Teenage Panic.

"But if you do happen to unzip your fly, then, uh... uh...
enjoy your new life as a cautionary example?"

Look at any forum or question site frequented by sexually active teenagers, and you'll see the same theme come up over and over:

"I had sex. I'm terrified I'm pregnant and have every STD ever."

"A guy fingered me.  I'm terrified I'm pregnant and have every STD ever."

"I touched a girl's breasts and then touched my penis. I'm terrified she's pregnant and we both have every STD ever."

I'm paraphrasing a little sardonically, but I remember being there.  The first time I touched a boy's penis, he demanded I wash my hands immediately, because maybe they had some sperm on them and maybe I would masturbate and then I would get pregnant for sure.  And when I started having intercourse, although we always used condoms, I was absolutely convinced I was pregnant and infected.  It got to the point where I would have stomach rumblings and think that I was feeling a baby kicking.

Despite (or because of) this belief, I never took any tests.  I was so scared of seeing a positive result, I couldn't bear to.  I'm damn lucky that I was worried over nothing, because it was more than nine months before I screwed up the courage to actually use a pregnancy test, and years before I went to a clinic for an STI test.

I was a pretty savvy teenager, intellectually.  My school sex ed wasn't much, but I'd been through every page of Scarleteen and the sex chapter of every "you and your health" book I could get my hands on.  I'd read up on the correct methods for every kind of contraception and the symptoms of every infection.  My problem wasn't lack of education, not exactly.  My problem was an all-consuming terror of punishment.  I'd been able to unlearn misconceptions about the biological details, but I hadn't unlearned the idea that having sex was a very wrong and forbidden act.

The morning after I had sex for the first time, I woke up with a crushing feeing that I'd done something evil and I was going to be caught and punished.  The next time I saw my parents, I was terrified.  I thought they were going to catch some nuance in my speech or gestures and go "Wait a second... you're acting like a sex-haver!  You are in so much trouble."  This didn't happen, but the feeling of guilty terror lingered.

And I think it was that guilty terror that led me to my paranoia.  I was so convinced that I had been bad and would be punished, I believed biology itself would punish me.  It didn't help that I'd grown up hearing about how pregnancy and STIs were "consequences" for sex.  Health class, parents, teachers, media, and peers had always talked about these things not as risks that adults have to manage, but as dire fates (or worse, humiliatingly comical fates) for sluts.  At age 15, I took a certain toxic-girl-hate pride in being Responsible and Pure.  At age 16, I'd had a penis inside me.

This nasty mess of emotions did nothing to stop me from having sex, of course.  There was a whole other mess of emotions telling me that you're undesirable and you're not growing up and you're not in a real relationship if you don't have sex, and those won out in the end.  (Plus I was really horny.)  And by "in the end," I mean "within two hours"--I had sex almost immediately the first time I found out a guy wanted to have sex with me.  So much for convincing kids to wait.  All I was convinced to do was have sex, but feel absolutely terrible about it.

But you can't say there was no deterrent effect, because I was powerfully deterred from seeking any kind of medical advice or testing.  That would be humiliating beyond measure, I was convinced.  It wouldn't feel like asking for help; it would feel like turning myself in.  Saying "I need an STD test" felt to me like saying "I'm a disobedient slut who probably got what she deserves," and I couldn't face that shame.  I'd rather just take my chances.  Even though I was terrified of my chances.

God we fuck up teenagers' heads.  We tell them that biological conditions are moral punishments and then we get all shocked when they don't practice rational risk management of biological conditions.  We teach them "sex is super desirable and all the cool kids do it, and it's hideously shameful and will destroy your life" and we wonder why they act an eensy bit neurotic about it.  If you tried to design a system for making sexually active kids confused and unsafe, you couldn't do much better than the American media and school system.

