Actual Casual Sex Part Two: A Lot to Think About

“Do you have a condom?” I asked as we started to aim for upstairs.

“No, do you have any? I mean, you said you hadn’t been fucked in a long time so I didn’t think we’d need one.”

“I mean yeah but I’m not crazy!”

(Seriously people, it’s basically legal to bounty-hunt abortion seekers in Texas these days, is there anything LESS HOT than trying to shirk safer sex? There might be one thing less hot, stay tuned.)

He admitted he *might* have a condom in the car so I smacked his ass and sent him out the door to go get it. I felt impatient and not exactly hopeful.

But yay! He had one and we went upstairs.

“Okay I want you to kneel down.” He wasn’t so much dominating as he was gently instructional.

It was nice to have a dick in my mouth again after aaaaaalllll this time. I really missed the taste (Didn’t make him have the condom on for this part, probably I should have.) and the fullness in my throat.

“Deeper now,” he said, guiding my head with his hand. The tip of his dick hit that part of my throat that makes me feel a little squirty and a little scared. I gagged in a way that I didn’t mind but that definitely shifted me away from my own room and into porn-mind.

“I want you to spit on it.” Yeah no. I ignored that request and I humbly ask that everybody look at porn just maybe slightly less.

Realizing I wasn’t going to be spitting on anything, he shifted to helping me do the best possible job, which I really appreciated. Love any time spent getting better at penises, learning about angles and rhythms and…

“Okay now I want to see how tight that pussy is. Take your pants off and get to the edge of the bed.”

Ahhhhhhhhhh he felt sooooo good. We fit together so nicely and he was both confident and competent enough that I didn’t have to worry about a single thing in the entire world for a few minutes.

“Move back onto the bed, I want to fuck you right.” And ohyes, he did. I hung onto the bars of the headboard and made all the noise and felt. Just. Relief. Welcome, hooray, thank you.

He started talking about how he was going to take the condom off and come inside me though, so I said “Wait, what?!” and wriggled out from under him until he convinced me it was fine, it was on, he was just talking shit.

(Again! So gross! Be a good citizen of sex!)

A lot of his talk was so much fun though:

“You deserve this. You said you haven’t been fucked since 2018? Tell me about 2018.”

“It was…this guy...from down the street…and we liked to watch…Gilmore Girls…afterward we…argued about the…midterm elections…”

And:

“You like this, don’t you? You watch a lot of porn, don’t you.”

“No just a little…Hentai… once in a while…I don’t…really need it…I have a good imagination…”

And:

“I love all this hair you have on your pussy. Don’t shave, do you understand me?”

(Okay points for that but I probably would shave for The Coach if he asked me nicely.)

And:

“This pussy is mine now, right?”

“Um, no. It’s actually mine.”

But then there was this moment that I can’t quite get my head around. Now, I don’t mind being objectified as a white woman, that seems totally fair, a little bit satisfying and corrective. And I should not be in the business of yucking anybody’s yum or getting protective of a grown man while he is CLEARLY having a good time.

But:

“You like that. You like that n****r dick don’t you? It’s okay, you can say it.”

After I winced and looked away, he dialed it back to “You like that big, black dick, don’t you.”

“We don’t need to make it about race.”

(Okay. I am attracted to black guys (and also, white guys are fucking terrifying) but I also spend maybe too much time worrying that they’ll think I’m fetishizing them, that I’m Allison Williams from Get Out. I should think a whole bunch about this later but first let’s finish the scene.)

After that jarring/heartbreaking moment, we got back on track.

“Okay are you ready? Can I fuck you harder now?”

“Oh yes PLEASE.”

It felt so good to wrap my arms around his big sexy strong arms, his muscular shoulders, to kiss him one more time and feel him let go inside me.

And then he was dressed so fast. He made noises about owing me cuddling another time, but I knew I wasn’t going to take him up on it. I put my pants back on the come down and lock him out.

