Rentabed.

The creepy part about staying in a hotel is the absolute certainty that someone has, at some point, engaged in some extremely body-fluid intensive perversions in this bed.

Of course, I have every intention of Paying It Forward, but still.

Sex toys in the backpack.

TSA guy: "Hey Bob, get a load of this!"

Bob and TSA guy: *hurr*

Me: Entertaining, ain't it, fellas?



In retrospect I should have burst out in tears. I don't really care, but it would have put them in a more entertaining position.

Boston!

Tomorrow morning through Monday night, I'm flying out to Boston! Whee! This is partly a family thing and partly a Tommy thing--I'm not entirely sure what, if anything, will happen but I'm a little nervous either way and looking forward to it either way.

I'll almost certainly post from the road at some point, but my WiFi gadget has a really teensy keyboard so it's hard to get into in-depth analysis of anything, my thumbs cramp up. Wordiness will resume Tuesday.

Jersey Swap.

Sexy men in mainstream advertising always make me happy. I think I'm going to make it a category.

Somehow this feels wrong... (Sort of work-safe; PG but features manflesh and seedy porn music.)

My Birth Control Utopia.

In my benevolent-dictator utopia, a totally safe, dosage-unimportant, man and child safe, otherwise perfect birth control is in the water supply and fortified into basic foods. To be fertile, you have to take the antidote for a month or two.

The antidote is widely available over-the-counter for about a dollar per hundred pills. No questions asked, no licensing, no counseling, no credit check, no home visit, it's easier to get than Tylenol. But to get pregnant you have to actively, deliberately take the antidote and you have to stick to it for a little while.

I think this would improve the world tremendously.

Jerkin'.

Very often if I'm sitting around naked (which is basically any time I'm alone in my room) I'll touch myself. Not full-on masturbation, not trying for an orgasm, just kind of hanging onto my important parts, reminding myself that it's all there. Or even less than that, just twiddling my labia the way I'd twiddle a paperclip, something to keep my hands busy. It's not sexy, it's just comfortable.

And very often lately I'll do the same thing with my dildo. I'll have it in my lap or even strapped on and just idly... dick around with it. Stroke it, rub my thumb around the head, bend it around gently. I'm more tweaking it than jerking it off, but it's the very same feeling, of being glad to have it there.

It's funny, I'm utterly used to writing about hyper-personal "what did Holly put up her butt this week?" topics, but that last paragraph got me all embarrassed, because I'm really not sure if that's a normal thing to be doing. I'm not a dude, I don't want to have a dick per se, but having one now and then to mess around with feels good.

So yeah.... sometimes I strap on and jerk off.



(Yes, I can feel it, and not just through the magic simpatico I have with my dildo--having the big firm base strapped right over my clit means that jerking-off motions actually send a lot of nice diffuse pressure through my whole pubic area. I can't quite get off with it but the pleasure is quite real.)

Oh Boi.

I'm not generally all that attracted to women. I mean, I know a sexy woman when I see one, and I certainly wouldn't mind having sex with a woman, but I don't really go for women as strongly as men, I'm a lot pickier and don't have quite the visceral reaction and the obsessions that I get with men.

(Complete digression: have you noticed how sometimes "sexy woman" really means "sexy packaging?" I was watching a movie with generic sexy-girls-as-backdrop, and I really looked at them, and no insult, but they were ordinary women. They were young and thin of course, but otherwise basically like anyone you'd see on the street. They were just ordinary women with ridiculous makeup and ridiculously skimpy little dresses, which work so well as visual shorthand for "sexy" that their actual faces and bodies barely read.)

The exception is butch lesbians and drag kings. Oh. My. God. A handsome woman with a boyish haircut and well-fit men's clothes can make me into a stammering, melting wreck in a way that not that many men can do. (Sometimes it's so bad that I worry that it comes off as homophobia. I need a card to hand out that says "Don't worry, I'm only being awkward because you're so hot.")

(Second digression: man, it's freakin' impossible to find flattering photos of manly women online. Am I the only person on earth with this attraction? There aren't any straight guys out there with a fetish for them? Millions of pictures of women popping balloons or stepping on gas pedals or whatever the fuck, and no one on Earth but me likes a lady in flannel?)