And for once, the answer is relatively simple.  Just talk about sex like it's a part of life.  Some people have sex and some people don't, because people are different. STIs aren't bad because they're Dirty Crotch Rot; they're bad because they're contagious illnesses like strep throat or whooping cough, and you can ask a doctor to check for and treat them just like you would with strep throat.  Unwanted pregnancy isn't a scarlet A; it's a mostly-preventable accident that sometimes occurs when people are going about their normal business of having sex. You can ask the school counselor about a variety of topics, including career planning, problems at home, questions about sex, or conflicts with teachers.

If we could just get the goddamn stick out of our collective ass and accept that sex is a human activity and teenagers are humans, maybe there wouldn't be quite so many plaintive "I don't understand my body and I'm confused and scared and I don't know anyone I can ask in person" messages flying out into the world.

Models of Sex.

When I was sixteen, my boyfriend Kevin brought me a vibrator.  (His mom had bought it, which... awwwwkward, but it was her well-intentioned effort to keep me from getting pregnant by her son. It didn't stop us having intercourse, but I didn't get pregnant so it all worked out in the end.)  The first time he used it, it was mind-blowing.  I'd never used a vibrator before, it happened to be an exceptionally powerful "back massager," and it was a goddamn revelation in sensation.  I came hard, immediately, and repeatedly.  I screamed and writhed and clutched his arm.

For about a minute.  Then he stopped.  He didn't look aroused.  He looked concerned.

"That was amazing!  Do it again!" I said, very happily.

"No," he said.  "I don't want to do any more of that."

Well okay then, that's certainly his decision to make.  We put the vibrator away and had a bunch of non-mechanically-assisted sex, which went fine.  When Kevin was about to leave for the night, I asked him to leave the vibrator behind, and he refused.  He told me he was going to throw it out.  I asked him, in roughly the tone of voice of a puppy that's just been told it can't go to Disneyland, why.

"I'm afraid it can pleasure you better than I can," he said.  So I couldn't have it.

Because I was sixteen, and meek, and naive, and did not have much power in the relationship, I said "oh okay," and then I burbled out a lot of nonsense about of course you pleasure me most of anything in the whole entire world, baby.  But even at sixteen and naive, I knew this was some bullshit.



What interests me now, at twenty-six (and still a bit meek but definitely not naive), is not that it was bullshit.  Telling me I'm not allowed to masturbate in certain ways because I might enjoy it more than The Mighty Penis is clear and obvious bullshit, now.  What interests me is why my boyfriend bought into that bullshit.

I believe it comes down to models.  There are many different ways to model sex, many answers to the questions "So, what exactly is sex? What is it for?"  I believe that once you know someone's answers to those questions, you can understand why their sexual choices make sense to them.

In the economic model, sex is a consumable good, produced by women and sold to men.  (And, in the nastiest implications of the model, sex can be "stolen" without losing value.)  In Thomas Macaulay Millar's performance model of sex, sex is like a cooperative musical performance, ephemeral and existing only in the moment of cooperation between performers.

I've seen people talk about sex in a maintenance model, in which sex is a task a women has to perform fairly regularly to keep her man contented in the relationship.  There's also an achievement model, in which the goal is to do the "naughtiest" or "sexiest" thing, regardless of whether you really like it or not--Cosmo espouses this a lot, and porn tends to encourage it.  And, famously, there's the competition model of sex, in which women are the mile-markers in a race men run against each other.

Or sex can be modeled as a cooperative sport, with the participants acting as teammates encouraging and challenging each other.  There's a communication model of sex, in which sex acts are a way for partners to express and strengthen their feelings for each other.  Personally, I tend toward almost a utilitarian model of sex, in which the goal is to work together to attain the greatest net pleasure.



Kevin's problem, I think, was that he had internalized a shitty macho-culture model of sex.  Going beyond "it's wrong to tell your girlfriend not to use a vibrator," why would it even make sense to tell your girlfriend not to use a vibrator?  In a utilitarian model of sex, it makes no sense--I gain fabulous pleasure, he experiences no harm to his body or his autonomy--this obviously ought to be a win-win, or at least a win-neutral, situation.

