucking imaginings and how thus released and resolved, like Hamlet’s imagined soul, into dew, he slept.

I love anal, but it’s a huge psychic and physical commitment. It takes forethought and preparation, like Martha Stewart’s rococo recipe for baked Alaska. Anal embodies physical and emotional risk; it has caused me both kinds of pain. Anal’s risks are anal’s rewards. Nothing gives as much pleasure, but nothing makes me break down sobbing, inexplicable and inarticulate, like butt-fucking.

This moment, this week snug between the Merry and the Happy, though, felt like the right time to offer the ass up to Donny and to the Sex Fates, or Sex Furies, as the case may be. The Erotic Muses, at any rate. And so I planned it—I squirted, I held, I released, I washed, I shaved, I lubed and I plugged, and I arrived at Donny’s doorstep with that prize hidden inside me like a fig in a pudding.

It was a risk worth taking, I can articulate here and now. At the moment, though, when after Donny had laid me on  my back and licked me with his pointy tongue and sucked my clit with his open pervert’s mouth; when he knelt above me and intently fed me his epic fat-bellied cock with one hand while his other pinned my hands above my head; while he fucked my persimmon-slick and swollen pussy above and below me, the plug pointedly obtruding with the most delicate insistence; when after these long hours of wet preparation, I held Donny’s well-lubed cock in my hands, poised and hovering above it, like a cliff diver on the brink; when, finally, painfully and then joyfully, with the pleasurable conflict of ripping velvet, my ass was entered, filled and fucked by my boyfriend; when my orgasm surrounded me like a mauve curtain, like the flight of a hundred hundred birds’ wings, like the rise and improbable crest of some somatic surfer; when my body took over for that fast eternity, Donny under and in me, during that there was no articulating anything. Not that moment, and not the moments after, when we lay together curled as cats dozing.

But now, here, in the paper-white light of day, I can say  the risk was worth it.

Happy New Year one and all. May you all drink good champagne and win at Jenga.

pillow words to live by

The words to leave you with are these: After anal, forgo the lemon pickle.

On the plus side, at least I did do it in the right order. On the plus side, I had the sodomy first and the curry after. Because if you must, if you really must, enjoy both the Indian food and the Greek sex in a diurnal duration, you really want to adhere to that informal rule: butt-sex first; curry later.

In my mind, national holidays positively scream “give yourself an enema and grab the lube, baby,” and not just because sodomy has been my lawful right since the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Lawrence V. Texas on 18 November 2003. More so, though, than simply availing myself of my legal right to be fucked in the ass by my lover’s fat-bellied cock is the fact that legal holidays give the two of us, a modern and urban couple pressed by time and crossed by traffic and bound by logistics, the unequaled luxury of uninterrupted time.

Time to ready our bodies, time for foreplay, time for the long and languorous running sentences of seduction and sensuality, time for all the heavy heaving breathing requisite for sodomy. Time to hold one anther after, then shower, and then hold each other some more.

There is, in my estimation, no such thing as an anal quickie. It’s not merely that anal sex requires the greatest trustiness of all sex acts—and it does—but it’s also that to do it right, and by “right” I mean with pleasure, with safety and with hygiene, I have to take the time to prepare for it. Before sex, I shave or wax; I give myself an enema (the means to my end); I mentally psych myself up; and during sex, Donny gives me a lot of foreplay; he pops a buttplug into my ass to stretch me a bit; he and I work up slowly, elliptically, inexorably to buttfucking. After sex, we spend extra time curled as quotation marks, making sure that each of us feels loved.

Buttfucking is like climbing Mt. Everest. In both endeavors, there is necessary preparation, no small amount of gear, a great deal of deep breathing, a conscious will to do something not entirely normal, and a wondering sense that while at the apogee, the pleasure may be brief, but it is also astonishing.

The month of August was an arid month for me sex-wise. Between my schedule and Donny’s, between my going to Vermont to care for my post-op Moms and my going to Fire Island for my vacation (which Donny’s schedule could not accommodate), we had sex on average once a week. Which is certainly more often than not at all, but it’s many fewer times than I wanted to have sex with him. (Even after a shower I can smell him on my fingers and pillows; I am in love; all the time and every day and each night would not be often enough.)

Moreover, it felt over and over that our sex was watery and pallid. Some kind of Mr. Woodhouse-type invalid gruel, some kind of ice-water and oatmeal sex, some kind of paucity in place of our usual profligate, if monogamous, perversities. It felt as if my gourmet banquet had been replaced with tasteless white food. I was, as I have admitted, getting bored.

I was also growing a bit anxious. Perhaps, I thought, the honeymoon was over with me and Donny. Perhaps, I thought, the halcyon period we’d enjoyed had been sucked dry and spent as a Bogarted bong hit. Perhaps, I thought, the thrill was gone, or if not gone, then maybe faded, and isn’t that really rather worse, the fading, the ashen dregs of the great staring me in the face accusingly, the great’s muted glory taunting my prodigious memory. Perhaps, I thought, I should resign myself to  the merely good.

This long weekend I found my anxiety had been, as it often is, for nothing.

For this long weekend, Donny fucked me properly.

cold ass ice

Step outside and it feels as if you’ve entered a hot, wet oven. You’re the pat of butter on the baked potato that is Gotham. It’s hot, hot, hot heat, wet and hot, and it cleaves to you, sweat-pressing your skin and enervating you with its doughy-moist succubus embrace.

You need to go somewhere the sun don’t shine. You need to find your place in the shade. You need to embrace your inner arctic. You need to stick an ice cube up your ass.

Maybe you try it on your own the first time. Maybe you go out and you buy a bag of ice because the cubes in your fridge just seem like you’d be shoving a square peg in a round hole, which you would. So you go out to the delis and the bodegas, the grocery stores and the mini-marts, you search high and low for those cubes shaped more like a child’s cartoon smile than a shoe box. You find a bag, you plunk down the outrageous $2.50, and gleefully you bring them home.

You stow the bag carefully in your freezer and you survey your bathtub. You consider the switch-twitch at the knot between your labia and then you consider the ring on your tub. You are suspended, momentarily, between desire and laziness, between disgust and yowling erotic need.

You clean the tub.

You stop and you admire its creamed-butter sparkle, and then you go to the freezer and you open the bag of ice. You pick out a singular, perfect, crystal-smile cube. You put it, a quick cold moment, in your mouth. You exhale and imagine you can see your breath in the freezer’s polar air. You take the ice cube to the tub.

You realize you still have your clothes on, so you put the cube in a cup, store it in the freezer, go to your bedroom, take off your clothes and tip-toe back to the bathroom. You don’t know why you tip-toe, there’s no one home, no one but pets to disturb, and they’ve born witness to so many of your indulgent perversions that they’re not even curious. But tip-toe you do.

Undressed, you get the cup out of the freezer. You add a second cube, just in case.

You go to the bathtub. You squat ungracefully and you recline clumsily. You extend your legs up the wall, so that the faucet sits between your splayed thighs, like the face of a grotesque lover. You consider for a moment running the tap with that gentle flickering stream that when you place your pussy exactly below its cascading fall, you come in a few wet minutes, your hips undulating a silent liquid adulation to your Neptune lover.

You consider it, but you don’t do it. Not yet.

You take a cube, you rest it against your asshole and you feel the immediate pucker of the asskiss, that quick inward convulsion, that wrinkle-crinkle in and up. And then with a deep breath, surely, remorselessly, unmercifully you use your index and middle fingers to push the ice cube into your ass.

The shock of the ice. Silver sliver ice-nine-esque core radiating. Like the plunge into a mountain stream from the inside. A swift round shot of pleasure/pain/pleasure.

Your breath inhales ragged-like. You imagine it’s not unlike the sensation of crack, only pure body.

You lie there in the tub, the ice melting in you, your breath quieting its rush-rush pants. You can almost see the cube rounding and erasing, turning into a little puddle of water, you can almost see it and you can feel the pain easing into a pure goodness.