This probably makes me fundamentally straight. I'm just attracted to masculinity regardless of the gender underneath, and in a way, deliberately-masculine women do it far better than most men who just coast on their chromosomes. Whether through ironic flamboyance or just thinking it through more than a biological male has to, masculine women often seem hyper-masculine. In the best way.

And this may also have something to do with what I talked about in this post: what we call masculine often has less to do with being male than with being awesome. I like women who are awesome. Can you blame me?



Man, there's not much of a slot in the gender spectrum for being butch, female, and straight. Maybe in San Francisco? If it were a viable, non-social-life-killing option I'd take it. I used to be a lot manlier, used to have super-short hair and dress like a dude, and it just didn't work out. I loved how it felt, but people's reactions sucked: strangers would be jerks about it and guys told me they really weren't attracted. Now that I've got long lovely red hair and wear skirts and push-up bras and shit, life is better. I still love my flannel and my steel-toe boots and my power tools, but I don't have the patience or drive (or the she'd-be-hot-in-anything bone structure) to swim against the current on this. Part of attracting boys is wearing the "I'm attracted to boys" uniform, and, well, I know it's weak but I'd rather have the boys than be a Gender Revolutionary.

Faces.

I'm not sure which is sexier: when a man receiving pleasure looks utterly enraptured into wild, unselfconscious grimaces, or when he looks utterly impassive. The former makes me think of my power; the latter, his. It makes the difference between feeling as if I'm controlling a man through his cock and feeling as if I'm simply servicing him. Very different thoughts and both wonderful.

Hypnosexuality.

The hypnosis fetish is one of those weird little things I feel pretty neutral about, like a hair fetish or a wool fetish: not my thing, but hey, nothing wrong with it.

Lately I've been listening to hypnosis mp3s--not fetish hypnosis, just general guided relaxation that helps a little with reducing stress and getting to sleep. And it's the damndest thing, they make me horny. There's no sexual content, but somewhere between "you feel your muscles getting very loose" and "focus on your breathing, in and out," I just get suddenly ravenous for cock. (This also increases my impression that the mp3s work, because when I unpause and finish the recording again a few minutes later, boy am I more relaxed!)

It's possible that I have a secret hypnosis fetish that was in me all along, but this seems unlikely. I certainly do have a fetish for unnervingly calm, deep-voiced men telling me exactly what to do. More importantly, though, I think I walk around with a lot more stress than I realize and it affects my sex drive more than I realize. Simply going through the actions of methodically relaxing, of putting away the blood and sirens (okay, the barf and yelling) of the day and focusing on me and now wakes up my potential enormously.

So this quirk with the hypnosis mp3s lead me to to an important platitude for my "real", partnered sex life: relaxation matters. It's the difference between "well, my body's doing its thing, but what am I really doing here?" and "OH HOT DIGGITY YES." And sometimes the stress I'm under is invisible to me until it goes away. I can come when my mind's elsewhere, my vagina's reliable like that, but it's so much better if I can really be there when I come.

I don't really want to have sex with hypnosis, but I could definitely use some "not trying to go directly from work to sex and rush everything like crazy"pnosis.

Cover that body part, it's shameful!

I don't think there's much difference between our culture telling women to cover their breasts and other cultures telling them to cover their hair.

Old people sex, ewwww!

One of the things that scares me about getting old is the idea that a lot of old people lose their sexuality. Not sixty and seventy year olds, I know all about the shenanigans that go on in retirement homes, but eighty and ninety year olds. When you go from retirement home to nursing home.

There's not much sex in nursing homes. (Quick clarification: in this whole post "sex" means sexual intimacy in general, not necessarily intercourse.) For safety's sake, every door has to be open all the time. Most roommates are same-sex strangers; once in a blue moon a married couple is able to room together, but only an opposite-sex legally married couple and only rarely. I don't think many nurses or aides would be comfortable helping with sex in any way--say, helping two people into the same bed (they're all single beds of course) would almost certainly be refused as some sort of safety hazard.