But in a competition model of sex, I was making him come in second place to a piece of plastic.  If he believed sex was about showing off his prowess, it was an embarrassment that his prowess couldn't compare to a machine--and it was as cruel and unfair as making a runner race against a motorcycle.

Because I believed that my pleasure was my pleasure, I thought the vibrator was harmless fun.  Because he believed that my pleasure was his measure as a man, he thought the vibrator would make him the loser in a race I didn't even know he was running.  It's no wonder he took it away.  He wasn't pointlessly depriving me of pleasure.  He was depriving me of pleasure because, in his model, he had to.



If I have a Grand Unified Theory Of Everything, it's this: I believe that people always do things that make sense to them.  Hard as it is to believe with all the hurting out there, almost nobody hurts others just to be a jerk.  So if you want to change human behavior on a grand scale, you can't tell people "stop being a jerk."  You have to dissect and then recreate their models of the world until being a jerk doesn't make sense.



[So here's the deal, scheduling-wise.  I'm going to try and have a post up every Tuesday night.  (Last week didn't go so well because Comcast accidentally cut off my cable for most of the week.)  Cosmocking is "extra", not one of the Tuesday posts, and I'll do other "extra" posts as time/inspiration allow.

Also, I just got this month's Cosmo, so that's coming up sometime this week, whee!]

Boiling Frogs and Family.

flickr user DonkeyHotey

I spent the weekend with my family.  It was not a pleasant experience.  It was an experience that made me wonder: "How did I ever live with these people for twenty years?"

Because I thought it was normal, of course.

The "boiling frog" experiment goes like this: throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, and of course it'll panic and immediately jump out.  Put a frog in a pot of cold water and slowly raise the temperature, and the frog will boil to death while never noticing anything's wrong.  (This isn't actually true, by the way.  Frogs in real life will jump out when the water gets hot, no matter how slow you go, because frogs are sensible like that.  But it makes a great metaphor.)

And the "boiling family" experiment goes like this: visit a family where every mundane conversation is an emotionally charged battle of wills and passive-aggressive posturing is the only way to express emotions, and you'll think "these people are fucked up!"  Grow up in a family like that, and you'll think "I'm fucked up!"

For a long time, I thought I would never have any social skills.  I just wasn't good at people.  Couldn't make friends, couldn't figure out when or how to talk, kept creeping out or annoying people without understanding why.  Then this weekend I had a little mini-revelation: I was bad at social skills because I never learned any at home.  (I am naturally awkward, but nowhere near as much as I thought I was.)  I had to learn things like "how to make small talk that isn't grossly inappropriate references to suicide" and "how to say what you want instead of giving bizarre hints and then screaming when people don't read your mind" starting at about age eighteen.  No wonder I was in my twenties before I could have such a thing as a casual conversation.



When you're immersed in an environment, especially when you're immersed in it from childhood, it takes a lot of time and distance to realize it was an environment, and not "just life."

It sounds like a sad or angry discovery, but it's kind of a wonderful one, because when you're in the frog-boiler you honestly believe that you're never going to be any happier.  That every relationship you'll have as an adult will be like the ones you grew up with.  That every time, in your entire life, that you knock over a glass of water, you will be screamed at and sometimes slapped for it, and this is right and normal and the only way to avoid it is to never be clumsy ever.

Finding out that this isn't so, that in the real world most people just go "oh darn, I'll get a towel," is one of the giant ongoing joys in my life.  And reorienting myself so that I expect people to go "oh darn, I'll get a towel" is one of the giant challenges in my life.

It's work, and work I definitely have not finished, to shake the habits and ways of coping I learned growing up.  (I still have way too much of the "conflict means violence so hide or cower at the first hint of conflict" stuck in my head, and a little bit of "people only tell you what they want via secret signals so constantly evaluate everything as a signal.")  It's also a tremendous source of power and confidence when I get it right.



