Lucy Jane Weston

The Bad Thing and Some Other Things

2010-12-09T22:51:00.001-05:00

Jack cheated on me.

There are people out there who are going to say of course, that that's what happens--open relationships are doomed to jealousy and failure. And there are people out there who are going to be very confused as to how anyone can cheat in an open relationship. That's the point of open relationships, right? That no one can actually cheat because they're open.

Those people can seriously just stop reading this blog.

About six weeks ago, Jack went out to a party. Not even that kind of party, just a gathering at someone's house. I was invited, but I was tired from working all day and had to be up early for work the next day, so I went home. We argued over the phone, about how late he would be out, and he told me I was "being really immature." I hung up. I called back a little while later, and he refused to talk about it, and acted like everything was fine. I was really upset. I think I talked to him again at some point and apologized, but I honestly can't remember. Maybe I just left a message?

He didn't come home until really late--really early the next morning, actually. 5 or 6 or something equally ridiculous. Again, I don't exactly remember. we were both tired and out of it and something was...off. Something felt weird. And then Jack admitted that he'd made out with a girl at the party.

Whatever. He'd always asked before making out with anyone new, but a few kisses are just a few kisses, right? We talked about things, we were both annoyed and irritable, I went back to sleep. I got up and went to work the next day. No big thing, felt a little icky but I knew it would be fine.

Of course it turned out it wasn't fine at all. It turned out a lot more happened than kissing, though I won't go into details here, I actually had to sit down across from Jack and interrogate him for every detail. It was kind of awful. I haven't been completely okay since. So he did stuff I wasn't comfortable with, with a person I didn't know well, and then he lied to me about it and that, violating the rules of our open arrangement (we had always asked before doing stuff with new people) and, most importantly, lying about what happened to cover your ass, well, that's what we call cheating.

I am currently drinking many wine coolers. Things were actually getting to be close to back to normal, and then yesterday my friend who I was supposed to hang out with completely blew me off and today, through a series of sitcom-like mishaps, I discovered Jack still has this other girl's number in his phone, well...I feel like shit all over again.

I acknowledge that this was not even a little bit the other girl's fault, as she had no idea any of this was against the rules and really it was Jack's responsibility to tell her and so really it's all his fault but I'm still not in a huge rush to be her new bff. In fact, for the first week after The Event, I had a mild panic attack when her name came up in conversation. It doesn't help that she is one of those always very put-together girls, with her hair always done and her makeup always perfect and her perfect fucking pictures on facebook (which I no longer sign onto if I can possibly avoid it, for fear of running across a picture of her) and I'm sitting here paint-stained jeans and one of Jack's nasty t-shirts with unwashed hair and the ten extra pounds I've gained back in the six week since this happened. Who wouldn't choose her over me?

But mostly, at this point, I just feel exhausted and like it's all unfair. You know where Jack is right now? At a motherfucking party. And I'm at home, drinking ALL OF THE WINE COOLERS by myself, in my one pair of paint jeans that are the only jeans that fit watching old episodes of "Friday Night Lights" and writing in my motherfucking blog. I've mostly been too upset to go out or want to see anyone so my friendships are maybe falling apart and I'm bored out of my mind and I don't know why I'm the one who's suffering when I didn't do any goddamn thing wrong. And my back is killing me because I've done nothing but angrily crochet for the past two days.

So yeah. I haven't been going to parties or playing with other people or even been dealing that well with masturbation because half the time I feel like my body is so repulsive. And I thought I was over all of this but all of a sudden it just came back today.

So you see why I haven't felt much like blogging lately.

Links and Stuff--the Sexademic

2010-10-29T10:26:00.000-04:00

I knew I'd be back sooner than I expected. I'm really just here to talk about one of my biggest pet peeves when talking to people about sex. I'm really, really tired of hearing about "vaginal orgasms."

See, the only thing I have ever heard about the mythical vaginal orgasm (that somehow supposedly more valuable orgasm that is achieved through straight up in-out-in-out penetration alone) is that people aren't having them. Seriously. I have heard this from friends, I have heard it from strangers, I have read it in countless anonymous confessions on the internet. It's making me exhausted.

Which is why I love these two posts by the Sexademic. I love most of her posts, actually, but I refer to those two in particular a lot in my conversations about sex. So go read them!

So yeah...this is my little blog homage to the Sexademic. I wish I were as smart and levelheaded as she. But before I go, I would just like to say: Ladies, if you don't come during penetration, but you come when you touch yourself on the clit, touch yourself on the clit during penetration. Or get whoever's doing the penetrating to touch you on the clit during penetration.

Thank you. That is all.

Bad Things

2010-10-25T18:20:00.000-04:00

I'm sure I'll be back to posting again sooner than I think right now, but I figured I should post this rather than just disappear.

Some things have happened between me and Jack the past few days that have left me less than enthusiastic about...well...our relationship, BDSM play, sex with Jack, sex with anyone else. You know, pretty much everything I blog about here.

Consider this notice of a possible hiatus.

Victim

2010-10-07T09:37:00.000-04:00

I was reading Amanda Hess' wonderful blog at TBD the other day, and she's been doing this feature where LGBT victims of hate crimes in the D.C. area tell the story of their assaults. And reading this one, well, I guess how I felt is best described by the word "triggered"--for whatever reason, all I could think about for the rest of the day was The Day I Got Jumped. I was trying to run errands in Manhattan, shopping for books for my one year old niece, and I kept expecting someone to just walk up to me and punch me. By the time I got home, I was freaking out a little.

I started wondering if things would have been different if I'd tried harder to get the girl who jumped me arrested. I started thinking about the first time something like this happened to me, thinking about my personal history of victimhood. Breaking down why I always feel so helpless when something like this happens.

It was sometime in the first few weeks of my sophomore year of high school--I would've been 14. My (horrible, abusive) then-boyfriend and I would go to the park after school and make out. That day, we were approached by four guys from the neighborhood, one who lived on my street hung back. They demanded my boyfriend's watch, a tacky knockoff his dad had bought him in New York. He refused. They asked if I had any money, and when I said no (because I didn't) they turned their attention back to him. He kept refusing to give them his watch--they took his glasses, then punched him in the jaw and took the watch off his wrist.

I didn't want to tell anyone, not even my parents. Technically, I was only a witness, as I hadn't been touched and they hadn't taken anything from me, but I was terrified and shaken up. We went back to the school, where it turned out something like six kids had been mugged by the same group. The police were called, we went and gave statements, they arrested the muggers.

I didn't go to school the next day, I was too shaken up. When I did go back, a girl who was friends with the muggers threatened me. People made fun of all of us for talking to the police, for making such a big deal out of basically having our lunch money stolen on the playground. When one of the muggers plead not guilty and his case went to trial, we all had to testify and the defense attorney tried to make me look stupid, tried to make me out to be a ditzy girl who couldn't keep her story straight. There was a story in the local paper where the reporter talked to the mugger's family, who called us racists and whiners, said it was ridiculous to make such a big deal out of nothing. They didn't talk to any of the victims (at least one of whom was the same race as the muggers).

Years later, when I got groped on the bus, I knew what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to stand up and yell, punch the guy, make a scene--but I looked around the bus, and all I could think was "no one will think this is a big deal. They'll think I'm freaking out for no reason. They'll think I'm a racist." So I didn't tell anyone (except, later that night, Jack), especially my mother, who I knew would want to call the police.

When I got jumped six months after that, and my mother did call the police, all I could think was "Oh, no, not again." I was actually relieved when the officer couldn't find the girls or any witnesses, glad that I never had to deal with any of it again.

And while it seems like I can't shut up about my victimhood here online, I almost never talk about these things in real life, except maybe sometimes to Jack. I'm scared that if I mention them I'll be brushed off, because I'm making a big deal out of nothing. I'm whining. In a world where something like 1 in 4 women has been raped, who cares that some guy grabbed my leg and ass, tried to touch my genitals? It's not a big deal, right?

A friend of mine asked for help online figuring out how to deal with street harassment yesterday. She said it wasn't something she'd ever really encountered before and she didn't know what to do, and she was worried that she was making a big deal out of nothing. I keep wanting to say that it is a big deal, it's not nothing, and if we don't make a big deal out of things like this, they continue. But that makes me feel like a hypocrite.

Shameless Bandwagon Jumping

2010-09-30T20:00:00.000-04:00

I signed up for Formspring. On the one hand, I doubt anyone will even use it or ask things, on the other I'm vaguely worried because encouraging any sort of anonymous commentary makes me nervous. I'll probably delete my account when I get bored with it. But for now, go ahead, ask me anything.

Happy Birthday to one of my Favorite Organizations...ans also, sex party.

2010-09-27T13:11:00.000-04:00

So last night was the one-year anniversary party for NYC TNG, the organization that changed the way I go to parties.

For folks not in the scene, TNG stands for, well, The Next Generation. Yes, just like "Star Trek." TNG groups exist to introduce younger kinksters (usually between the ages of 18 and 35) into the public scene. Our own TNG group here in New York runs munches before a lot of the major parties, providing a chance to meet people in a diner and actually talk in a fairly low-pressure environment. It's so much easier to have a for reals conversation in the diner over pierogies than to try to talk to someone in the club at the party, over the music and the other ambient noise.

I actually hadn't realized how much NYC TNG has changed the way I interact with people in the scene until I was listening to the most recent Freedom of Fetish podcast. In answering the question of how to meet people in the scene, the host (the fabulous Raven Lightholme) and her guest say not to try to meet people at a party. Go to munches, they say, join groups on FetLife, talk to people. And I realized that before NYC TNG, meeting people at parties, playing with them far sooner than I would now, I blundered into lots of awkward situations. I've made most of my friends through TNG--not just scene friends, but friend friends, people I go out to dinner and to bars with.

So happy birthday, NYC TNG, you and your moderators kind of changed my life.
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The other night, Jack and I went to a sex party. Like, a for reals sex party at an apartment where people were fucking as well as getting beaten up. It was very fun and friendly and there were cookies and dildos and I saw a girl actually get DPed right there in the room and I was naked in front of people I'd only just met, which was new and scary for me.

The main thing that stuck with me from the sex party, though, is how awesome everyone was about using barriers. There were gloves and condoms everywhere, and toys and hands got covered before they went in on on anyone's genitals. It's something that I am not always that careful about. It's very different watching everyone conscientiously putting on gloves and condoming toys from hearing from my friends in college "Well, he put on a condom before he came..." I'm resolving to be more diligent about barriers.

2010-09-22T19:20:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, after an intense scene or something new and exciting that I haven't done before, I feel...icky. Emotionally wrung out, but also weird and nervous and like people somehow will magically know exactly what I've been doing and will judge me and won't respect me. I used to almost always feel like this after anal sex, I felt like this after I got Eiffel Towered that one time, and I'm feeling kind of like that right now.

Jack and I just had a fairly intense scene. He made me cry and grovel and beg and it was wonderful while it was going on, but now I feel kind of gross. It's like I'm slut-shaming myself inside my head--nice girls don't do this, if people knew it'd be all over, they'd be so disgusted. It's like the end of 9 1/2 Weeks, the horrible, shaming end sequence that I hate. I feel so exposed and all I want to do is hide. Even with lots of lovely aftercare, even with hugs and kisses and reassurances it happens.

Getting dressed again helped, but I'm still a little icky-feeling. I kind of just want to be alone. Jack went out and I'm making mac and cheese, because comfort food seems like a good idea. But I really, really want to know if anyone else ever feels like this. Hey, fellow bottoms, does this happen to you? If it does, how do you deal with it? I could use some advice.

2010-09-15T17:55:00.000-04:00

So last night I went out for a few drinks with some friends. Jack had an appointment early this morning, so he stayed home to go to bed early. I knew he wanted me to polish his shoes for said appointment, but wasn't sure if I should do it when I got home or just go to bed.

I came in at around 2:00am, still a little bit tipsy. I unlocked the door, went down the hall towards the bedroom and there, in the middle of the hall, were the shoes and the shoe polish kit, with a post-it note attached that read "<3 ATTN: PET <3"Apparently I was still expected to polish the shoes.I went towards the living room, to plug in my phone which had died while we were at the bar. As I reached to turn on the light, I happened to look up at the ceiling. Before even turning on the light, I saw it there on the ceiling--a centipede.

Now, as a kid I was utterly terrified of any sort of invertebrate creature--ticks, spiders, and any and all bugs. Terrified. Even a closet moth would flip me the fuck out. These days I'm usually pretty calm, but there are two things I am still completely, ridiculously, unreasonably afraid of--black widow spiders and centipedes. Black widows, of course, are fuckoff huge and creepy looking and full of hemotoxic venom that can kill you, so I feel like my fear of them is pretty reasonable. And, of course, I've never seen a black widow in person. Centipedes are really creepy looking, but the kind that live in New York are not at all harmful to humans. Centipedes, however, appear in our apartment all the goddamn time and I am so scared of them I can't cope with it at all. One time, when there was a centipede in our bathtub, I went to the library to use their bathroom. i am unreasonably terrified of them.

So there's a centipede, a creature of which I am terrified beyond all reason, on the living room ceiling. And it's 2:00 in the morning, and Jack is sleeping, and I'm a little drunk and I have to polish Jack's shoes.

I did what any reasonable adult would do--I ran into the living room, grabbed my laptop to protect it from the centipede, then grabbed Jack's shoes and the polish and went and hid in the bathroom (which is roughly the size of a closet, since of course this is a New York apartment) and polished the shoes.

I feel like the Allie Brosh of consensual D/s.

My life is so difficult...

2010-09-04T14:39:00.000-04:00

Eve, who I mentioned in the previous post, is having a party tomorrow. Eve's parties are always awesome, filled with amazing food and awesome beer and attractive, smart people and I always have a really good time (well, except for that one time with the tequila, but that was an anomaly). Also, we haven't hung out with Eve in a while, because she's been out of town.

Tomorrow night there is also a play party, and through the magic of modern technology, I just got a message from a friend who is super hot and also gives awesome spankings, saying that her hand misses my ass.

Damn. What do I do now?

A Whole Bunch of Stuff

2010-09-03T15:04:00.003-04:00

I know, worst post title ever.

I haven't blogged in a while. A lot has been going on, I've been cranky, Jack has been around the house more which is less conducive to writing, and since he's been on a less regular schedule we've both been partying more. Basically, I am full of excuses.

