That Darn Internalized Fatphobia, Part One

OMG I’ve only got thirteen days left of my dating break!! For the most part, I’m rarin’ to get started—everywhere I go, there are completely smoochable-looking guys. I’ve got some cute new pictures for my Feeld and Bumble profiles—my favorite is me in a pink tutu sort of dressed up as Rose Quartz, carrying a sign that says “Ban jerks, not books.” It’s really starting to feel like there’s a romantic future for me, like at least one more entry into the First Date Hall of Fame might be in in cards.

I found a really nice Summer Therapist who has helped me believe I might really move on from the margins of others’ relationships. It’s been such a lovely summer with myself so far, lots of firefly walks, friend time, pictures of flowers.

But this dumb, sexist, fatphobic thing happened in the lap lane at the pool last week. Too dumb to recount, but when a thin and unhelpful pool manager blamed me for “just not feeling confident” that day, I thought it might be a good time to write about where I’m at with body positivity and fat liberation. Summer Therapist, by some miracle, listens to Maintenance Phase, so I can talk to her about like 80% more things. (You should listen! Especially if you’re a straight-sized person! https://www.maintenancephase.com/)

The Kitten Calendar has been all about body love, so I want to be PERFECT at it by now. When I started this blog in 2011, well before “fat” was even THINKING about being a neutral term, I had the idea that because I was plus-sized (Size 20 then, around a 24 now) I could only be attractive to women, that all men would find me disgusting. The Nude Beach and all the different play parties and superhot experiences gave me a more well-rounded (Ha) view of beauty and desirability, but the internalized fatphobia (and weird sexism about it!) is still causing trouble in my heart.

In the present day, I’m pretty convinced I’m desirable. Most of the time, I walk through the flirty world feeling like an adorable dorky goddess—cute, abundant, lush, bountiful. Like a human pleasure garden.

But when it came to intimacy with a man, there was still a tangle of self-doubt, self-consciousness, and pain. I never found a good way to talk to The Shy One about it, so instead, I’ll blog it out to you. Thanks for listening!

Just Some Sexy Fat!

 

Please note: I did use a pink filter. I'm not really this close to the color of an Animal Crossing peach!

It's not a CURE for a body-size freakout, but some time between the covers with no PJs on sure helps. I couldn't quite get the angles I wanted--I either need a selfie stick or a photographer or both. 

More Nineties! Pagan Boy Part One

Word choice note! I’m usually only comfortable describing myself as “fat”, meaning it in the most up-to-date, celebratory, body-positive way. (For very good writing about body positivity, see The Body Is Not an Apology: https://thebodyisnotanapology.com Sonya Renee Taylor is such a treasure.) I don’t think Pagan Boy would mind me calling him a hot fat man, so I’m going to learn to write that way. Wish me luck!

 

A draft of this entry has been in the to-type pile for a couple of weeks. I lost Pagan Boy to Covid at the beginning of this year, so every sentence, no matter how cheery, is a little molasses-step through grief. I hope I can do justice to this miraculous on-again-off-again friend and the lust for life (and pop culture!) he helped me to cultivate. In my own, snotty, irritable way, I loved him, and I hope to make that clear.

 

After Perfectly 1993 Guy broke up with me, I had even more room in my working-at-Burger-King-and-getting-ready-for-photography-school life for…something? That roller coaster summer, I’d started making poems in a black-and-white speckled notebook with doodle-y lilies drawn all over it. I don’t remember anything except one of the poems had a reference to Blondie’s Heart of Glass. (#onbrand)

 

I fully fancied myself a beatnik, so the early-Nineties coffeehouse craze was EXACTLY the thing for me, even pre-Friends! So I dressed in a polyester turtleneck day-glo psychedelic maxi-dress and headed to the newly minted Cake Place (not its real name) with my no-doubt melodramatic poems. (Side note: The featured poet that night became my mentor ten years later post-California. Magic night! Synchronicity!)

 

I sat down next to Pagan Boy after my poem and he said something catty-complimentary, reminding me of Perfectly 1993 Guy’s best friend. I looked at him and my heart said OF COURSE.

 

Fat, expansive, queerish, a little goth. So. Much. MAN. Plus, these really fluffy dark eyelashes. Pretty and handsome and musky in a way that went perfectly with the buckets of patchouli I used to wear. (Okay I bought some a few weeks ago. Still smells SO GOOD. Gonna put some on now.)

 

Jeez I really miss him. I always wondered if we should be together and kinda took our friendship for granted, even let him become a Bernie-bro facebook casualty through most of the Trump years, but he came back. (The ONLY man in my life who apologized for Bernie-and-Russia-fueled madness! He gets all the stars,)  It was like he never left, and right before he died we were texting through bad movies together. I miss him so much, and I hope I can make these paragraphs the reunion we deserve. Of heart, wish me luck.

 

 

The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, Part Five

An old painting, but apt. <3

It was such a pleasant weekend but I’m antsy to get back to the story, anxious for the part where the paragraphs drop me back in 2019, on a few-weeks-ago bright spring day in a nearby city, surrounded by people with fancy dogs and deeply curated outfits, pleasantly arguing with Sweetie (Still ex-wife, now freakishly close best friend and co-aunt) whether I was stopping to take pictures of forsythias or just boring yellow leaves.

While driving toward family for Easter, Sweetie and I decided to play YouTube DJ, with the rule that we could only pick fun-to-sing but wholly undignified songs. This led to a lot of belting hair-metal ballads and the over-optimistic decision to swing by my teenhood home. I was curious and it was on the way. I had this idea that it would be healing to be there and see how un-evil the place was, to be there as a strong adult with a reliable car for easy escape. But we hit a bad pothole and a hubcap flew off my pretty car, and Sweetie was worried about the tire.

Even if there hadn’t been car-upset though, the street would have felt rotten and bleak. Not even a couple of Pokéstops could redeem it—that place doesn’t deserve Pokéstops! The sky was trauma-grey and there was no escaping the fact that this was the place where the worst things of my life happened. The little park made me so angry and the old house had been painted a particularly upsetting shade of taupe. It was old-Twilight-Zone creepy there, without the fun or charm. I fucking hate that block, I hate that I’ve spent so much therapy time on it, I hate it, hate it hate it.

The magical thinking of mental illness clicked in and I thought I had broken my lovely car by getting curious about this awful place, but the tire was fine and if I want a new hubcap, the guy at the car place is very cute. Nieces and nephews several towns over broke the spell of the bad street, my youngest nephew chose a Captain Marvel book on our traditional comic shop visit, and all was well.

Back in the nineties, it’s still that summer. I’m pining and waiting for the mail—which, now that I think about it, was my default state for the ensuing ten years. I loved the feeling that someone cute was going to send you a card or a letter or a mix tape, sometimes they even still do.

Far more painful than the pining were the long and painful treatments for STIs—who knows if I got them consensually or not, I guess it doesn’t matter. The doctor was a harsh and judgmental old man, gouging and pinching away at the hurts, freezing my insides to try and heal them. There were big, intimidating, emphatic antibiotic pills. My mom was there with me for all of it, and, though we’ve spent big chunks of our lives at odds, for this, she was kind.

Once, after a particularly harsh doctor’s visit, I was walking in town and heard kids yelling “Slut!” out of a pickup truck at me. The summer was half ugly insult, half beautiful dream.

