pretty dumb things

scent, redux

In the most recent issue of Filthy Gorgeous Things, I wrote a piece about scent. My editor in her infinite wisdom changed the original title, which had been something horrible, to a line from the text, "We Are Mammals Under Our Thin Skins." Here's an excerpt:

I wish I had scratch-and-sniff remembrances for all my favorite lovers. I imagine thin cards, slick and white and vaguely clinical. A swift scratch on the rough patch and the sudden call to mind of this one, his roasty rosy odor; or that one, her perfume of strawberry and algae; or that one, his strange but not unpleasant dusty must. I’d love to collect them all, and in the dark of night summon them at will.

The first time that I thought I fell in love, I was twenty, an impressionable age. My boyfriend, this young guitar player who bobbed in the attitudinal ether somewhere between punk and hippie, had this tie-dye t-shirt that was ripped and held together by safety pins, sort of Sid Vicious on a lesbian dairy collective. This guy wasn’t large with the personal hygiene. He bathed when it mattered, and he felt passionately about his hair gel, but his pits and his tender bits had a tendency towards the funk.

You can go here to read the rest. It’s free. It's also, I might add, not at all visually safe for work unless you work at home or at Playgirl. While you’re there at FGT, you should take a moment and spend a buck to read my friend David Olimpio’s piece too. His is actually much better than my own, and that’s just a downward-facing dog fact. I’ve never been accused of false modesty.

Writing this FGT piece, I drew heavily on a post I’d written earlier for my blog—earlier and, I need to note, not so well. It’s good to see that I’m improving as a writer because, wow, yeah. Enough said about that earlier draft. That’s why pencils have erasers and computers have memory chips, I guess. Revision is the key to a long and healthy literary life. Do-overs are a blessing, except for when they aren’t.

And now I end enigmatically. More to come, as they say, except for when they don’t

 

barriers, plastic and mental

On the heels of the 4th of July, here's a reason to prolong celebration. I've a new piece on Filthy Gorgeous Things. This month the theme of the issue is Barriers, and my piece, "Golden Ring," explores my itsy-bitsy clit, some mental blocks and my genital piercing. It's fun for the whole family, as long as the whole family is over 18 and not above intimate rubber-necking. And preferably not having this fun together, because, wow, creepy.

Here's an excerpt (I can't figure out why the line spacing is being so funky; please forgive it and me):

I don’t come easily, or reliably, or sometimes at all. Looking back at my history, I realize that have shouldered the responsibility for my truculent orgasms. I have blamed my head, my heart and, most often, my clit. I have a tiny, tiny clit. Blink and you’ll miss it, ditto if you move your finger or your tongue one centimeter to the left, to the right, to the north, to the south. It’s a finicky, petulant, churlish clit. It’s a bitch of a clit, and I’ve oft called it my Greta Garbo clit for its beauty, bitchiness and reclusiveness.

So small and so perfect my clit, so pert and pretty sitting like a tiny pearl in a darling oyster, so often missed, so frequently elided in darkling fumblings that in 1993 I chose to mark it. I chose, in fact, to pierce its hood. 

I think the piece is open and free, so you should get your tanned hide over to FGT, read it, and then hit your browser's "back" button to leave a comment here telling me how wonderful I am because I'm a bit parched for praise.

I'm trying to write more, I really am. My friend read my cards and says I need to write. So I shall endeavor to, for if you can't trust a gypsy, whom can you trust?

In the meantime, feel free to enjoy the meanderings of my mind on Twitter. I love followers, though I may not lead. Just walk beside me and be my friend.

more rejected tailpieces: fumbling deaf, dumb and blind

Sometimes even I find it hard to tell the truth. Sometimes the truth is hard to tell. I wrote this story for a collection, one edited by a person I know. I wrote it painfully, haltingly, stutteringly. It took an inordinately long time to write this piece of just over a thousand words; it might have taken weeks. Anyway, it was hard to write, but I wrote it, submitted it, and revisited it periodically in my head because even the telling of the tale didn't quite bear it away.  

The editor of the collection dithered with it, promising me edits and then not giving them to me. Last night I heard that the piece would need substantial revision, and rather than revisit and rewrite, I killed the piece. Like my other rejected piece, it's about sodomy. There seems to be a trend.