I don't know what the ethics of dementia and sex are. Obviously having sex with someone who's a little forgetful is fine, and having sex with someone who can't understand what's happening is wrong, but where do you draw the line? Is there a single day when you realize it's no longer okay, or the day before they have to move out to a facility, and on that night... do you have the last sex of your life with your spouse? What is it like to knowingly have the last sex of your life?

The whole hospital setting, whether you're old or not, seems horrifyingly anti-sex, or rather just not considering sex as a concern; with nurses making rounds at night and privacy consisting of a curtain if you're lucky, I don't know how people who are in the hospital for courses of months even masturbate.

Healthcare institutions make at least some effort to provide physical and psychological comforts; they have massage and music therapists and therapy dogs and recreational therapy. Maybe by the time I'm old the "vibrator, porn, partner if you've got one, and a promise of 30 minutes of real privacy" therapy adjunct will exist. God I hope so.




The real problem here is I don't want to lose anything and I don't want to die. Not wanting sex to die is just another part of that.

Pride.

(This is a lot more utopian than I usually swing, and I'm not entirely sure I agree with myself here or how implementation wouldn't be disastrous, but I thought the idea was interesting enough to share. Also, I'm not a Nazi or anything, I hope that at least is clear.)



We need white pride. We need male pride. We need straight pride.

Because the only way racism is going to go away is if white is just another race, with white culture and white events no more or less special than any other kind. When we have black and Latino culture but white things are just culture, we make white the default in a very unfortunate way. We should have White Entertainment Television, showing white-made programming aimed at white people, with news and politics of interest to whites, and ads for products popular among whites. Instead of just calling it "the major networks."

Likewise with other forms of discrimination and identity politics; while eliminating all divisions would be nice, given people's propensity to divide themselves and their (often perfectly reasonable) desire to stay true to their roots, another solution is to make the dominant group an identity too.

"Equal rights for women," by that standard, misses the point; it's too close to saying "women should be equal to people." Having a women's movement means that men are considered the default gender and being as good as men means you've got it made. How about equal rights for men and women? The distinction might be subtle in practice--it's not like we're going to have to raise men's wages to match women's very often--but important in philosophy. A man's right to wear a dress is just as important as a woman's right to wear pants; and a man's right to be respected in his relationships and safe from abuse can't be taken for granted. Because the only way for feminism to succeed is for women's issues to become people's issues, and the only way to do that is to treat men as a gender too.

And only when straight is just another spot on the continuum can we really have equality for gay people. When finding out that your son likes girls is an event worth noting. And when that son gets older, he can meet girls at straight bars. (Of course he can go to regular bars too, but he'll have to make some effort to look for girls who are acting stereotypically straight or who are giving him straight vibes, and there's always the chance he'll be wrong.)

Saying "but whites/men/straights already have so much privilege" is missing the point; I don't want us to have the dominant culture and White Day too, I want White Day to be a path to letting the dominant culture be truly mixed. I think there's a certain emptiness to being a generic white American these days, a feeling of not belonging to any groups, and it's that feeling that leads majority members to define "everyone, except when specified otherwise" as their group. Which frequently ends up sucking for the specified otherwise.

I really don't want to Balkanize the world further, I obviously don't think white/male/straight people should be separatists, but neither do I think they should be assumed as mainstream. I don't think their identity should go unspoken. Too often it seems like someone's race is either defined as either Black/Latino/Asian/etc. or raceless. So I'm in favor of white racial identity, because to respect other races we don't need to be apologetic, "politically correct," guilty-by-genetics; we need to be a race ourselves.

Ooh baby.

Today at the supermarket there was a woman ahead of me in line with a baby girl who looked about nine months or a year old. The kid was cute as a bunny, but something about her face seemed very strange. Her eyes and lips seemed too big and well-defined, her skin oddly colored. It took me a moment to realize what was going on.

The baby was wearing makeup.

The Porn Myth.

Bruno sent me this article by Naomi Wolf on how porn may be changing sexuality. This is one of the rare cases where I can't go "fuck yeah sister" or "haha what a nut"; the article touches on real concerns before veering off into things I can't agree with.