In a warm, fuzzy, kinda-shocked-at-myself daze, there was exactly one person I wanted to talk to about this. Not super-advisable, but my guard was all the way down so I texted The Coach.

 

I Miss My White Supremacist Mom Part Two

I want to try and piece together the beginning of Covid, familywise. Just before the quar hit, I would have said I was close with my mom and aunts. In February, Sweetie and I spent a day at my late Grandmom’s house, trying to help sort her stuff, which really just boiled down to mom and aunts convincing us to take home a bunch of stuff to ease the burden. I took home many spools of ribbon, a ratty but retro pink towel, trash bags’ worth of silk flowers for art projects, and a random little business card holder that I now use every day for my work Zoomings.

 

Despite Catholicism/conservative politics’ lifelong irking of my soul, I loved my Grandmom so, so much. I felt united in grief with my mom’s generation, intensely aware that I might be doing this sorting in my own mom’s house before too long. That night that we sat around Grandmom’s old table, Favorite Aunt, Beach Aunt, Mom, Sweetie and me, I felt closer with them than I ever had before. I don’t always allow myself family attachment easily, but that night, I was all in. I felt powerfully purposeful and secure, buoyed by these women who’d shaped me all my life. It wasn’t like I forgot politics, but love did let me forgive and transcend.

 

When quarantine came, when I wasn’t taking trauma naps or crying into Zoom, I shifted mightily into tend-and-befriend mode. I checked in daily with family members to make sure everyone was okay, sending (I hope) undemanding good cheer in the form of cats-and-flowers pictures and bird-sightings updates. The first inkling that they were tapped into the disinformation machine was subtle, but it heaved me into reality and a lifetime of stored hurt.

 

My mom was sewing me a gorgeous set of masks, as was Favorite Aunt. While Favorite Aunt griped along about some nebulous “they” forcing us to wear the masks, I thought my mom was mostly in sciencetown with me.

 

But then, in a Messenger thread, I expressed worry about my mom (68) visiting the post office to mail the masks.

 

“Oh, I’m not worried,” she said “I have a really strong immune system, and besides, it’s not like this is the city.”

 

Pretty innocuous, but to me what she said had the bitter sting of racism. It reminded me of back in 2016 when she’d told me that “Rural people are just better with guns than city people are.”

“Sometimes,” I typed as gently as possible, “It comes across as racist when you say things like that.”

 

That concern went unresolved as mom pivoted into her fave form of gaslighting, medical magical thinking that ranges from the victim-blamey to the Eugenic.

 

“I think fear is what’s causing the disease. I wish you weren’t so fearful.”

 

I wasn’t going through my days in fear, at least I didn’t think so. I was listening to poetry from far away, I was taking walks, I was working when I could, I was checking on the neighbors. I was proud of how well I was taking care of myself and Sweetie in such a horrifying month. But all my mom could see in me was weakness and cowardice and self-fulfilling dread. The grief-chasm between who I am and who she thinks I am made me panic and flail like Wile E. Coyote realizing belatedly that he has just walked off a cliff.

(Curfew Has Lifted) Postscript: Quarantine Crush

It’s been such a hard couple of weeks, even here in my relatively un-police-terrorized neighborhood. My city was one of the ones with the curfews, with the police brutality toward protesters, with the military occupation. We’ve had so many victories, too, but I still really struggle to put the experience into words. Mostly I’ve just been repeating it over and over, like I did that time in the Nineties when my house burned down. Only everything is burning down and building up all at the same time.

On Saturday the 30^th, Sweetie an I were in a big protest (I’m so fucking SICK of the phrase “peaceful protest” because of its respectability politics implications, but it did start out that way.) and we got separated from our friends (twenty- somethings who referred to us as “protest moms”) just before the first fire started. (“Tear gas is an accelerant,” my young friend later pointed out, not sure it wasn’t the police who set their own car ablaze.) My friends were boxed in by the police and I was just outside the crowd. Sweetie, panicking because she struggles with wearing a mask for very long, had gone to get the car. I stood there feeling like the very epitome of a dumb white lady, filming and sobbing, while my stuck-in-the-crowd friends texted periodic updates so I’d know they were alive.

