Links and Stuff--the Sexademic

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.

THIS! So much THIS!

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.

Carnival of Kinky Feminists

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.

Becoming Sally Bowles: The Manic Pixie Dream Girl and Me

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.

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

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.