...Yeah, I can't really connect this post to sex.  I mean, it's got lots to do with sex, considering how much the shift from "people communicate by incomprehensible hints followed by hissyfits" to "people communicate with goddamn words" has improved my sex life.  But I don't think I can work "vagina" into this one.

My next post will be all about vagina.

Everything gets better.

As I may or may not have bothered to mention, I've started classes in nursing school.  Classroom prerequisites this year, two years of nursing classes and clinicals, and if all goes well, I'll be 28 when I become an Actual Real Nurse For Real.

The weirdest, and best, part of going back to school as an adult is how terrifying the professors aren't.  I always used to think of professors as bosses who wanted me to work and could fire me, or (much worse) parents who wanted me to be good and could punish me.  They're not.  They're working for me. I don't mean that in the sense of "you're working for me, so give me an A," but in the sense of "you're working for me, so give me the knowledge and skills I'm buying from you."  My Microbiology professor isn't an authority over me; he's someone who knows more about microbiology than me so I'm paying him to tell me about it.

I still need a good grade, of course; and I still have some anxiety about that.  But it's nothing like the anxiety I felt as a teenager.  It's a matter of "I'll learn the stuff and I'll tell them what I learned," not of facing judgement.  I wouldn't say that school is easier now--but it doesn't scare me.

---

Sex with Rowdy last night was amazing.  Amazing like a drug, amazing like the physicality of it didn't even matter any more--I was flying.  I slipped into a state where everything felt good.  He fucked me and it felt good; he kissed me and it felt good; he bit me and it felt good; he touched me and it felt good. I was moaning and squirming every time he did anything to me, and he did oh so many things.

We didn't have sex this good a year ago.  We had good sex, but it wasn't like this.  We didn't know each other's bodies and minds well enough.  It's the difference between driving a good car--and driving your good car, the one where you know exactly how tightly it takes every curve, exactly how it responds to every gram of force on the pedals.

Our sex just keeps getting better.

I was still flying when I fell asleep, his whole body wrapped around mine.

---

Yesterday, I went and got a cup of coffee between classes.  I asked the coffee lady for a medium drip coffee, she told me "that'll be a dollar thirty," I gave her a dollar thirty, and I took my coffee and went to class.

I know this sounds like a really, really pointless story.  But what struck me is how easy it all was. Specifically, how much easier it was.  Even such a minor transaction used to be fraught with weird anxiety for me--anxiety I would never admit to, because how can you admit something like "I have great difficulty with the social nuances of buying a cup of coffee"?

I didn't know what kind of coffee I was supposed to order, or how I was supposed to phrase the order. Should I call it "java" or "joe" to show I was a cool, experienced coffee drinker, or should I use precisely the name on the menu?  Were there certain drinks that only dorks ordered?  Would it be rude to act chummy with the coffee lady, or rude to not act chummy with her?  If I fumbled my change and she got impatient with me, did that mean she hated me?  Could I ever show my face again at the coffee stand if I made the coffee lady hate me?

These goofy-ass things tormented me when I was about eighteen.  It feels almost magical that they don't any more.  Not by figuring out all the secret social codes, but by figuring out that there aren't any secret codes, I became one of the cool, experienced coffee drinkers.

I can order coffee in total comfort now.  It's a wonderful feeling of power.  Eighteen-year-old me would never have believed it.

---

I'm taking Human Growth and Development right now.  The professor's in his late fifties or early sixties, and told us that in his experience, each stage of life is better than the last one.

So far, it's true.

I don't get bullied any more--I take for granted that I won't get bullied any more--but that's the least of it. As I've gotten older, gotten more established in my relationship, gotten more perspective on the world, gotten more comfortable in my body and my life, everything has gotten better.

The biggest secret we keep from young people is that being an adult is actually pretty freaking awesome.



Also, I can have pizza whenever I want.  I don't even like pizza that much though. We have secret adult foods that are better than pizza.

Survivor.

temporarily locked post, sorry

Four years!