My friend in the crowd texted “Walk, don’t run, north.” I followed her instructions and picked a place for Sweetie to meet me with the car. I sat in some grass on a quiet corner, took off my mask to breathe a little better, and snapped a selfie, mostly so I would know I was alive. My regular check-in-buddy, my extremely mild-mannered neighbor in charge of feeding the cats if Sweetie and I ever get hurt or arrested, had never received this upsetting of updates. I hoped I wasn’t scaring her. I wanted to text Quarantine Crush but I knew that made no sense. I was relieved when his facebook reactions showed me he was out there rooting for me.

Sweetie and I were waiting in the car when our friends finally unstuck themselves from the crowd and started making their way towards us. They texted that they were almost run over by a police car in an intersection. (They later clarified that it was THREE police cars that went ahead and drove into the crossing protesters. May Heather Heyer haunt those police bitterly for the rest of their lives.) I got out of the car and waked toward my friends and though our county was still in the red zone, quarantine-wise, we definitely did hugging.

Though it was the police and not the protesters instigating and cultivating the violence and fear, our mayor put our town on curfew after that day. I did activism from home most of that time, but many people I cared about were still out in the now-also-military-occupied streets. I joined the protest watch group on Facebook, so I knew when my friends had to close the windows of their homes to keep the teargas out. I knew when the police were dropping teargas bombs from helicopters. Like everyone else with a heart, mine was petrified, breaking, and proud all at once. I took roll calls every morning so I’d know my friends had survived. So far, they have.

One night, after days and nights of terror, once I finished posting my phone number for the however manyth time in case there were emergencies in the night, I RSVPed yes to Quarantine Crush and Adorable Co-Host’s poetry reading, figuring I needed any comfort I could get. Figuring that things were now so life-or-death (I know! They seemed super life-or-death before!) that heartbreak and longing couldn’t possibly be factors any more.

Oh, Adorable Co-Host. Perhaps the person who hung up on me because I was talking too much about U.S. imperialism after 9/11 wasn’t the person to go to for comfort in this particular week. I feel like an actual crazy person for having thought so.

There were many signs in the pre-Zoom-reading chitchat that should have told me I’d better log out. Someone said “I’m glad *theyre* protesting.” (Emphasis mine.) The apparent queen of this almost-all-white reading piped up in favor of “states’ rights” as if we were in Civil war times. A white guy (possibly the one who said “We’re all in cages now” a few weeks before) used the phrase “identity politics.” I really should have logged out.

“Since we’re not gonna get abolition,” began Up-To-That -Point-Adorable Cohost, “One way to compromise with the police would be…” I tried to push back, but he switched into lecture mode:

“I mean, the police do good things too, like control crowds…”

I stayed for a little while. I read a nice post-protest poem and a not-nice letter to city council. I felt so jagged and broken that it felt like I was shouting Sweetie’s house down. (There was a weather-related power outage at my place, so I camped out with her for a bit.) I heard what the readers had to say, and it was good, as much as I could hear through my humming panic and boiling blood.

Right now, I’m so angry with myself for whatever in my heart and not-okay mind made it seem like this reading would be a place of comfort. I’m so angry at myself for mistaking facebook friends, twenty-years ago friends, for people who would really care about a city so far away, about me.

In the grand scheme of things, micro-abandonments by white and/or not-sufficiently courageous friends, don’t matter so much. I know that. What matters is that the Minneapolis City Council is in favor of defunding the police, that my city, through the efforts of so, SO many may have a chance at defunding as well.

Please, no matter who you are or where you are, go beyond your usual roles. Use every platform you have, not to make a cozy space for hand-wringing moderates, but to work for real change. Sheltering-in-place is not an excuse for sitting by the sidelines, especially not online. Write to your mayor, your city council, your governor, your friends. Please.

