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.

The Last Time I Had Sex

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.

Sl...lighty Promiscuous

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On sluttiness...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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