Roadblock # 7: Why I Am Afraid of Young People

“Every generation thinks it’s the end of the world.” –Wilco

“Your pussy doesn’t care about your politics.” –Mollena Williams

***Note: As soon as I finished sitting in a diner and writing this post in my notebook, I went to an eye doctor appointment where I got totally asked out by a really excellent 28-year-old. He may be scrolling through at this moment and realizing he bit off more than her could chew, but still, if that’s not incentive to kick down this roadblock, I don’t know what is. As if the Steampunks and all of my other younger pals weren’t incentive enough!***

Amusing as it was, my foray back into the world of OK Cupid ended up being kind of triggering. It gave me kind of a trapped feeling—I’m sure that was partly because I’m not ready for dating, and also there’s something I don’t like about online sexting, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Anyway, it was fun at first to indulge in some non-goal-oriented flirting. I wound in an amusing game of Truth or Dare with a twenty-something guy and there was absolutely nothing wrong with that until he revealed, about eight messages in, that he has a rape fantasy. That in itself was not enough reason to stop the conversation—lord knows my fantasy life isn’t chock full of consent, so I feel like I have kind of a double standard being bothered by it.

But really, WHY is it okay to say the word rape to a girl you’re trying to get somewhere with? I didn’t ask him that, just moved the conversation on to other things, but I felt icky about him so I said a nice goodbye. He was kind of a snot about it, so I guess I made the right choice to cut him off. It was a fine afternoon’s entertainment, but it also inspired me to try and tackle this topic that I’ve stopped and started writing about so many times.

People who are in their twenties spent their entire formative years in a culture where rape jokes are part of the mainstream. Sarah Silverman (who I love, but who definitely adorabled rape jokes into okayness) and Seth McFarlane (who I think I would punch in the face if I could) both came along at the same time Buffy was getting sexually assaulted by Spike, and I really freaked out about it being taken so lightly. After a while, though, it became so normal that I, like most people, just kind of stopped fighting it.

Last spring, I was standing outside work at dismissal time and I heard some sixth grade girls joking about how their guy friends were trying to rape them. I put on the teacher voice and said, “Girls, I know you’re just kidding, but that is a very serious thing so please don’t joke about it.”

“It’s not serious to us!” They said, and went back to laughing and roughhousing.

There are studies that have shown that the definition of consent is eroding, and umpteen million books and articles have been written connecting those changes to the advent internet porn. I definitely don’t feel comfortable making blanket statements about porn’s relationship to real-world consent. I use it myself, about once a week, and not nice feminist porn either. I just troll through YouPorn like anybody else. I actually think it’s helped me to figure out some things that I would like to have happened to me, and in the years before I found the courage to date men, it gave me a safe way to experiment. Like any other porn user, sometimes it gives me ideas I want to use (I am a girl who genuinely likes to be come all over) and lets me experience things that would be terrifying in real life. (I probably wouldn’t like to be come all over by 100 guys.)

I don’t feel ashamed of using porn and I don’t think men should either, but at the same time, I did enjoy the time before guys wanted to choke me. Whitney Cummings has a great joke about that:

And I miss the time before guys would mention rape and expect to get somewhere with me. There are very good things about taboos being more out in the open, but dating just seems too harsh sometimes. I don’t know how much of the harshness I’m perceiving has to do with my own fears and past traumas (and Sweetie’s Rape Crisis Center view of men) and how much of it is actual sociological change.

I know my fear of young people fed into my fear of the Scary Party, (it’s the younger-skewing of the two main dungeons in town) even before the thing with The Man. I felt judged and sexualized there. It was just a fear and it was no doubt made worse by the fact that I was trying not to realize I would much rather play with men than with Sweetie, but it was a sensation like the bad, exploitive aspects of porn. I felt defined by the male gaze in a very unfun way. It was a terrible, desperate feeling that the only way to be worthy was to attract that gaze, and the only way to attract it was to fit into a very narrow set of criteria. If I wasn’t young, small, pliable, childlike, and deeply masochistic, then I was nothing at all.

A lot of that impression is about broken aspects of my psyche just finding expression out in the world. I have referred to it as the Cabinet in Which I Store My Fears. Some of the badness was something I was projecting, but not all of it.

Part of my fear of young people, if not most of it, comes from a sort of arrested development feeling that I’ve carried around since I was seventeen. I still have a general suspicion that I might be conspired against, rufied, raped, beaten and berated by mean kids just because ithappened that time when I was a kid. Now that I am shrugging off (blinking off?) that victim lens, I am hoping I will find fewer ways to end up expressing it out in the world.

I know it’s a skewed lens because many of the dearest people I know, including one of my protectors, belong to that generation I get scared of. I know they have nothing but goodness in their souls and no intention of hurting anybody who doesn’t want to be hurt. Just like I think the TNGers' age cutoff of 35 is mean and arbitrary, so is making assumptions about people under 30. The best solution to dismantling the arbitrary limits I’ve placed on myself and others is giving everyone a chance, getting to know them one-on-one, and continuing to say good nos, parsing out which scary things are within and which are without.

There’s a lot to be said too about my own anxieties about aging, but I’ll save that for another day.