You find that your hand moves between your legs, and you rub your hard little knot of a clit, your legs up the wall, the ice melting in your ass, you rub and you rub, and you imagine your lover watching you, maybe with his friends, all of them crowding in at you in the bathroom, perched on the sink and on the toilet, peering down with you with encouraging eyes, commenting favorably and as you imagine, and as you see the ice melting, and as your hand rubs your little hard knot, as the heat bears down on this glass city, wrapping it in still-born siroccos, as your heels scooch uncontrollably down the vanilla cream tiles of your shower, you come.

Or perhaps you just get on your hands and knees before your lover, hand him the cube and tell him, Stick it where the sun don’t shine. And turned away from him, you smile secret as he does so.

a hit, a miss, an error and a fuck

It was all going pretty well. I was tied up across the width of my bed, arms and legs spread wide like an elongated “X.” My naked body marked the spot.

A pillow under my head, a blindfold on my eyes, its interior fur pressing against my eyes and its black leather smell against my nose, I was comfortably restrained, beginning to relax into the position’s imposed immobility and delightful anxiety. Earlier, Donny had asked me to get out all of my toys and put them on my desk, but then he had named a specific few: my buttplugs of four sizes and two materials, my two vibrators, and the Big Dildo. I had arranged them on a vintage tablecloth spread over my desk, an impromptu pervert’s picnic. And now I lay back, listening for clues about what he would do to me next, half hoping I’d guess it right and half hoping that I would guess it wrong.

“Where are your nipple clamps?” Donny asked.

On the right far corner of my desk, I said. I heard rummaging, the rustling of plastic or paper, a clink of ceramic, and then Donny say, “Fuck it.”

“I thought I told you to take out all your toys,” he said.

I told him he hadn’t been clear. That he had begun by saying “all,” but had then switched to enumerating certain ones. And anyway, I said, my clamps were on my desk; it wasn’t my fault if he couldn’t find them.

“You’ve been very sassy,” I heard him say, accompanied by aurally detected movement. “Why…are…you…so…sassy?” he asked.

Something hard and round against my mouth. The ballgag. Donny swiftly smashed the big red leather-covered ball against my upper lip against my teeth, mashing the lip down forcefully against my teeth as I yowled around it.

Ow. Ow. Ow, I said, unable to enunciate “poodle,” my safe word, and flapped my hands in their tethers to indicate the pain.

Donny removed the gag, sensing my discomfort.

Fuck! I said and licked the inside of my upper lip. I tasted the copper of blood and felt a small marble beginning to form just left of the cupid bow’s center. I told Donny to use his tongue and feel the lump; he did, and to my surprise it felt quite nice.

I told him that now I would look like a one-quarter Angelina Jolie, and he said it wasn’t that bad.

Donny, trying to recapture his capital D status after the great ballgag gaffe, told me to open my mouth wide. I did, and he popped an end of the steel plug in my mouth. He told me to warm it, which I did, sort of. And then after telling me to open wide so he could remove it, he shoved it in my ass, not uncomfortably nor ungently.

He positioned himself between my parted and trussed thighs, and set about bringing me close to orgasm over and over with fingers, mouth, and toys, until finally he let me beg him to let me come and I did, helpless, bound, vulnerable, blindered and happy beneath his scrutinizing gaze.

Removing the steel wand, but not the plug, Donny clambered on top of me, sliding his cock into my still-ululating pussy, wedging himself inside my snug aperture made tighter by the unyielding presence of the steel buttplug in my rectum. He groaned loudly, said something vaguely incoherent about now using my pussy, and commenced sinking his rigid cock into me.

I have to pee, I said.

I’m sorry, I said.

I’ve been drinking a lot of water, I said.

“It’s ok, baby,” Donny said and started untying one of my hands, I used it to untie the other, and he meanwhile freed the leg tethers from the bedstead. I began pulling them off my legs, and he told me I didn’t have to do that and I could just go to the bathroom but to remember that I had a buttplug in me.

I scurried off to the bathroom, trailing about thirty feet of rope behind me, to my cat’s active delight. In the bathroom, I quickly popped the buttplug out of my ass, squatted, peed, wiped, flushed, trailed the rope and the cat back to the bedroom, fetched the lube, trailed the rope and the cat back to the bathroom, re-inserted the plug, washed my hands, trailed the rope and the cat back to the bedroom, got stuck dragging the cat across the floor, yanked the rope with the cat into the bedroom, and got back into bed.

“You didn’t have to leave the rope on,” Donny said.

Oh, I said.

“You look like Marley’s ghost,” he said.

What? I asked, the ghost of fuckings past?

“Yes,” he said, and laughed.

As I lay on my back, Donny positioned himself over my face, his previously turgid cock gone all baby-bird flaccid in the past few moments. I opened my mouth and took the head of his cock in, gently cupping his balls with my left hand.

“Yow!” Donny bellowed, jumping about eight vertical inches. “Cold!” he yelped.

I giggled. I washed my hands, I said.

“I guess you didn’t use hot water,” he said. “That’ll make things go in the wrong direction,” he said, and took the head of his cock in his hand, guiding it to my mouth. I sucked the tip of his cock, running my tongue in clockwise circles, pressing my swollen lips against it, deep-throating him with savage delicacy until his cock grew hard again. Once more, Donny positioned himself between my thighs, once more he began fucking my slightly obstructed pussy, the plug rubbing against the thin wall separating my pussy and my rectum.

Once more, he sighed, once more he picked up tempo, once more he muttered something sweet dirty nothing about my pussy and his fucking. Getting his groovy groove on in my tight tightened little post-orgasmic pussy.

And then plop! The buttplug popped out and rolled under my hip.

We looked at each other and laughed and kissed. And then he lubed his dick and fucked me in the ass because when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade.

Or some such anal equivalent.

oh, joe jackson, where have I gone right?

I don’t want to be one of those annoying, smug coupled ones. When I have been single, which has been often, or when I have been unhappily coupled, which has been nearly as often, I bristled at the happy loving couples. They made me sick, in short.

I wanted to hurt them. Indeed, not quite a year ago, I wrote what amounts to a manifesto against the happy loving couples, their hand-holding solidarity, their affectionate pleasantries, their high-end, luxurious happiness powered by their own sense of self-satisfaction.

I don’t want to be one of them, those people who are really only setting themselves up for their own dismal demise, therein giving the rest of us the satisfactory icyhot flush of well deserved schadenfreude.

Times have been when I would, with only a slight twinge of guilt, gleefully roast the happily coupled ones on twin spits, marinating them in their own juices as each of them twirled over the fire of their own mutual passion. (I would imagine each of them catching one another’s eyes as they were spit-spun over those white-hot extra flamey coals, their eyes flashing with desperation, and mine brightlit with retribution.)

I don’t want, then, to be one of those roastful ones.

And yet, I must admit being oxymoronically seriously giddily happily coupled. Oh, yes, I am. I am guilty with my own sense of couply satisfaction. I am happy, and somehow I still stand outside myself, my remembered bitter single self pointing my finger at me, mouth agape in shock and horror.

I would then happily sniper rifle the me that I am now, were I then to have seen my now self hand-in-hand with the Donny.

It’s gross, really. We sleep snuggled together like Paolo and Francesca. When I shift in my sleep, I feel Donny nestling closer to me, often uncomfortably—he wakes sore in the morning from the efforts of his nocturnal flesh pressing. (To my credit, I did have continuous and prolix dreams of amours with Nathan Fillion as I slept with Donny last night, so perhaps all is not as well as it could be between us, which is a relief.)

The sex. Oh my sweet Aphrodite on a pocketless pita, the sex. Donny has come to loving to watch me come. He splays my body out like a playset and manipulates me with his hands and his mouth for hours. Saturday night, he propped my abundant and good-natured ass on three pillows, the better to watch my pussy bud, flower and burst. He knelt behind me, thumb on my clit, one or two fingers thrust inside me, watching the frisson slowly build in my body, murmuring dirty words of encouragement behind me.

“Show me how you’re my slut,” he said behind me. “Show me,” he said; “come for me, slut,” he said over and over until I did.

And then he assfucked my accomodating and blissy butt with abandon and lube (and a ready towel, always a towel).

Today he laid me out in front of him, brought me close to orgasm, and kept me hanging on that delicious precipice for a sweet eternity. Then he fucked me until I spoke in unctuous tongues.