Where Wolf touches a nerve is with the idea that porn (and sexy-ladies-as-decoration culture in general) is making humans look dumpy in comparison. I see pictures like this and this and think fuck, I'm a human being with muscles and fat and texture to my skin and hairs on my body, and even when I'm trying to be sexy I don't dress or pose like that--if you look at Gisele and then me I'm a complete troll. (This isn't just simple jealousy, because if you look at Gisele and then Gisele in the real world with no Photoshop and normal clothes, real Gisele might be no one's troll but she still pales in comparison.) Hyper-sexy images are the high-fructose corn syrup and monosodium glutamate of sex, and real food is bland beside them.

So I've got to admit I'm pretty enthused by the idea that in recent history
it was still pretty cool to be able to offer a young man the actual presence of a naked, willing young woman... If there was nothing actively alarming about you, you could get a pretty enthusiastic response by just showing up.
Of course men still do have fun with normal women all the time, but you do get a sense, sometimes, that they're settling. That they're thinking "eh, spotty and chunky, but she'll do." Whether that sense is a creation of modern synth-porn, or an age-old insecurity since the tribe had two women and you were the scruffy one, I'm too young to say.

What Wolf is pushing is low standards for female sexiness, and that's an appealing idea, because unmeetable standards leave real-world women and men unhappy. I don't know how it could be achieved, though. You can't tell pornographers and advertisers to stop using women who look too good because they're making it hard for the rest of us. Making women look good is their business, and in the last couple decades they've gotten good at it. Maybe the only hope for civilization is that the trend continues until the ideal Photoshopped woman is an inch thick with three-foot breasts and normal women are so obviously different that they're no longer compared. It's like when dog breeds split into show lines and working lines.

But then Wolf goes too far. In trying to say that vaginal missionary should still be a big deal, she makes it sound like women who do other things are always giving in rather than exploring for themselves.
Now you have to offer—or flirtatiously suggest—the lesbian scene, the ejaculate-in-the-face scene.
You have to consider the possibility that I like threesomes and come on my face, not that I'm reluctantly "offering" them because all I really want is mish and everything else is a compromise.

And then the weird part.
I will never forget a visit I made to Ilana, an old friend who had become an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem. When I saw her again, she had abandoned her jeans and T-shirts for long skirts and a head scarf. I could not get over it. Ilana has waist-length, wild and curly golden-blonde hair. “Can’t I even see your hair?” I asked, trying to find my old friend in there. “No,” she demurred quietly. “Only my husband,” she said with a calm sexual confidence, “ever gets to see my hair.” ...And I thought: Our husbands see naked women all day—in Times Square if not on the Net. Her husband never even sees another woman’s hair.

She must feel, I thought, so hot.

Or so constrained. I have--or mostly had--Orthodox friends too, and the way they hide women away isn't sexy. I went to a Hasidic friend's Bar Mitzvah once and all the women in the congregation had to sit behind a screen, looking politely at a goddamn white sheet as the sounds of the service sort of drifted through. Being sexier in private (if that's even true) isn't worth that shit. It's humiliating. And when I'm asked to cover my hair, I don't think it's because my sexuality is special, it's because my sexuality needs hiding. My very identity--which is being treated as synonymous with my sexuality--needs hiding.

FUCK THAT.

Gisele and her cohorts and their Photoshoppers may be unfair competition, but ultimately I can't ask them to hide their light under a bushel. I'm sure as fuck not hiding mine.

Cosmocking: July '09!

Pink cover! Lauren Conrad! The weird super-high-with-super-low-cutout shape of her neckline makes it looks like her boobs are down around her belly button! Which they clearly aren't, it's just a terrible neckline!

Hey, there's an article about how you can "have more than one soul mate." Oh wait, they don't mean at the same time. They just mean we shouldn't think that there's only one man in the world we could ever love. Uh, thanks, Cosmo. Next month, the shocking truth about the moon and green cheese?

