The Lives of the Saints

I swear, I went years without really thinking about Catholicism until I started this whole over-analytical "Why am I kinky?" quest. But now I think about Catholicism all the time. Catholicism is HOT.

People say stuff about Catholic school and kink kind of a lot - it's a cliche, the naughty Catholic schoolgirl getting disciplined. But in all honesty, I grew up in the 90s. The nuns didn't hit me - that would be abusive and illegal. Catholicism influence my kinky self on a purely mental level.

Have you ever looked at the Lives of the Saints? My mom was really into saints when I was growing up, and I read a lot of the entries in her Lives of the Saints book when I was choosing a confirmation name. And the saints are all about suffering. When you do a search for the word "suffering" on the site I linked to, you get 124 matches. There's St. Alice, who suffered greatly (though leprosy isn't very sexy) and was known for visions and ecstacies. St. Rita, who prayed to suffer like Jesus and spent her days praying, fasting, and doing penance. The whole concept behind stigmata is that of ecstatic suffering as a show of devotion to God, and there are countless other saints and martyrs who were tortured and murdered for their faith, proving their unwavering devotion.

This idea of ecstatic suffering definitely got into my head and rattled around. As a kid, I had a coloring book biography of Blessed Kateri Tekawitha which detailed her fasting and painful penances (I want to say she did some self-flagellation, but I can't find a link supporting this). And there was that movie about St. Bernadette of Lourdes (Song of Bernadette, I think it was) where Bernadette is sweet and pure and devoted and has visions and becomes a nun, and at every turn people (often people within the church) look down on her and think she's crazy. I just remember the scene where the mean old nun who never believed in Bernadette says to her "What do you know of suffering?" and it turns out that Bernadette had horribly painful cancer the whole time and never said a word about the pain, instead just smiled serenely and worked and prayed. That's devotion. And Catholic imagery definitely influenced my concept of devotion.

A girl I was sort of friends with in high school once said to me "I wish I were ignorant, so I could be Catholic, because they have such beautiful ceremonies," and because I was a teenage goth girl at a Catholic high school who'd been dragged to mass every Sunday since age 8, I think I rolled my eyes. But now I kinda know what she was talking about (though without the weird, condescending part about ignorance). I went to church with my family on Christmas, and before communion, when everyone said "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you but only say the word and I shall be healed," it struck a chord with my submissive little self. I thought "That's beautiful." And the idea of redemption through suffering, an idea I learned in church and Religion and Theology classes, is kind of an idea that I took with me into relationships.

I lost my faith, and I don't really believe in God anymore. However, I feel like suffering to prove love and devotion is a huge part of who I am. If I'm bad, if I misbehave, if I sin, I want to do penance and be forgiven, and to prove how really and truly sorry I am, I want that penance to hurt. And when it's over, and I've suffered enough, I want to be redeemed.

Merry Christmas!

Jack and I are heading home to see our families tonight, so last night we opened our gifts to each other.

After narrowly avoiding running into each other buying gifts at Babeland, (that was a hilarious phone conversation - "You're on Mercer Street? I'm...nowhere near there! Really!") we realized our gifts probably wouldn't go over well with our respective families under the Christmas tree on Baby Jesus' birthday. And we were right!

Jack got me the Form 2! Holy crap, is it awesome! I was really skeptical about "luxury vibrators" for a long time. I mean, I've got my Hitachi (and I love my Hitachi, I preach the gospel of the Hitachi Magic Wand), what else do I need? Oh, boy, was I mistaken! The Form 2 is a wonderful, wonderful thing.

It is quiet! It is powerful! It's tiny and cute and pink! Well, mine is pink because Jack is the best boyfriend in the world and went to two stores to make sure to get a pink one. It is waterproof! It's rechargeable! And it's just so well designed.

It fits perfectly in my hand while the flexible little "ears" nestle on either side of my clit and it buzzes merrily away. It's got multiple speeds and a bunch of different wave modes (four? I think? I lost count.) The highest vibration speed was almost too intense, and I'll have to play around with it at some other point when I'm less worried about squirting all over the bed.

And I've never owned a vibrator with wave patterns before. While I've always been a big fan of vibes, I've also always been broke as fuck, so up until Jack gave me the Hitachi for Christmas last year, all my vibrators were of the hard-plastic-under-$20 variety. What a difference the waves make! I was doing my usual thing, wiggling the vibe around, when I thought "What would this feel like in wave mode?" Well, the answer was that it feels AMAZING! I don't have to move the vibe. I can, but one of the wave patterns (the second one in?) feels like what I usually do with the vibe only better.

And then I came really hard. It was awesome.

On a related note, Babeland is awesome. When I talk about Babeland with other people in the kink scene, a lot of the time their reaction is "But they're sooo expensive." But you don't go to Babeland for kinky stuff. You go there for regular ol' sex toys - because they have the best selection and the most knowledgeable and friendliest staff of any sex shop I've physically been to.