Oh god oh god oh fuck oh god, I called out to him, this Donny, my love.

We go out to dinner in post-sex bliss and over order. We drink copious wine. We have in-jokes. We cook brunch together. We fight about politics and we end up in each other’s arms.

It’s disgusting, really.

I’m glad the me I was last year can’t see the us I am today. I’d be forced to do myself some serious bad-ass harm. I’d be forced to kick my ass with the full gale-wind force of my arctic bitterness.

I don’t want to be one of those smug happy couples. Remind me pointily if you find I get too rotund with my own complacent “you complete me” couplehood.

Please.

donny redux

Freud, I think, was spot on in this one thing: in our ass sits our emotions.

A synecdoche is a part for a whole, and our heart has become the synecdoche for love and its loss. Our stomach, or testes if we’re men, which I am not, for courage and anxiety. Our feet for wanderlust and flight. Our shoulders for burden. We feel, somehow, these emotions in these somatic seats; when we lose that which we love our hearts literally and figuratively hurt.

But our ass, says Freud, is where we hold back. Our ass, after all, is one of the first things we learn to control. To learn to control is also to learn to lose; moreover, it is to learn a fear of loss beyond our control.

A person who is anal retentive, according to Freudian psychological models, is one who learns to control a bit too well, a bit too efficiently, a bit too anxiously. 

I am not anal retentive, but I am anal. I have a deep and profound awe for my anus in general and the act of anal sex in particular, something that regular readers of my pretty dumb things know perhaps too well. I have awe for the act in part because the pleasure and the pain are so earthshatteringly resonant and in part because I find doing it leaves me vulnerable and emotional and open in ways I cannot even begin to articulate.

I have not been entirely honest with you. I have not been entirely open. I have not been entirely honest with myself, really, and that’s the thing that’s more important because I don’t know you, the swirling hordes of my readers. You are mostly numbers to me, and while I appreciate you and your little blips and dots and IP addresses and your comments, your comments especially, most of you I don’t know. And it is to myself I owe the honesty at the end of the day.

To myself and to those whom I love.

Last night I was opened. Last night I was fucked.

Last night I saw Donny. Again. The strobe light of our relationship continues flashing offONoffONoffONoffONoff in a stream so continuous that our movements have the herky-jerky stop-motion look of actually being illuminated, when that light is merely an optical illusion. We have, since I broke up with him after Fire Island, seen each other. We went to the Yankees games, Donny and I, and we had fun.

I took a picture there at Yankee stadium, and I’d share it with you, but then two anonymities would be broken, and mine is my own to give, but Donny’s is not. This picture of us at the game, the first one, has fucked me up. We look so happy, he and I. We look like a couple. We look in love and we look comfortable with each other. I look at it and it feels easy and right.

It’s not easy.

Suffice to say that it’s not easy.

Last night I saw Donny and we..what?..had sex/made love/buttfucked. We did and it was sublime. Amazing. Celestial and warm and like being wrapped from the inside out in multitudes of feathery wavelets until I screamed aloud and long with the sheer intense pleasure of it all.

And then I sobbed.

Freud, I began, said in our asses sit our emotions. Technically, no, he didn’t quite put it that way. Technically, yes, I am simplifying, transmogrifying, altering his views to suit my anal purpose, but you will grant me this liberty, will you not?

I was buttfucked and something unnamable broke in me and I sobbed. My body heaved and convulsed with the force of my crying. Long, silent breath-free interludes punctuated by the ragged force of sobbing. My sinuses jammed with snot. My face crinkled like the fists of a child.

I was blindsided, if one can be blindside not from the outside but from the in. My emotions smacked me up from my bowels. I had no idea that this was sitting inside of me, waiting, biding its time, gathering force, until, with the force of Donny’s cock, it was released.

And as I wept one coherent thought kept going through my head and it was this: I’m just a little girl.

I’m just a little girl, a voice kept repeating to me, I’m just a little girl and I can’t hold this all in anymore.

Sometimes everything just feels like a lot, you know?

Sometimes it just is.

directions toward the tender part, part 2

This post continues my directions for anal-sex beginners; you can read the first part here. Go and read it if you haven't already. I'll wait until you get back.

Step 5: The In, The In & Out, The Out

The In: Ok, so you’re in bed, you’re prepped. Let us assume some pre-anal lovin’ steps that follow whatever erotic dance you and yours enjoy. Remove the butt plug, or have your partner do so (see step 3 in part 1 on removal).  Now you’re ready to get spelunked as you’ve never been before.

I like every position for buttfucking—missionary (though I doubt it’s what they had in mind), doggystyle, woman-on-top—it’s all good. But if you are feeling nervous, be on top. That way you can control how deeply the cock or dildo goes in your ass. Plus, I think that it’s nice to be able to see your lover’s face when you’re doing something new. It feels less scary if you can make eye contact. Moreover, a position facing one another facilitates communication between you and your buttfucker, and that, in the improbable words of ex-con Martha Stewart, is a good thing.

You or your lover need to lube the cock or dildo. Your ass has been pre-lubed by the plug, but you can still add more if you want. If you’re on top, it’s easiest if you guide the cock or dildo into your own ass, sort of sitting down on it gently. If you’re on the bottom, it’s easiest if your partner slides it into you, still gently. If your partner is holding a dildo in his or her hand, there are obviously many more position options. Pick one you think you’ll be most relaxed in and go with that. Be gentle with yourself (and if you are the lover, rather than the lovee, be gentle with him or her). Take it slowly and find what feels good for you

Take deep breaths. Relax as much as you can. Go slowly. Accept that for all your play you will be feeling something new and initially uncomfortable. It will pass and in its place will be, if you’re anything like me, an amazing, indescribably, primal pleasure.

Essentially, it’s going to break down like this: the head of the cock will enter you a lot like the buttplug—there will be discomfort and a kind of audible “pop.” That’s where the similarity to a buttplug ends, for a cock is a lot longer than your plug. There’s more of it, and you will learn to accommodate what you want to accommodate. Understand that you will feel a bit freaked and a bit overwhelmed. It’s ok.

One way to relax is to push out slightly with your rectum. Oddly, this opens you up so that you can accept more cock in you. Since you’ve cleaned house, you don’t need to worry about poohing, even though you will feel like you have to (however, you’ll be expecting this feeling because you’ve been playing on your own). You aren’t going to pooh. It’s all cool, baby. Just relax with the knowledge that the exquisite need to expulse that object that has just entered your rectum will pass. I promise.

I’m not going to lie to you; you will feel some pain. You will feel some pressure. You may have to tell your partner to pause while he or it enters you. Do so. You should be in control. Understand that when your lover pauses, your body will relax. Work incrementally, and if you need, have your lover withdraw and add more lube.

The In & the Out: When you begin to feel the need to poop dwindle, you will begin to experience a feeling of pleasure. Trust me. It’s there; you just need to find it. Free your ass and your mind will follow. You will want to experiment with rhythms. Some people like quick, short strokes. Others like slower, smoother strokes. I enjoy long, deep strokes that pause at their apex.

If you’re a woman, try to aim the cock toward your g-spot through the wall separating your rectum and your vagina. It’s actually pretty easy—I do it by tilting my pelvis up and forward toward my lover if I’m on top of him or under him, or tilting up and back, also toward my lover, if he’s behind me.

If you’re a man, try to aim the cock or dildo toward your prostate. (I have no idea how easy that is being utterly lacking in one and, hypocritically, not being into the bendover boyfriend thing my own darn self. I guess this is where your pre-game onesy warm-up will be helpful.)

One thing to note about anal sex that is very different from vaginal sex is this: you don’t want the cock or the dildo to pop out, really. You kind of just want that cock to stay in there because removal can be rather messy. And re-entry can be kind of uncomfortable. Therefore changing positions can be tricky. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I am saying that it can be problematic. Therefore find a position you like at the beginning, at least in your virgin anal days, and stick with it.