When school started again in the fall, everyday life settled onto me like a weighted blanket, not in a pleasant way. I gained so much weight (though I’m sure I was teensy compared to today, but this was WAY before Dietland/Roxane Gay/Shrill.) that my drama teacher (No Kate Moss herself) took it upon herself to tell me that I needed new jeans. I remember those jeans, high-waisted and acid-washed to almost white, devolving into a permanent wedgie as I got bigger. I want to say I didn’t care, it seemed like I didn’t, but I seem to remember it a little too vividly.

(This might have also been why I only got the teensiest, tinesiest part in that fall’s Drama Club production, one scream from backstage in a murder mystery. I hate this drama teacher. She also told me I’m too tall to ever be a leading lady, which I guess is true in the patriarchal sense. Fuck that lady though.)

ANYWAY, there was a very bright spot to look forward to! The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow was coming up with Favorite Aunt for the Drama Club production, maybe in early October. In anticipation, still glowing with love about the pillow, I sewed him a shirt.

Objectively, this shirt was probably pretty hideous. I LOVED fabrics that made not sense back then, I really kind of still do. It was aqua blue, light green, and purple, with a large and semi-realistic-looking fish print. (He told me the other week that it also had tiny turtle buttons, a detail I thoroughly enjoy.) It was the most structured thing I ever sewed, with a collar and buttonholes and all kinds of ironing and steps. There is NO WAY I would ever have the patience for all those steps today, good job teenage me.

Roadblock #8: Scared I’m Too Old

I’ve always had a poet’s preoccupation with the finiteness of life, and it used to be much worse. Lilacs are my favorite flower and every May I used to worry my head off about whether I’d smelled them enough that year. Of course, once I made room for a bigger life and other flowers, the lilac-urgency relaxed, but I still do feel very upset about the passage of time, especially with my 39^th birthday coming up next week.

I came to both my career and my body at a later-than-usual point in life. At work, I’m surrounded by experienced twenty-something teachers while I’m just starting out. In the dungeon, it’s hard not to feel inferior to the women who knew what they wanted right away and claimed it. I am so ashamed and embarrassed for being so far behind, for all the time I managed to put off growing up and making the most of things.

Although I’m pretty sure I don’t want a person to come out of me (I have space issues, people!) my biological clock is pissed off at me and twisting the knife in my gut lately. How did everybody else find the right people to make families with? How did they trust themselves and their partners and the world enough to take such big risks? Why did I automatically count myself out for so long? I try to tell myself that the family I was with Sweetie was what I needed for a while, but now I am just absolutely terrified that I missed my chance to find the family I really want. Although I know millions of ladies are in the same boat, 39 seems like an INSANE time for me to realize I want a male primary partner—that statistic about being more likely to get struck by lightning gets stuck in my head sometimes and it’s paralyzing.

I remember the panic I felt when I first realized how valued younger women are, and that I was now sharing the dating pool with them. I was fussing about how some crush of mine had taken up with his 24-year-old student and another guy friend of mine said “Um, because he can!” as if she were some special privilege he was entitled to claim. It pissed me off so much that she was assumed to be better than me simply because of her youth.

Given the societal dictate that younger is better (How often have I been in a rope class where the teacher who needs a demo bottom automatically chooses the youngest and smallest girl in the room?) just how in the world am I supposed to compete? I’m so excited to find authentic ways to connect and express mindful adult sexuality and it doesn’t always feel like there is a market for that.

I’ve known for a while that I’m having a pretty classic midlife crisis—grief for what I have missed and a worry that I won’t be able to make everything out of my life that I want to. I’ve wasted a lot of years thinking that I’m too big, too ugly, too old for men, and I’m still trying to take apart those assumptions.

There’s no way in this world that I would ever want to go back to my own twenties, though. I was selfish, mean, and afraid of every kind of intimacy. My body may have been better by some narrow, sexualizing made-up standard, but I didn’t have a single clue of what to do with it.

The current version of myself is decidedly the best one I’ve had to offer, but I feel so very, very scared that no one will ever want it, that there will always be some younger, better girl standing in the way.

Back in the spring I had to break off a friendship with one of my guy friends for a while because he (42 years old, I think) kept talking about the “vitality” of his 24-year-old crush. I have vitality—all you need is life and excitement. I know the biological clock pressure is false because I don’t need to reproduce to have the kind of family that I want. I can’t go back and start over so that I’d have more experience by now. I know that any guy who’s that into youth is a creep and not the guy for me.

The birthday-panic is so strong this year both because of the divorce and because of the times I’ve felt so close to having what I wanted. I’m going to try and filter out the influences that make me feel old and dried up (Bye for now, porn and pre-Criss 30 Rock episodes…) and get out in the world among the real play and real bodies. Though I do occasionally like to play as 17, I can’t and don’t want to be younger, smaller, or magically at some further-along point in my life. I can only do my best exactly where I am and hope that the right folks’ll meet me here. 

Cuddle Party Part One: Yay, a Lot Less Grief!

I am so excited and happy to have a new adventure to write about. Before I start, I thought I’d share the cuddle party rules, copied from www.cuddleparty.com:

“ARRIVE ON TIME: Once we begin the Welcome Circle and orientation, sorry, we can let no one enter late. This creates comfort and safety by knowing that everyone is on the same page about rules and expectations.

WHAT TO WEAR: Pajamas – nothing too risqué. Think more comfy than sexy. (More drawstrings, less lace! No shorts.)

WHAT TO BRING: Sorry, no liquor folks. Juice or sparkling cider is always welcome. A pillow or stuffed animal if you like. Otherwise, just bring your smiling self.

STICK TO THE RULES:

1.                      Pajamas stay on the whole time.

2.                      You don’t have to cuddle anyone at a Cuddle Party, ever.

3.                      You must ask permission and receive a verbal YES before you touch anyone. (Be as specific in your request as you can.)

4.                      If you’re a yes, say YES. If you’re a no, say NO.

5.                      If you’re a maybe, say NO.

6.                      You are encouraged to change your mind.

7.                      Respect your relationship agreements and communicate with your partner.

8.                      Get your Cuddle Party Facilitator or the Cuddle Assistant if you have a question or concern or need assistance with anything during the Cuddle Party.

9.                      Tears and laughter are both welcome.

10.                  Respect people’s privacy when sharing about Cuddle Parties.

11.                  Keep the Cuddle space tidy”

In order to capture what Saturday’s party was like for me, I need to backtrack a little to the Snuggle Party that I attended back in February. It was called a Snuggle Party because it didn’t follow all of the same rules, just most of them. It was a little more sex-friendly—women were allowed to strip down to their bras and sexy touching was encouraged. But all the neat stuff about yesses and nos were in place.

I attended the Snuggle Party as part of a fantastic conference day, one of the happiest days of my life, actually. I had spent the day feeling accepted and body-positive and had even had the most wonderful Indian food and gelato date with Sweetie. (She brought me gum so that I wouldn’t have too-spicy breath while snuggling—we know she’s awesome like that.)That was the day I started my tradition of getting fresh socks after every adventure—so soothing.

All of that wonderfulness aside, as soon as the welcome circle began, I got a terrible pain in my middle back. No matter how much I stretched or sat up straight or exhaled loudly, it huuuurt. I have a skeptical/aloof view about body energy, even though I experience it all the time, but this definitely felt like some terrible blocked energy. It began to radiate down from my back into my hips, and up into my shoulders. I went to the facilitator for help and she said the only way to stop the hurt was to stop dismissing my grief (over Bill, over all that time fighting being bi, about the hurt in my marriage, and so on), so I did—I cried a little to the snuggle facilitator and a lot to Sweetie on the way home. I call it a snuggle fail, but it really isn’t. That crying was so productive—it was kinda like handing in homework, and you know I love handing in homework.