While I was busy not blogging, a new Carnival of Kinky Feminists came out! And they included one of my posts again! And lots of other peoples' posts that are far more interesting than mine, so you should go and read them!

While I was reading the various posts in this second Carnival post, I came across one entitled "What We're Expected to Be" over at Beyond the Hills and found it really fascinating. Roles are so complicated, and they get more complicated (for me at least) all the time.

You see, Jack has a bit of a masochistic side--sometimes he likes some pain and attention. And I have no problem providing pain, but I tend to freak the fuck out if I perceive a power shift. Basically, if a scene is going on, I am submissive. I do not want to be in control, I don't want to have the power. Order me to hurt you, and I'm game, but don't put me in control, that makes me really uncomfortable. Once, while discussing this, Jack said "The role of submissive, of being owned by me, so comforting that you don't want anything to threaten that." And it's true.

A story: So Jack and I have this friend, let's call her Eve. Eve and I once went dildo shopping together, and later I fucked her with a strap-on. While said fucking was going on, Eve told me to spank her. "What?" I said, thinking I'd misheard her. "SPANK ME!" she repeated, slightly more emphatically. So I did, while fucking her from behind, grinning from ear-to-ear the entire time while Jack watched. It was fun!

Now, it's possible to see all of this as me switching. I fucked a girl, I spanked her, clearly the roles here are obvious. But in my mind, I spanked a girl because she told me to, and that makes all the difference. I like taking orders, I like doing what I'm told. I will totally hold someone down, or hit them or bite them, but I'm not topping them, I'm helping or following orders. I like helping, but I have no interest in topping.
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Jack and I have been working on reworking the nonmonagamous aspect of our relationship. The break down of our rules has been, for the past year and a half or so, that I get to have sex with women, either in threesomes or by myself. And Jack gets to beat people up. Which...um...kind of wasn't that fair to Jack, despite the impressive mental contortions I kept going through to explain why this arrangement was totally fair and fine and anyway it works for us so it's really not your business and why are you questioning me and grrrrr.

You may have detected the confrontational tone there. Obviously I was having some trouble with things. But we talked the other day, and re-drew some boundaries (Oral sex for everyone! YAY!) and established a compromise in which, well, we both get to have sex with other women, for certain definitions of sex, but we'll also be doing more D/s stuff together.

We used to do a lot more D/s and service-y type stuff before we moved in together. Have I mentioned that here before? It was fun and hot and made me feel close and connected to Jack even when we only got to see each other on week-ends. I had lists of things to do! I kept a journal! And a lot of my fantasies have been D/s oriented, even before I knew I was kinky. But when we moved in together and actually shared a living space, lists of household tasks that I'd thought were super hot before abruptly became anything but sexy.

It also didn't help that I, not knowing about FetLife had fallen into an unfortunate Maledom/femsub community online where 24/7 was kind of viewed as the only real, authentic way to do D/s. It was kind of like how things were with my college boyfriend, when I was convinced we needed to get engaged because that's what people did and that's the next step and so why haven't you proposed to me yet? I (in my naive, deluded state) thought 24/7 total power exchange was the direction in which our relationship must inevitably go!

Now I realize I don't have to get married if I don't want to, and that D/s and service can be a part of our relationship without my being confined to a cage or not allowed on the furniture. Not that there's anything wrong with relationships where someone is confined to a cage or has to sit on the floor, it's just not for me. Like how marriage and 2.5 kids and a house in the suburbs aren't for everyone.

Actually, that's why actually being on FetLife and being part of a live-and-in-person kink scene and having kinky friends is so great--because you get to know people who have all different type of relationships that work in all kinds of ways and it's easier to avoid falling into the trap of reading one group on the whole internet and thinking everybody does it this way, so I have to do it this way, too.
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More stuff about body image: I have gained back some weight. I realize this is not supposed to bother me, and I actually thought it didn't. I'm working on eating better, not out of a desire to lose weight but more because I've realized I'm a grown up and I need to stop eating like a teenager whose parents aren't home. Also, I got tired of my coworkers making fun of my Hot Pocket addiction.

Like I said, I thought it didn't bother me. Sure, I've gained ten pounds, but don't my tits look great? I was feeling pretty awesome...

...until I found myself in bed with a friend who is totally conventionally attractive (which is to say, attractive in a way agreed upon by most of society, not necessarily conventional-looking), and she kept telling me I was pretty. Every time she said it, I felt awful and embarrassed and like I might cry. I wanted to shout "Stop saying that!"

So yeah...so much for being totally over my body image issues. I need to work on this.

THIS! So much THIS!

2010-08-13T15:07:00.000-04:00

So, um, this post on the Pervocracy. You should totally read it! You should read it RIGHT NOW! Because everything it says is true and perfectly put.

And then you should read this grouchy quiz post. Because these two posts basically say everything I've been trying to say with my kinky Miss Manners posts, only they sum it up way better and less angry-to-the-point-of-incomprehensibility than I do.

The thing is, I'd been kicking around the idea of doing little posts about the people and blogs I link to over on the sidebar there for a while, and hadn't gotten around to it, and then these two posts came along and I just had to link to them.

Reconciling the Guilt

2010-08-03T15:26:00.000-04:00

Since moving to New York, I've discovered that I really enjoy scratch baking and cooking.

I like making delicious things from basic ingredients. I like knowing that I can make these things, that I can produce buttercream frosting as good as the buttercream frosting served at overpriced cupcake shops. I like how old fashioned it feels, how pretty desserts can be, how it feels like making order out of chaos. I like that it makes me feel close to my great-grandmother, whose kitchen skills were locally famous in her small hometown.

Sometimes, I worry about my kitchen proclivities. Are they regressive? Are they anti-feminist? Is my desire for yummy food made from scratch, food like my great-grandmother made, a sign that I secretly want to return to the times when a woman's place was in the kitchen? Is the pleasing, desirous feeling get while looking at the Joy of Baking somehow a sign of creeping, covert sexism? Because I swear to god I feel something like lust when I see that picture of the vanilla cupcakes on that site, with their perfect, perky paper wrappers and charming blue frosting. And feminist women aren't supposed to lust after the ability to make perfect cupcakes, are we?

And then I realize I'm being a jackass. My obsession with perfect, pretty baked goods or extra-delicious mac and cheese made from scratch is because...I like baking, I like cooking. I like making things. It only becomes bad if I decided that all women have to love making perfect baked goods. Actually, in my parents' house when I was growing up, my dad did most of the cooking and was really into making things from scratch with fresh ingredients, and my mom and I would bake bread with dark beer on her days off from her various interesting jobs. Also, um...I like food? I love eating, most of my best friends are really into food, and eating and sharing delicious things is one of my favorite social activities. And if you're a lady who doesn't love baking, that's awesome. It's totally your right and choice to bake or not.

It's all about choices. Feminism is about having choices. If I want to bake things, I get to bake things. Baking is not inherently sexist just because it's sometimes reminiscent of a time when women didn't have choices. If I don't want to bake, I can do any number of other things...like go bowling, something my other great-grandmother loved to do. When she wasn't busy riding motorcycles, that is. And if you're a woman, you should totally have a choice to bake or bowl or sew or ride motorcycles if you want to do any or all of these things.

So why is it so hard to apply these things to sex? Much like I know lots of dudes who like cooking or baking, I know plenty of guys who are submissive or masochists. Like cooking, BDSM only becomes a problem when someone decides all women everywhere are inherently submissive and should bow before all the inherently dominant men. It's also all about consent. If I'm not in the mood to cook, Jack can make dinner or we'll order take-out. If I'm not in the mood for a scene, or decide I don't want to play, I can safeword and say "Hey, not right now."

Sometimes I think that saying all BDSM everywhere is inherently misogynist is just as silly as saying that about all baking.

Failure to Communicate

2010-07-27T14:38:00.000-04:00

This is my 50th post! Woohoo! 50th post!

Anyway, I'd been feeling really smug yesterday, thinking of writing an entry about how good Jack and I have been at negotiating in-scene. It can be tricky to do that without dropping roles, and I have a serious tendency to just drop things and go "NO! Nothing in my ass right now, thanks, I'm not really feeling that today!" or whatever. And since Jack and I are both actors, and the sort of self-congratulatory assholes that actors often are, it feels like a special accomplishment when we can cover stuff like that without breaking character, as it were.

We had a really intense thing going on the other night. He threw me around a lot, and I was really deliciously scared, and when he asked me what I was afraid of I had a moment where I realized that I could decide exactly how this could go based on what I said I was afraid of. I squeaked out "I'm afraid you'll kill me--please don't kill me, I'll do anything." and that set the scary tone for the rest of the scene. I communicated, essentially, "You can be really fucking scary right now and I will find that hot."

Another night, I was feeling really ultra-submissive. It wasn't even something I completely realized I was doing at the time, but when I was calling Jack "sir," which is usually what I call him during that kind of scene, it didn't feel right at all, it didn't really express the ridiculous depths of my eagerness-to-please at that moment...so I shifted to calling him "Master," not something I do very often--not actually trying to communicate anything, but just because it felt right and seemed like the proper form of address at the time. Jack, knowing that I don't usually throw around the m-word, was then able to figure out where I was mentally. And hotness ensued.

Then, last night, when we were both sniping at each other and kind of cranky and out-of-sorts and play-fighting a lot, he waved his fist at me. I said "Fine, whatever, just don't hit me in the face." He punched me in the shoulder a few times...then slapped me in the face. I thought I'd clearly communicated that I didn't especially want to be hit in the face right then, he thought I just didn't want to be punched in the face. He apologized.

Sometimes, when everything is going well, you can communicate subtly. Sometimes, when you're cranky and annoyed even seemingly explicit communication isn't clear enough. Also, there are all sorts of other situations and scenarios where either of these things might work or not work. I need to learn to not be smug and self-congratulatory. Maybe this blog needs a "Lucy is an asshole" tag.

(Note: I think this entry maybe is the first where I've written this much about major scenes Jack and I have done that include possibly scary stuff. I feel a little weird about posting it, especially so soon after that entry about guilt and pop culture images of violence against women. It's kind of like "Oh, hai, here I am acting out those scenarios I wrote about in that other entry." I feel a little creepy. I might post more on this later?)

First Time

2010-07-19T23:32:00.000-04:00

So this week-end I fucked a pretty girl with a strap-on for the first time.

The harness was a little uncomfortable, and it slid and shifted around a lot. It was the kind of harness with a pocket for a little bullet vibe and the vibe felt both good and painful when it was in the right spot. Also, it turns out all that thrusting is really hard work!

But forget those minor complaints. Seriously, forget them, because it was really, really fucking awesome. To watch her completely delicious body from those angles, to hear the noises she made as I fucked her--so completely hot and awesome. According to Jack, who was hanging out on the edge of the bed watching everything, I had a maniacal grin on my face the whole time. It was so much fun. I can't wait to do it again, and I keep thinking up all sorts of hot fantasy scenarios involving lucious, curvy girls who are also very mean and like making hapless innocents fuck them with strap-ons.

I totally want a Feeldoe now.

Another Post of Small, Random Things

2010-07-19T22:54:00.000-04:00

- Hey people with OpenIDs--one person e-mailed me saying they were having trouble commenting. Is this true? Are OpenID comments not going through? Because I hate to think that comments aren't happening because of some glitch. If you're having trouble with comments, email me at lucyjweston@hotmail.com--or comment anonymously. If there is something wrong, I'll try to work it out.

- I'm really disturbed by a lot of the stuff that's been going on in the Catholic church. I've written here about being raised Catholic kind of a lot, and while I don't particularly believe in God I still tend to think of myself as culturally Catholic. It really disturbs me when the Vatican does extremely fucked up stuff, with this latest proclamation equating the ordination of women to child rape just being the latest in a long line of fucked up things. I also hate that I wrote a lot of my posts about Catholicism right around the time a lot of the recent child abuse things came to light.

-In related news, Mistress Matisse's column in the Stranger this week has a bunch of stuff about blood, vampires, Catholicism, and kink. Matisse and I apparently have more in common than I previously realized.

-There were other small, random things I was going to post about, but I forgot what they were.

Guilt and Awkward Confessions and Weirdness and Guilt

2010-07-06T16:11:00.005-04:00

You guys know I'm fairly kinky and generally all proud and vocal about it--I'm usually the first person to get upset and insulted and angry when BDSM is portrayed negatively in the media or dismissed as weird or creepy or wrong. If you've been reading here, you've read lots of entries where I've done just that.

But then, as a woman and a feminist--a woman who has been sexually assaulted, a woman who is freaked out and disgusted by our sometimes rapetacular culture, who gets upset and offended by song lyrics and TV shows that imply blurred lines and lack of consent...well...a song came on the radio the other day, a pretty standard, unremarkable blues song, with lyrics that pretty much boiled down to "If you don't give me what I need, woman, I'll take it from you." And it bothered me, kind of a lot. Jack and I sat there in the car talking about rape culture and sexual assault statistics to a third party who kept saying things like "I don't think you're supposed to take this seriously."

I once read this book called Citizen Girl (warning: HERE THERE BE SPOILERS!). It's a pretty simple little book about a 20-something EveryGirl struggling in the Corporate World in New York City. She gets hired by a sketchy company that lies to her, she gets used by them, she faces a world in which all other women are beautiful and vapid, or beautiful sellouts to the patriarchy, or (in one scene) butch, unshaven feminists. There are no in-betweens in Girl's world, no shades of gray.

Girl goes to a burlesque show, and it is Horrifying and Wrong! Girl goes to a woman-friendly, woman-run sex party, and it is A Phallocentric Tool of the Patriarchy in disguise. I don't think the authors ever actually use the term "patriarchy," but the attitude throughout the book is that everything either puts women down, brutalizes them, objectifies them in the worst way, or it is good and true and holy and pure. Penises are Bad. Dildos are Worse. Burlesque is the Enemy. Mascara also may partly be the enemy. Actually, kind of the only thing that isn't the enemy is Ms. magazine.

The climax of the book is a double-whammy:

1. Girl's boyfriend nonconsensually ties up her hands with some silk bondage rope from the goodie bag they gave her at the aforementioned Evil Sex Party.

2. It turns out her job was all kind of a scam, and the website she was working for is being redesigned as a rape-fantasy porn site where men can watch actresses dressed as high-powered business executives get fucked. Roughly. They even talk about men choosing the clips with the actress who looks most like their boss. Because women don't ever watch porn.