I like to touch my clit while I’m buttfucking. I like to touch my clit in general, but I really like to touch it when I have a lovely hard cock up my ass. Nothing, really, makes me come harder. But I’ve said this before, and this is your time in the sun, so figure out what works for you. If you are a dude and you are enjoying some anal play, you probably want to have your lover touch your cock with hands or mouth. Or you can let your lover concentrate on your ass and watch while you touch your own. (We like to watch.)

Expect your body to experience and react in new and unforeseen ways. It’s cool. As long as you don’t feel excessive pain, you are good. Excessive pain: bad. A little pleasurable pain: good. Only you know what you’re feeling, trust yourself and go with it.

Finally, don’t freak if you don’t come the first time. I mean, how often in your sexual history have you? It took me many years to learn to love a lot of different sex acts. Give yourself permission just to experience new things, and you’ll be amazed what pleasure you can feel.

The Out: Removing a cock or dildo from a rectum is not at all like removing it from a vagina. You need to let the cock get a little soft, actually, and your man needs to remember to hold onto his condom when he withdraws to lessen the chance he’ll leave you a little party (dis)favor. Regardless of whether it is a cock or a dildo leaving your rectum, you need it to exit in a slow and orderly fashion. Don’t just rip it out or it may be joined by Mr. Hanky. Nothing puts a damper on the naughty hot monkey butt lovin’ like surprise pooh.

Exit slowly. Hope for the best, and keep your towel handy.

To recap: lube; go slow; talk; be patient; breathe; repeat; enjoy; towel.

Step 6: Love Me Tender, Love Me Sweet

Here’s the big fat downside to anal: after it you have to negotiate the difficult terrain between the hygienic and the emotional. Poop is dirty; butt-fucking is vulnerability-making. You need to clean up and you need to cuddle. But you need to clean up first.

If you’re a chick who has been butt-fucked or a dude who has been buttfucking, you need to pee to cleanse your urethra to help prevent a urinary tract infection. If you have been the buttfuckee of either gender, you’re going to need to poop. Which you’ll probably want to do in private, I’m assuming. The rule here is this: if there’s one bathroom the buttfuckee goes first (and the buttfucker has to clean the toys. I didn’t make the rules; I just have to give them out). You can, if you want after your various forms of elimination, invite your lover into the bathroom to shower with you, which can be quite nice. (And if you're the man and you've had buttsex without a condom, you need to clean really very well. Might I suggest anti-bacterial soap?)

However, my suggestion is this: wash up quickly and hop back into bed. Because you need to cuddle.

Anal is incredibly emotional. It takes a transporting leap of trust to accept an object as large as a cock in your rectum. It takes an almost metaphysical level of openness to find pleasure in that acceptance. You and your lover need to acknowledge this. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than anal sex, but also nothing makes me feel more vulnerable, more in need of reassurance and affection, more craving of ruthless tenderness than being fucked in my ass.

You may be somewhat blindsided by the emotional repercussions of buttfucking. I have been. I don’t do it with anyone I don’t trust within an inch of my emotional life because I have learned that to do so is to throw an openhouse to heartache. You might be different, but even if you are, some lovingkind cuddling never goes amiss.

Take care of yourselves together.

Step 7: Odds & Ends

Odds 1) D’jaevle asked me how many times in a night you can buttfuck. I don’t know. How many times in a night can you buttfuck? It’s really the call of the ass. And that is why you don’t want to do the sodomy dance when you’re impaired. It’s just too dangerous. Sure, have a cocktail (insert pun here), or smoke a bowl. But don’t be totally fucked up before you totally fuck. D’jaevle, if your lady love can take it in her accommodating behind three or four times in a night, and you all are being scrutinously hygienic, knock yourselves out and color me impressed.

If you can only do it once, that’s good too. My last lover, Donny, has incredible stamina and could fuck for an hour or more. I mean, fuck. For. An. Hour. And sometimes it got to be a bit much, and I’d have to whimper “Poodle,” my safeword, and we’d stop.

It is always up to the discretion of the buttfuckee to say when. Always.

Odds 2) Have a sense of humor because accidents will happen. The ass is where the pooh lives, and as much as you may do your best to prevent it, the pooh will escape. Your pooh is Steve McQueen; it’s in prison and it wants to make a break for it, and it will, often at inopportune times. You gotta, metaphorically, let it go and giggle.

And then clean up.

Odds 3) Don’t worry if it doesn’t work for you the first time. Like St. John’s Cathedral, everyone’s sexuality is constantly under construction. I didn’t love buttfucking the first time I did it way back around fifteen years ago. It took me until the last couple of years to relish my buttsluttery, something I suspect that has to do with a more holistic acceptance of my sexuality in general, rather than something directly having to do with an evolution of my ass.

But if you like it, try it again, even if you don’t come. It can take a while to figure out what works for you and yours. As long as you talk (and use a lot of lube), it’s all just good, dirty fun.

Ends 1) You may find yourself sore the next day. You may even bleed a little bit. If you’re really sore, or if you bleed a lot, you need to go to a doctor, and for the love of god tell the truth. You did not accidentally sit on something. You had anal. Accept and move on.

You cannot buttfuck every day of the week. I consider it more of a treat than a meat. I wouldn’t eat bacon every day—nor should I—but a BLT once a week isn’t going to do my heart any badness. Trust your ass (and your heart) and do what seems right for you.

Ends 2) I don’t claim this overlong post does to be the final word in buttfucking. It’s not. It’s just a little overview. To pare it down to the essential components: lube, safety, play, talk, patience, and love. And a towel.

It is the tender part, this anal sex, as much as it is the forbidden zone, the naughtiest of the naughty bits, the love that dare not speak its name. It is the tender part; treat it with joy, with laughter, with reverence, with patience. Treat it with love.

And lube. Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of lube.

directions toward the tender part

The truism goes, “Those who can’t do, teach.”

Despite the several lovely and generous offers from some of my male readers, mostly those who live rather inconveniently across the Pond, I find myself currently sans partner, as you who keep up with my pretty dumb things are well aware. I even, to my intermittent consternation, find my libido flickering like a lightbulb with a faulty connection.

And yet, when it’s on, it’s klieglight bright. Cities have been lit with the power of my libido.

I hyperbolize, but you get the enlightened picture.

Currently, the house is a bit dim. The lights are down, and the absence of kinky means that I can be more clearly thinky. Let me, then, address some questions that some of my readers have been asking of me. Let me, then, give you directions to the tender part.

Let me teach you how to buttfuck.

I’m writing here more or less a primer to the beginner sodomite. I don’t pretend to have knowledge treading on territory much beyond the narrow bounds of dilettante buttfuckee. I will not, she may rest assured with her eponymous plug snug in her rectum, snatch the crown from the Ass Sex Queen, Tristan Taoromino. She can sit pretty and easy on that omniscient butt of hers.

But enough people have asked that I want to share my limited wealth. And here is what I know.

Step 1: Know Thine Own Ass

The best way to make friends with anal sex with someone else is to first experience it on your onesy. You will feel infinitely more at ease opening and spreading the virgin gates of your butt if you have some idea of what is coming. I cannot urge you emphatically enough to buy two items and play with them by yourself before you invite another body into your home.

You need to buy some designer lube, and you need to buy a small buttplug. I have tried a lot of lubes, and Maximus is the best. It is highly viscous and it stays liquidy when you need it to. It doesn’t taste particularly good, but anal and oral should never mix, so that’s really not an issue. I also like Liquid Silk, but Maximus is better.

I promote the use of the buttplug over other anal toys for the simple reason that I like it best. I don’t particularly like beads or beady dildos. And while I do enjoy the traditionally shaped ass dildo, you may want to graduate to a dildo slowly. Buttplugs are great because they stay in place while you masturbate, receive head, or fuck vaginally. They are small, not particularly scary (many of them), and they insert easily.

Buy some very good lube and buy a buttplug, preferably a silicone one because it washes up easily. Watch porn, read erotica, do whatever it is you like to do when you masturbate, and when you’re aroused, lube your plug generously, lube your asshole generously, and slowly insert the plug in your ass.

It’s going to hurt as you spread, and then it will “pop” almost audibly into place. That pop will be accompanied by a little flash of pain, and then the pain will subside.