Sweetie was overwhelmed and scared by the depth and breadth of my sobbing, but she did the best she could as we drove home. What I was crying about was, I felt like everyone there was so nice and someone bad like me could never belong with them, like I would only cause trouble with my bad energy. “You’re good enough,” Sweetie said over and over, “You’re good enough.” Scary as those tears were, I knew they were getting me somewhere.

Back to the present, on Saturday, Sweetie and I had had such a wonderful day together and I was settling into a book of Jonathan Franzen essays, so it was hard to pry ourselves out of the house. Like on so many other adventures, she’d offered to drive me and go to a coffeeshop nearby to work on her graphic design. (It occurs to me that it might be good to drive myself next adventure...) When we pulled up to the ashram, it was a somewhat foreboding house on a woodsy lane—spooky. Sweetie offered to see me in but I took my suitcase and kissed her goodbye, found my way to the back of the house and went in.

I saw one couple that I knew right away, that was comforting. It was hot in there, muggy and something else. There was a spread of snacks out in the kitchen that people had gathered around—this Cuddle Party was part of a weekend-long series of Tantra workshops, so people looked flushed and tired and seemed bonded. It didn’t look the way one might picture an ashram, just a regular pretty-big kitchen in a regular house. The body smell of everyone was less funky than one might expect—it was fresh. Not quite clean, but clear.

Cuddle Host One, a solid, sensible-seeming butch lady, came over and introduced herself. She gave me a waiver to sign. “This says you don’t hold us responsible if you have an emotional breakthrough.” Ok, noted. I felt aaaawkward and couldn’t find a surface to write on. I ended up ruining the email list by putting it down in some water. I didn’t really know where to put myself, either.

When I saw the room being set up for the Cuddle Party, my first instinct was to run. It seemed impossibly small for all of these people. Cuddle Host One was spreading out all kinds of blankets and pillows. I thought about adding my own blanket but didn’t want to have to pull it out from under anybody of I had to leave early. A cute fifty-ish man was asleep in front of the air conditioner. There was cute/radical Etsy-style art on the walls—that made me feel at home. There were lots of books on the shelves about being bi and sacred—how nice!

Comparing my body’s reaction to the Snuggle Party back in February and its reaction to this Cuddle Party really lets me know that I’ve gotten somewhere. Though there was awkwardness, there was no anxiety or pain. There were some guys who weren’t being careful with space, but I didn’t feel scared of them. I settled in and let my curiosity take over, knowing that Jonathan Franzen was there if I needed him, but letting myself be soft and present. There wasn’t pain in my center, but warmth—I wasn’t ready to let strangers hug me, but I was safe.

 

My teacher-brain suggests that I use Cuddle Parties as a quarterly assessment to see how far I’ve come towards inner safety and self-acceptance. I can’t always see the progress I’m making, but as I settled into that room of strangers the way one might settle into a warm bath, I could see I deserved a gold star.

Next: The Welcome Circle

More Tantra! Moremoremore!

I'm still in the middle of trying to write about last weekend's adventures, but I went to a Tantric writing workshop last night and it reaaaaaly hit the spot.

May Is National Masturbation Month and I Am Celebrating!

**First, some meta-blogging—last night I read one of my smuttier blog posts in public for the first time. It felt great, especially the parts where they laughed. I’d been lagging a bit, but the combination of a few glasses of wine and a warm audience was very restorative. I woke up feeling like today was a holiday, a nice spark/sunbeam feeling for my upcoming adventures—gonna try my best to keep them going. Thanks a jillion to the wonderful hostess and audience—I think I know what the next steps are.**

So May is National Masturbation Month, and it coincides with the fact that I have been dawdling through the self-love exercises in Jaclyn Friedman’s What You Really Really Want. One of the things she recommends is to try masturbating every day for seven days. I would have done that anyway, but she says to try and make it special, to really try and push your boundaries. I recommend trying this—even a handsy-from-way-back girl like me can always learn some new tricks. I’m shy to share some of the experiments here, but here’s a favorite recent self-adventure:

On Sunday when Sweetie and I were driving back from a trip, I was feeling antsy because we’d been away from our bed and missed out weekend sex-reading-napping routine. Also I’d been reading Wicked before we left, which I’m surprised to note is pretty hot in places. So I asked Sweetie if she would mind if I took some personal time on the road. She suggested that I wait until after we stopped for gas, but thought it was a fine idea.

As I laid the seat back, Sweetie offered to switch over to music from her usual podcasts, but I didn’t think that listening to the Extra Hot Great crowd talk about The Avengers would have a bad effect. It seemed oddly fitting.

I borrowed her big green zip-up hoodie to put over me like a blanket. I wanted to show off but didn’t want to be too much of a highway pervert. I pulled my white lacy tank top up and pulled my books out of the cups of my shiny pink bra. I flashed them a little bit, letting the sweatshirt/blanket sit just beneath them. I imagined that truckers were driving by and looking down at me.

I was slow and shy, just brushing my nipples with my fingertips at first, closing my eyes and feeling the sun on my face, looking up at the sky or Sweetie. I felt a little guilty for not asking her to join in. I played with my boobs for miles and miles. I loved letting them poke out from my shirt, seeing them stick up like perfect pink peaks in the sun. I love them so much.

Once I reached down into my pants, it didn’t take long at all to finish. I was very quiet, almost like I had to be stealthy so that the traffic wouldn’t notice. I couldn’t find a napkin, so I wiped my hand off on my jeans. Pretty soon, it was my turn to drive, and time to switch the podcast over to Judge John Hodgman.

A Month After Fireguy: On Coming and Writing

A month ago, I had a basement-date with Fireguy that went (consensually) a lot further than it should’ve. It wouldn’t have occurred to me that I could end up restrained and at third base by the end of a first date. It was a LOT of fun buy it was also certainly too much for me.

The next day, I was feeling good but overwhelmed, a little shaky and unsure. I figured I’d give it a few days to let it sink in, then write it through and consider what I wanted to do about that budding relationship or acquaintanceship or playpal arrangement or whatever it was supposed to be. Fireguy, however, went into damage-control mode, quite unbidden and unnecessarily. He texted and said that if I wrote about it that day, it wouldn’t be the “one handed read” that he wanted it to be, but if I wrote about it the next week, then “that would be fine.”

It isn’t that I dislike being jerked off to, either in person or in written form—in fact, until that moment, turning people on had been one of the big joys of writing this. When Fireguy sent those texts, I felt the bottom drop out from under me, both because he was taking ownership of something that’s creatively mine and because he’d reduced this complex personal journey or whatever to something that existed just for his enjoyment. I wanted to handle it properly, so I called him up to talk about it, but I was so panicked that I ended up blubbering and unable to finish my sentences. He seemed irritated: “You just don’t understand what’s going on with me.”

What was going on with him was that he and Varga Girl broke up but were trying to continue as sub and dom, that’s a big deal, admittedly. But what he’d mentioned in the texts was, this guy had embarrassed him on FetLife, and he was very concerned about his reputation. It still makes me so disgusted that he was:

A. A grown man that concerned about his online reputation.

B. Willing to compromise my well-being about it.

C. A dominant man trying to squelch a submissive woman’s point of view.

What I kept asking him, and what I still keep wondering, is what about what’s going on with me? All of that stuff that happened was a big deal to me, and I still wish I could’ve gotten anybody to acknowledge it. I was completely unable to convince either Fireguy or Varga Girl that I was a person in the story, that, for better or worse, something had happened to me, and I had a right to write about it, I had a right to a point of view. I’ll never get them to acknowledge me as a human being, and that is really scary.