I cried when I finished this book, and I felt screwed up about my whole life for days afterwords. And this was years ago, before I moved to New York or started going to kinky parties or got especially educated or informed on feminism beyond the 101 level. I still feel kind of screwed up about it, even though I can tear it apart now as simplistic and devaluing the voices of sex workers and sex-positive feminists and women who wear make up for being the wrong kind of women.

But it still bothers me.

The problem is, how can I be upset by rape culture, by objectification of women, by images of brutalization, when I am sometimes aroused sexually by these images?

I mean, where do I draw the line? Clearly it's not okay to just say that whatever turns me on is okay. I mean, I delight in the clips at the end of Kink.com previews where the model smiles and talks about what a great time she had--yay! Consent and sexy times! But what about things like...The Story of O, which I've read and found hot and also pretty fucked up most of the time? Or stuff like some of the Wonder Woman art posted here, which I agree is creepy and fucked up in many ways, but I also find kind of hot?

It gets to a point where I start to wonder if there's something wrong with me.

I don't hate myself. I have some body image issues, I was in an abusive relationship for a while where I really did hate myself, and it took me a long time to get over it, but these days I mostly think I'm pretty awesome. I don't actually think that when Jack ties me up (which he does with my explicit, enthusiastic consent, because negotiation and communication are awesome, authors of Citizen Girl) it inherently makes him a misogynist and me a helpless collaborator with the Patriarchy to oppress all women everywhere.

But sometimes, while I'm simultaneously railing against people who treat women as objects and for my right to sometimes think of myself, a woman, as a sex object in certain situations because I think that's hot...well...I know that it's all about consent. I know that consent is the thing that makes all the difference in the world between rape fantasies and real rape, between kidnapping scenes and real kidnapping, between SM and actual torture...but sometimes I still secretly think I'm maybe a little bit fucked up.

The problem, for me, is fiction. Fictional things--movies, books, what-have-you--in which BDSM is depicted often don't bother with explicit and continuous and enthusiastic consent. It's a fantasy, is often the argument, so why does it matter? I mean, the scene in 9 1/2 Weeks where Mickey Rourke convinces Kim Basinger to stay with him by raping her squicked me the fuck out, but I've heard it described as hot and defended this way--it's fantasy. It's fiction. But I'm turned on by the idea of extremely bad things, so does it make me a hypocrite to also think that these images can be damaging to our view of women on the whole?

I think I'm really worried that something may be wrong with me after all. I sometimes am scared of the Patriarchy, I sometimes feel so hopeless because of rapey song lyrics or upsettingly sexist movies that I feel like the whole world is against me and nothing will ever change and we'll never win. And then I worry...is the enemy in my head, too? Is the Patriarchy so completely in my thoughts and my brain that it controls my sexual preferences, my responses, what turns me on? Am I kinky because I've internalized the world's fucked up view of women in general?

I don't know. I don't think so, but I don't know.

I do, however, think that it's probably really good to examine and talk about this stuff. I actually feel less fucked up and filled with guilt and confusion for writing this.

Lucy is an Asshole

2010-06-22T12:59:00.003-04:00

When I was in college, I participated in some major victim blaming.

There was a party, which I did not go to. A girl I was friends with, in that small-social-circle, person-I-tolerate, frenemies kind of way that happens in school, was in a room alone with her exboyfriend (who I also didn't like) at this party. The next day, people were saying he raped her.

Actually, people were saying she said he raped her. And because the girl in question was kind of a drama queen about other things, and because I was friends with her roommate, who didn't believe her, and because I'd been told over and over that sometimes women cry rape for attention--I didn't believe her.

I realize now that this was an asshole move, and I was an asshole for not believing her, and I'm still an asshole for making whatever awful thing happened to her about me and my reaction to it now.

Years later, when I was sexually assaulted (which, I realize, I talk about incessantly here, partly because I'm not over it so please cut me some slack) I found I couldn't tell anyone. Why would I want to tell anyone, when in the past I hadn't believed other victims' stories of assault? I'm still trying to sort this out in my head, but mostly I just feel really shitty for all the times I heard about someone being raped or assaulted and I dismissed it.

I'm pretty angry at myself, actually. I'm angry at any of us who've been assholes like this, who've decided that women who don't speak up about their assaults are cowards, but then attack the ones who do as inappropriate drama queens. We're damning ourselves here, folks--if you didn't report your assault, you must not have thought it was real enough to report, but if you talk about it openly, you must be lying to start drama and rumors. What the hell is anyone supposed to do with that?

I just...I'm getting so angry that it's making me inarticulate. I feel pretty disgusted with humanity on the whole.

Edit: Oh, hey! This post on Tiger Beatdown sums up pretty much exactly what I was trying to say, only in a much more eloquent and less choked-with-rage and awkwardly personal way. So you should read that.

If Only...

2010-06-20T17:06:00.003-04:00

If only the rest of the world were like the BDSM scene. Seriously. This is something that lots of people have written about, and I can't even say emphatically enough how much I wish it were true this weekend.

Yesterday was the annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade. Jack and I have gone for the past few years, but this year a friend and I decided to put a marching group together. It was really fun and exciting to be a part of the Mermaid Parade, with all the amazing costumes and floats and whatnot.

What was not so fun and exciting was dealing with the photographers and random people wanting pictures. It's pretty traditional to, well, not wear much clothing in the Mermaid Parade and this tends to draw some attention from both professional and hobbyist photographers, as well as random people with cameras. It's all part of the experience, posing for pictures, but by the end of the day it gets a little wearying. A lot of the photographers were really considerate and asked before taking pictures, but a lot weren't, like...

-The guy who butted into the middle of a conversation I was having with Jack and our larger group of friends, trying to figure out where to go get food. He stepped right into my face to ask for a picture, then when I said no he yelled at me for "not showing any love."

-The guy who tried to touch my breast. Yes, I was wearing pasties, but for Christ's sake, ASK BEFORE YOU TRY TO POKE SOMEONE IN THE BREAST. He poked and then asked, and as a result I think he got a picture of me yelling at him.

-The many, many people who did not ask to take pictures when we were standing around with our friends who were not in costume, just hanging out. Some of our friends had no interest in having their picture taken and just happened to be standing next to those of us in costume.

At the play parties we regularly go to, shit like uninvited, nonconsensual touching and taking photos without permission (taking photos at all, in some cases) will get you thrown out of the party. And sometimes it's hard to remember that the rest of the world doesn't operate that way. It's actually really nice to know that at a party, you can be as scantily clad as you'd like (provided that you at least have your nipples covered and wear a g-string as per NYS liquor laws, if you're somewhere where alcohol is served) and the majority of people understand that it's not an invitation to touch you.

So yeah...I really wish it were like this everywhere. I wish that dressing however you wanted didn't warrant unsolicited comments stronger than "Wow! I love your outfit!" or get interpreted as an okay to touch. Can someone find me some bouncers to enforce these rules wherever I go?

On Re-Watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer

2010-06-15T12:54:00.002-04:00

So guys, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." I've been re-watching the TV show from the beginning, because it's on Netflix instant and I'm bored and I really liked this show when it was initially on TV. And, well, since I can apparently only blog about things that are not at all new or relevant, I'm blogging about it.

The thing is, I watched this show pretty much religiously for the first two years of high school. And now, re-watching the early episodes, I have to say that a lot of the stuff with Angel and the boys-will-turn-evil-if-you-fuck-them thing is annoyingly heavy-handed, and Buffy's super powers are annoying in their lack of real world practicality and things are simplified and sometimes almost preachy.

But here's the thing...watching the early episodes of this remind me so clearly of what it was like being in an abusive relationship. Not so much the actual relationship part, as, well, to paraphrase what my lovely ex said, my ex wasn't possessed by a demon or put under a spell, he was just a dude who treated me like shit. No mystical, magical excuse needed. The stuff Buffy deals with after killing Angel, though, is like the writers looked into my head and wrote down exactly what it was like to get over my ex. Buffy's nightmares, the fear that Angel will come back mixed with wanting him to come back is like seeing myself on screen. I remember feeling that! Lonely and scared at the same time! My ex may not have actually been an evil demon-type vampire, but the nightmares I had about him for years afterwords turned him into one sometimes.

What's even weirder is that these episodes were on before this happened to me. I was, in fact, either not-yet-dating that guy or still with him when this stuff was on TV. How on earth was I so completely oblivious? At the time, I saw all these things and they just didn't connect at all. Now, I see these interactions, these moments where I can't trust Angel even when he really does get his soul back and it's deeply scary and awful. How could I not recognize then that the same thing was happening to me?

Also, I find it interesting that I can't deal at all with Angel anymore. The first time around, I watched this and I had no difficulty suspending my disbelief that Angel lost his soul, got his soul back, and so on and so forth. Now I see David Boreanaz on screen (I swear I don't actually have anything against David Boreanaz as a person or an actor, he just gets cast in some roles I find unfortunate) and my abuser-radar is pinged and I'm afraid of him. Like, I have an actual, visceral reaction to seeing him and it's all I can do not to yell "Don't trust him!" at the screen. I don't trust him, and I feel like he's making excuses with the whole soul/soulless thing, and it creeps me the fuck out.

I guess I'm still angry with myself sometimes. Actually, I'm angry with myself a lot of the time. I should be smarter than to get hurt, I should be cooler than to let things bother me. And I don't know why it should seem so bizarre that the 25-year-old me can see things the 15-year-old me couldn't while watching re-runs of a TV show about vampires. But it kind of does.

Carnival of Kinky Feminists

2010-06-07T13:47:00.003-04:00

Hey, guys! After a comment from one of the admins, I submitted the first entry I wrote about "Bones" to the Carnival of Kinky Feminists. And they accepted it! Woohoo! I'm excited to be a part of this brand new blog carnival.

I'm reading through the other blog posts that are in the first edition, and most of them seem to be much more interesting and well-put-together than my angry little post. So go check them out--if you're reading me, you'll probably enjoy them much more.

What Upset Me About "Bones"

2010-06-01T02:14:00.004-04:00

So I wrote a post about that episode of "Bones" with the pony play and the murder and stuff, and I mentioned at the end how completely enraged I was and how Jack kept saying he didn't understand why I took it so personally. I always take stuff like that personally, and I'm trying to figure out why.

I used to be really, really goth. I was a clove-smoking, Cure-listening, dressed-like-Stevie-Nicks goth girl...and then Columbine happened. And being a goth kid in high school in a post-Columbine environment was really scary sometimes. Because of the rumors, the media information that said the Columbine shooters were goths themselves, (rumors that have since been refuted) you got the feeling people viewed you with suspicion, that people were scared. And not in a superficial way, in a way that made me think of witch hunts and the House Unamerican Activities Committee.

I got yelled at by the principal for wearing my long black raincoat to school on a day when it was raining. Kids who didn't fit in, like the one cool punk guy, or me and my asshole then-boyfriend, got singled out for punishment for things that the "normal" kids got away with. Eventually, there would be mandatory five-day suspensions and the police showing up to search your house if you made an offhand comment at school that contained the word "kill." One dude got this treatment for saying "I'd kill for a lollipop right now."

I know now that, being a cis, white, mostly-het (perceived as het, anyway) chick, that my life has really been pretty full of privilege and free from oppression, but at the time, I felt pretty persecuted. 15 and 16 year old goth girls are not exactly known for a lack of dramatic reactions to things. I wrote research papers about bullying and school violence, about McCarthyism and in defense of media that's been blamed for various violent incidents. Eventually, I got the hell out of high school and went to a liberal college where no one even noticed when I wore a cape to class. It was a huge improvement.

But what I took away from that whole mess was that news stories and dumb movies and poorly-researched TV shows affect people's perception. It may be just a silly TV show, but if that's all someone sees of goth kids or kinky folks or sex workers or furries or whoever, then that will affect their perception. If your only frame of reference for bondage porn is how frequently it turns up as evidence on Law & Order: SVU, then you're probably not going to have a very high opinion of consumers of bondage porn.

It's one of the things that I was trying to get at when I was angsting about coming out a while back--if people only see portrayals of kinksters as freaks and murderers and rapists, or as pathetic targets of humor, as something damaged and twisted and abnormal, then that's what the perception of us will continue to be. How could I not take it personally when it seems to me that the writers who penned that speech at the end of that episode of "Bones" were saying to me "This is what we, the normal people, think of you and your friends and your relationships."

Street Harassment

2010-05-31T17:17:00.004-04:00

So guys, let me tell you about street harassment. It's really, really shitty. It happens a lot to the women-folk (and to the LGBTQ folks, but I think maybe in a different way sometimes?), and it doesn't get talked about enough, and it very often gets dismissed as not a big deal. After all, they're just words, right? It's not like being attacked or anything.

Here's the thing, though--words can be used in awful, scary, hateful ways. And, I'm saying this as someone who has been attacked by a stranger on the street, it's pretty awful. Back when I was in high school, I was sometimes uncomfortable leaving the house because I knew some guy on the street would say something to me. The summer that I was 17, a guy looked at me and said "I'd like to get my cock up in that," while I was walking to the bus on my way to work.

But that's harmless, right? It's not like he actually tried to touch me, so I (a 17-year-old) had no reason to be scared of him (an adult, male stranger). He was just saying I was attractive--it's practically a compliment!

Today, Jack and I went for a walk. Actually, I went for a walk while he ran ahead because he's doing this thing where he's running. And while I was walking, I passed these guys in a green van. Not a mini-van, a big, industrial-looking, no-windows-in-the-back van. And they said something. I actually didn't hear what they said, because I was on the phone and not paying attention. A few minutes later, they drove past me pretty slowly, making kissy-noises out the window.

Now maybe it was because the street was deserted, or maybe it was because they were driving a van, but I got really creeped out. I was really relieved that I was on the phone and had an obvious reason to ignore them. I caught up with Jack, and we walked around a bit, and there was a lovely park and some roses...but when we were going to head back, Jack said he wanted to run back. I said (kind of forcefully) that I didn't want to walk back alone because of the van dudes. And, well, we had an argument. And Jack, who is a really awesome feminist dude who's usually really understanding about things, who was in fact the first person to say I was sexually assaulted when I got groped when I was reluctant to put that label on it, said that he didn't really understand street harassment, that it didn't seem like a real thing because it doesn't happen to him and he doesn't see it happen to other people.