So it’s going to hurt a little bit, then it will feel interesting, and finally it will feel good. When you learn to experience the plug happily, you can start playing with it in various ways—you can sit on it and touch yourself (whether you’re male or female); you can enjoy double penetration with another toy if you’re female. Just be patient, and figure out what you like. It’s your ass, to paraphrase Bliatz, play with it.

When you're done playing, remove the plug by grasping the flangy end and pull it gently and slowly out of your little behind. It will probably be kind of nasty. Accept. Move on to the sink and wash it with hot water and anti-bacterial soap. Make sure you clean up after your own darn self too--if you're a chick, you need to pee in addition to washing to prevent urinary tract infections.

Finally, don't be nervous if the lube makes you a bit...uh...anxious to poop. It's normal. Everyone poops. (Unfortunately. But really, my horror of pooh is a post in its own right.)

Step 2: Don’t Just Walk the Assy Walk; Talk the Assy Talk

You are, of course, taking buttplug in hand so that you can enjoy all this assy fun with another person. What you need to do after figuring out what you like is to communicate it to him or her or them. Talking about sex is not just fun, it’s dead helpful. So find the vocabulary and do it.

If you’re old enough to be fucking, you’re old enough to talk about it in no uncertain terms. And I must urge you to choose to pop your anal plum with someone you can talk to. You do not want to do it for the first time on a first date. It doesn’t have to be someone you have a love connection with—though I’m not knocking that—but it does have to be someone you can have a frank and open discussion with about the state of your ass. Talk about it before you do it, talk about it while you’re doing it, and talk about it after you've done it. Just talk.

I would suggest playing with the buttplug with your partner before you actually do the bendover girlfriend or boyfriend deed. It took me a really long time to feel comfy with toys during sex. I used to feel quite self-conscious about the toys. I got over it.

It feels divine to get head while wearing a plug. It feels diviner to get fucked while wearing a plug. Integrating your friend the buttplug into your sexplay will not only get you feeling chuffed about ass sex, but it will also add new hotness to your traditional sex play.

Really.

Step 3: It’s a Wash

You have the lube, you have the plug, you’ve talked to your partner, you’ve played in bed, you’re ready to rock and fucking roll. Now go to the pharmacy and buy an enema.

Good sodomites clean house. Cleanliness is next to godlessness, and you need to be cocksure that you have mitigated the possibility of accidental poohage. Yes, as Elvis Costello and the Attractions have pointed out, accidents will happen, but you can prep yourself so that they are less likely to.

I suggest a plebian Fleet enema. Follow the directions on the box. Enough said.

Step 4: Plug It

After your enema and at some point during and/or before your play, insert your plug. If you have a small one, you can actually walk around, go shopping, have dinner, watch a movie, drive to the mall, go bowling, whatever, while wearing it. This will do a couple of things: it will excite you both physically and mentally, for nothing is more titillating than knowing you’re secretly preparing for naughty hot monkey butt sex; it will excite your partner physically and mentally (see above); and it will stretch and pre-lube your rectum so that when your partner inserts his cock or her dildo into your previously egress-only orifice it won’t hurt that badly.

Trust me on this one. Just wear it.

Step 5: Doing the (un)Nasty (and Loving It)

You’re in bed, and you’re prepped and ready to go. You’re going to be nervous. It’s cool. In fact, it’s exciting. You and your partner are poised on the brink of experiencing something new and potentially fantastic.

So now that we've reached this magic moment and I have your full attention, it’s time to talk about safety. There is a long litany of nasty you can get from buttfucking. AIDS/HIV, sure, but also gonorrhea, syphilis, hepatitis, herpes, anal warts, anal fissures, and hemorrhoids. You don’t want any of them. Therefore, unless you and your partner are 100% monogamous and checked out for all known diseases—or unless your play is with a preferably silicone dildo that will fuck one ass and one ass only, ie, yours—you must use a condom. You must in any case use lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of lube.

There is no such thing as too much lube. Lube makes the friction pleasurable, and your ass doesn’t produce the right kind. Use a metaphoric ton of lube. As you did with your plug, lube your ass and lube your cock before insertion. Lube will help you from getting tears if you let yourself go and buttfuck vigorously, and it will help prevent hemmorrhoids. Let the lube flow.

You need to be safe by also being very clean. Anything that goes in your ass must not go in anyone’s mouth or pussy. You and your partner have to keep track of what goes where. I suggest that if you like to use fingers, you do the Hindu thing and use one hand for the ass and the other hand for all other body parts.

And as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy suggests, a towel is a good thing.

Ok, so you’re in bed, you’re prepped. You're ready to pop the plum. And I'm going to leave you, ass hanging in the air, as it were, until tomorrow.

Trust me. It'll be worth it.

turning the other buttchic

I want, once more, to talk about my ass. Or, to be more specific, I want to talk about my ass and my deep fervor for anal sex. Anal sex: I love it with a white hot, extra flamey passion. It’s not that my anal adoration will ever overtake my love of the traditional and procreative practice of vaginal fucking (don’t those two words go oddly together? It’s like a lab coat being worn with shiny black patent leather ankle strap heels), but if someone Pol-Pot-like put a pistol to my temple and made me choose between the two, I’d choose the pussy over the ass only after much hemming and hawing and with much lament.

I have previously written about my love of anal. Nothing since that post has changed, except perhaps that I feel more galvanized in my feelings. I wish that I felt the same kind of transcendent release that accompanies my being butt-fucked when I am pussy fucked, but I don’t. I wish it in part because this flavor of loving requires so much care and so much clean up.

There is the commitment to daily bran, the pre-game cleansing, the anxiety-inspired need for towels, the requisite post-game showers, the rest period between anal experiences. Anal sex is a lot like running marathons; it requires maintenance and persistence and an acceptance of potential injury; and anal, like running, requires uncomfortable stretching. Like long-distance running, too, anal gives a high only once your body has accepted and embraced that which you are asking it to do, a thing that is not the normal operations of the day.

I am not a runner. I have run, but I, like Calvin Coolidge, now choose not to. My body is not built for speed. I find running about as comfortable as slogging through hip-deep Jello; I run like a baby elephant. I have, however, forced myself to run, to run competitively, to run long distances, and to run regularly. I know of what I speak; long distance running is a lot like anal, and vice versa.

So there’s that. But I also wish I felt the same kind of hot animal metaphysical sublimity in having my pussy fucked as I do when my ass is fucked because my culture makes me feel badly about it.

The thing that is bothering me today about anal is that it apparently makes me a stereotype. I’ve worked fairly hard at not being a stereotype. To be a stereotype is to be easily read. I like to maintain a carefully crafted enigmatic persona. Certainly, you could see me as a left-wing feminist intellectual—and if you’re a proud NRA card-carrying member of a red state, you probably do; I am after all a Democrat living in New York City with an advanced degree who supports NARAL and Planned Parenthood.

Not only my politics and my profession, but also my love of the butt loving stereotypes me. My bloggy galpal O reminded me earlier today of the scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen’s character, Alvie, stands in a movie line with Annie, Diane Keaton, and behind him blathers on this pompous man who annoys Alvy.

Alvy says the annoying man and his date, “Probably met by answering an ad in the New York Review of Books. ‘Thirtyish academic wishes to meet woman who's interested in Mozart, James Joyce and sodomy’.” And ok: Ouch. I don’t listen to much Mozart, but he is an eighteenth-century musical figure, perhaps even the musical figure of the latter eighteenth century, and I am an eighteenth-century scholar, and I do have that Joyce quote tattooed on my left wrist, and, hey, yeah, anal.

O also chose to tell me about this study a friend of hers told her about. This friend, who inconveniently is vacationing somewhere in the South Pacific, mentioned some findings correlating a woman’s enjoyment level of anal sex with her level of education. Supposedly, the more advanced a gal’s degree, the higher the likelihood that she is enamored of ass sex. I’ve spent the better part of a couple of hours scouring the web for a glimpse of the study. I’ve found nothing. Which leads me to suspect either the study is apocryphal or O’s friend was tugging at her gorgeous gams.