I eventually managed to get it through to him that trying to control me creatively was crossing a limit. He apologized for that and for breaking my trust. We had a pretty good conversation (even if he did try to rewrite the meaning of the phrase “one-handed read”) and I was relieved that I didn’t have to stay mad at him.

AND THEN HE DID IT AGAIN.

Paranoid and still trying to Smeagol his precious ex, he tried to convince me again to stop writing about our date, trying at first to shame me about the sex parts, but eventually admitting that he was afraid of his sub reading it. He tried to convince me to take out the sex scenes or “make it more anonymous” even though I already don’t use names or locations. He even suggested switching the entire blog to private. “Everyone knows it’s me,” he said, he said he didn’t want his family to read it.

I was beyond livid, I still am. First of all, I had made a clear limit about trying to control me creatively. Breaking a limit once can be seen as an accident, breaking it again is torture. He knew that what he was doing would have a triggering effect, and he kept doing it anyway. When I got upset and panicked, he told me I was too angry to be in his family.

What I heard in all those attempts to control my writing: “My point of view is more important than yours. Nobody in the scene knows who you are, so you don’t matter.”

So right now, I’m still scared. I’m having trouble getting back to the feeling I had before that night-the feeling of being free and loved and starting to accept myself. I really worry that I will never be able to trust a man again, that I can only find men who embody a secret inner wish to be erased.

Part of me want to jump up and down and say “Why don’t you see, what happened was important,” both the experience and the paragraphs he squelched. After all, he did succeed in fucking up the writing process—I was too disgusted and humiliated to finish telling the sex part of the story.

One part I didn’t get to was, toward the end of the scene that night, I did get to try the “Please, Sir, may I come” thing—he was playing with my boobs and I was finishing myself off down below, and I started to feel the wave crest, so I found just the right moment and asked: “Please sir, may I come.”

“Sure, go ahead,” he said, and I did.

Sometimes you don’t know that you don’t like something until it’s too late. There’s some connection there between his wanting a say in the deeply intimate rhythms of my own body and wanting a say in the way I write about the experience—to me, those things are not separate. If you’re keeping score, that’s “”Come for me, you greedy little brat,” yes and “Please Sir may I come?” no. It’s complicated.

As much as I enjoy the feeling of submitting, it seems very difficult to find a guy whose dominance does not spill over into everyday life. Both Bill and Fireguy refused to let me belong to myself after I left the couch or scene. Both experiences were about losing my point of view, and I am very scared of letting that happen again.

Ohno, Second Date Tears

Sunday was my date with the Gentleman, and it was a fail. Sigh. I felt off before I even walked out the door. Sweetie and I hadn’t had much time together during the week, so we were feeling each-other-deficient. My chemicals were a little off from having to leave her, but the Gentleman was driving over from out of town and I’d been looking forward to him and the art museum all week.  Sweetie and I straightened the house in case he wanted to stop in and I got myself all dolled up.

As soon as I was in the car with him I felt like I was fucking up the date. I couldn’t keep myself off of dark topics. He mentioned having had a steak the say before and I didn’t stop myself before I veered into Food Inc, territory. I mostly gave up red meat a while ago, but it’s been a looooong time since I was the kind of insufferable person who'd begrudge anybody a steak. On a topic slightly more relevant between potential playpals or whatever, I also didn’t stop myself from mentioning the slew of scary rape discussions going on on the local FetLife boards and the ethical dilemmas I’d been having about BDSM. I was not being fun.

The conversation lightened once we were in the museum, but when we got to the point of discussing out current dance cards, I ended up telling him why I’d broken things off with the Mayor of Kittentown. I told him that I do worry about only being liked for my boobs. I said that if we had a scene together again it would be helpful to compliment additional things about me.

“That’s nice nail polish you’re wearing,” he said sarcastically.

“See how easy that is?’ I really didn’t mean to make such a big deal about it—it was only a minor quibble with his brand-new topping skills.

“In my defense, you were kind of leading with them.”

….

“What?”

“When you walked into the diner and I saw you, I was like, whoa. I mean there’s nothing wrong with that, but…”

I started to cry.

“Um, I was just trying to look cute. I think I want to go home.”

He suggested that going to see the exhibit we’d come to see would make me feel better, and I agreed, but I didn’t stop talking about it.

“That was so unfair of you to say. It’s just what I look like and you made all kinds of assumptions about me based on it. It’s not fair.”

He seemed defensive, who wouldn’t be, I guess, but “leading with them”? Ugh. I guess they are technically in front of me, but still.

My picture of myself showing up for that date was totally different from what he saw. I blowdried my hair, chose pretty pink makeup, put on a cute purple dress, which, yes, had cleavage, and new stripy platform shoes. I felt pretty and confident because of my happiness at the idea of getting to make new friends and learn new things, of being at lunch with my wife and a date and his wife, it felt like such a happy occasion.

But here’s what he saw: boobs.

He said he was sorry and I acknowledged that I am in kind of a bad place.

We waited in line for the exhibit, for which he’d paid a lot of money, but I just wanted to get away from him and cry. Eventually that’s what I did. He apologized, offered to drive me home, but I said I wanted to be alone, that he should stay and look at the art. I really hope he stayed and looked at the art.

I sat on the museum steps and sobbed in front of the Sunday crowd. I called Sweetie, even though I felt bad for interrupting her creative alone time. She said to start walking towards home and she would come to get me. I hung up the phone and sobbed some more.

A pair of ladies, sisters carrying lots of baby gear, came over to ask if I was okay, and I said, yes, sure, it’s just a bad date, and they said “Oh, that explains it. Everything is men’s fault.”

I laughed and sniffed and said I really don’t want to see it that way. They gave me some baby wipes and I started to walk towards home.

Once Sweetie picked me up, I could really unleash the tears. “I feel like a kid.” I kept saying. “I feel like a kid.”

I don’t know why that was the feeling, except that the day had wiped away some naïveté that I really didn’t want to lose. I didn’t feel like an adult woman with all kinds of worth and accomplishments. I felt like a little girl whose body (which she absolutely loves) somehow makes people not see her. Which somehow makes me seem less respectable.

We spent a quite evening at home, went for a little walk. We watched lots of sitcoms. There were these terrifying ads for a Family Guy episode wherein Meg (the teenage daughter) gets kidnapped and tortured, dragged all around in her underwear, and her dad offers 2$ for her safe return. On a comedy! It’s a network show I’m sure many of my elementary-age students watched. How could I NOT feel like the world is a fucking terrifying place?

I don’t want to feel all dark and threatened, helpless. A month ago, I felt strong and beautiful, like something wonderful was emerging from me. But where in the world is safe for that version of me, if even the nicest guys reduce me to a floating set of bosoms?

Because this is not a bad guy, none of these guys are evil and maybe not even intentionally mean. They just seem so conditioned by stereotypes and expectations that they can’t see me, and sometimes I can’t see myself. I know that lots of men are not like that, I hate the way my fears lead me to confirm them over and over. Because I may not be leading with my boobs, but at this point, I am leading with my fears. I’m not sure what the solution is to that.