Anyway, this collection's piquant loss is your salty gain. You'll find my rejected tailpiece of erotica #2 below the fold.

miss remiss or links and things to feed the savage beasts

I have been lax. I’ve been remiss. I’ve been a bad blogger, and I should be spanked, except that I often enjoy spanking, so therefore I should suffer some other kind of corporal punishment for my egregious behavior.

To all outward appearances, I haven’t been writing, but the truth is that I have been writing, just not very much or very often. (Perhaps I also haven’t been writing very well; you can tell me that, and perhaps you shall in the comments below.) In the past two months, I’ve had three pieces published by Filthy Gorgeous Things, two free, one not, and none of them have I linked, until now.

One reader wrote to tell me that he was tired of seeing the guy with the cockles on his shoulders every time he checked to see if I’d posted something new. Well, dear Guy-Who-Hates-Mollusk-Inspired-Menswear, this is for you.

First, way back in April, the month of taxes, I had two pieces published in FGT’s Commerce issue. The free one, ironically, is on writing erotica for cash; the other is an interview with New York School of Burlesque Headmistress and all-around Queen of Cool, Jo Weldon.

I begin “What I Write for Money, Honey” thusly:

Anaïs Nin makes it look easy. (Or maybe she doesn’t because to be honest I haven’t read much of her beyond the sexytime stories, and they kind of make me want to cock-punch her. I’d like to see Anaïs Nin in a cage-fight with Dr. Maya Angelou.) I’m sure there are parts in Nin’s voluminous diaries wherein she describes in satin prose how difficult it is to write erotica. I just haven’t read them, nor will I.

After this, I go on to talk about the pangs of pay. I guess some people could consider it heavyweight whinging, like, oh, god, I get fucking paid to write about fucking and my wallet’s too small for my fifties. I maintain that writing about sex has a cost not attached to writing about less sweaty, less somatic, less emotional acts. It’s a crossing of consciousnesses that feels to me a lot like stripping, but then perhaps that is due to my work history. I write what I know, and perhaps too close to the bone.

My piece on Jo, which again will cost you a small fee to read, begins like this:

Jo “Boobs” Weldon, Headmistress of the New York School of Burlesque, is gorgeous; she also has all the poise and all the fearsomeness you’d expect from a woman who commands a school. There’s a heady mix of control and perversion contained in the tiny package that is Jo Weldon, but then Jo has worn many hats in her lifetime: stripper, pro-Domme, feature dancer, burlesque performer, adult video producer, teacher and writer. The doyenne of duende, Jo has had a hand in shaping the burlesque scene of today—and with the June release of her book, The New York School of Burlesque Handbook, Jo will continue to influence the burlesque stars of tomorrow. I sat Jo down to talk about the collision of money and sex, the evils of white slavery, eating cat food, and when she might consider exploiting a developing nation for commercial purposes. 

Jo dishes the dirt on community and cash and why burlesque audiences enjoy watching the fur hit the floor. She is one smart, funny woman. I’m delighted I got to spend time on her couch drinking her tea.

Most recently, I wrote "You Say Taboo, I Say I Do," a piece for FGT’s Taboo issue on my experiences of SlutFest 2004. I’ve gotten a lot of narrative mileage from those three months, three women, and 18 men. This might be my last telling of that particular tale. It starts here with a lavish photograph:

As it turns out, being raised by wolves in the wilds of Vermont doesn’t work to create taboos. Nor does it help that I was raised by a woman who hit the sexual revolution running or that she had a fast and loose relationship with her childhood faith, which was Unitarianism and therefore more a list of manners than an actual faith. Given that the role models who around me were hippies, freaks, geeks, junkies and jazz musicians, I wasn’t surrounded by models of the moral majority. Sex was something one did, apparently, and did early and often. My mom’s first major piece of advice to me was this: “It’s ok to touch yourself as long as your hands are clean.” I’ve lived by that motto; it has served me well, childhood into adulthood.

It ends with stripping.

Really, I should get out more. At least my 27-year-old lover is coming to visit me in a few weeks, for I've been living the kind of life that makes me pallid with boredom.