But really, verifying the existence of the study is unimportant. For the cultural conscious holds a relationship between being an edgy feminist egghead type and being a closet butt slut. I think of the film Me, You and Everyone We Know, and how it portrayed the edgy artsy intellectuelle as a lonely woman looking for love in all the wrong place. And how, as I’ve written previously, the film suggests to her that she turn her energy to a more procreative location for real love.

Certainly, there is a kind of cultural crescendo about anal right now, a noise that mirrors the cacophony over cunnilingus and fellatio in the 1970’s: anal is the new oral, people say, though if they’re doing it right I don’t see how they can. But it’s not the new buttchic I really want to address here: it’s that women, specifically heterosexual women, still can’t seem to avoid being stereotyped for what they enjoy.

Straight men can. They have the freedom to enjoy a wide pantheon of sexual activity without worrying about being condemned in a sideways manner for it. And I don’t mean to sound like a whining bitch here, and I guess I really can’t avoid it, but what the fuck?

If I were a straight guy, my desire to plant my erect cock in some fair maiden’s accommodating behind would garner no pejorative terms. If I were a straight guy, my desire to have my cock sucked would not raise an eyebrow. In fact, I would be thought weird if I lacked that desire. And even my desire to lick pussy would be commended for its Alan Aldaesque sensitive giving male generosity. There is no cunnilingual epithetic equal to "cocksucker."

But be a woman and enjoy sucking cock, and you’re a cumwhore; be a woman who likes anal, and you’re a buttslut. Here’s my complaint: I don’t like to be limited by words. “The limits of my language,” said Wittgenstein, “are the limits of my world.” He has a point. I don’t like stereotypy because it is language that does just that: it limits. Stereotypy limits, and what I like about sex is it liberates.

I’ve been reading this post on Figleaf’s excellent blog. I have been reading the comments and considering the various arguments, and it seems to me that we chicks have bought into this good girl/bad girl/cumslut/buttslut bag of stereotypy as much as the next guy in a t-shirt reading The New York Post.

And I wonder what we have to do to liberate our sexuality from our language. I wonder if owning these terms on my terms helps. Or is something else will. Or if I just need to find a place in my wallet next to my voter registration card that reads “Democrat” and my school ID that reads “English Department” for my card that reads “ButtSlut.”

some romantic evening

(Ok, there's sex here, but mostly there's love. You choose how you want to read it.)

I want to talk about romance.

It is no secret to the readers of my pretty dumb things that I have a tempestuous relationship with the man known here as Donny. Tempestuous, actually, seems an odd word to use in this context, for it implies fighting. We do not fight, Donny and I. Donny abhors fighting.

I don’t. I’ll all too gladly settle in for a nice row. I’ve thrown dishes. I’ve yelled. I’ve made frantic, emphatic and occasionally obscene gestures.

I’ve stormed. I’ve thrown a drink or two. I’ve caused scenes.

I don’t so much anymore, but I am not Stevie Wonder to what I am capable of.

Donny and I do not fight as much as we drift. I prefer fighting. He doesn’t. We drift.

Last Friday while on the phone, I laid out in no uncertain terms that I had nearly had nearly enough. I laid out in terms approaching severe blue clarity what I need from him. I did not hold back, and it felt good, this vocal untethering of reasonableness and patience.

I held forth and forth until I was done.

And I was rewarded with this:

Saturday Donny came to my apartment around 2:00. I met him at the door wearing a brown suede  miniskirt and a brown chiffon shirt and hot pink high heels. And nothing else. We kissed, and I caressed his lovely cock through his pants. He pushed me into the bedroom where he posed me in front of my full-length mirror, and standing behind me, he rubbed my breasts through my shirt. And all the time watching us together, he kissed my neck and told me over and over how beautiful I looked,

How beautiful I was. How beautiful I am.

Then he led me to my bed, pushed up my short skirt and licked my pussy, tongue fucking me. He told me to use my finger and that he wanted to lick my ass. I turned over so that I was kneeling on my bed, leaning on my left elbow while my right hand busied itself by teasing my burgeoning clitoris.

I raised my ass high; Donny licked it. I came.

It was excellent.

Then, he fucked me, my face, my pussy and back again. I sucked myself off his cock as he face fucked me. He came and I swallowed.

As we lay in bed, curled like tendrils, he asked me, “Do you think you could have just one cock for the rest of your life?’

I hedged. I balked. The answer is, of course, no: not when I stop and think about it. But I didn’t answer him in those words.

I don’t know, I said.

“I don’t think you could,” he said. “And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”

I was gobsmacked. But I didn’t show it. 

He continued, oblivious to my state of shock, and began telling me about his grandmother and grandfather who ran the pre-nuptial counseling in their Catholic church. They always advocated that relationships were centered on change, and Donny said, “I think that includes sex. I think people’s sexualities change, and that mean your partner’s sexuality changes, and you have to accept it.

“I never thought I would feel this way before meeting you,” he said, “but I think I don’t have to have monogamy. How does that make you feel?’

Shocked. Amazed. In love, frankly.

Then that night he took me out to a French restaurant with a garden. We were shown our fern bordered table by the Maitre D’ who spoke French to us. We had a beautiful bottle of Bourgogne. We had rack of lamb and pheasant. We talked of sex and we called it “guacamole.”

We went back to my apartment, and we fucked again. Celestially. Anally. Completely.

I’ll tell you what romance is: it is knowing your lover has heard you and loves you for what you have told him.

Romance is this: listening and being heard, eating and being eaten, fucking and sharing a good bottle of French wine,

me you and everyone my ass knows

Tonight I went with my friend DaisyDukes to see Me and You and Everyone We Know. It has garnered a bunch of awards, including the top prizes at Sundance and Cannes. It was playing at the IFC theatre, the newly renovated Waverly Theatre space on 6th Avenue in the heart of Greenwich Village.

The show was sold out, and Daisy and I had to take the last two remaining seats in the front row. It turns out the reason for the sold out show was not so much the hype, or the new theatre, but that the filmmaker, Miranda July, was present for the screening, and the show included a little question and answer period after.

I liked the film while I was watching it. Miranda July is a lyrical filmmaker and a winsome actress. The plot is interesting. The performances are affecting, especially those of the kids in the movie. There are a superabundance of witty, sweetly bitter moments. It all seemed pretty good.

I laughed. I cried. I enjoyed the Q&A.

And then I left, with my Daisy, and we went to get drinks and we started discussing the film. And then I realized what bothered me.

Here it is: in the film, the lonely, intellectual, anal-loving woman gets nothing. Except, arguably, derision.

Now, as a lonely, intellectual, anal-loving woman, this rankles me.  It irks, and even more, it angers me. I would like to see the lonely, intellectual, anal-loving women of stage, screen and reality bestowed with all the companionable, cerebral, rockin’ hot monkey butt loving their heads, hearts and asses can stand.

But tonight, I’ll settle for the occasional filmic narrative that gives our l.i.a.w. a treat of some sort.

And, without giving away too much of plot here, what Me and You and Everyone We Know's l.i.a.w. gets is a reminder that a child might be her salvation. A subtle hint that perhaps she should focus her energy on procreative acts, rather than on those which are purely pleasurable.

See, I can take the mainstream media’s jingoistic depictions of normative matrimonial bliss. I expect this propaganda from movies like As Good as It Gets, or Pretty Woman, or When Harry Met Sally, or any of the other gabillion films that wave the big foam finger for normative monogamous heterosexual relations, especially ones in which the love of a good woman spontaneously heals the gangrenous heart of a misunderstood man.

What I don’t understand is why an independent film needs to sell me this exact same fairy tale. What, exactly, is independent about that?

And this independence of spirit is exactly why I loved Secretary, a film that literally naturalizes BDSM in its narrative of orchids and spreader bars, or Boogie Nights, a film that culminates with a money shot of an unusual family embracing alterity, or a film like The Royal Tennenbaums, a film that pretty much outrightly rejects the traditional narrative of romantic love’s traditionally reformative powers.

After the film, an audience member queried Miranda July what aspiring filmmakers can do to make their feature-length dream a reality.

“I did a lot of different things,” July said, “before I became a filmmaker.”

“Do what you enjoy,” said July.

“I can tell you that whatever it is,” said July, “if it’s keeping you up at night thinking about it, then keep doing it.”