Song of the Week: Beautiful

Can't wait to murder this song at queer karoke tonight. It's goin' out to all the bottoms. 

Goodbye (Again), Mayor of Kittentown

“She wasn’t just cleaning out her locker, she was cleaning out her life.” (Kevin Arnold on The Wonder Years as Winnie Cooper got ready to leave town.)

This week, I broke things off with the Mayor of Kittentown. For the third time. I’ve never been quite able to figure out what doesn’t work between us, only that something doesn’t. I’ve known almost the whole time that he wasn’t a romantic match, and maybe I’m just not an FWB kind of girl.

Remember last week when I was feeling fretful about guys only liking me for my boobs? Here’s part of why: I was texting with MKT, just catching up because we hadn’t seen each other in a while. When I asked how things were going with the other woman he’s dating, he said she wasn’t really exciting him too much and

“Besides, she needs bigger boobs. ;)”

I sent him back an “Eeeeeeew” for talking about a woman’s body that way, it really got under my skin. Yes, I’ve heard and enjoyed guys saying much filthier things, but in dirty-talk context and therefore consensual—how would she feel if she knew he was saying that about her? He isn’t poly so I can’t expect him to know he shouldn’t compare us, but the fact that that’s the first way he could think of to say he liked me better, not my heart, my face, my general enthusiasm for B-movies and pancakes, just my boobs, of course.

The trouble with being new to sex with guys is that I don’t always notice when I don’t like something until it is kind of way too late to do anything about it. Like I’ve said before, I like for my boobs to get lots of attention, but the way he fixated on them was kind of childish. “Boobies!” He would say often, even on days where I was feeling objecty from other jackasses. And the fact that I was feeling objecty from other jackasses always made me want to give MKT a pass.

Is worrying about being an object old-fashioned or prude? It certainly does seem to be getting in the way of my fun.

He said insensitive things in other ways, too. On out first date he said something demeaning about a homeless person, he made jokes about them regularly. I think that’s a mainstream thing to do, but I thought it showed a lack of empathy—a lot of my dealbreakers just seem like guidelines for being a decent human being, but I still feel obligated to compromise them sometimes. I am a perfectionist and I don’t want to be, but I guess limits are limits. Close to the end of our relationship, he told me he’d once tweeted that the woman being loud on the bus behind him “Should choke on a bucket of cocks.” That’s hard for a girl like me to get past, even though, again, comments like that are part of everyday culture. I’m sure plenty of decent guys say things like that every day nowadays, it sucks.

Anyway, those seemed like small things compared to the fact that he was being so sweet to me almost always. I wanted to like him because he liked me. He has the prettiest green eyes and (when it isn’t leering) an angelic smile. He called me beautiful and held me when I was sad. Sex was always fun between us, even if we both wanted to be on the bottom. He’d usually take the top and make me a very loud, happy girl. His neighbors probably got woken up more than once.

But I can’t quite get away from the idea that being together when we aren’t/won’t be in love is a kind of using each other. It feels objectifying to both of us. I wish that I didn’t feel that way—I am very, very frustrated that sex is such a big deal to me, it’s really gunking up my experiments. Maybe it isn’t a matter of rejecting the whole idea of FWBs, maybe just this particular situation didn’t work?

All in all, I’m grateful to him. He was such a good first-in-a-long-time—I appreciate that so much. It’s hard to let him go and scary to have an almost-empty dance card, guywise. Aside from my date with the Gentleman this weekend, I’m turning my attention back to my friends for a while. I’d love to be a little more healed before the next guy comes along.

I wish the Mayor of Kittentown all the luck. I think the lessons here are: treat people like whole people as much as I can. Get better at saying (kindly and directly) what bothers me. Get better at listening to my body and heart, and don’t cling to things that don’t work. Those are good lessons.

I’ll miss him, his cats, his episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Thank you, pal.

Beginning Rope Class FTW Part Three: Aftercare Is the Scary Part, Maybe

Once he had the harness on, the Gentleman said he wanted to tie my arms back. “To accentuate that gorgeous chest of yours.” While he worked back there, my hands were against his crotch, I could feel him big under my jeans. Friendly. I felt so warm under his hands as he rubbed them up the ropes on my arms, my shoulders, my neck. It didn’t seem like a place for spanking, but he said “Now I really do want to spank you.”  I said

“A little hair-pulling wouldn’t be out of line.” and so he did, gathered up my hair so gently and pulled it slooooowly to the side. Then he brushed it aside gently and kissed the back of my neck, making me all tingly. He ran his hands up to my belly and pressed, pulling me back against him. It was hot in that conference room. A drop of sweat landed on my ear.

“I just want to enjoy you for a few more minutes.”

“Take your time! I’m not in a rush!”

I really enjoyed being enjoyed, except when he said things like “Your tits look amazing.” I even enjoyed that, with a little twist of shame and worry. I don’t want to fall prey to anyone else, don’t want to be anyone else’s vacation-fantasy-doll. This guy isn’t that, I told myself, but sometimes I feel hopeless, like they’re all like that. It’s terrible.

He unwound the ropes from me and I admired the pattern of red marks they made on my chest and wrists, a little pinch-mark on my right arm, where the rope got stuck and stung…

He played some more, in the front this time, making thick rows of loops up my arm. He put his hand on my neck and I felt a swoony falling sensation, but when I opened my eyes he said “I’m practicing completing a circuit.” Apparently you are supposed to touch in two places to make a circuit—it worked, oh boy.

When it got so there was only a half hour left, I suggested we get in some hugging. We sat down and he wiped his brow, got to work winding up the rope, but I said I thought he should attend to his girl first. He agreed, tossed them down and gathered me up. Even though my head had a few worries, my body was totally relaxed, and I completely relaxed into him. I snuggled under his big arm, into his chest and just breathed with him. He ran his hands over me, gently but firmly. It’s amazing to me how things can feel this intimate, this safe, with someone who was so recently a stranger. It’s such a beautiful exercise in trust. It’s a miracle. It’s irresistible to me.

And it’s dangerous. Whenever I’m in that vulnerable position, I wonder if he’ll ever come back. I always try to make plans during that time. Bill resisted it like crazy, said mean things during aftercare either because he was an oaf or to deliberately set me off balance—it drove me nuts and made me feel desperate.

But this wasn’t that. This was just sweet hugging. I invited him to an upcoming play party but he said he was busy and encouraged me to go with Sweetie. (I am! Yay!) He said I shouldn’t let fears and heartbreak stand in the way. I like that he was rooting for me and Sweetie to get some good experimenting in, too.

Saying goodbye was hard, even though he’s brand new. I wanted him to kiss me, and said so, but he said he was feeling shy. I’m not sure what that means, if he likes me that way or not. I’m always a little afraid that a guy will forget me, but he didn’t.  He asked me out again and we are making plans that don’t involve ropes or fetishy things, just getting to know each other. That seems like progress.

I’m trying to get out of the habit of seeing each character as a solution to the last. Instead, I’d like to experience him as a nice new friend. A very snuggly one. 

Triggers and My Voice: The Story of a Hard Limit

Note: If you’re someone who gets triggered by mentions of non-consensual sexual violence, you’ll want to skip this one.

Last week I talked a lot about being protective of my voice and being subject to panics. I’m unsure if these facts about myself disqualify me from experiencing BDSM in the ways I want to. I guess I thought there would be failsafes or at least compassion in case someone’s triggered, but that doesn’t seem to be the case so far. I’m trying to not judge the whole “lifestyle” based on one group of people.