We don't want you to beat yourself up--unless you're doing it for our benefit. "I was with a girl who had an epic freak-out--like relationship-ending stuff," says Jesse, 25. "But a few days later, she sent me an email, and instead of trying to explain away her behavior, she said she had thought about things from my perspective and was tortured about how she'd acted." Mustering up a few tears in the process also works wonders... but you didn't hear that from us.
Cosmopolitan magazine will teach you how to exhibit classic syndromes of borderline personality disorder including a manipulative abuse-apology cycle, all with a cutesy "it must be harmless, I'm just a silly girl" tee-hee... but you didn't hear that from me.

Apologizing is important, no question that "I fucked up, sorry" is better than "let me explain why I was right all along," but dramatized self-flagellation is just creepy.

["things guys wish you knew"] A lot of us are insecure about our bodies. Women look like beautiful, soft, gorgeous angels when they're naked. We look like hairy ogres or little scrawny trolls.
It's so nice that you're a heterosexual male! But I, personally, am not! Therefore, I am cursed with the illusion that certain ogre-trolls are attractive! Am I crazy for this? I guess so!

Also, if you don't think you're hot, why do you think women are sleeping with you? Answers range from the merely desexualizing ("my sense of humor?") to the depressingly inevitable ("money?").

Q: What can I say midbooty that isn't too tame or too raunchy?
A: "You make me so wet."
Well, god forbid I say something too raunchy, I'm only having sex here.

Q: What should I do after I tie him up?
A: Like your way from his neck to his ankles and then back again.
Ew? Licking is funtimes, yeah, but doing a methodical tongue bath seems like kind of an awkward, soggy waste of a tied man.

Q: What does a penis ring do, and will my boyfriend like one?
A: It constricts bloodflow and keeps him hard longer. It can be hard to remove, so steer clear.
Cock, Cosmo. COCK. It's a COCK RING.

But that doesn't matter, because all you need to know about pee-pee naughty-place rings is that they're way too risky for a little dear like you, don't you bother giving them a thought now. They don't make kinds with removable snaps or anything.

Q: How can I tell if I smell okay down there?
A: Touch yourself and smell your finger.
This is absolutely correct of course, it's just a hilarious mental image. And that someone had to ask.

Q: How can I get him to spank me?
A: Spank yourself and he'll follow suit.
You know, if you're incapable of human speech, you really ought to give some thought to learning sign language or at least keeping a notepad handy.

Q: Does it feel different getting it on with an uncircumcised guy?
A: No.
Um... yeah it does. At least sometimes. The foreskin slides back and forth inside you, you can feel it. This one isn't ideologically offensive or anything, but it's wrong, and I wonder why they bothered putting it in the article then.

Q: What does being inside me feel like for him?
A: Stick your finger in your mouth and suck and you'll get an idea.
In my mouth?

Your makeup may be off and your hair may be a bit messy, but taking one last second to primp can make you feel great. Keep a bottle of your favorite perfume on the nightstand, and spritz your body once before you crawl under the covers.
Why, is there someone I'm trying to impress hiding under there? Maybe it's just some fundamental difference in wiring, but having all the beauty shit off doesn't make me feel bad, it makes me feel free. I don't wear my work uniform to the beach, and I don't wear my date uniform to bed.



There's more, but Christ, it's like 500 degrees in here and I can't think. I'm taking a cold shower and going to bed. Maybe I'll write a Part II if my keyboard doesn't melt.

Embracing saddlebacking.

I don't know why the idea of kids having oral or anal sex to be "abstinent" and stay "virgins" is quite such a subject of derision. I mean, shit, they're having fun and they aren't getting pregnant. Works for me.

Although for safety's sake, we really need to add in to the abstinence-only classes that sometimes it's very important to use condoms and lube while you're being abstinent.

CC Obsession Watch.

A fun thing to drop into casual conversation: "yeah, so apparently getting your cervix bumped is pretty unpleasant for women."

I believe CC's goal in life is to see me explode.

When the good guys cross the line.

So there's a group in Washington State called WhoSigned.org that states it will publish the names, zip codes, and possibly addresses of everyone who signed petitions in favor of Referendum 71, an anti-gay-marriage initiative currently gathering signatures. Now I'm as pro-gay-marriage as I can be without actually marrying a girl, but this is creepy bullshit.