I’m guessing whatever it was that kept Miranda July up at night, it wasn’t anal.

And that’s just a shame.

surrender, dorothy

(Oh, yeah, we're talking NSFW, full-on, multiple penetration adult activities here, friends. Feel free to ramble through some of my more PG-13 fare, wherever you can find it. Might I suggest either this one  or that one? They're both about dogs. Mostly.)

Fuckit.

Things have gotten heated over here in Chelsea. I have found myself awash in a hot city of glowing breasts. Like oranges they hang, like peaches, like mangoes, they sway around me as if this urban environment had transformed into some kind of weird Eden.

Today this customer came in, she was wearing a little, thin grassgreen t-shirt with three delicate buttons, the first two unbuttoned, rounding into a gentle vee neck exposing her globey glories.

It was mesmerizing.

All I wanted was to lift her shirt over her head roughly, abruptly, exposing her exquisite Asian tits. I wanted to slap them with my palms, to press them against my cheeks, and to rub my face against her erect mauve nipples.  I longed to kiss and bite her with my unbridled self.

Instead I sold her a dog toy.

Dang.

I want to talk, however, not about my Sapphic desires but about my submission. I was enjoying Bliatz’s blog, sent to me by my friend the Zero Boss, reading one of her early posts where it seemed she was just beginning to explore her small, curvy essness. She was concerned, in researching the D/s scene, about the legitimacy of her submission, wondering if it was hardcore or just "fluffy" submission.

I haven’t read the sites that raised Bliatz's anxiety levels, but I’m guessing “fluffy” D/s is comprised of the people, such as myself, who play the homegame with our D/s accoutrement. We have blindfolds. We have bondage tape. We even, perhaps, enjoy being spanked. We, if females, enjoy having our hair pulled, used as a rein, a guidance system toward our, presumably but not exclusively, man’s crotch.

After all, spanking, as one of my new D/s friends has said to me, has become vanilla.

I have documented some of my marshmallow fluff D/s stuff here, but what I haven’t disclosed is the one time I was Dominated by someone who’d done it before, done it for years, owned all the gear, read the manual, watched the training videos, and collected the action figures.

His name was Les.

It’s hard for me to separate that name from Les Nessman of WKRP in Cincinnati, but since at one point in my life I looked like Loni Anderson (a picture I won’t be showing you), I guess in some bizarre way it’s fitting.

A willing supplicant, I went to Les; I journeyed the town in the tri-state area where he resides. We’d spent a very long time IMming each other and chatting on the phone, so we were very clear about what our expectations were. He knew that I was a sub wannabe, and I knew that he wanted me to get on my knees and call him Master.

Les met me at the train station. I was wearing what I call my “magic dress.” Brown and with a deep vee halter neck, it makes the most out of my breasts, especially when I wear it with a cornflower blue push-up bra that peeks Sex in the City-style out of the neckline.

Les—he looked like one of my uncles. Less than good.

I clearly made him nervous.

Imagine.

At lunch, where I wolfed my salad and Les barely ate his gazpacho but quaffed his white wine, we talked about his D/s experiences. It was pretty standard stuff, from what I had read, and what was shockingly lacking, now that I recall it all, is exactly how unhot the whole thing was.

Not hot. Tepid.

I could not have been less enamored of this man. But I wanted the full rubber jacket experience, I needed to find out how I felt about it, I was driven by some unknown force to find myself in shackles, and so I went with him to his house.

In his defense, he was perfectly nice. He was polite. His house was immaculate. He kissed me.

Which I thought weird.

He undressed me in the living room and had me climb the very middle-class, family-picture-lined staircase to the bedroom.

There he had me strip completely.

He fitted me with a collar, with handcuffs, with shackles, with a spreader bar, with nipple clamps. At every turn, he asked me if I was ok. I assured him I was. I was game. I was down.

Literally.

Face down and ass up. Les flogged my ass, my thighs with a soft deer-skin flogger. He swatted me softly, he swatted me hard. He worked the flogger so that it stung the inside of my thighs, flicked my pubic mound, kissed my clit with its leather strips.

“Are you ok?” he’d ask from time to time.

Sure. I answered.

And he had his way with me. He inserted toys, in my pussy, in my ass. He face fucked me. He pussy fucked me. I think, though I’m repressing it, he fucked my ass.

I felt as if I should have been wearing a white coat and carrying a clipboard.

• Collar: check yes
• Handcuffs: check yes
• Ankle restraints: check yes
• Spreader bar: check no
• Nipple clamps: check yes for aesthetics, no for sensation
• Weird acrylic double ended wand thing: check yes for g-spotter, no for bumpy anal probe
  
• Flogger: check yes. Yes, please.
• Flogging marks: Oh, yes. I love the aesthetics of the post-flogged ass.

But on the whole, I found the experience oddly…lacking. Lacking in emotion. Lacking in sensation. Lacking in passion. Lacking in intellectual stimulation.

I kept on thinking of that scene in Margaret Cho’s I’m the One That I Want when she recalls her foray into the leather and rubber world of BDSM, and remembers being in a fetish club in San Francisco, spread on a cross, a dildo up her ass, a blindfold on her eyes, a large German woman in latex standing in front her and thinks, “This is not me.”

This woman, in the black leather collar and cuffs, checking out her stripey ass in the mirror in Les’s bathroom was I. It just wasn’t—me.

On the trainride home, I felt much more exposed than I had at Les’s–-bound, shackled, with toys in my orifices and a near total stranger penetrating me. I felt more cowed by the inappropriateness of my attire, the crashing weight of my disappointment, and the deflation of my expectations than I had by anything this man had done.

Was I ok? I was not.

I felt like a whore.

And not in a good way.

Getting off the train at Penn Station, I immediately called Donny, whom I had been seeing less than a week and who was fully apprised of the situation. He could hear I was upset. He invited me up to his house. I went, shaking and vulnerable.

I told him about everything.

I told him how I felt riding home.

He held me and he kissed me. And then he fucked me. And while he was fucking me, he had me tell him again what Les did to me, how he clipped my cuffs to my collar, how he clipped them to my ankles, how he fucked my face, how he fucked my pussy first with toys and then with his cock. How he fucked me in my ass.

And Donny’s fucking got more urgent, as I told him again and again and again what Les had done. He turned me over, looked at my bruise-covered ass, and came, a long, urgent and tidal orgasm, splattering come all over the bruises, like salve.

Like a benediction.

In the morning, Donny stood me against his windows, bent me over, and fucked me hard again. Slamming my sore pussy. Sore. Sore as hell.

And I took it willingly.

I remember the first book of erotica I ever read; it was Anaïs Nin’s Delta of Venus. “The Veiled Woman” was a story within a story—an experienced cocksman telling about a time when he was poor and had been paid to fuck this beautiful, but cold, woman in a room lined with mirrors while her husband watched. 

The woman showed no sign of enjoying herself, she didn’t get wet, she didn’t move much. She was polite, compliant, but not aroused, until at the end when she sees their bodies interlocked in the mirror in a way that looks as if they weren’t fucking. At that moment, when she has the visual image of her own passionlessness, she becomes excited, and orgasms violently.

I bring this story up because for me it’s easy to give pleasure. It’s easy for me to be compliant, even spectacularly so. But if you want me to accept pleasure, that’s where the challenge is. Either it’s something I want and will take, or it is my surrender into pleasure.

I don’t give it up easily.  Not the pleasure.

For it is easy for me to accept physical pain, because I can take myself out of it. It’s easy for me to accept humiliation, because I think it’s a joke. It’s easy for me to expose my body, because it’s just the outside.

But my inner core? That’s where the pleasure lives. And for me to show it to you is a gift—either a quick release like masturbation it is a gift to myself, or an attenuated process like surrender it is a gift to you.

So you tell me: where’s the fluffy submission? In giving in to Les’s arsenal of toys and gear? Or in surrendering to Donny’s urgent fucking with a great yowling orgasm?

Submission is a lot like the beauty/the eye/the beholder, to steal from Sappho. For me, submission is in the body of the surrendered.