A lot of things contributed to me being an anxious girl with shaky self-worth. I had both a happy childhood and a terribly abusive one. Both my mother and father were physically and verbally abusive to myself, my siblings, and each other. They often fought loudly about sex. One night, I’m pretty sure I heard my dad rape my mom. I got it to stop, in fact, by crying loudly. “Now you made (me) cry.” she said as the action simmered down in there.

But the biggest factor in me being protective of my voice was something that happened when I was seventeen. I’ve been telling the story in the same stupid way for twenty years: I was promiscuous in high school and it lead to an inevitable conclusion of rape and assault. That is a bullshit way to tell the story—it’s sad that I only realized recently that there was no cause-effect relationship. It was a terrible, evil crime, not a path I put myself on.

What happened was, my friend Sheri and I lied and said we were going to each others’ houses so that we could hang out with her boyfriend and his friend and get laid. That didn’t take very long, so after the guys were done with us, they dropped us off in the park three doors down from my house. We were considering sleeping in the park when a pickup truck full of hooting and hollering people we vaguely knew pulled up and asked if we wanted to go to a party and we said sure—I thought of how mortified my mom would be if she knew I was riding in the back of a pickup truck.

They either put something in my drink or I drank way too fast. I don’t remember drinking very much at all, but we were playing Quarters around the time that the guys started asking, “So which one of us are you gonna fuck?” I was woozy and tired and I didn’t want to fuck anyone, no matter how known for it I was. But I knew I didn’t really have a choice—I wasn’t in any condition to stop anybody, and this was kind of who I was now. So I chose Willie, the cutest guy at the party. He was a tall, skinny African American guy, cute but with kind of a dismissive face. I chose him partly because he was there with his girlfriend, I think her name was Lisa, a blond in acid-washed jeans. I thought he couldn’t do anything with her there, but he sent her home.

Willie took me to the party host’s bedroom and told me to get undressed. “All the way,” he said, and I did. He got on top of me and put it in, humped quickly and mechanically. I opened my mouth to cry out, not for help, but to moan so I’d be doing a good job. He put his hand over my mouth and I shut up. When he was done, he left the door open so that the whole party could see me scrambling around for my shirt.  

That’s when I started to get sick, just throwing up copious amounts everywhere, so, so much. I must have passed out then and when I came to, I couldn’t see, and they were hitting me with something hard. (I found out later it was tennis rackets) and yelling at me for throwing up. They were screaming all kinds of names at me, but I just remember them saying I was bad. I’m not sure how many people were doing the hitting, but Willie and Lisa were two of them.

I screamed and screamed and screamed and some angel neighbor called the cops. When they got there, Lisa or some other blond girl took me into the bathroom to try and clean up the blood that had spattered all down my shirt. I remember she was talking to me so sweetly.

So far we have three reasons why my voice (which includes these paragraphs) feels like a lifeline that could get taken away: “saving” my mom by crying, Willie’s hand over my mouth, and the screams that maybe actually did save my life. But the fourth reason is much guiltier: I didn’t tell the police the sex part of the crime. They couldn’t get it out of me. Everyone knew, but I refused to say it on the deposition. I’d been drinking, I was a slut, I didn’t know how to prove I didn’t deserve what happened.

I didn’t know how to prove I didn’t deserve what happened. I’ve told this story so many times, but never understood it quite that way.

I felt like I couldn’t really say it was rape because I’d chosen him, I didn’t try to stop him. The Accused had somehow become embedded in my consciousness, having the opposite (?) of its intended effect. I knew the danger of being “put on trial” for it and I wanted no part of that. So I lied my face off and told the police the assault story without the first part. A few of them, including Willie, did some jail time for the assault, but the fact that I didn’t tell the truth about the rest of the crime makes me feel like a co-conspirator, like I didn’t do enough to protect myself or my fellow women.

The crying, the hand over my mouth, the screams that saved my life, the guilt over not telling, they’ll always be in my body. Sometimes they make me very hard to be close to, but they also make me brave, protective, and they make me try to be transparent.

I guess what I want people to get out of this is that you never know what stories can be inside someone’s body. Every single person you touch, even in the most casual way, sitting next to her on the bus, tying him up at a play party, or hugging them on a first date, has a body full of stories. Give up the idea that enough negotiation can make those complications got away. The stories inside us, even the screams, are beautiful and deserve to be treated with care.

Beginning Rope Class FTW Part Two: I Feel Conflicted About My Boobs

When Sweetie saw the above photo, (it’s a crop, the original does show my very smiley face) she said “If you want them to stop fixating on your boobs, maybe you shouldn’t…” I’ll get to unpacking that statement in a few paragraphs.

As we settled in for the presentation, the Gentleman left the rope on my wrist and did that thing where he looped it into itself, to make a kind of a handle. (To give it some “flair” he said.) He kept the handle in his lap. There’s no other way to say it, the guy has good energy. Sitting next to him he definitely felt like someone you’d meet at a snuggle party; warm, safe, open.

The first part of the presentation was about different ways to use sex toys with ropes—ah, my old nemesis, the Baggie full of vibrators. They didn’t seem so scary in the light of day; though I’m not sure I’ll ever warm up to big bouquets of machinery. It’s an awkward talk to sit through on a first date, but once she got to the ropes part, the Gentleman and I settled into each other. Our legs touched. He put his hand on my leg.

The woman who was getting demo-ed on left her clothes on. She had the prettiest smile, and it was fun to watch her settle in under the presenter’s hemp ropes. She built her a harness and then showed everyone how awesome it in to yank someone around by a rope in the middle of her chest. The presenter crab-tied the demo-lady and said “Wouldn’t you like to fuck someone like this?” Then she climbed on and pantomimed it.

The impressive thing about this lady is that she does a lot of self-bondage and even self-suspension. “I do this a lot at home,” she kept saying, but she stressed the need to keep your hands free, for safety and for other reasons. “I’m not Houdini,” she said. I’d always thought of ropes as being so dependant on finding the right top, but I like thinking of it as something I might be able to play with on my own.

When the demo was over, it was time for us to play. “What’s gonna happen now?” I asked the Gentleman, and he said he wanted to put a harness on me. Okay!

I put my arms up and smiled, relaxed, let him loop the rope around me. He has a soft, slow touch, and soon enough the ropes started to feel like they were hugging me, and I started to simmer down into subspace. What I love about a harness is the ways it feels on my back—like support, like someone’s holding me up so that I don’t have to for a while. It’s such a concrete way of feeling cared for.

He commented on how amazing my boobs are, how could he not? Remind me to tell him to try and compliment other things as well—sometimes I feel like a floating set of breasts, the way guys fixate on them. But the tricky thing about that is, I fixate on them too. I WANT them to have lots of attention, to be seen, showcased, enjoyed, played with, adored. I physically love the way that feels.

But the problem is, I don’t like worrying that they were the only reason I was invited. That is a Catch-22 about fetishes in general: How can I know that I am a person and not a thing, that he likes me as me and not just as a collection of fetishes? My nice pal Bo Blaze said a few weeks ago to look within and ask myself, but clearly my instincts are warped.

This gets back to my deepest fear, one of the convictions I have that’s hardest to fight: That there is no reason a man will ever want me for anything other than sex, and that the only thing sexy about me is my breasts. That idea has been in my head at least since I was 14, maybe longer. I am not sure where it comes from, but I know it’s really damaging. I think it leads me into situations that don’t just objectify me; they objectify my partners as well. I know that that fear keeps me from being able to feel the closeness I so desperately want to be able to feel.