Oops, I Accidentally Got a Crush on a Men’s Rights Activist, Part Two

This story is sad, but it’s hopeful too. I like the way that I was able to love this person, this man so disjointedly separate from me, so deeply. It gives me faith in my heart, even if my taste in humans is once again not the best.

Conversation came back again to the “morbidly obese” who were, Cute Pansexual Assistant Manager kept saying, a problem. “For them,” (us, I meant) “MAYBE, but it’s not fair when society tells people what our bodies should look like. It makes me want to punch society in the face.”

WHY was I IN a conversation about his, about ANY of this, at work? With the Assistant Manager and the Store Manager? The Store Manager cosigned my feminism out of empathy for his teen daughter, which was comforting, but it hurt to have to defend my body weight in the middle of my stupid day job.

Even when I told Cute Pansexual Assistant Manager directly that he was hurting my feelings, he maintained that it was “just a difference of opinion.” He had thoughts on the matter if I was interested. NO, REALLY, SUPERVISOR AT WORK, tell me more about how the size of my ass is burdening you.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about a comp class I was in fifteen years ago at Syracuse. The professor had ostensibly chosen food politics as the semester’s theme, but in retrospect I can see she was doing body terrorism before I knew there was such a term. As we watched Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me show shot after shot of headless, poorly dressed fat people, revealing the filmmaker’s contempt for both the fat and the poor, I sat in my slightly two small classroom desk feeling scrutinized. The fat at my middle felt naked, my boobs too big. I felt exposed in a way that reminded me of my long-ago rape.

In 2018, I would have been OUTRAGED, would have called every campus official, but instead I wrote about objectification in my class papers, got an A and moved on. Now, whenever I see Morgan Spurlock’s book, or any other piece of body-shaming trash, in the Little Free Libraries around town, I put them in the recycling where they belong.

Anyway, back to the bookstore, fat-shaming comments weren’t the only ones to come out of CPAM’s mouth—he seemed determined to dismiss any existence of sexism or racism ANYWHERE. “It’s 2018,” he said, “It sucks for everyone.” He brushed off feminism as man-hating, ignored my complaints about his frequent casual racism, and seemed personally injured by any kind of justice talk. I was only DOING any justice talk because his gentle but constant stream of prejudice kept nagging my conscience to say something.

 “Stop trying to school me,” he eventually said, the third time I tried to calmly explain that fat people aren’t less-than, that we haven’t necessarily “let ourselves go,” that we haven’t somehow placed a burden on him or on other straight-sized people just by existing.

I can see how the “schooling” was annoying to him and how it DEFINTELY wasn’t my job. I gave him way too much leeway because I needed a friend, because I wanted a new bookstore home. I should have reported him to the Store Manager, but he had a ways to go, too—I’d had to also gently call HIM out when he referred to an old Cosby joke that was only sort of about rape. (At least SM was receptive to pushback and didn’t make me explain myself, but the reference hadn’t exactly inclined me toward trust. )

Partly, I was doing a bad white person thing: I didn’t want to give up comfort to do what was right. I wanted a break from being like this. I wanted to be a part of things without being an SJW for like FIVE SECONDS but I think what I’m learning is that those days are behind me. Good.

I’m not sure why I tried so hard to belong there, when there’s so much belonging available all around me—there’s marches, there’s canvassing, there’s yoga and massage and occasionally stopping into (super liberal Unitarian) church. There are my feminist-bookstore-owning neighbors who still have their Hillary sign (from primaries!) up. I have a home in the world no matter what. I’m not sure how or why that bookstore got so important to me.

Because of that needless struggle to belong, or because of my poor handling of it, (and, to a greater degree, because America puts children in cages now) the first half of this summer was about battling depression, about really struggling for hope. I want sometimes to go back to my life before activism, before Nazis came back to the streets, before Heather Heyer got murdered, but this is where we are now, and there’s no way out but through.

At the bookstore, that would mean a few more snits and a lot more HR.

Next Time: Does he know what he’s saying?