I’d also like to mention that one of my friends, the incomparable Bubbles, aka StripperTweets, also had two pieces published in the Commerce issue. I love Bubbles more than sliced ham: she’s twice as sweet and just as salty. Really, she’s someone to watch, a woman of great wit and immeasurable charm. You want to check out her pieces because she’s swell in all the right places.

Finally, I’m working on something for The Rumpus, about which I’m wicked excited—no details now, but they are forthcoming and they include shooting stars. I’m also recommitting myself to writing early and often. If the muse wants to find me, she’ll have an easier time if I’m sitting at my desk. I’m going to try this whole writing on a regular basis thing again. You never know what will happen.

If nothing else, maybe I’ll have an idea more sustained than a 140-character Tweet. 

the gift that keeps on giving

Here it is, yet another free link to a new piece by me on the high-class, smarty-pants, pay-as-you-go erotica site Filthy Gorgeous Things. This issue revolves around euphoria, and my piece, "The Gift of Euphoria," describes those times when you give others that ecstatic moment. It begins thusly:

There is that moment. The body relaxes into a limp capitulation even as it suspends taut with anticipation. The eyes may close or they may widen in surprise, though the pupils go invariably round as pushpins. The mouth makes a little “o,” the circular call of cherubim, of succubae, of banshees. The skin flushes sanguine and spotty. The breath moves yogic. Time hangs apparitional and euphoria surrounds like a sweet pink cloud, a pristine cell of bubble wrap, a serendipitous shivery sliver.

It’s not your euphoria. Not exactly. It not yours because yours is not the limp-taut rag of erotic compliance, yours are not the eyes fluttering delicate as moths, yours is not the lower-case vowel pout, your skin is unchanged, your breath is unremarkable. Yet with your hands, your mouth, your turgid parts, your fecund imagination, your wily ministrations, you have created this moment for another. You have given free wild reins to your perversity and you have made marvels.

On the turf of your bed, you stride as a colossus.

Enticed? Of course you are. Go here to read the rest and expect a picture of, or possibly worth, a pearl necklace. It's less safe for most workplaces and certainly unfit for all but the most metaphoric children.

Please do tell me how you like my writing, and if you can't get enough, enjoy it in tasty 140-character portions on Twitter.

filthy/gorgeous/free...shhhh

So my new piece on Filthy Gorgeous Things is live and open for your reading pleasure. The piece, which I've called "Hush," talks loudly, purplish and long about secrets.

Here's the first paragraph:

Secrets in and of themselves are sexy. Knowledge, especially knowledge that is personal and private, is sexy. Power is sexy. And secrets, those delightful, frisson-bearing scraps and orts of information, hold power. A secret told enough times becomes a story, and while stories hold pleasure and while stories carry power, a story lacks the whispering, murmuring, susurrating sexiness that a secret does. “Secret”: all sibilance and cutting consonants, even the word is sexy.

Want to read the rest? Of course you do. Go here.

And as ever, let me know what you think in the comments below, and feel free to keep up with my daily meandering mind on Twitter.

my rejected tail piece: the good, the bad and the anal

I wrote a piece for a magazine that was rejected. It's about anal, and if you want to read it, it's below the fold. I suspect my own ambivalence about writing the piece imbued it a bit too heavily for publication. Hey, it happens. My remunerative loss, your chewy gain.

fucking with the Internet

I've a new post on Filthy Gorgeous Things as part of their June issue, Modern Love. It's the tale of my time spent in the throes of SlutFest 2004, snippets of which have made cameo appearances here on my pretty dumb things. You know how it goes. You spend a summer having indiscriminate sex and one day you find yourself squatting on the very clean bathroom floor of some former tennis pro, fingers spelunking your vaginal depths, chasing an elusive and escapist condom. And you think to yourself, Just what the hell am I doing here?

We've all had that moment. And even if we haven't, we can enjoy mine.