Anyway, back in the rope class, I wasn’t thinking of any of that. When other folks stopped what they were doing to gape and exclaim, I just felt playful and seen. I did feel like a person. It’s weird how a positive situation can still unearth negative emotions. Today I’m just feeling conflicted about boobs.

Next Time: Even More Swoony

Momentum Con Part One: The Winner for Best Epiphany

(The photo above isn’t something that happened at Momentum. It’s a picture from my FetLife profile, taken during my photo play session with Fireguy. I’ll get to why it’s relevant in a sec.)

Momentum Con was exactly the right thing to go to. It really helped me to understand how I can contribute to the overall project of sex-positive feminism. Getting to meet some of my sexpert idols filled me with courage and, yes, momentum.

I liked my first foray into live tweeting: you can see what I said at @kittencalendar and what everybody said at #mcon .

I’ll say more about the larger themes of the conference later in the week, and I’ll post a reference list, too, but the experiences that are most relevant to this project were both very personal. They both happened yesterday as the conference was starting to wind down.

The first was: I skipped the fist set of sessions to take advantage of the big, fluffy hotel bed with Sweetie. As we were getting started she said “Remember, we’re in a hotel, so….”

And I said “So?”

We had a fantastic time and I was just as loud as can be. (If we’d been in the host hotel, it would have been even more fun.) While we were spooning afterwards, Sweetie said (all mocking-affectionate)

“You’re just a show-off.”

And what else could I do but tweet about it to the con’s live feed?

The second thing was this: One of the things I was most excited to go to was Cunning Minx (Polyweekly.com) giving her talk on “How Not to Be a Douche on FetLife” I’d heard parts of it already on the podcast (and, in fact used it in building my FetLife profile) but I love etiquette talk of all kinds and I was excited and starstruck to meet Minx.

When she asked for volunteers to share on the big screen and use as examples, my hand shot up. She’d mentioned being a smiley sub, and I wanted to show her that we had that in common. It felt so, so good for my profile, and especially my picture gallery, to be up there in front of all those nice polyamorists. It was a moment of pure joy and recognition, especially when someone in the crowd piped up “Great ass!” Thanks. It also makes me superproud that Minx pronounced my profile “adorable.”

She thanked me for volunteering, and people kept being really sweet and saying I was brave, but honestly I’ve never felt so indulged in my life. That burst of joy from being a show-off was such a big epiphany.

I was thinking about those two experiences on the way to therapy this morning, and I realized that wanting to show off is a big part of my earliest sexual experimentation. When I first started getting boobs (around 12) I was completely obsessed with them. (That sure hasn’t changed!) I couldn’t get enough of touching them. When my family was away from the house, I would stand in the upstairs window, pull up my shirt, and just play with them for hours.  We lived in the middle of nowhere and it was extremely unlikely that anyone ever would’ve seen me.

Once or twice, I even wrapped up in a sheet, went outside, dropped the sheet and walked around naked in the middle of the day.  Apparently I was close to my inner Bettie Page before I even knew who that was!

My childhood was not a sex-positive one by any definition. Our house was full of anger, shame, criticism, fear, and abuse. The fact that young me was able to find enough inner safety to want to be exposed, to take so much pleasure in it, seems like a miracle to me. I am very proud of that person and so encouraged by the way pleasure can overcome such adversity sometimes.

The power of pleasure was one of the overarching themes of the conference. It’s a wonderful blessing to feel it so deeply within my own body. Thanks.

Nearly-Naked and Fire-Kissed, Part One

 

If this adventure feels much more vulnerable to write about, does that mean I’m making progress? I hope so.

Saturday before last, I went to a BDSM play party by myself for the first time. It didn’t happen the way I’d expected, but what did happen turned out to be one of my favorite things ever.

Before I start the story, it might help to describe myself. I’ve given myself the assignment of getting through this paragraph with out any judgments.  Nothing about me is little. Okay, except my cute little sneezes, but I am a big (not natural) redheaded Amazon. I have big boobs, big hips, and we’ve already talked about the spankability of my not-little ass. I do have a waist, but also a belly. (I’m holding myself back here from writing about a million paragraphs about fat and gender and love. Stay tuned, I guess.) Men tend to gravitate toward the bosoms, obviously, but I think I like my shoulders best. I have a tattoo of a phoenix at the small of my back. I designed it myself back in 1995 after I escaped a housefire. I also have a little Valentine heart at the back of my neck, a gift from a tattoo artist I wasn’t very nice to. As you saw the other day, I have a little bit of a bruise/scar on my left forearm. On this particular night, I was wearing the same outfit I’d worn to the Photoplay story, but Sweetie had talked me into not putting a shirt on under my cardigan, just a turquoise bra. Also there were fishnets and pretty shoes.

I’d been to this particular group’s party before, just after my breakup with Bill. My first impression upon walking in was “This is way too safe,” which is partly because I have issues, but partly because, even in my inexperienced state, there’s something about that place that feels like training wheels. Maybe it’s because the crowd skews a little young.

My hope was to meet some new people and see if I could be in anybody’s supporting cast. Everybody always talks about how an available bi woman is like the holy grail, but this particular unicorn was feeling like a wallflower at the school dance. I just didn’t know where to start. I saw a few couples I would have been more than happy to help, but from the outside there’s something monogamish about D/S couples, (Yeah, I’m not gonna lower-case submissives.) something that looks impenetrable.

So I chatted with a few people in a friendly way. I learned that when people ask you “What do you do?” at a play party they don’t necessarily mean your work and art projects and such. Also, I learned that the word “torture” might have a different meaning within this context. I learned this when I asked “But who would want to torture nipples? They’re so nice!”

Anyway so I was in the middle of conversations like that when who should I notice but my photopal Q. I’ve decided that he should have a cute Kitten Calendar nickname, so I hereby dub him “Fireguy.” Fireguy had his table set up in the dimly/warmly lit stage area and was working some fire-y magic on a beautiful Pre-Raphaelite woman. It was very soothing to watch. I felt self-conscious about running into him—I didn’t want to seem needy or like I was going to take him away from what he was there to do. He very quickly put my mind at ease when one of the first things out of his mouth was:

“So what can I do to you?”

I was like “Um…fire? Ropes? Snuggling? Got any friends here you’d like to tie me to?”

And he said “No. I want to tie you up. And do stuff to you.”

Yay!

Next time: First time naked in front of a room full of strangers. (And one friend.)

Nice to Meet You!

About a year ago, I started dating men after 10 years of only being with my wife. It’s been mostly-wonderful and very instructive so far, but my first couple of mini-relationships with guys have me asking a lot of questions about my relationship with my body and with the (mysterious and yet not-so-mysterious) male gender.

I love books where the author spends him-or herself on a year’s adventure and then writes about it so see what he or she learned, so that’s what I’m doing. My mission is to find my inner Bettie Page—I couldn’t hope to look like her, but I do hope to access come of the joy and confidence that I see in her face, whether she is clothed or naked, romping in the woods or tied up and being spanked. This is that kind of story.

The best way to start would be to paste in these two entries that I originally wrote on my Fet Life page. Things have gotten a lot better from there, I promise.