The thing that's scary for me about street harassment is that you never know where it's going to stop. If a guy would say to me that he'd "like to get his cock up in that," it already seems to me that he's not seeing me as a person, that he's seeing my body as public property to comment on--so how can I know whether he's going to take that idea further? And some guys, unsurprisingly, will just not take no for an answer--"I was just trying to talk to you," they say, "can't you even say thank you?" And if a stranger would grope me on a bus, if a strange guy would follow me down the street late at night, is it really so surprising that some stranger on the street talking about fucking me would ping my defense system and read as "Danger!"?

Jack got angry with me for being creeped out. We talked about it, and I pointed out that his "street harassment doesn't happen to me so it's not a big deal or concern" view is pretty much the definition of male privilege, and he said he really needed to examine why my being street harassed made him angry with me and his other feelings about it.

What I took away from this conversation is that we're not talking about this enough. Clearly we need to talk about this more, need to make this more visible. If you think street harassment isn't a big deal, or that it's not happening, go read a few posts over at Holla Back NYC and then tell me it's not a real problem.

2010-05-27T03:08:00.008-04:00

So...um...for some reason, I decided to watch the pony play episode of "Bones" the other day. It was on Netflix instant, I'd read a brief mention of it at Tiger Beatdown (which is an awesome, awesome, extra double plus awesome feminist blog that you should totally read) and I was bored and casting about for something to do.

For those unfamiliar with it, "Bones" is a police procedural type TV show involving...unsurprisingly...a lady who is a forensic anthropologist and studies bones. And she solves murders by examining the evidence found in/on said bones, with the help of David Boreanaz, whose character's defining characteristic seems to be that he's kind of a douche. I've tried watching this show a few times, because I love a good police procedural, and mostly have found it boring. But when I heard there was an episode about pony play, well, of course I had to watch it.

Pony play, for those unfamiliar, is a variety of animal-type role play. Since it's not one of my own, personal kinks, I'm vaguely terrified that if I try to explain it I'll horribly offend any pony players who happen to stumble across my humble blog. My main exposure to pony play has been in Anne Rice's erotica, so I'm inclined to take it with a pinch of salt. That, and I really like the snazzy boots.

That pony play was specifically the focus of this episode was kind of beside the point. The pony scenes were very...well...tame. Mostly conventionally attractive dudes (almost all the ponies seemed to be dudes) wearing a huge amount of insanely expensive specialized leather gear being led around by ladies in sexy riding outfits, prancing and making horsey noises. I was pretty disappointed that no one got smacked with a riding crop or pulled one of those little pony carts Anne Rice was always going on about.

But aaanyway, this was the worst example I've seen in a while of the "kinky people are freaks and murderers" trope that is constantly infuriating me in my consumption of mysteries and police procedurals. Brennan, our forensic anthropologist heroine, is basically the only cop-type who's even slightly non-judgmental towards our pony players, but she still comes out with gems like "Fetishism is a way of indulging in sexual activity, without actually engaging emotionally with the other person as a fully formed human being."* Which, um, even if you're using the hyper-judgey definition of fetishism that turns up in places like the DSM-IV-TR, is not necessarily a technically accurate definition. She then goes on to talk about "masturbation fetishes," to which I can only say LOL WUT?

So the show goes on with its unsurprising plotline of "one of these weirdos must be a murderer" and, surprise! One of them is, in fact, the murderer! Just to make it extra, extra hackneyed, it's the victim's play partner/toppy person. Because that's an original plot line.

It's seriously gotten to the point where I've become so desperate to see some sort of TV show where there's a murder and kinky people are involved and one of them isn't the murderer that I got really excited about that one episode of one of the innumerable "Law & Order" spinoffs where the domly dom dude turns out to just be a Lord Master Domly Asshole type who nonconsensually smacked the victim with a riding crop and not the guy who followed her out of the party to rape and murder her.

The last straw for me with this episode of "Bones," though, came at the very end. Douchey special agent David Boreanaz is sitting in a diner-y place having coffee with Brennan, when he unleashes this lovely speech:

Why? I’ll tell you why. Here we are. All of us are basically alone, separate creatures just circling each other. All searching for that slightest hint of a real connection. Some look in the wrong places, some, they just give up hope because in their mind they’re thinking ‘Oh, there’s nobody out there for me.’ But all of us, we keep trying over, and over again. Why? Because every once in a while, every once in a while, two people meet. And there’s that spark. And yes Bones, he’s handsome. And she’s beautiful. And maybe that’s all they see at first...But making love? Making. Love. That’s when two people become one...Yeah, Bones. A miracle. Those people- role-playing and their fetishes and their little sex games- It’s crappy sex. Well, at least compared to the real thing. *

This speech is mostly done as a voice over, played over shots of the other characters interacting with their partners. All the couples shown are 100% heterosexual, which is so full of issues and so angry-making on its own that I could write a whole separate post just on the fact that these are the couples being shown as "right" and "real" and how icky and homophobic that is.

But I seriously couldn't get past my blinding rage at this show that would not only characterize kinksters as freaks and murderers, but that would end with a speech dismissing all non-heteronormative, non-vanilla sex as "crappy" and not "the real thing." How dare you, faceless writers of a dumb TV show, tell me that my sex life is crappy!? How dare you dismiss the best relationship I've ever had as not being a real connection? The vast majority of the people I know who are into some form of kink are incredibly close, connected, and communicative with their partners. Negotiating issues that come up in kinky, BDSM-y relationships takes tons of effective communication and trust (which is not to say no vanilla people ever communicate or negotiate effectively, just that I think it's much less the norm to negotiate as much in non-kinky encounters and relationships.) I'm still ragey just writing about this, their explicit condemnation of my own relationship and my friends' relationships...which makes me think harder about their implied condemnation of non-hetero relationships...which makes me even more ragey! It's an unending cycle of rage.

Jack didn't get why I was so angry, why I took it all so personally. I had a hard time explaining, but I'll try to go into it in more detail about why it always feels so freaking personal when I watch or read stuff like this in another entry.

*Direct quotes are lifted from a transcript of the episode that I found here.

2010-05-24T16:14:00.004-04:00

So Jack and I were traveling this week-end, with friends who we're not out to. Somehow, I found myself with a group of friends of friends making all sorts of comments where I would basically say "I'm into BDSM! Only I'm JUST JOKING! Hahahahahahahaha! I'm being scandalous and funny!" It was a very weird situation for me.

And I realized that this is something I used to do all the damn time. About kink and about being attracted to girls and sometimes even just about liking and enjoying sex. It's a defense mechanism. It's a way of gauging reactions, testing the waters, and of being kind of confrontational without actually risking anything.

It's kind of cowardly. It's something I haven't done in a long time because I've mostly been around people I don't feel the need to shock and then hide from. It's nice. Unsurprisingly, I like myself a lot better when I'm just being honest than when I'm telling the truth to provoke people, then pretending I was joking. I like myself a lot better.

Becoming Sally Bowles: The Manic Pixie Dream Girl and Me

2010-05-17T17:41:00.005-04:00

When I was in high school, I saw the 1972 film version of Cabaret for the first time.

Like probably every other teenage musical theatre geek and outcast, I was immediately seized by an overwhelming desire to be just like Sally Bowles. Only maybe without the cocaine and the unplanned pregnancy.

Sally is flashy and dramatic and decadent, and flashy dramatic decadence was incredibly attractive to me (my other film obsession at the time was the Rocky Horror Picture Show) and I wanted to be just like her, to be flashy and dramatic and decadent and maybe just a little bit doomed. But how, exactly, does one go about being just like Sally Bowles? Especially if one wishes to avoid the cocaine addiction and unplanned pregnancy. It's difficult, since, well, Sally the character actually admits to the fact that she herself is attempting to deliberately cultivate a projected image of mystery and glamour.

Also, we, the audience, never get to find out what's going on inside Sally's head. She's kind of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, in that she is quirky and strange and sexy and lifts Brian/Christopher/Cliff/whatever-the-hell-his-name-is out of his dudely doldrums. Of course, Christopher/Brian/Cliff is asexual or gay or possibly bi, and so is not entirely won over by Sally's Manic Pixie charms, but still...she's empty. She's all style and no substance, all frosting and no cake. What the Hell is going on in Sally Bowles' head? We don't get to find out, because Sally is only dealt with through observation, from a distance. She's not a thinking, feeling person, she's a decoration, a glittery butterfly. The only time we maybe get to actually hear Sally's own voice is in the song "Maybe This Time," and then I would argue that it can only be interpreted as her voice in the 1997 stage musical, in which she sings the song outside the Greek-Chorus-otherworld of the Kit Kat Club stage. In the film, it's more of a projection of what she should be thinking, a comment on female loneliness and expectations of couple-hood.

Sally Bowles has been one of my only ongoing female role models. All the other film characters and celebrities I've wanted to be just like have been male, from David Bowie to Frank N. Furter to Sir Percy Blakeney to Adam Ant. And I think this is because they have that same flash and drama and glamour that I want combined with an actual voice. That's the thing about Manic Pixie Dream Girls, about female characters in movies observed through the male gaze, is that they don't have voices, or thoughts. They're a sparkly, completely empty construct that men get to put they're own ideas and feelings into. Christopher/Cliff/Brian may be a camera, but his observations of Sally Bowles come uncomfortably close to making her an object.

This makes it hard to figure out who you are as a girl. I remember years of writing stories in high school in which someone else observed the character who was supposed to be me, and rhapsodized for pages about how pretty and charming and fascinating she was. I also clamored for friends to use characters based on me in their stories, so that I could read someone else's observations of me and use them to figure out who the hell I was.

The closest I ever came to being Sally Bowles was my sophomore year of college. I was actually not especially tormented about this at the time, was just sort of bumbling along, being myself, doing dumb, quirky shit like leading around a female friend on a leash (I totally didn't know or acknowledge that I was kinky at the time). And then, second semester, I started hearing rumors that one of my male friends, we'll call him...Cliff, had a crush on me. No, wait, he was in love with me. There were livejournal posts that were unsubtly disguised, rumors and weird conversations and even weirder conversational pauses around me. And suddenly, without any regard for what I actually felt or thought or the fact that I was, in fact, already in a relationship, it seemed like all our mutual friends had decided that Cliff had found the perfect girl for him and that perfect girl was me, though when I heard about it all, the girl they were talking about didn't actually seem to share my thoughts or feelings or much else. They had decided I was Cliff's Magical Pixie Dream Girl, and that he and I should be together, with no actual thought or regard to the fact that I wasn't interested.

It felt creepy. I felt violated. I told my dad about the whole dramarama, which ended with Cliff awkwardly confessing his love for me via IM, and he said "Yeah, Lucy, that's kind of what 'objectification of women' really means." I felt like my friends had tried to shove the thoughts and feelings and personality they wanted me to have inside my head, inside my body, with no regard for the thoughts and feelings and personality I already had.

I don't want to be Sally Bowles anymore. I may paint my nails green, or sing "Maybe This Time" at karaoke, or ask Jack "Doesn't my body drive you wild with desire?" but it's a pose, a character I play at sometimes. Being Sally Bowles is being empty inside, a flashy sparkly package with nothing in it. It's not being a real person. Instead, I'm looking for female role models who are real, for female voices. They're hard to find sometimes, but they're out there. And I want to be a real person, like them.

The Submissive Vampire: A kinky reading of Interview With the Vampire

2010-05-17T13:26:00.007-04:00

I kind of simultaneously love and hate Anne Rice.

When I was 10, the film version of Interview With the Vampire was released and there I was, already with an interest in vampires and (people tell me) a slight resemblance to Kirsten Dunst, just starting to figure out this whole "attracted to people" thing that was starting to happen in my body and head. I was attracted to the idea of vampires, the power and sophistication that vampires implied, the idea of being more, being better than humans, being special.

I was also, it's worth noting, completely terrified of sex. I had only just recently learned about that whole penis-in-the-vagina thing that was apparently sex, and I was horrified. Also, in my not-knowing, sex had mostly been something that older kids made fun of me for not knowing about, something that was a cause of humiliation and shame and jokes that I didn't understand and would later get in trouble for repeating to my parents. Any mention of vampirism as a stand-in for sex in the nonfiction books I would occasionally read made me intensely uncomfortable, but vampires were also my own personal sex stand-in. Being interested in vampires, being completely obsessed with vampires in general and Dracula and Anne Rice in particular made it okay to be interested in sex--because I wasn't interested in sex, I was interested in vampires.

When the film version of Interview was released on video and Pay Per View, I watched the preview guide all day while my parents were at work, hoping to see commercials. I wasn't allowed to see the movie. It was rated R, it was full of nudity and sex and my parents did not think I was old enough. I saw it on the sly at a friend's house and was actually kind of disappointed, so I secretly got out the book from the library and read it late at night and hid it under the bed.

I'd buy my own copy in high school. Now, from the wise old age of 25, I can say that I think Anne Rice is guilty of serious over-writing. Her prose comes in many shades of purple, and "savage" and "exquisite" are to her what words like "eldritch" and "gibbering" are to H.P. Lovecraft. But in the depths of my high school gothiness, Interview seemed hot and dark and lush and swoony. I felt Louis' pain, understood and wished for his weird, dark fantasies and hallucinations, wanted to be under Lestat's power. Until midway through my freshman year of college when I tried to re-read the book for the umpteenth time, said "Wow, this is overwritten and wanky," and put it right back down.

But it had a huge influence on me, both the book and the movie. Seriously, if you looked at a line-up of the guys I've dated (with the possible exception of Jack) they look like an Anne Rice casting call. And while I mention above that people tell me I look like Kirsten Dunst, and have since that movie came out, I've always claimed to not see the resemblance--not because I have anything against Kirsten Dunst, but because I really dislike the character of Claudia. I'm not like Claudia at all, so how can you say I look like her?

In criticisms of Interview, people tend to talk about the "vampire family" idea. It shows up in lots of modern vampire fiction, the idea that vampires change humans into vampires out of loneliness, to create a blended family, in The Lost Boys and lots of children's vampire fiction (Nancy Garden's books like My Sister, the Vampire) it's a major plot-point. But it never connected for me when people have said this about Interview With the Vampire, mostly because they usually follow this up by saying that Louis is the mother figure and we have a nice little conventional nuclear family here. Even though the Lestat-Louis-Claudia group is referred to as a family in the text, it resembles an actual family much less than it does a leather family (though still an unhappy one), a triangle in which dominant Lestat and Claudia butt heads and power-struggle over who gets to control submissive Louis.