When shopping for vibrators and other non-BDSM specific sex toys, it is completely worth it for me to go to Babeland and deal with a knowledgeable staff, be able to poke at things out of their packages, and just not be in some seedy place where every toy is packaged with a porn star's picture. I can bring my born again Christian friends into Babeland and pick out vibrators with them, and that's awesome.

Also, they gave me free anal beads, which is awesome. Of course, Jack was there the same night, and he went to two different stores...so now we have lots of anal beads. Like, more anal beads than one couple can actually use. Do you know anyone who needs some anal beads?

I may have overused the word "awesome" in this post.

Missing masochism...

So firstly, I'm completely wiped out by all this holiday ridiculousness. I just slept for, like, twelve hours and I still feel kind of zombie-like.

But here's the meat of the entry - I haven't been that into pain lately. It's kind of disappointing. It happens from time to time, but I don't think I've ever really thought or talked about it much.

I'm still totally up for rough sex, for dirty talk and being called names, and for other stuff as well...but I can't take a good spanking. It's really disappointing. I like being spanked, I like the idea of it. But right now the physical like just isn't there.

It's not that spanking or otherwise being smacked around ever doesn't hurt, but it feels different when I'm in the right headspace. I know this isn't news to anyone else into this sort of thing, but I figure it's worth describing what it's like for me.

I'm not what you'd call a pain slut, even at the best of times. And it's really hard to talk about pain quantitatively - how can you ever be sure anyone else is experiencing the same level of pain you are in the same way? I can take what I'd call a "moderate amount" of pain, but for someone else that might just be the warm-up.

For me...right now, even a spanking I know I would normally take and enjoy has me squealing and trying to get away. And not in a role play sort of "Oh, no! The mean man is hitting me!" kind of way - in a way that's close to genuine panic.

Usually I don't reach a panicky place. Usually it hurts, but not in an upsetting way. And then there's a magic hit, and it doesn't hurt anymore and everything goes tingly. Sometimes after a little while, it starts to hurt again and I know I've had enough, but it's not often a scary, panicky feeling. It's just an "Okay, I'm done now."

The thing now is that I miss all that. It's really disappointing to try to get to that tingly, intense, close feeling and instead just feel like you wish it'd stop. But talking about it is a lot better than just feeling it alone in my head, and acknowledging that it's just a thing that happens sometimes is kinda nice. And eventually whatever it is will shift again and I'll be back to normal.

So yeah...talking about things is good.

This week I've had difficulty going to bed at a reasonable hour when not completely incapacitated by an orgasm. Possibly I need to solve this with more frequent incapacitating orgasms.

Santa, Baby...

...slip a flogger under the tree for me. Been an awful bad girl...

Okay, that's enough of that. But (and I feel like everyone and their kinky grandmother knows this by now) FetLife is doing a huuuge Christmas giveaway. So if you haven't entered (and I realize I'm speaking to the ether here, because no one reads this) GO DO IT NOW!

This is just one of a thousand reasons why FetLife is awesome.

Sl...lighty Promiscuous

So in college, I had this friend. Let's call her Cara. And while we started out close, over the course of one semester in which we had almost every class together, I slowly came to hate her. This is largely because, at a time when I couldn't for the life of me get laid, she would not shut the fuck up about her sex life. And really, what's more irritating than hearing about someone's multi-orgasmic adventures when you haven't had sex in years?

Part of what made me so uncomfortable was that I don't think a lot of the guys she was having all these multiple orgasms with liked her very much. I know this is kind of my personal hang-up, but the thought of having sex with someone who I wouldn't want to just hang out with, or who wouldn't want to hang out with me, makes me cringe.

It all came to a head when we were both kind of interested in the same guy. I hate telling this part of the story, because I'm afraid it makes me sound like a crazy, jealous nutcase...but anyway, we both knew this guy. And I was not up for NSA sex, and Cara was. The guy hung out with me one night, and told me all about how dumb he thought Cara was and how annoying he found her. I found out a month later that after that night, he and Cara had sex.

I was horrified. I just felt so icky thinking about my friend sleeping with this dude who clearly didn't have any respect for her at all. It seemed to me like no guy I knew wanted to have sex with a girl he respected, and that really freaked me the fuck out. I flipped one night and told Cara all the shitty things he'd said about her. We didn't exactly have a falling out, but we were never even sort of close again. I was left feeling awful about the whole situation.

In an unfortunate effort to make myself feel better, I started referring to Cara as "my slutty friend Cara." Not to people we both knew, as I was out of school and away from anyone who actually knew her, but just when telling stories about things that happened. "Jen, Allie, and my slutty friend Cara were at the bar..." Stupid shit like that. Then I started dating Jack, my awesome, awesome boyfriend, who would not stand for that sort of nonsense. I amended "slutty" to "sl...lightly promiscuous," said just like that, with the l sound drawn out, just to be a smartass. "My sl...lighty promiscuous friend Cara." It annoys Jack slightly less than just calling her a slut would.