List for my First Quasi Sub-Dom Thing

1. He wasn’t doing it right and neither was I. I pretty quickly lost the ability to say which things bothered me, which things I didn’t want to be part of the game.
2. I learned that I am submissive but not a masochist. I like to be held down, restrained, but I only like pain inasmuch as it is part of rough-and-tumble fun, and I don’t like intentional emotional pain or humiliation outside the context of play.
3. There are names that I like to be called, in context. I still get weak in the knees when I think of him gruffly saying “Ah, come for me, ya little brat.” I liked being called any number of nasty names, but when it became clear that he actually SAW me as those things, I couldn’t really go any further. (Okay, I went a little further, but I did know that that was where it needed to end.)
4. Even though my trust in him turned out to have been misspent, I am proud of how far I’ve come when it comes to trust. There are things I have feared with men for so long—roughness, being pinned down and unable to move, being too aggressive myself, having a hand over my mouth, having sex with a guy I adored…he took me past all of those fears. I am really grateful.
5. It was Christmastime, and so I gave him some pretty Christmassy ribbons to tie me up with. It was too early to be giving presents, but I am what I am. He never got to use the ribbons. At a certain point, all he could do was figure out what I really wanted and withhold it. That’s not fun.
6. I get feelings for people. I was really attached to this guy even though I know I wasn’t supposed to be getting all emo with him, so when Someday, You will Be Loved by Death Cab for Cutie shuffled on, I was going to get up and change it, but he wouldn’t let me. I struggled to get up but he held me there, pinned and trapped, kissing and wrestling and fighting to be free. I’m sure he didn’t mean it to be as poetic as it was, but I felt like the song was some kind of cosmic message: “And the memories of me will seem more like bad dreams, just a series of blurs, like I never occurred, someday, you will be loved.”
7. I liked the bruises at first. They’re bite marks, and when there were just a few little ones, I felt kind of precious about them, like they made me his. But they got a little out of control, until my whole left shoulder and upper arm were black and blue. I started having to wear long sleeves. I worried what other lovers would think of me.
8. I’m sure this was unintentional, but the evening after we first went to third base, I posted a makeout song on my blog, and he posted a series of vintage VD posters on his. I started to feel like I was diseased.
9. I loved when he called parts of me his: “This is mine, and this is mine, and this is mine…” but I don’t think that he really understood that I WAS his, even though I have a wife and another sweetie, that my heart can really belong to however many people. Maybe he didn’t think about it that much, or care, but I was his, scary as that turned out to be.
10. By the end, I couldn’t stand myself. I couldn’t remember who I was or how to make myself happy. I was crying almost every day and feeling ugly and full of shame. That was never what I was after. I wanted a game between equals, but I think his fantasy was different, in fact, I knew that it was, and I should have asked. I wanted a safe place to act out my darker parts, a true friendship with someone whose deviations matched mine. He wanted, as he finally came out and said, a “fuck doll.”
11. So I have to find out some way to submit without losing my voice, to find a person who will pull hair and bite and call names and wrestle, but who will also treat me like a human being. That is a lot to ask for, especially since I also would like him to be poly and tall and big and obsessed with music. I am glad that I let him go, if only so that I’ll have my heart ready for my really and truly trustworthy top.

Love in a Time of Erectile Dysfunction

All of my adult life, I’ve been afraid of men. Because they could hurt me, sure, but mostly because I’ve always felt at their mercy, desperate for their attention, angry and resentful that they had something I needed. But it is, they are, something I need. So when I recently returned to men after more than a decade, I was determined to confront and master these fears. I sort of regret that the fears took the form of a person, not because of what happened, but because I would’ve liked to have known who he was outside of the role I/we created for him.

I need someone to push me past my fears, and push he did. His phone’s wallpaper was Ganesh, Remover of Obstacles, and that’s how I saw him. Before our first date, I drew a tarot card, and got the Devil card reversed: “Release from bondage, throwing off shackles…the first step towards enlightenment.” I told him about the card and he said, “Oh, like a catalyst.”

I wanted someone I couldn’t control, and that is what I got. He was intractable and unreadable and definitely incorrigible. At every turn, he pushed me further than I would’ve thought to go. He called me names I’d always been afraid of, and it was always a relief. One day at work we were watching “Spirit, Stallion of the Cimarron,” about a horse that couldn’t be broken; I blushed because the lines all kept reminding me of him.

After a little while, I started to feel uncomfortable with the way things were going. When I first started dating men again, I’d begun to see myself as hot in a way I never had before, but that eroded. He kept breaking dates to go places and only wanted to see me if nakedness was involved, emailed me songs that implied I was fat, old, worn out. He called me “Dummy” and I’d happily agree that he turned my brain into a test pattern, but of course that didn’t sit right. I didn’t complain because I didn’t want to control him, and also because I didn’t want him to get frustrated and go away.

And I still wanted to know what rough sex felt like. I have been having sweet, wonderful adorable sex for all of these years and I can’t complain too much about that, but I’ve always wanted to be taken, it’s both my worse fear and my strongest fantasy. Since he generally seemed to want me so much that I sometimes thought he might eat me, he seemed like the guy for that. So even though things weren’t sitting right with me, I wanted to keep him around for at least until that happened. Well, I really wanted to keep him around forever and ever, but I think I knew that wasn’t possible.

The day that it was supposed to happen was a revelation I didn’t expect. I expected the angry-hot guy who’d so expertly and emphatically ripped off my jeans on the third date, the one who sometimes pounded my arms down onto the couch when I tried to hold him. I expected to feel the way I’d asked to feel, like I had no choice, but instead he was tentative. His façade dropped. He still made plays at ordering me around, but he became self-conscious in a way that I took for tenderness. The guy who’d grabbed and shoved and hair-pulled his way through bases one to three was gone and here was this…friend of mine.

It was hard to find a place to be since we could only ever get together at my apartment and Amy has a strict (and very reasonable) no-boys-in-the-bed-policy, we had the choice of either the couch or the floor. He pulled me on top of him on the couch and I pouted a little but climbed on and gave it a go. He wilted soon after I started. I sat on the floor beside the couch and tried for some combination of soothing but not emasculating.

Next we tried the floor—I spread out a Care Bears blanket and down we went. After an awkward moment of “Is it in?” in it went and it felt great, but he lost his erection again after a few minutes. He climbed off and lay beside me, apologetic, and I have to say that’s the moment when I knew I loved him. He was clearly mortified and frustrated, but I couldn’t resist petting his hair and telling him what I believed in that moment, which was that he was perfect. He wasn’t any of my fears or the scary guy he tried to be, he was just a boy trying to do a good job for me. He lay there claiming my body as he liked to do, talked dirty and told me to come until I did.

I was so happy that day because it really felt like we meant something to each other, like we truly were friends. He told me he’d find room for me in his life even when another woman comes along, which is kind of what a poly girl hopes to hear from a single, not-poly guy. We snuggled and played and kissed and watched a whole bunch of Party Down episodes, and I was happy.

His interpretation of events was different from mine, and he was gone from my life by the following week. I’m not sure that I can see him as a remover of obstacles, since the experience brings up more questions than it answers. But I am trying to take the lesson of that day to heart—I am not at the mercy of men. We are all at the mercy of each other, and beneath even the snarliest of us there is a sweet vulnerable human being just trying to do his best. I can’t take back the role I placed him in or the way things turned out, but I can learn to open myself up a little more to men. I can admit that I love him and hopefully find a way to let him go. The song I most associate with him is “Close to Me” by The Cure, and the thing I most want to remember is that aside from all the fetishes, fantasies and fears, closeness is my dearest wish, the thing I truly hope to find again.