Petition signatures are public record in this state, and people should stand behind their beliefs. But publishing the names of people who didn't expect that when they signed is a screwjob, and threatening to publish names when the referendum doesn't yet have its quota is flat-out intimidation. It's also eerily reminiscent of what only the creepiest opponents of abortion do. Saying "we don't have to be nice because this cause is just so clear-cut and important" is scary no matter what the cause is.

I think what bothers me most is how little this has to do with gay rights. This tactic would work with any controversial and emotional issue. It's low, it's mean, and it doesn't make anyone look good.

This is a whole lot less "Gays: they deserve to have normal families" and a lot more "Gays: if you piss them off, they'll tell everyone where your kids go to school." And if you look beyond the individual referendum to the future of gay rights in this state, or to actually changing people's minds, that's not a strategy with much persuasive power.






By the by... Whosigned.org is being run by Brian Murphy, who lives at **21 BROADWAY E and has a home phone number of 206-***-6738, and I put those *'s in because I'm not an asshole and I wouldn't want him to be harassed or anything.

Disgusting sex toy story.

So I'm at the sex store to pick up some basic needs, and they've got a clearance rack with really, really cheap stuff.

Hey! Ben wa balls for two bucks! I always heard those were bullshit. But I also read an old sex manual once with a description of having them in your vagina and just rolling your hips and coming to orgasm after languid, easy orgasm. That kinda... grabbed me. It's probably bullshit, but hey, two bucks.

Alright, got home, let's try these puppies out. Slip them in, and... yeah, the hands-free thing is utter bullshit, but if I rub my clit and the outside of my pussy with them in... ooh. Not bad. I can feel them turning and sliding inside me. Mmmm. Spank me harder, invisible imagination man. Oh, you've got such strong arms. Harder. Oh. Oh yeah. OOOOOHHHHH.

Gosh, that was nice.

Well, now to get them out. First one just pops out. Second one... oh shit.

Oh Jesus. It's way in there. Every time I squeeze it goes higher not lower. I can't get a finger behind it.

Oh Jesus. All the emergency rooms in 50 miles know me. I'll have to drive to Yakima.

Alright, look around. Is there anything I can use? Forceps? Speculum? Dammit, if only I were more of a pervert, I'd have the tools I need right now. Maybe I can poke at it with a pen or a ruler or something... no, I'm going to hurt myself. Bad idea.

Okay Holly. Just focus. You can do this. Like giving birth to a tiny, spherical, metal baby. Focus. Deep breath. Puush. You can do it.


*plop*


I am never using those fucking things ever again.

Sex blogger completely forgets mission statement, posts vacation slideshow

Out of 6 planned ghost towns, 2 were impossible to find, 1 was located on private property, and the 3 I visited were not properly "ghost" but still occupied either in the form of really really shitty towns or deliberate historical showcases. If this area contains truly empty towns with naught but a tumbleweed rolling down Main Street, I didn't have the time or information to find them. I did get some maps and good advice at Cashmere, so I might be able to do better sometime in the future.

•Snoqualmie Pass, with busload of British tourists
•Roslyn, WA
•The Rosyln cemetery dates back to 1887
•Liberty, WA
•Liberty arrastra - water-powered stone-crushing mill
•Mysterious cairns in Liberty
•Campsite over the Wenatchee River
•Swim at your own risk
•Leavenworth, WA - a fake-ass "Bavarian" tourist town in some very real-ass mountains
•It's like Disneyland, only in the middle of nowhere! And German for some reason!
•McBavaria
•Cashmere, WA
•Moo
•Church in Cashmere
•Modern apartments
•Mommy, I want to see the 10 deadliest snakes!
•Feedin' time
•happysnake.jpg
•Chameleon!
•Tortoise :)
•Be nice to the tortoise :(
•Whitey
•HOLY SHIT



Your regularly scheduled horniness will resume later tonight; I've got a disgusting sex-toy story, a sexy fucking-outdoors story, and a Cosmocking coming up.