But now, as part of my self-improvement campaign to end the slut-shaming inside my own head, I feel like I should maybe knock it the fuck off. I have no reason to identify her this way anymore, except to validate my own issues with casual sex. I kept telling myself that the problem was with Cara, and with the guys she banged - it wasn't that she was more attractive than I was, just that she had lower standards.

It still makes me really uncomfortable to think about people I care about having sex with people who don't respect them. But it's kind of awful of me to lose respect for my friends because some asshole dude (or lady, though this only ever seems to happen to my female friends) doesn't respect them - the dude (or lady) is an asshole, so why would I care what they think about my friends?

And really, thinking about this today, part of me wishes I could go back in time and take Cara shopping for a vibrator. That would've been a lot more productive than causing a big, stupid blow up. Not that a vibrator is necessarily a perfect sex-substitute (as I knew very, very well at the time) but I feel like more college-age girls should know that they can take charge of their sexuality and have multiple orgasm adventures without hooking up with skeezy dudes.

And honestly, I'm sl...lighty promiscuous myself these days.

On sluttiness...

At this point, pretty much everyone knows I went to Catholic school. Catholicism has been a pretty heavy influence on my kinkiness, what with the penance and forgiveness and the saints and martyrs and their ecstatic suffering and so on and so forth. But Catholic school had a different influence altogether--all because of the idea of being a slut and the practice of slut shaming.

Despite the best efforts of abstinence only sex ed, pretty much everyone at my high school was having sex left, right, and center. It was also a small school, so everyone knew each other's business. And when a girl crossed some invisible, undefinable line, by performing the wrong sex act, or the right sex act on too many people, or with the wrong people, or in the wrong place, or did it and admitted to enjoying it too much, she was labeled a slut.

I was mostly a good girl. I had my (emotionally abusive) boyfriend and no one knew what we were doing in bed because he isolated me from my friends and he hated "sluts" and "sluttiness." I though his us-against-the-world, no-one-understands-our-love take on things was romantic, but really it was awful...but that's for another post. We had our quiet, dramatic, devastating, awful relationship and effectively hid what was really going on. And I was miserable for obvious reasons, but also, secretly, I was really jealous of the girls everyone else thought were slutty.

On the one hand, I didn't really want to be a good girl. When I heard about someone's ill-advised threesome or the girl who put on a sex show with her boyfriend at a party, taking requests for positions...everyone else acted disgusted, while I was secretly frustrated and turned on. I wanted to have adventures, I wanted to feel overwhelmed and taken over by sex. I wanted to lose control. But I was stuck in an awful relationship and vaguely terrified at the thought of the girls whose names were written on the bathroom walls.

I've gotten over a lot of that stuff. The boyfriend dumped me, I came to terms with the fact that I do, in fact, want someone to control me sometimes--but I want it to be consensual and sexy and not scary and abusive. I'm in an awesome relationship, I'm having those adventures I wanted. It's great.

And the results of watching other girls get whispered about and laughed at and slandered in graffiti stayed with me. On the one hand, it gets me incredibly hot when I'm called a slut in bed. I do the things the bad girls did in high school, and the leftover shame makes it super sexy.

On the other hand, I still have moments, even on websites designed for kinky people (where I'm pretty much 100% sure that no one cares) when I have a hard time talking about things I'm into, things I enjoy. It took me months to admit online that I enjoy anal sex, because on some ridiculous level I was sure someone, somewhere would be judging me for it. And after the first few play parties I went to, I spent days wondering if I'd done too much with too many people, if someone was laughing at me behind my back.

I've gotten over some of that fear...but now I want to make more of a conscious effort to get rid of the rest. I'll hang onto the hot remnants of slut shaming. I'll keep getting turned on by the thought of being a bad girl, a dirty girl, a slut. But I don't want to let those stupid girls in high school control me to the point where I'm dishonest anymore. I don't want to care what people think of me because of what turns me on. It's ridiculous and it's time to stop.

Sexbloggery?

So...um...hi.

I'm Lucy.

First posts kind of suck.

I'm 25, female, and probably not all that interesting. I work in retail, live with my boyfriend, and sometimes (very rarely these days) act in amateur film and theatre. And no, that's not a euphemism for porn.

I'm also increasingly active in my local BDSM scene, a feminist, submissive, and opinionated about sex in general. I like to think I sometimes have interesting things to say on certain subjects. However, I'm also woefully underqualified to be a sex blogger. I'm also aware that everyone and her sister has a sex blog these days, and that there's probably not anything especially unique or interesting about mine. Maybe my overabundance of ideas will balance out my lack of experience?

Clearly, Lucy Jane Weston is not my real name. You get oodles (yes, oodles) of cool points in my book if you get the reference, though.

Let's see where this goes...