But I could be wrong.

and now a bit about my butt

(Oh, yeah, you know what the italics mean: they mean that if you're a friend or a relation, and you do not want my sexlife tattooed like a sailor's anchor on your image of me, such that whenever you see me, hug me or talk to me on the phone, my tattoo anchor hangs in the air between us, invisible but clear, you want to stop reading. Now. Step away from the blog...)

I realize that of late my writings have been a bit cerebral, a bit earnest, a bit too consistently concerning my head and my heart and not nearly enough emanating from my earthbound loins.

Too much think, not enough kink you, my tomkittenish readers, might be saying. Where has the tasty bitch gone with her twisted yarns, and what coup d'etat put this middle-American virago schoolmarm in her skankygoddess place?

Not to worry, pets. Let me speak now from my ass. Or about it, anyway.

It is no secret to my friends and my lovers that I love anal. Perhaps it should be, but it is not, and now that this particular kitty has escaped from her enema bag, it’s tough to stuff her yowling and scratching back in.

Yup. Not only a slut, me, but a buttslut as well. And rhapsodic on the subject of my buttsluttiness.

My first anal experience was with Will. I remember we took a weekend at the Mohonk Mountain House  in New Paltz, New York. It was late February or early March, and the place, shambling large and Victorian, was nearly deserted, reminding us more than a little of the hotel from The Shining.

Sybarites both of us, though as it was before Will had started up with his drug use again our decadence was fairly pedestrian, we had planned this getaway to pop my anal cherry. We brought Astroglide. We were prepared. We were ready. We would become sodomites.

We took a shower, we had dinner, we began to dance the conventional sex waltz. I wish I could remember anything about Will as a lover, but I can’t really, other than that he was a really soft kisser. Kissing him was a lot like kissing a chick. He had a large brown birthmark over and around his left nipple and a huge scar down his left thigh from crashing his bike. That’s all I can remember.

One memory I do retain: the one night in a big bed at the Mohonk with him behind me in the style of the dog, slowly and patiently pushing his cock into the up-until-that-moment one-way-only orifice of my ass.

It hurt. A lot. I remember I took deep, deep breaths and did my best to relax. I recall the pain, and I recall how completely inelegant I felt. I remember vaguely that by the end, and by “the end” I mean the last thirty seconds before Will filled my rectum with his come, it began to feel, well, kinda nice.

I am sure I buttfucked with him again, though it’s lost to my mental mists. The next anal episode that my erotic mind lingers over was when I was vacationing on a Caribbean isle, fucking around with this eighteen year-old surfer. I was thirty-one. And I was a total bronzed, implanted, Playboy wetdream. I’ve probably never looked better.

I picked this boy, whose last name is Lakota, which I found totally poetic and told him he should name his daughter Dakota should he ever have one, I picked this boy from his bobbing pod of surfers; right out of the ocean, I plucked him like seafruit and I ate him whole.

But I was also determined to let him do whatever he wanted with me and one thing he wanted was to fuck my ass. So he did. That’s all I remember. Though, and here I digress a wee bit, he was beautiful. The sun rose and set on that man’s white behind.

I had anal sex too with the most recent live-in boyfriend, let’s call him Ernie. Ernie and I went to his parent’s vacation house on the beach, lit a fire in the fireplace, and buttfucked to the sound of the winter wind wolf circling outside. Again, it hurt. And then it felt nice.

And then it was over.

Mostly, my anal episodes made me want to be fucked by a nice, clean hard dick. And of course there was none around. Not immediately, anyway.

But I didn’t really get it, not really, not yet, that deep intestinal yowling visceral need to be fucked long and hard in my ass.

Even having experienced the visceral thrill of buttfucking, and even having played around a bit with it when I was on my onesy and feeling particularly naughty, I found it wasn’t until SlutFest 2004 when I began to embrace my inner buttslut. A Dom likes to fuck his sub up her ass. Even if physically distant, he likes to play with the sub’s head through having her play with her own ass. So I did. I bought a buttplug, and I played with it while I was on the phone with first Whitey and then MenudoMan. (For readers new to pretty dumb things: SlutFest 2004)

And here’s what I discovered: I liked it. A lot. It felt better than nice. It felt indescribably feral and powerfully hot. I discovered I could come with a toy in my ass, and it was amazing.

So amazing, in fact, that I talked about it nonstop to any of my friends tolerant enough to listen. Stevie, the one who warned me not to write this blog, asserting that it was like watching a “comedy disaster movie,” was especially patient. Bless her.

I must interrupt my own narrative flow here, I must, and interject that while I had not been raised to have implanted in my mind that sex was dirty--really quite the opposite--I have a horror of pooh. I don't like pooh. Saying that, I could at this moment take out my Li'l Sigmund Home Analysis Kit, but I am going to deny the impulse. Suffice to say that backalley-wise, I perch somewhere between anything is okay between consenting adult liberalism and an oh, god, can I please just use an enema first near freaksomeness. But this little digression probably warrants its own bloggy log, so I'll let it go now.

Let us return, then, to our narrative already in progress.

I was, of course, chomping at my little metaphoric sub’s bit to find some man to explore this new erotic side. And I had a couple of encounters where I did (one was with this married dude who came so fast in his condom I wasn’t even sure that he’d entered me fully; the other was with this boy/boy ménage a trios I had, a story that deserves its own blog), but not really to any extent fulsome enough for me to verify my asstastic epiphany.

Finally, though, I hooked up with Donny. And Donny loves anal with a white hot extra flamey passion. And he has, as I’ve said before, a generously long and adamantine cock. It was, in many ways, a match made in heaven.

Heaven indeed, if you choose to follow anal’s most recent disciple, Toni Bentley. Bentley, a former ballerina, published this past summer The Surrender, a book on what she calls her “anal addiction.” I have not read the book, though I did read Bentley’s first book, Winter Season, and liked it, and I did read excerpts from The Surrender in Playboy. Bentley’s writing is a bit purple for my taste, even when, or possibly especially when, she’s writing about having her ass fucked. “I am sitting on the threshold,” states Bentley in Surrender, “Perhaps this is the final paradox of God's paradoxical machinations: my ass is my very own back door to heaven.”

Maybe.

I don’t know if my ass is my own back door to heaven, but I do know that when Donny and I buttfucked I felt a primal urging I’d never felt before. I have had lovely lovely celestial sex. Lots of it, but nothing, nothing, nothing makes my hips move of their own wild keening volition like having the right man’s cock firmly embedded between the firm round mounds of my ass.

Which is not to say it doesn’t hurt. It does. Donny, especially. Donny took no prisoners when he fucked my ass. He slammed his lithe, long, scythe-like body into mine, his cock pulling out to its furthest tip before driving to its base into my ass. And often, I gasped with the pain. Sharp, ribcage expanding intakes of breath, explosive guttural releasing of sound. I surfed the crest between pain and pleasure, and my toes curled over the edge in my efforts.

Anal sex releases something in me that conventional fucking does not. When I had Donny’s cock in my ass, especially if I was riding on top of him, to my own perpetual amazement I could not control myself. Control was lost. In its place I found movements, sounds, motions, weird and wild convulsions that surprised me. I spoke in tongues. My epiphany was fulfilled.

And yet.

Here’s the rub, for there always is one. Anal sex, unlike any other flavor of sex, makes me feel especially acutely vulnerable, small and easily crushed, and wanting to use usually anathema analogies like “flower” and “butterfly.” Anal feels, I’ve said at my most cynical, like very pleasurable open-heart surgery.

But more honestly, and less covered in the hard candy coating of the cynic, anal sex feels as if—and this is only when I have surrendered to the experience utterly—I have spread my ribcage wide as my thighs, ripped my heart out whole, bleeding and still beating, and handed it to the man.

Here it is, my heart. You thought you were merely getting my ass. How wrong you were. I do hope you were ready for this raw gift.

In my mind I am bent-kneed and subservient, my ribcage open like an unbuttoned bloody vest, my head bent down and my hands offering up my heart like a prayer in my two open palms. That is how vulnerable I feel.

Casual anal sex? Not possible. Not to me. The next man who gets my ass must accept the whole package. Which, I guess, makes me much less of a buttslut, in the end. I guess that after all, I’m an old-fashioned girl, in the end.