Here's the first paragraph of my piece:

Five years ago, I spent my summer in the throes of something I've come to call SlutFest 2004. For that brief, tawdry and occasionally halcyon period, I gave myself a virtual blank check to indulge unto surfeit any and all of my sexual appetites. I fucked women and men, sometimes together and sometimes separately. I had sex anonymously, and I had sex with names. I had twosomes and I had threesomes (sadly, I didn't have moresomes; I'm not certain why I didn't push that particular erotic envelope). I had phone sex, kinky sex, vanilla sex, banal sex, anal sex and hotel room sex. I had pity sex. I had passionate, even emo, sex. I had a lot of sex that summer, and all the sex I had, every last sweat-stained thrust, spent condom, and ululating orgasm was brought to me courtesy of the World Wide Web.

Now go here and read the rest. Then return here and tell me what you think, because I so want to know.

kissykiss,
chelsea g.

my new body of smut, now conveniently located othewhere

It began as just a default setting, but as with so many decisions that wear the cloak of circumstance, it has become a clear and conscious choice. I’m not writing about sex here on my pretty dumb things. Or, I should clarify, I’m not writing about the sex I’m having, the sex I’m not having, the sex I had, the sex I want to have, or the sex I dream of having. I do reserve the right to write pretty dumb things about sex as a generalized or ambient concept, a sex divorced from my specific genitals at a specific moment in a specific time with a specific human, machine, or implement. I further reserve the right to write about my sexual history in less KA-BOOM! POW! BLAMO! graphic terms. I reserve the right to break my own rules, in short. I am a despot in the land of my narrative.

This not-choice to not-write about sex seems to have started when I stopped having sex, but in truth, it began well before I started living the lover-free life. It started, really, when I began to realize that I loved my ex-almost-fiance Donny deeply. To trot out the intricacies of our intimacies, however displayed in the laciest of poetic language, felt at odds with my love for him. It began to take on a patina of betrayal, and to pour out to a faceless public the liquid details felt like I was making a product out of precious experience. I stopped enjoying the writing, in short, and it began to feel like a burden rather than a gift.

Then Donny and I broke up and I stopped having sex. I slumped into doldrums; the doldrums grew into a vast depression; and I drowned in that murky black for altogether too many months. I didn’t fucking feel like living, much less did I feel like fucking. Forget fucking writing anything other than what I was paid to write, which was not about fucking.

The lake receded and I’m now high and dry and relatively chipper for an ambient misanthrope raised by a long line of dour people. I have vague and happy notions of perhaps dating in the not-too-distant future, and I have optimism that this potential dating might lead to actual physical friction with another willing, perhaps enthusiastic, partner. But I won’t write about said friction because, as I’ve explored previously, I don’t want to jeopardize a fledgling relationship with my occasional will to overshare the very moist, throbbing and tumescent portions of my life.

Plus, I don’t want to be only a sex writer for the rest of my life. So there’s that. I have too much to say to limit it to things most quintessentially expressed in guttural phonemes.

And yet, I acknowledge that I do like writing about sex. I think it’s important cultural work. I think there’s a power in doing it well, and I have the hubris to believe I do do it well. I just don’t want to do it on my blog. Therefore, you will be able to find all of my new sex writing at the gloriously shiny, newly opened, terrifically sleek and gleefully—if thoughtfully—perverse Filthy Gorgeous Things. In fact, you can go here to read my first piece for the site. It begins with Hegel and ends with Oscar Wilde, and because I’m both thinky and kinky in equal measures, it meanders through strip clubs and deep-throating. I’d love to know what you think here because there are no comments there.

I’m keeping my smut archives here on my pretty dumb things because to jettison them would be untrue to the history of this blog, but the great priapic share of my new sex writing will be now found on FGT. I’m already working on two new pieces on sex and techs. They’ll be really very, if not like totally fetch.

I do hope you enjoy the full body of FGT. It’s quite beautiful and strange and erotic. Plus, it’s wicked smart, and anyone who doesn’t get the intrinsic sexy value of the grey matter is no friend with benefits of mine. I’ll let you know when I post new material, or you can check out my Twitter feed here.

foot in mouth

There was this one photo buried in a spread in French Vogue at some point in 1983. Shot in black and white, this one photo showed a close up of Jerry Hall’s gloriously equine face, her blond hair falling in amber waves, her eyes slitted near-shut, her mouth painted a rapturous shade of what must have been red and delicately wrapped around the marble toe of a statue. The copy of Vogue has gone the way of all flesh; I carted it around with me for years until it got shucked off in some great purge of stuff. It was that photo, the one of Jerry Hall giving toe, that made me keep the magazine for so many years.