Louis is not so much a mother as he is submissive, to both Lestat and Claudia, and I'm uncomfortable with the reading that says his following Lestat's orders and wishes, even when he doesn't want to, makes Louis feminine and mother-like. Ick. Also, it disregards how thoroughly Claudia has Louis wrapped around her dainty fingers (or, if you like the image better, under the heel of her little slippers). One of the main ideas of the book is that, while Claudia looks like a child, she quickly grows out of this role and has the mind of an adult woman--so why are critics so quick to stuff her into a child-box when talking about the "vampire family"? Louis is the least forceful, the least commanding of the three, and he transfers his loyalty, his submission and willingness to serve, from Lestat to Claudia as Claudia changes from a child-doll to a, well...woman trapped in a child-doll's body.

This continues and is heightened when Claudia and Louis meet Armand. Louis gets all swoony and strange in the pull of Armand's age and power--he's pretty much in subspace when they interact. Weirdly, Armand is also able to subdue Claudia, in a domlier-than-though display that seriously creeps her out, because she doesn't want to lose Louis or lose control over him. Louis is always kind of a passive figure--he doesn't really decide much for himself, or do much because he wants to. He does what Lestat wants, then what Claudia wants, then, Armand tries to take him away to do what he, Armand wants. Louis doesn't seem to want much, except to make whoever his current dom-figure is happy. Or, in the case of Lestat, who Louis doesn't really get along with once the honeymoon period of their relationship is over, not actively angry.

I can see how this eager-to-please Louis can be read as feminine, as a mother-figure, but it makes me uncomfortable to read it that way. I don't like Louis being cast as feminine because he is passive, especially when Claudia an actual female character is there being all strong (and sometimes crazy and obnoxious and demanding) for contrast. I would instead argue that submission does not equal femininity or femaleness, and that Louis and Claudia's relationship much more closely resembles a femdom/malesub relationship than that of parent and child, at least once Claudia "grows up."

And while the "vampire family" idea comes up again when Claudia brings Madeleine, her chosen mother-figure, into the equation, Claudia is still in charge and Madeleine's characterization of Claudia as "'a child who cannot die'" seems creepy and wrong because Claudia is not a child at this point, except in appearance. Claudia wants a family, wants an appearance of normality, but she also wants to control her "parents." Also, Louis has no attraction towards Madeleine--and why would he, when he's clearly attracted to dominant personalities? Madeleine is more like his co-sub than any sort of interest for him. He doesn't want to "curse" her with vampirism, but he also knows her view of Claudia as a child is incorrect and, I suspect, resents her competition for Claudia's attention.

This also explains why, despite being a girl, and blonde, and looking maybe a little like the actress who played Claudia in the movie, I've always related far more to Louis than Claudia. In my reading, the book and movie were not about a vampire family or Louis' loving Claudia like a daughter. They're about Louis, and his transitioning from an uncomfortable relationship with Lestat (who would have him be subservient, but also mocks him for his "weakness") to a fulfilling one with Claudia (in which most of his actions serve to please and serve the object of his affections) to losing Claudia because of being drawn to a similar relationship with Armand. For an oblivious submissive girl like me, Louis was a far more relatable character than the one who was superficially more like me.

Note: This is not to say that Claudia and Louis have an ideal relationship, or that the whole Claudia-as-a-woman-in-a-child's body thing isn't kind of creepy, or that all people who identify as submissive are doormats like Louis who need to or can be taken away from their respective dom(me)s by force. No one should base an actual relationship on anything Anne Rice has written ever, and that's doubly true of her porn, which I'll probably write about in another entry.

Another Note on Ettiquette...

2010-05-15T12:45:00.002-04:00

I would have posted this as an addendum to yesterday's post, but I had to run out the door. A friend and I were talking about this the other night, and it's something that really annoys me, that I really just can't believe people do.

So generally, it's a rule that when you're at a play party, you don't interrupt a scene in progress. It's really, really rude and inconsiderate and, if you do it the really wrong way, it can be dangerous in an accidentally-getting-hit-by-stuff kind of way. The thing that people sometimes don't realize is that a scene is not necessarily over when the hitty part stops.

See, there's this thing called "aftercare," which most people need at the conclusion of a scene. Different people need different things, different versions of it, and it may look different from person to person, but you really shouldn't freakin' interrupt it!

I know I sometimes get dizzy and/or emotional after a particularly intense reaction. And when I do, I just want to sit and process and maybe have someone hug me and tell me I'm a good girl. Maybe drink some water or a Coke. What I really don't want to do is make smalltalk, especially with a stranger or someone I don't really know well.

So if you see someone being cuddled or stroked or wrapped in a blanket, or even if you see someone who was just being spanked or caned or otherwise played with sitting with a slightly dazed look on their face, for the love of God, WAIT a little while before you strike up a conversation with that person. Seriously. And if you do start chatting with someone, and they say they're a little out of it from a scene still, back the fuck off. Seriously.

And don't offer people foot massages immediately after a scene, either. That's freakin' creepy.

Pain Tolerance and Other Stories

2010-05-14T16:00:00.002-04:00

I used to think pain tolerance was completely relative and subjective and there was no way to know what yours was relative to anyone else's, as it's impossible to know if someone else is experiencing it the same way you are.

Then I started going to parties and playing with other people, and it became apparent that I am, in fact, a huge wuss. While it's arguably a completely different situation than, say, accidentally cracking some ribs, it definitely puts things in perspective to get hit by someone in a way that makes you squeal and squirm and say "Oh, my God, I can't take anymore!" and then watch that same person hit your friend the same way and get almost no reaction.

One of the earliest entries I wrote in this blog was about going through a thing where I wasn't enjoying pain like I had been. Well, oh boy has that changed. Lately I've been wanting more, wanting to push myself, to see what I can take...and it's pretty awesome. There's a palpable release that I'd heard about and read about but had never really experienced firsthand until very recently. It's really an amazing feeling, and I really like that I'm not too afraid to get there anymore.

So yeah...kind of like the post I wrote about fireplay, I feel really good about trying things even though I'm scared. Trying new things, expanding boundaries. It's scary, but I like the way things are going.

Toys

2010-04-30T14:55:00.003-04:00

This is what I found on the couch when I wandered into the living room this morning. Jack is going out of town tonight, and I guess he packed the bag we usually use as a toy bag.

I saw this tangle of stuff, and my thought was "Wow. Is this really my life? Awesome."

(It's worth noting that this doesn't include any vibrators or insertables, which have taken over my nightstand. Or things like the long riding crop, which don't fit in the bag.)

2010-04-19T16:01:00.004-04:00

So I keep trying to find a way to build a big, important post about this framing it within lots of meaning about trying things I'm afraid of and being brave and adventurous and what I've gained from that...but that post kept coming out really pretentious. So I'm just going to skip to the part I want to brag about...

...Guys, I got set on fire this week-end.

Actually, the fire was burning just above my skin and only felt uncomfortably hot when left to burn for more than a second or two. But still, I was pretty much scared to death and I did it anyway and it turned out to be really awesome.

so yeah, thanks to the friend who set me on fire, I did something scary and I was okay and that's awesome.

2010-04-14T00:46:00.005-04:00

So writing about the creeper ex in my last post, I touched upon the fact that I'm scared he would find this blog and recognize the events I've written about...and then two seconds later, I brushed it off and said something about hoping he'd be scandalized. He probably would be scandalized--either that or dismissive, he'd read about my wonderful adventures and say "I knew she was a slut all along."

But what I didn't really go into is how afraid of him I still am.

It's definitely not as bad as it used to be, back in the days when I would actually jump when I saw a car that looked like the one his mom drove, but it's still there. He broke up with me nine years ago and I am still afraid of him.

For years I had nightmares. I dreamed we were at a party and got in a fight, I dreamed he was leading a cult and his followers kidnapped me. In college, I dreamed he appeared backstage during a show I was in, dragged me offstage and raped me in the basement of the theatre building. The nightmares only stopped within the past year or so.

I have a hard time talking about the whole situation. I tend to dismiss it. I tend to try to blame myself. A few months after the break up, he read my livejournal and was furious. He hadn't abused me, he claimed, I'd been a willing participant in everything. I'd wanted it all...and it's true, at the time I wanted nothing more than to prove my love, to please him. But that doesn't mean it wasn't abuse. It's hard to talk to my friends about it, because some of them were there. My college boyfriend just didn't understand at all what I meant by emotional abuse. "What exactly did he do to you?" he asked.

He manipulated me. The first few months were wonderful. I was perfect, an angel, his salvation. He was prone to extravagant romantic statements and it made me feel desired and loved and wanted. He had been so alone, and now he had found me and I was his first and only love and we would be together forever and it would be perfect.

The first clue should have been that I was terrified of him when he was angry--he would punch things, slam things around. When I did something "wrong," something like not being around to talk to him on the phone at exactly the right time every night, he would hurt himself, cut himself. There were certain things I couldn't say, things I couldn't do. Commenting on anyone else's appearance was forbidden, was hurtful and would make him jealous. He was only interested in me, so why should I think anyone else was attractive? Going anywhere without him would make him feel left out and upset. Saying things like "I can't imagine ever being with anyone else" implied that I wasn't 100% sure, and expressions of doubt made him feel like I didn't love him as much as he loved me. Didn't I want him to feel as loved and valued as I did?

I followed all his rules completely, but it was never enough. I stopped going anywhere with my friends, my friends stopped talking to me, but I still occasionally went places with my parents and that made me unavailable for phone calls. I started faking headaches and sickness when my parents wanted to do family things. I didn't look at other guys, but I still occasionally had dreams about them, and that made him upset. I stopped having sexual dreams about other guys. Don't ask me how that's even possible, but I did. If a dream crept under my defenses, I would turn it into a rape dream...which resulted in him telling me that if I was ever raped, he'd leave me because "I couldn't bear anyone else being inside you." He didn't even want anyone else to see my bare shoulders or arms or calves, so I wore long skirts and long sleeved shirts and shawls year round.

Even when I did all of these things completely and perfectly, he would find fault. I had hurt him in the past, and he couldn't trust that I wouldn't do it again. I begged for his forgiveness--literally begged--and apologized until the words "I'm sorry" didn't sound like words any more. I swore I'd be better, I'd do better, I'd be perfect. Things would be perfect. I wrote angsty poetry and short stories where my character was cursed or part demon and was redeemed by love. He said "You weren't cursed, you chose to hurt me."

But hey, he didn't hit me, right?

His brother did. His brother did not like me, and would do things like twist my arm behind my back until I had tears in my eyes. I would, in fact, provoke his brother to hurt me on purpose so that he would have to step in and save me, because that proved he loved me. I cried every day. It was a goal of mine at one point to go a week without crying, and it seemed like an impossible one. I often didn't know why I was crying--we were blissfully happy, right? Everything was going to be perfect someday, right?

So yeah...I'm still scared of him. I'm not sure why, as none of this would possibly happen again, but the thought of running into him somewhere ties my stomach up in knots. Every time I think I'm over it, something will happen to remind me of him and I'll freak out all over again. I still have a hard time saying his name.

I actually thought I was over it. Jack has been really wonderful and patient over the past two and a half years in helping me break out of the last few remaining behavior patterns I was stuck in because of this. But a few weeks ago, I read a lot of the archives over at Quizzical Pussy and her posts about her abusive ex scared me so badly I stayed up half the night. At one point, I actually was convinced she had dated the same guy as I had.

Clearly, I need to talk about this more. I need to talk about it until I'm not scared anymore, if that's even possible.

Only tangentially related to the main post: The evil ex definitely needs a pseudonym, but all the ones I keep coming up with make him sound too interesting. Need to think about that some more.

The Last Time I Had Sex

2010-04-12T12:51:00.004-04:00

I've written here before about my creepy abusive ex from high school, and I've written about being groped by a stranger on the bus. And since April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, I've been reading lots of other people's assault stories. For some reason, what reading these stories reminded me of was not my own assault story, but...well...the last time I had sex with my creepy abusive ex-boyfriend.

It was consensual. It was, in fact, probably what I wanted almost more than anything else in the world at that time, because I was convinced that if we had sex again he would want me back. But I'm getting ahead of myself...let me start over.

He broke up with me. He broke up with me in April for unclear reasons (I was convinced it was my fault, because everything had always been my fault) after at least a month where he was increasingly distant and strange. Later, I would remember the IM conversations with my "best friend," a girl we knew only online, that he had finished by saying "I love you," and it would all add up, but for the time being I was devastated and confused and spent pretty much all my time either begging him to take me back or deciding when, exactly, I was going to kill myself.

The day it happened was the day of his graduation. After the ceremony, I went out to dinner with his family and back to his house. We were kissing, making out in his bed, and I think he asked me what I wanted. I told him I wanted to have sex. We left his room and went into a closed-off room that no one used for anything except storage. He kept asking, over and over, "Are you sure you want to do this?" It seemed like things were going so well, he had been so attentive, so affectionate, so nice to me, that I was thinking I had passed the "temporary break-up test" (because up until this point, everything had always been a test) and that we were going to get back together. I was very, very sure I wanted it.

I laid down on the floor and he got on top of me. It was brief, in my memory it seems like it only lasted a minute or two but I'm not completely sure. I remember being confused about where the condom had come from, as he'd said a while before that he was out of them and that's why we weren't having sex any more. And then, after he came, he got up and went back to his room. I followed, and sat on the bed. I don't know what I was expecting--that he would say we were officially getting back together? That he would come sit on the bed and cuddle with me? Instead, he picked up a cheap plastic bracelet off his dresser and tossed it to me. Then he went to sit down on the floor and play video games with his brother. He pretty much ignored me for the rest of the night, until I went home.

I didn't have penis-in-vagina sex again for six and a half years, and for that time this was an event of huge, terrifying significance in my life. It was "The Last Time I Had Sex."

It would hit me a few months later, the awful symbolism of the bracelet and the way he ignored me. I ended up tearfully telling my next boyfriend the story, concluding it by saying "he thought I was just a worthless whore."

The creepy ex didn't speak to me for about two months after graduation, after the last time we had sex, and over the course of those two months I woke up. It was that sudden. I got up one day, and I wasn't in love with him anymore. I wasn't devastated. I was, well, me again. And I slowly reconstructed my life, figured out who I was. He and I were in contact for a few months after, on and off, with me telling him to leave me alone and him convincing me we could be friends. Eventually I stopped replying to his e-mails.