The Sparkly Festival of Awesomeness, Part 6: Hot Sex, Hot Hand-Holding

As I’ve been writing my way through this story, I’m conscious of being the least experienced person in the tent, at least when it comes to this kind of sex, and trying to keep things in perspective. I’m thinking about oxytocin and other bonding chemicals and how they might be the source of these lovely deep feelings of connection. When I write about it, I’m agnostic about energies and such, but in the moment, none of those thoughts or doubts were relevant at all. I was, for those few hours, a true believer in magic, men, myself, and everything else, like a horny mystic on ecstasy.

So back to where I was, snuggled between two radiantly warm guys, one-in-each-hand, hands in my hair, on my back, everywhere. Legs intertwined. Kissing, kissing, kissing. I was enveloped in the smell of them—one smelled fresh, the other, more dark and musky. Both smells made me ravenous for them.

We paused for a moment to go over our testing situations, of course. The guys geeked out for a while about STI science facts, and then it was back to the snuggles.

Mr. Shiny Eyes put on a condom and a glove. He slid his hand in and I was as wet as I’ve ever been. His fingers jolted my inside awake and alert and every nerve ending lit up like Christmas. I wanted so badly for him to fuck me. There was a little fuss about positions (remember, we’re on an air mattress, and one that could use some inflating at that) and he ended up deciding to lay back and have me climb on.

“But I’m a bottom…” I complained only a tiny bit.

“Okay, then I’m making you be on top.”

Friends, it had been since last August. I’ve had plenty of adventures, as you know, but for whatever reason it’s been much easier to get a guy to spank me, flog me, tie me up, set me on fire, drag a knife over my (pajamaed) clit, etc—for some reason this part of things has been elusive.

I was so, so happy to have Mr. Shiny Eyes inside me. All of him is so smooth and assured—his arms, his kisses, his penis. As soon as I straddled him and pushed him in, waves of delight sparked up inside me and I started making ridiculous sounds. As the Mayor of Kittentown’s neighbors would attest, I can never contain my joy when a man is inside me. I am super, super loud, and since I’m a showoff, I was glad to feel like the whole festival could hear me.

Since up until this point, I’d only Googled two-(or ten, or a hundred) guys-one-girl, and so even though everybody knows life isn’t like porn I feel compelled to talk about the contrast. In videos, the men always talk around the girl, either egging on the other men or talking about practical things like which way to bend her. Sometimes they might as well be moving a couch, for all the interaction they have with the lady. Of course, that objectification is fun to watch, but would never be fun to do.

This was the complete opposite of that in every way. Even as I was being bent into ways I didn’t know I could bend, (thank goodness for yoga) I felt like they were both so there for me, like they were being so generous, that we were all working as a team to get what we needed.

As Mr. Shiny Eyes fucked me, Mr. Sweetheart was kindly there to help, kissing me, pulling my hair, giving my ass the occasional helpful smack. But my favorite, the part of the day that I revisit the most, is when I reached out and he just took my hand. That hand-holding was so tender that it might have been a friendship oath. That support is a magic thing to walk through my days with.

But back to Mr. Shiny Eyes. After I first met him, back at that conference, I asked around and folks told me his dance card is really full—and no wonder! He moved in me like an expert. I kept saying/panting “Oh, you’re so perfect, no wonder you’re so popular.” He kept going until I exploded into fireworks, and we all piled up again for snuggles.

Next time: Pillow talk and being held down a lot.

Momentum Con Part Three: Megan Andelloux, Tina Horn, Sexual Side Effects

Megan Andelloux is a new hero of mine. Not only did she found the Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health, but her The Three P’s of Porn: Pleasure, Politics, and Personhood workshop yielded one of the best lines of the convention:

“People want to see their genitals on your face.”

Being a straight-A student type, I also have to brag that I won a vibrator from her for having this to say about food shopping as an analogy for porn:

“Well, I try to shop at the co-op for most things, but, there are things that aren’t so good for me, and I want to eat them anyway.”

Her conclusion was that it’s best to work for ethical pornography, that is, porn that represents many points of view and in which the performers have good working conditions and are doing things that they like to do.

(Queer Porn TV is a great example. In a later panel on Feminist Porn, dreamboat producer Tina Horn had this to say about genuine expressions of sexuality: “When people are given the freedom to do what they want, they do the nastiest shit I have ever seen.”)

Megan’s talk also included this video, which reminds me very much of some spanking-related conversations between me and Sweetie.

But what really knocked my socks off about Ms. Andelloux is that she let me ask her a really personal question in the restroom while she was in the middle of brushing her teeth. A friend of mine had texted and asked me to ask the sexperts if there’s anything that can be done about the sexual side effects of antidepressants—in this case, taking a superlong time to reach orgasm.

She said that there are anti-depressants that don’t have sexual side effects, but that people often don’t know that they can ask for them. Often the psychiatrist says

“This has some sexual side effects.”

and the patient says

“Okay.”

This makes me feel very pissed off and bratty and reminds me of what the Milgrim experiments taught us about our general willingness to follow authority.

For my part, I feel conflicted about antidepressants anyway. I’ve always refused them myself, figuring that if I was sad, there must be a reason, and I should change the circumstances instead of changing my body chemistry. On the other hand, I have friends who say they’re helpful, and I’m a big fan of my friends being happy and alive.

Either way, though, it seems really counterproductive to take away or impede something as happy-making as orgasms in order to chemically create more well being. It really seems to me that if genuine happiness were made a priority, lots of people could cut out the drugs and produce well-being for themselves.