Toe sucking rarely gets its rightful share of visual representation. For all of the ways magazines can sell stuff through artfully composed shots of metaphoric kink—blondes or brunettes swilling long necks, sheeny-slick piles of emaciated models looking like they just emerged pansy-eyed in a post-coital swoon from a D/s dungeon, bent-over jeans models proffering round and mysterious butts that jut to invite the eye and more, jewelry hanging like gyves around wrists and ankles—toe sucking gets pretty short shrift. Perhaps only cunnilingus gets less visual air time, but then as pornographers world-wide have discovered, it’s hard to shoot the licking of a pussy. This is not the case with toe sucking. Toes stick out; they’re easy to suck; it’s a picture just waiting…and waiting to happen.

Toe sucking bears the inescapable taint of fetish. Toe sucking, like rubber clothes, like age play, like any sex act involving hats, seems to be a speciality act. It’s not, of course. No gear is required to suck a toe or ten. One needn’t even be particularly into feet to enjoy having one’s toes sucked, nor to suck them. That’s my position and I’m sticking to it.

I enjoy a good toe suck every now an then. I prefer mine in someone else’s mouth, just as I prefer being the salad tosee to being the salad tosser. I know it’s not an equitable thing, but all is not fair in love and war, and I’d rather be the one being eaten than the one doing the eating. In my mind, I’m the succulent dish, and I say this being a woman avowedly stuck in her oral stage. It’s the strange imparsability of the feeling. The toe in another’s mouth bears a paradoxical keenness and a blunting of sensation. It’s a feeling that’s bigger than itself, or bigger than my toes, anyway. Maybe it’s that my toes get so little notice except for pain that when they get a bounty of pleasure, such as they derive from being nestled like little white chocolate eggs in another’s mouth, they get a bit giddy with it. It’s a surfeit of feeling, the toe sucking.

The first man who sucked my toes was Vlad the Would-Be Impaler. He did it in a hot tub. I was a fool not to recognize his seduction for what it was. I still, 26 years later, kick myself for not fucking him. I don’t remember the next person or the person after that; there have been lots. Toe sucking was something I know I indulged in with many men (and a few women). But the next one who was really into it was the Goat Gatherer. He’d fuck me, one of my legs extended up his stubbly, chiseled torso, one of my feet stuck in his mouth. He said he liked toes, the way they felt, the way the smelled. I would always have a pedicure before seeing him. He’d rename my toenail polish.

“I call that one Biker Slut,” he’d say, looking at the scab-red polish on my toes. And then he’d put the whole fat row of them in his mouth. It was heaven underfoot, around foot, about foot.

I loved that French Vogue shot of Jerry Hall giving toe to some anonymous stature, much like I adore this new shot from Italian Vogue of Eva Mendes giving toe to herself. There’s something unabashedly naughty about the sucking of the toe, something sweetly verboten, something just left of vanilla in the toe suck. It’s like Vincent Vega says of foot massages in Pulp Fiction. “That's what's so fuckin' cool about them,” says Vincent, “This sensual thing's goin' on that nobody's talkin about, but you know it and she knows it.”

The toe suck, as Vincent’s partner Jules observes about the foot massage,  may not be the same as “stickin' your tongue in her holyiest of holyies,” but it feels pretty fucking close, pretty fucking close indeed. That is exactly what is so fucking cool about it. A toe suck is as close as you can get to oral sex while dressed. The intimacy, the tickle factor, the edging onto trammeling on kink, the smell, the unquestionable need to deny questions of hygiene for the sake of pleasure: the toe suck is the closest somatic approximation of tongue on holiest of holies.

The only thing possibly better is the open mouth on the naked arch of the foot, all wide warm maw, wet-hot pink and the barest scrape of the pearly whites. The ball of the foot against the bald pate. Or the press of the toes against a cheekbone. The cupping of chin in the arches of both of your feet. Or the two big toes together in a mouth, tongue swirling like a creemee around the both.

Summer is the time of feet. Enjoy them—your own and those of others.