I'm still scared of him sometimes. Part of me is scared he'll find this blog post and read it and recognize it (there are enough details here I feel like he would) and then he'd have found me again.

Part of me hopes that if he did, he'd be scandalized by what I'm up to now, since he would constantly say that he "hated sluts" and that open relationships were wrong and cheating.

But today, thinking about this, I'm really unnerved by how many times he asked if I really wanted to have sex with him that day. I'm convinced he knew it was a bad idea, he knew I'd look back and regret it, and he was really just obtaining clear consent over and over to cover his ass. I'm so creeped out by that thought.

Easter

2010-04-04T13:07:00.003-04:00

I keep forgetting about Easter. In college, we didn't get any days off for Easter or Passover, so Easter stopped being the big family holiday it was when I was little. But it's still kind of lurking around the edges of my brain.

It's hard for me, as a lapsed Catholic, to talk about Easter without thinking about Lent and holy week. In fact, at this point, the whole not-believing-in-God thing has turned them into completely separate things in my mind.

Growing up, Lent and holy week and the Triduum and the sacrifice and darkness that lead up to Easter always kind of seemed like a bigger deal than Easter itself. Advent, the lead up to Christmas, totally made sense--who doesn't want to count down until Christmas? But Lent is 40 days long. That's, like, forever when you're in third grade. And as you grow up Catholic, going to Catholic school, you learn that Lent is about sacrifice and abstinence (not necessarily that kind of abstinence--just general abstaining from things like booze and anything else that might make you happy) and fasting. You can't eat meat on Fridays, when you're an adult you're supposed to fast as well, and, if you grew up in my house, you go to church, like, 50 times during holy week for confession and to pray and for Easter Vigil and it all feels very Medieval and ancient and strange.

I never really got how all that enforced suffering (though I love fish fry, so that no meat on Fridays thing wasn't very suffer-y for me) was connected with Easter itself. I knew intellectually from probably third grade on what the connection was--we're suffering because Jesus suffered for us, we're celebrating because he rose from the dead, the butterflies and bunnies and eggs are signs of new life (new life, the nuns stressed, definitely new life). But most of what I got out of Lent was that we're supposed to suffer and Easter seemed like a weird follow up.

Now I know that part of the reason for the disconnect is that the bunnies and eggs are co-opted pagan fertility symbols, something I now greatly enjoy explaining to other people. But this is still a time of year I can never seem to really make sense of. But yeah, Lent and Triduum and sacrifice and spending what felt like 60 hours in church are definitely the things I think of when the conversation comes around to "why I'm kinky."

Even though I'm a happy atheist now, and I started brushing off all this "Lent" stuff when I was in seventh grade and told Sister Frances that I was giving up human sacrifice that year, I'm really attracted to the idea of fasting and suffering and sacrifice. Even when I was trapped in that awful relationship in high school, one of my favorite tactics to prove my devotion was to not eat--look what I'm doing for you, look how I'm suffering to show you my love. It turns out fasting is not a great idea when you're hypoglycemic. But anyway, this year I'm thinking maybe I could do with a little more structure and sacrifice in my life. Because it's kind of hot.

Coming out of the kink closet, pt. 2

2010-03-30T14:25:00.003-04:00

So Jack is thinking about coming out to his mom.

I totally understand this, as I think we're feeling a lot of the same things in respect to people who know/people who don't know.

I know I feel kind of cut off from people I'm close to but don't talk to about this sort of thing. My best friend from college, someone I used to talk about every single thing with, doesn't know. And I feel like I'm isolating myself from her, even though I know I can trust her and she's seen me crying over dumb stuff and falling down drunk. I know I need to talk to her about this, but I'm having a hard time finding the way.

What makes me even more upset than the few close friends I haven't gotten around to telling yet is that I believe in kink. I know that sounds really silly when I say it like that, but I believe in being sex-positive and talking about sex and that talking about kink is part of that. Whenever I see a movie that portrays BDSM in a negative light, or read infuriating, biased blog posts on the subject, it makes me want to tell everyone that I'm kinky. Because I feel like the best way to counter all the misconceptions and stereotypes and shaming is to actually talk about things.

The problem, of course, is that I'm terrified of my parents finding out. My parents are generally pretty liberal, and don't generally get upset over sex-related stuff...unless it also involves me. Their take on sex seems to be that everybody does it, except their little girl. And beyond that, they seem to think that a lot of kinky stuff is, well, kind of silly. And the thought of my parents knowing and judging me and possibly disapproving makes my skin crawl. I love my parents, I think they're really cool most of the time, and while I don't think they would disown me I can't help but think of the people I know who haven't spoken to their families in years because they came out or were outed as kinky.

So that leaves me feeling stuck. Because you can argue that while BDSM is something between you and your partner and, like your favorite sexual positions, not necessarily something to share with anybody and everybody, that argument doesn't work as well when...well...it's not something you do in your bedroom with your partner. What if it's something you do in a bar twice a month with your friends? What if it's actually how you know most of your friends? I may have gone to a sports bar for beer and wings, eaten at an Ethiopian restaurant for the first time, and gone to a Korean bakery in the past week (as well as going to a play party) but I did all these things with friends I made in the scene.

So yeah...I pretty much don't know what to do. I'm lucky in that I'm not at risk of losing my job or my nonexistant kids or anything like that if I did decide to come all the way out of the leather-lined closet, but I still cringe at the thought of my parents finding out. I just...I want us to be in a world where this wouldn't be a big deal. But if it weren't a big deal, I wouldn't feel as much of a need to talk about it, to try to counter the misconceptions.

I don't know what to do.

A Note on Etiquette...

2010-03-29T14:36:00.003-04:00

There's one particular group I know that seriously emphasizes this particular aspect of scene etiquette, and I think it should definitely become a more widespread thing: Don't assume anything.

Basically, don't assume anyone's role or preference or relationship with anyone. Let me repeat that last part, for emphasis: Don't assume anyone's relationship with anyone.

So, for example, if you see a scene in progress and the top is say, using the rubber grip on her riding crop to rub between the bottom's legs, and the three people involved in said scene graciously allow you to join in, don't fucking assume you get to put your toys between the bottom's legs as well.

Maybe it's just because the people I generally play with are above average communicators, but it seems like a pretty common sense thing to ask before you touch someone's crotch with anything. I don't care if it's just your toy and not your hand, fucking ask. Ask the bottom, or, hell, ask the top who clearly has an established relationship here. But definitely, definitely, do not start touching the bottom's crotch with your toys without talking to anyone first, and doing it when the top is obviously distracted by something outside the scene makes you look like a creepy predator-type.

You know, just to pull an example out of the air. A completely fictional example.

Seriously, people, what the hell? Who does that?

Another Post About Rope

2010-03-08T22:37:00.004-05:00

Jack and I went to a rope bondage class the other night. Now, as I've mentioned in an earlier post, I think rope is awesome, and I definitely enjoy being tied up. I really like being more or less immobilized and I like the sensation of rope (especially hemp!) against my skin. It's a fun, fun, super-hot thing.

What I didn't count on is how much I enjoy tying up other people.

It's actually not that surprising. I've always had kind of a knack for three-dimensional stuff - jewelry making, sewing, sculpture. When we covered knots in my Stagecraft class in college I was surprised at how easily I figured all of them out. The thing is, when I'd thought about rope bondage in the past, I didn't think of it as an artistic and creative outlet--I thought of it pretty much entirely as a sexual thing. And, y'know, I figured if you're tying people up, being a "rope top" as the kids say, you're, well...a top. And I am pretty emphatically a bottom in pretty much every area of sex and kink that I participate in.

But this is totally different. Jack had been saying for a while that he thought I'd enjoy tying, so at this class he insisted I try it. And I was pretty much instantly hooked. Seriously, all I did was a relatively simple two column tie (there's video of how to do one of those here, though I learned it differently than it's shown in the video) but it was kind of fascinating to me, to understand that by putting the rope there, then there and through there I had created this nifty little tie that held Jack's wrists without tightening around them. It looked pretty, too.

It just made sense to me, in the way that sewing makes sense. I am not the neatest seamstress in the world, but putting a garment together, knowing that by attaching this shape to that one and adding this piece like this, I'll be putting together a three-dimensional piece of clothing that fits a human body is really exciting to me. There's this point I reach when I'm making something where it transforms from flat cut-outs of pattern pieces into something recognizable as clothing, and I like that feeling a lot. Finding where to put the rope to tie someone the way I want uses the same part of my brain and it gives me that same sense of satisfaction--I made this!

So yeah...totally not a sexual experience, but so satisfying in a different way. I like rope. I'm starting to find that I like tying people up.

A Bunch of Really Random Thoughts

2010-03-05T19:05:00.002-05:00

-Jack said back in January that one of his goals for 2010 was for me to be fisted. I'm pretty sure he was mostly joking, but the more fisting comes up in my life the more intrigued I am. I think I'm now on board with the fisting mission.

-I've discovered that I put way too much pressure on myself for things to be awesome. If I go to any event, whether it's a play party or to a bar with my college friends, with really high expectations, I'll freak myself out so much that I end up having a terrible time. I'm working on not having expectations, but just letting things happen.

-I think How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship, and Musical Theatre by Marc Acito is the most sex-positive novel I've ever read. I may actually write an entire post on why and how cool that is, but I can never think of a good way to bring it up.

-I feel like I have an identity crisis every few months. This has been going on pretty much my whole life, except maybe briefly in high school. I never feel like I quite fit in anywhere, and I wish I was more comfortable with that and didn't feel the need to label myself.

-I can't talk to my parents about sex at all unless it's as a very abstract concept. Whenever they mentioned it to me in the past, I got horribly embarrassed and awkward and froze up. These days, the reverse is true--they freeze up. I find this weird, since my dad once said, in response to a TV show, "Anyone who says they've never touched themselves is either frigid or lying." I feel like my parents are probably pretty cool about sex, except when it comes to me.

-I now have as much trouble watching movies that reference kinky sex as I used to watching film adaptations of musicals or costume dramas. Instead of yelling out "OMG! They cut one of the best songs!" or "OMG! The sleeves on that dress are completely wrong!" I'm now going "OMG! They just pierced his nipples with no real consent!"

Dear Prudence, Dan Savage, and...me.

2010-02-25T15:17:00.004-05:00

I'm not an advice columnist. This is probably a good thing. When I was in high school and college, friends frequently asked me for relationship advice and I like to think I was okay at giving it, but now that I realize how fucked up my own relationships were then, I'm not actually that sure.

Regardless of my advice columnist status, and the fact that no one actually asked my opinion, I'm really, really weirded out and upset by today's Dear Prudence column about a teenage boy with a latex glove fetish. The letter is written by the kid's mom, and she asks "Should I try to stop him [from looking at glove porn, wearing gloves, etc.], or should I just chalk it up to a personality quirk and worry no longer?"

Unsurprisingly, Prudie starts tossing around words like "deviant" and talks to a shrink, who "says your son needs a complete psychological workup." Seriously? Because he likes gloves? I would say on a kinky scale of 1 to fucking scary, rubber and latex gloves are, like, a 0.5. And, of course, even kinks that fall at my personal fucking scary end of the scale are still okay.

Dan Savage, who is in my opinion a much sounder source for sex advice, posted his response, and it's (also unsurprisingly) not crazy and alarmist like Prudie's. I certainly don't agree with Dan on everything (certainly not with his stance on pit bulls), but I agree with him here.

I'd like to add that I'm pretty sure most 13-year-olds, regardless of whether or not they're kinky, feel worry about whether the people they're interested in dating will like them. So, in fact, do most people older than 13. I feel like sending your kid for a full psychological workup (though I have nothing against psychological professionals in general) is not going to accomplish much except reinforcing the message that there is something wrong with them.

I really wonder if this had been another issue, not a fetish but something else that made a kid concerned about their possibly limited dating pool, would the advice have been the same? If my mom had written this letter when I was 13 and said "My daughter is worried that her interest in vampire movies is 'too weird' and is scaring away potential boyfriends," (and a dude totally shot me down when I was 13 because of this) would a psychiatrist have been called in? Well, maybe. Because vampires are scary and evil and I was 13 around the time of the Vampire Clan murders, but that's beside the point. What if it were an interest in "Star Trek"? Or video games? I feel like those would have a very different answer. But because it's a fetish, it must be dangerous and scary and a sign of a bigger problem. That is such crap.

So you know what? I eventually found and started dating someone who liked me despite my inability to talk about anything other than vampire movies and The Rocky Horror Picture Show when I was 13. And all you people out there who are worried about finding someone--there are people out there who will like you and find you attractive and sexy and interesting despite (or better yet, because of) your interest in "Star Trek" or your obsession with Joan Crawford movies or even your weird freakin' fetishes, let alone your relatively harmless ones.

Worries.

2010-02-22T16:52:00.003-05:00

I am a worrier. I've been a worrier for about as long as I can remember, and worrying runs in my family. My mom worries, my grandma is a seriously world-class worrier. I have had two small panic attacks, mostly because of being exhausted and in crowded places. I often say I have some anxiety issues, but I've never been diagnosed with anything.

One of the attractions of BDSM for me is that I don't have to worry while I'm in the middle of a scene. Especially when playing with Jack--I get to relax and put myself completely in his hands and trust that he'll take care of the worrying. It's actually pretty awesome that it works that way.

(I'm pretty sure lots of people would tell me that this is unhealthy, that this is just an escape like drugs or alcohol, that dealing with anxiety by getting consensually beaten up is sick. I would like to point out to those people that I think it's probably more healthy than frequent binge drinking, which is how I used to deal with my worrying.)

Regardless of how I think anyone would possibly react, it is a relief for me not to have to think. I have never been much of a physical person--I never really got into sports or working out or the other things people say makes them feel connected to their body. There's a line in Christopher Durang's play Baby With the Bathwater where Daisy talks about having innumerable casual sexual encounters because of the moment during sex when you forget everything, even who you are and just feel. Pain pulls me back into my body, makes my brain shut up. And that is really just freaking awesome.

There are lots and lots and lots of other reasons why BDSM and kinky play are awesome, why submitting and surrendering to your partner can be amazing and freeing. There are lots of reasons why I find this sort of thing sexy as hell. But for me, there's a delightful side benefit to be found in not having to worry.

Coming out of the kink closet...

2010-02-12T12:34:00.003-05:00

Over the course of the past year-year and a half, I've gradually been telling people in my life that I'm kinky. Not everybody--my mom, grandparents, and fuckton of cousins don't need to know. But as I've started going to more and more play parties, and made more and more friends at said parties (hi new friends!) it's become increasingly more difficult to tell people I've known since middle school (hi old friends!) amusing anecdotes without going into detail. And the more people I tell, the more I feel like I'm hiding something really big from the people I haven't told.

Telling people can be hard. I think I actually make it harder than it has to be a lot of the time. But it always seems like kind of a big deal.

The first time I told someone I was interested in BDSM-y type stuff I hadn't actually realized it myself. It was the beginning of my junior year of college, I had been dumped over the summer by my boyfriend of two years, and I had started flirting with a cute freshman to...I dunno...take my mind off how shitty I felt. We were walking around campus one evening, talking about past relationships, and my emotionally abusive ex from high school came up. I believe what I said was "...I've realized since then that power games and stuff really need to stay in the bedroom where they belong."

On the surface, the conversation went smoothly along, but in my head I was freaking out thinking "WHERE THE HELL DID THAT COME FROM!? Did I really just say that?" I avidly read Savage Love every week, and usually Control Tower as well, so the idea of kink was not completely foreign to me...it was just that I very definitely thought of it as something other people did. Never mind that I fantasized all the time about being tied up...that was normal, not the sort of extreme stuff other people got up to.

After the ill-fated hookups with the cute freshman came to an end, I kept thinking about being tied up. I wore a corset in a show and loved how it felt, so I made my own (even tighter and sturdier than the costume-y one I'd worn before) and fantasized about being fucked while wearing it. I thought about being corseted and tied up. But still, I wasn't kinky. It wasn't until Jack broached the subject years later that I was even able to admit it to myself for real.

I'm still in touch with the cute freshman. We were in a show together, and we follow each other on Twitter. We're not close at all, though, and it's really weird to think that he's the first person I came out of the kink closet to. I doubt he even realized the significance that once little sentence has taken on in my life.

Orientation

2010-02-10T13:32:00.003-05:00

The question of sexual orientation came up in a discussion group I'm in not that long ago. It got me thinking about my own orientation, who I'm attracted to, how I identify, and how and why those two things have matched up over the years.

When I was in high school, it seemed like everyone I knew was bisexual. It was cool and rebellious and I thought that some girls were kind of hot and so I occasionally told people I was bi. It didn't really matter, because the only person I was allowed to express any sort of attraction for was my bastard then-boyfriend, who also claimed to be bi.

After he dumped me, I was completely at sea. With, like, everything. He had such complete control over my life when we were together that it took me moths to sort out how I actually liked to dress and what bands I liked to listen to. Also, relationships were vaguely terrifying. Somewhere in there I developed a crush on one of my female friends, and we started sort of dating. What could be less threatening than something so completely different? Well...it turned out that I just didn't know how to have a relationship with anybody, and I acted exactly like I had with the awful ex. I remember sitting on the floor at her feet, clinging to her arm...I had no idea how to act. It ended quickly and mutually.

What I drew from this was not what seems obvious now--that I was far too screwed up to be having a relationship with anyone, that I needed time to figure out who I was and what I wanted, but that I wasn't that into girls after all, and that I was too caught up in traditional gender roles to date girls. Clearly someone needed to smack me upside the head and tell me that my being a clingy doormat had nothing to do with "traditional gender roles." I started identifying as straight.

There were a few other factors, though. One of my very good friends at the time did not believe that people could actually be bisexual, and I got the sense she really disapproved. Also, it seemed like a lot of the bi girls I knew assumed that if someone identified as bi it meant they were really attracted to absolutely everyone and therefore there was no reason not to hook up with everyone. And that was something I really wasn't interested in.

I met a nice boy and we started dating. I got comfortable enough to tell him I sometimes got crushes on girls. I went off to college. By my sophomore year, I was back to tentatively occasionally saying I was bi, but I still felt like some people saw some sort of obligation to hook up in that--you're into girls, I'm a girl who's into girls, clearly we need to hook up. I got into a lot of weird situations by flirting and being kind of an attention whore, while expecting people to understand that I was in a monogamous relationship and was never going to follow through on anything. I was kind of a manipulative little shit, both in my relationship and to a lot of my friends.

I got dumped that summer, and around the same time I started identifying just as straight. I had some seriously awkward rebound hook-ups with a cute boy (who was actually the first person I told I was kinky, but that's a story for another time), and I thought about hooking up with girls but never did anything about it. I decided I could never have casual sex with a guy and I could never have a relationship with a girl.

Weird random things happened, as weird random things do. There was a Halloween party where some other girl hooked up with the guy I was interested in...so I almost hooked up with her sister. I didn't because I was still afraid, even drunk and half asleep, that my friends would somehow judge me. I think I was afraid everyone would turn out to be as disapproving as that one friend from high school. But when I brought it up, the response I got was "Well, you totally could have made out with her. No one would have judged you." That was the thing that ended up changing my whole view.

Jack and I got together, and I finally realized I'm kinky, and the subject of threesomes came up--first as pure fantasy, then as something that would be cool some day, then as a project we were undertaking. I still identified as straight. "I'm straight," I would say, "I just sometimes am attracted to girls."

Which became "I'm straight, but sometimes I make out with girls..."

We set up a profile on alt.com (being completely new to all this, and not knowing about the awesomeness of FetLife) and by some miracle met Tails. I started saying "I'm straight, but I sometimes have sex with girls."

Clearly this was getting kind of ridiculous.

At this point, up until a few days ago, my FetLife profile listed my orientation as "heteroflexible," which, well, sounds an awful lot like "I'm straight but sometimes I have sex with girls." If that's who you are, that's awesome...but at New Year's I started off 2010 by making out with one of my female friends. About a week later, we had sex. And I started reevaluating how I talk about my orientation.

The word bisexual makes me a little uncomfortable. It has completely ceased to resonate with me--I don't know if it ever did, or if it sometimes just seemed like the most accurate box to put myself in.

I'm attracted to some people. It has very little to do with their sex or their gender. I'm mostly attracted to personalities, especially if someone gives off a particularly sexy dominant vibe. One of my coworkers at my new job identified herself as "humansexual," saying she's not attracted to people of any particular sex or gender, she's just attracted to other humans. That makes a lot of sense to me.

These days I don't really know what box I fit into, and I'm not very eager to figure it out. I have a serious, committed, emotional and sexual relationship with Jack, who's a cis-dude. I have sex with two cis-ladies semi-regularly (or I would if one of those ladies weren't overseas and the other wasn't so busy). I engage in kinky play at parties with all sorts of people. So...um...I'm me. And my orientation is kind of a tricky question.

2010-02-02T12:22:00.003-05:00

I'm sorry I've been neglecting the blog. I'm in the middle of transitioning between jobs, leaving the job that's been making me on-again off-again miserable for one that's really awesome that I'm really excited about. It's been stressful. And exhausting.

I'll be back to posting soon, I hope.

2010-01-26T19:41:00.001-05:00

See, I told you guys Catholicism was kinky.

Rope and Orgasms

2010-01-25T10:56:00.002-05:00

Jack and I went to a rope class a while back, and it was really cool. We'd never really been rope people (despite my not-so-subtle hints of buying rope, and books about rope, and entering online contests and winning rope) and I was really excited that jack was going to learn about tying me up. It was an awesome night and we learned a bunch and met and interacted with lots of cool people.

So last night, we were fooling around and he breaks out the rope. He tied my hands behind my back, and then tied my legs--ankle to thigh. I was pretty much completely immobilized. And then he fucked me.

It was great sex--I really like being unable to move during sex. It makes me feel used and powerless. However, in the past when I've been tied with scarves or neckties or held down with inexpensive velcro restraints, I've either been untied before orgasm (it's pretty easy to untie a scarf or necktie while in the middle of sex) or haven't really come.

But rope, real rope bondage tied tight with pretty blue nylon rope is really different. It's sexy as hell, which makes it pretty easy for me to come...but I'm a wiggler. I move around a fair amount while having an orgasm. I had a moment, immobilized with the rope, where it seemed like the orgasm would last forever. And then I realized I couldn't move. I was still coming, but I couldn't move. It felt really strange, and kind of distracting.

It's supposed to be the tying part that's tricky, that you have to learn and practice. But I think I need more practice being tied. And, you know, coming while tied up.

Hard to Offend?

2010-01-24T17:09:00.004-05:00

It says in my profile that I like making people uncomfortable. This is kind of a throwback to my years in college, when we did lots of theatre that was offensive and in-your-face and often just...well...uncomfortable. Two of my favourite playwrights are Christopher Durang and Martin McDonagh. I had friends who delighted in saying horrible things in public just to get a laugh, and I always found it hilarious.

But lately I find myself really bothered by things that, on the surface, seem really innocuous. And I find that hard to reconcile with the hard-to-offend person that I thought I was.

The subtle things are creepier, though. And a play, at least, is not real life--though using the same sort of exaggerated language one would in a play to get a response offstage is a little more problematic--it's really different when a character onstage makes a sexist remark and when your friend does it. Durang plays in particular show us really horrible things framed by absurdity and humor to make a statement about what a weird, screwed up, sometimes horrible place the world is. And while I was not offended by the rape scene in Betty's Summer Vacation, I definitely was occasionally disturbed by the show on the whole.

Two of my favorite characters have been really, really unlikeable. An abusive mother and a violent, bullying teenage girl. Possibly the two most potentially offensive characters I've played, and I loved every second of being with them. However, when a critic referred to one of the characters as "sluttish" in a review, I was pretty upset--how is she a slut? Because she talks openly about her curiosity about sex? Because she swears and fights and takes charge of things? Because she isn't ashamed to talk about being sexually assaulted? That never seemed "sluttish" to me, it seemed strong.

This is kind of a disjointed post. Clearly it all has to do with context. A lot of media that I think people could characterize as "offensive" is wildly different from real life. There's a huge difference between Divine's speech about her beliefs in Pink Flamingos ("KILL EVERYONE NOW!") and my dumb friend from college calling a girl a skank. And as I write this, it becomes more and obvious why I'm offended by one of these things and not the other.

I think there was also something self-conscious in all the awful things we said in college. We were in on the joke, and it was like saying "This would be really horrible if it were true, but we know it's not so it's hilarious!" We were fucking with people, and that's not very nice, but there's a big difference between fucking with people on purpose and saying horrible things but not realizing they're horrible. But maybe I'm just defending it to avoid feeling guilty.

Making people uncomfortable at least gets a reaction. I'd rather get a reaction than never discuss anything ever and sweep everything under the rug.

On a lighter note...

2010-01-21T11:30:00.002-05:00

There's a part of me that really wants James Spader's characters in Pretty in Pink and Secretary to be the same person. I'm not sure why, other than the fact that they are two of my favorite movies and I seem to be developing a bit of a thing for snotty rich kids.

I have seriously spent time trying to think of a name that the E in E. Edward Gray (Spader's character in Secretary) could stand for that could also be shortened to Steff (Spader's character in Pretty in Pink). I want Mr. Gray, when talking about his life, to say "I was kind of a jerk in high school. I grew up outside Chicago and my parents had a lot of money..."

Clearly I need more productive things to do with my spare time.

That one time when I got sexually assaulted.

2010-01-20T15:00:00.005-05:00

I have alluded to this in other places, and I have sort of told my two best friends from high school and laughed it off ha ha ha. But the only person I have ever really told about this, with all the details and emotions and feelings is Jack.

And I know this blog has been a little low on sexy BDSM-y content lately (as if anyone I don't know personally is reading this anyway) and I promise to remedy that soon, but between the comment that Tails posted on my last entry and this article I happened upon today (and its companion piece), I decided I should really write about this.

It was October, and I was 23, a year out of college and working two jobs. I was living with my parents, and had only just passed my road test. I took the bus pretty much everywhere, including to and from my primary job at the mall every day. On this particular day, I had gotten out of work early and was headed home to get ready to go to my much more interesting second job.

I was sitting in my usual seat, three rows back on the "passenger" side, window seat. I was listening to my mp3 player and reading Son of a Witch by Gregory Maguire. I forget which stop it was, but an older man (in his 60s or so) got on and sat down next to me, in the aisle seat. His hand, which I remember had unusually long and well-manicured nails, hovered just on the edge of my field of vision.

I concentrated on my book, barely even noticing as the hand brushed against my thigh. It actually took me a few minutes to figure out what was going on...and by then his hand was creeping higher and higher up my leg. In my head, I was panicking. I was convinced that if I caused a scene no one would believe me. I pushed my book down against my thighs, trying to block him from moving his hand higher and to my right, towards my inner thigh.

I think I was shaking. I was trapped in my seat, a few stops away from my usual stop. I had to do something, so I decided that I would act just like a normal passenger. "Excuse me," I said, "this is my stop." He didn't move, so I stood up as the bus stopped, figuring I'd just push past him. As I stood up, he grabbed my ass, his hand moving, trying to get between my legs. "I SAID THIS IS MY STOP!" I half-shouted, and shoved him into the aisle with my shoulder and ran off the bus. People looked up. He just laughed at me.

I know I was shaking once I got off the bus. I half-ran through the park, terrified. I could already imagine what people would say if I told them. My mom would call the police, my friends would say what they would have done--"I would've screamed," "I would've punched him"--and I couldn't stand the thought of those things.

I think I took a shower when I got home, thinking that I should want to get clean. I changed my clothes and forced down some food, got my Halloween costume together to change into for the party I was going to later. I waited for my ride to my second job, and she picked me up and we went to work. I acted like nothing had happened, though I knew that if anyone touched me at work that night I would lose it. I chugged a five-hour energy shot, so I would be "on" for work and the party. Nothing unusual happened.

Weirdly, coincidentally, the party that night was where Jack and I first got together. I told him what had happened, and then I promptly forgot all about it for about six months. I actually can barely remember it now, despite other events that same day being crystal clear. Jack and I hooked up, started dating, and started exploring our kinky proclivities and I didn't really give it a second thought.

About six months later, I was jumped walking home from the bus by a teenage girl I'd never seen before. She hit me until my nose started bleeding, while a group of girls watched, then she ran off. She didn't try to take anything--not my purse or my mp3 player or my cell phone. Some guys pulled up and offered me a ride, but I refused, terrified. I walked home, crying and covered in blood. My mother wouldn't let me wash my face until the police came. I remember everything about that with complete clarity, including what I was wearing and what song was playing when it happened.

After that, Jack and I had to dial some things back for a while. No hitting my face, of course, but it didn't occur to me until later why I would get so freaked out when he laughed while we were playing. It was because he, that other man, laughed at me when I shoved him and ran off the bus. Once I figured that out I started getting more and more uncomfortable on crowded buses. I had to sit in an aisle seat, in the first row where I'd be visible. Now I have a hard time even getting on a city bus.

I didn't really talk about it. I actually found myself one day posting a comment on a friend's blog that said "I've never been sexually assaulted..." and then I suddenly remembered that I had. I would like to forget this. My brain is apparently trying to forget this. But I don't really want to be quiet about it. I got groped on a bus by a horrible man and, while it wasn't the worst thing to ever happen to me, it was really awful. I don't think I can explain how or why just being touched can leave you feeling sick and violated and awful, but it can and it does.

It wasn't trivial or stupid or nothing. It wasn't just something to brush off or forget. It's something I'm going to talk about and call by name: sexual assault. He assaulted me. And saying that isn't causing drama or making a big deal out of nothing or blowing it out of proportion, it's simply saying what happened and telling the truth.

Blaming myself

2010-01-17T15:49:00.005-05:00

In the past few years, I think as the actual events get more distant, I've gotten really weird about the emotionally abusive relationship I was in when I was a teenager.

When I tell people about it, I think because emotional abuse is difficult to explain, I kind of blame myself a little. And that's starting to creep me out. I say things like "Well, he cut me off from my friends and told me how to dress and got angry when I went to the movies with my parents, but it was partially my own fault for not standing up to him."

You know what? I tried to stand up to him, so fuck that. But it is really difficult to explain how completely I was manipulated by guilt and fear. He never hit me. He just said things, like "If you really loved me..." and "Well, I did this for you, so why can't you do the same for me?" It doesn't sound like anything too terrible, but he could send me into a panic. I always had to prove myself. I always had to apologize and beg (literally beg) for forgiveness for every slight. Awful things like...commenting that an actor in a movie was attractive.

That was abuse. And it wasn't my fault. It wasn't because I was weak or inadequate. It wasn't my fault.

Please refer me back to this post the next time I'm in a conversation where I dismiss this as "not a big deal" or "partially my own fault."

Becoming Lucy

2010-01-12T23:53:00.004-05:00

A lot of people I know these days have what you call "scene names." If you go through my phone, it's really obvious who I know from kinky stuff, because I only know their nickname or don't know their last name. It reminds me of a scene in Live Nude Girls Unite (which is a fascinating movie, btw) where Julia Query talks about running into a bunch of her peep show coworkers with her mom and only knowing their stage names.

Personally, I never feel like coming up with fake names for anything. My real name, the name my parents and grandparents call me, is unique and unlikely enough that most people assume it's not my real name, anyway. But that's way too easily tied back to, well, real life.

So Lucy...

I was really into vampires when I was a kid. I think it started off as a power thing--I was a pretty miserable kid, at a snobby private school where most of the girls had more money and different interests. I was an outcast. For some reason, my version of the "turns out I'm really the long-lost child of millionaires who will reclaim me and take me away from all of this" or "I'm secretly a princess" fantasy was the idea that some epically handsome, ;powerful vampire dude would see how special I was and turn me into a vampire and take me away from all of this.

It gradually turned into a sex thing. The movie version of Interview With the Vampire was released on video right around the time I had my first inklings of sexual feelings. And then I read Dracula. And while I didn't realize it at the time, there are now passages in Stoker's novel that I can point to and say "That's it. That's what turns me on."

The embodiment of what I wanted to be then was Lucy Westenra. Now if you've seen film versions of Dracula but not read the book, you don't know Lucy. Lucy is not the saucy bad girl that she somehow got turned into in film adaptations--Lucy is all sweetness and light. Lucy is adored by those around her, she's sweet and rich and a little frivolous. And, most importantly for me as a teenager, Lucy is the one female character in the book that we actually see transition from human to vampire. And I wanted (desperately wanted) Dracula to choose me--and so I wanted to be Lucy.

It makes even more sense considering my life now that Lucy represents me. Lucy starts out, like I said, as a perfect and lovely good girl. So sweet and sunshiney is our Lucy that three men propose to her in one day! But Lucy, being a sweet, pure Victorian girl, has absolutely no knowledge of sex or sexual power. She only gains these things through her interaction with Dracula. Dracula drinks Lucy's blood (which, as everyone knows, is a stand-in for sex in an era where sex was incredibly taboo) and Lucy gains knowledge and control of sex. She starts demanding "kisses" from her suitors, and eventually becomes a sexually powerful vampire herself.

While I realize that to Victorian readers this is all supposed to be A Very Bad Thing, I think it's a pretty apt metaphor for my own self-discovery these days. I used to be prim and proper enough to give pre-vampirism Lucy a run for her money. I was so hung up on the idea of sex that I didn't have any for six years. But these days, thanks to the deliciously dark influence of...well...lots of people, I'm taking control of my sexual side.

Lucy Weston is what they changed Lucy Westenra's name to in the 1931 film version of Dracula, which is boring and painful to watch unless (like me) your first crush was on Bela Lugosi. It also holds onto the Dracula reference while still being generic enough that it's not immediately, irrevocably tied to the novel. And the Jane? That was just my own whim, 'cause I think it sounds nice.

Creepy Dudes (and the people who defend them)

2010-01-09T10:05:00.006-05:00

So there's been a lot of semi-heated debate in a lot of the groups I'm in online lately about creeps. Particularly about creepy dudes, though of course ladies can be creepy, too. I've contributed, and listed off the attitudes and behaviors that I, personally, find creepy, as did lots of other people. I feel like no one actually said anything about looks, and yet there's this pervasive, infuriating idea that when a woman (and always, only, specifically a woman) says a guy is creepy, it's because she's decided he's "not hot enough" to be "worthy" of her.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is complete bullshit.

It is sexist, entitled, bullshit, which perpetuates the idea that men are allowed to treat women however the hell they want and women are supposed to be flattered by the attention. And I'm pissed off and sick of it.

The main interaction that I think of when I think of a creepy dude at a play party was a guy Jack and I once chatted with at one of our favorite monthly parties. He was an ordinary-looking guy, in semi-dressy clothes, around our age. It was his first party, and he told us how he wound up there and we told him how cool the group usually is...and then the conversation turned to our specific kinks. And I remember the way this guy looked at me as he said to Jack "What's the kinkiest thing you do to her? Does she let you do anal?" At that point, I made some sort of excuse and got the hell out of there.

What I felt at the time, and what I feel in other interacting-with-creepy-dudes situations, was that this guy wasn't really thinking of me as a person. It would have been far less weird if he'd actually engaged with both of us and talked about...well, whatever. If he'd said "Are you guys into anal? 'Cause that's hot!" it would've been much less creepy. But instead I felt, well, objectified. Like a thing rather than a person.

So basically, what I'm saying is that women are people. And people like to be talked with, and looked at, and generally interacted with as if they are people--with thoughts and feelings and things like that. Not like objects onto which someone else's fantasies are projected. And not just that, but it's totally okay and acceptable to NOT like it when someone treats you as less than human.

So no more of this "She's only saying he was creepy because she doesn't think he's hot" nonsense, okay guys? If Mr. Does-She-Let-You-Do-Anal had looked like Johnny Depp, it still would have been an intensely uncomfortable situation. And that's a general "guys," not a gender-specific "guys," since it seems like other women say this even more often than men do. Saying that is kind of creepy on its own.

Subspace with Tails

2010-01-07T22:05:00.004-05:00

A few days ago, our friend Tails came over. She was one of the very first kinky people Jack and I met, months before we even started going out to play parties. She's very sweet and very fun, and we always have a really great time.

This most recent date was seriously beyond all our previous ones. It's taken me almost a week to process it enough to sit down and figure out how to write about it. I think also I'm having a hard time actually figuring how to write about the specifics of a sexual encounter - the who did what to whom part. It's scary, and I'm worried I won't do it justice.

Tails was the first girl I ever had sex with. And the first few times, I definitely felt like there was a learning curve...I knew where the right bits and pieces were, and I knew what I was supposed to do, but I'm pretty sure it was apparent how inexperienced I was despite my enthusiasm.

This time...I don't know how else to describe it, other than to use words like "beautiful" and "moving." I was going down on her, and I basically never wanted it to stop. I was completely focused on what I was doing, completely absorbed, and blissfully happy. I just wanted to keep giving her pleasure, to keep feeling her grind and wriggle against my tongue and contract around my fingers.

When I was younger, I read Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. When you're drawing (and I've felt this while drawing) and your concentration is complete, and your brain shifts into the drawing-place, you don't notice anything else. You can't hear music, and distractions cease to exist, and everything else in your life just fades into the background. That's what this sex was like - complete concentration, my senses completely absorbed in the act. Amazing.

Eventually, she pulled me up into a sitting position and hugged me. I was shaking, almost crying. On some level, I didn't know what was going on at all. I was someplace else. I kept saying "thank you" over and over again, I felt so honored that she'd allowed me to have this amazing, earth-shattering experience. She and Jack hugged me, and stroked my hair and told me I was a good girl, and eventually I came back to myself.

I feel like a lot of the time people I know talk about subspace being reached through pain. And that's awesome (and I'm totally back to loving pain, btw) and exciting and wonderful, but it's much rarer for me to hit subspace just through sex, to lose myself in someone else's body, to be in that place of complete concentration and wanting nothing else in the world but to pleasure this person. I've always had this idea of losing myself in sex, and I'd always thought that was only possible for the moment when a particularly amazing orgasm takes hold. But what I'm learning is that I can lose myself in someone else, and that's even more exciting.

Lots of other really awesome things happened that day. Tails spanked me until I couldn't take anymore, Jack spanked her until he bruised his hand, she showed us some cool new rope bondage stuff she's been learning, there was some candle wax and some squirting. Tails is turning into quite a mean top. But probably the thing that will stick in my mind is how I felt when she pulled me into her arms and I was shaking and on the verge of tears and thanking her over and over again for allowing me to experience her like that. It was amazing.

2010-01-05T22:54:00.001-05:00

I have a tentative date with a female friend to go shopping for a dildo for her strap-on harness. Jack just said to me "If you guys go shopping tomorrow, and you buy a dildo, will you take a picture of it so I can see it?"

He said this not because he's jealous, but because he's really, really excited.

A post about body image...

2010-01-03T18:00:00.004-05:00

Like every other girl in the world, I have body image issues.

I'm not overweight. I have been in the past, but at present I'm supposedly a healthy weight for my height - about 5'2" and 135 pounds. My measurements, on a good day, are 35.5-27-38. That's pretty normal. I've had a couple jobs where I spent 40 hours a week (or more) going through people's measurements, and if I came across my own, I'd think I had an okay figure.

...but when I actually look at myself in the mirror, or go shopping for clothes, I make myself miserable. I hate my hips, I hate my ass, I hate my breasts. I feel fat, like I'll never be attractive. I hate my fat, jiggly arms. I hate that sometimes the only jeans that fit are a size 11, even though I know that women's sizes are completely arbitrary numbers and sometimes the jeans that fit are a size 6. And beauty standards change at random and are also arbitrary and have very little to do with what people actually find attractive, anyway.

The really crazy thing is that knowing all of that just doesn't help that much. And even crazier is that I'm not even especially attracted to the super-skinny girls that we're being sold as the current beauty standard. I think curvy girls are hot, I like hips and breasts and if I see one more picture of a size 0 model in a corset that's just sort of vaguely encircling her waist instead of cinching it in (because there's so little there to cinch), I'm gonna scream. And actually, more than anything else I'm attracted to people's personalities, so this whole conversation is really moot.

I think the thing that makes it hard for me is clothes. Pants suck, I hate buying pants. Every pair of pants in the world makes my hips and butt look huge, except for this one pair of cotton capris I own. When I iron those so they have a sharp crease and wear them with heels, I look (or maybe mostly feel) like a 1950s movie star. And I know how to shop for the things that flatter my body type, that are supposed to cover my flaws...but especially here in New York, I find myself insanely jealous of these rail-thin girls who can wear absolutely anything. Skinny jeans, bubble skirts, any garment made out of latex. I see them and I want to look like that. It's hard to tell yourself that you're perfect just the way you are when you pass an actual model on the street while fabric shopping.

Even if I work out every single day, even if I starve myself, even if I had a perfectly flat stomach and skinny arms, my hips and butt aren't going anywhere. Those hips are part of my bone structure, and I'm never going to be a size zero. My freshman year og high school, I weighed 115 pounds, I looked like a crack addict, and I still had wide hips and a big ass. I know this, and I know I should not let it get to me, but somehow it feels like a personal failing.

One of my goals this year is to get the fuck over this nonsense. I want to learn to love my body, as ridiculous as that sounds. I want to stop wishing for a "bikini body" and instead celebrate how awesome it is that 1950s dresses fit like they're made for me. And I'm going to wear my goddamn skinny jeans, regardless of whether or not girls with 38" hips are "supposed" to wear them. I spent so many years trying to lose weight, made myself crazy with impossible diets, and now I give up! I'm going to learn to love myself the way I am, and say "fuck you" to anyone who says the way I am isn't good enough.

Happy New Year!

2010-01-02T22:50:00.003-05:00

So I know lots of people are down on 2009, saying it was the worst year ever and stuff, but I had a pretty good time. One year ago, I had never been to a BDSM play party, I'd never been spanked by anyone other than Jack, I'd never had sex with a girl, I'd never been flogged...the list goes on. Now I've done all of those things and more!

This past year definitely involved some occasional growing pains, but oh, boy did I grow! I made a ton of amazing new friends, I got much more comfortable in my body and with a lot of the quirks of my sexuality, and I've learned probably more about myself than I did during any other single year. Sometimes learning and growing kind of suck while in progress, but the results this time definitely have me feeling awesome.

I spent a lot of time in 2009 figuring out what the life I wanted to live should be like. In 2010, I want to start living that life.

The Lives of the Saints

2009-12-28T22:08:00.004-05:00

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!

2009-12-24T11:34:00.006-05:00

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...

2009-12-21T11:57:00.004-05:00

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.

2009-12-17T01:57:00.002-05:00

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...

2009-12-16T11:00:00.003-05:00

...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

2009-12-15T21:44:00.004-05:00

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...

2009-12-15T00:41:00.004-05:00

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?

2009-12-14T23:59:00.001-05:00

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...