Today is my fourth bloggiversary! That's 1264 posts spanning across 5 homes, 4 relationships, 3 jobs, a move across the country, and a massive refocus from "my vagina: let me tell you about it" to "my vagina: it is a tool for liberation." Also, 43 issues of Cosmo.

I'm looking back at my archives from the very beginning, and it strikes me, to the point of cringing, just how much I've changed. Changing minds is something I wonder about a lot--sometimes I worry it can't be done at all, that people who are now assholes will be forever assholes.

So it's good to see that I used to be an asshole. Not a complete one, but I used to be a very different person, and I learned and changed. There was no one moment where someone said something to me that made me go "holy shit, I've been wrong all along, and I must change everything!" Instead, it was water dripping on a stone; over time, though I often looked very resistant, I was changing bit by little bit until I'm so different I don't feel like the early entries are my own voice any more. (And not just because I used to throw out "lame, retarded, crazy" insults like they were candy. Sorry about that.)



I mean, look at this asshole:
I feel like sexuality has no legitimacy unless you're hot. If you're hot it's sexy, if you're ugly it's just ridiculous.
Sure, she admits that she's voicing her own insecurities, but those insecurities are leaking out into judgement of everybody on some completely unspoken beauty standard, and people who don't meet that... aren't allowed to be sexual? Christ, past-Holly.

Or, oh jeez, what was she thinking?
There's a well-known sex/BDSM club with a relatively low skeeve factor in town and I've visited a couple times. I suppose I should join but I just never make the commitment. Partly because the median age is kind of "hi there, dad," but partly because I don't want a community. I like being a little furtive, a little unhealthy, a little freaky. Nothing ruins the illusion of being an outlaw like going to a "spanking enthusiasts social."
Not only is she being incredibly snobby about age (and not even correct about the demographics, as it turns out), but she's so dedicated to feeling like an "outlaw" that she won't deign to talk to her own community and get actual friends and allies who understand what she's doing. Is her little fantasy really more important than learning anything or connecting to anybody? Cripes.

And then there's this post where she really gets going:
Call me a rich white het cis privilegebunny, but I don't feel very oppressed. Sometimes insulted, sometimes worried, sometimes concerned for the oppression of people in other places, but in my own life I just don't feel the boot on my neck. At work, at school, socially, nobody acts like I'm less than human or tries to enforce the Patriarchy on me directly. For me, in my daily life, I don't feel like being female is difficult or painful.
I still have my issues with the concept of "privilege," but I don't just disdainfully make fun of it and then deny that there's any oppression of women as well. I mean, we've got the vote and everything, right? What more could you need once they let you vote?

Overall, though, there's less in the old entries that's "asshole," and more that's just "ouch":
Sometimes I think that if I were strong enough to say "I'm not seeing you unless you treat me well, and I'm not fucking you unless you treat me like a goddamn princess," my relationships would go a lot better. But the problem is that I'm so damn happy to be seeing/fucking the guys at all, I can't stand to withhold it for any reason.
It's incredibly clear that she knew from the beginning that Benny was treating her horribly. I thought there was a "honeymoon," some sort of time when the relationship was going well, but there really wasn't. The first entries about him make it clear that he's a huge jerk but at least he'll deign to fuck her. That she stuck with him for years until he actually assaulted her is... a major source of shame for me and frankly one of the reasons I'm hesitant to talk much about it. I don't think she "should have seen it coming"--who does?--but I think she should have long since dumped him for all the other reasons.

I can't believe she went and just threw this in as an embarrassed little parenthetical (well, I can, but I feel terrible for her):
(Benny, always happy to be on the worse side of any comparison, once actually fucked me against a "no," and not in scene or anything--we were just hanging out naked in bed and he got on me and I wasn't really ready and said so and he started anyway. Again, it was mere moments until things got sorted out, but... I could swear I was audible the first time, goddammit.)
Holy shit, past-Holly.



I'm not here to lick the wounds of my past. I'm here to marvel at just how much growth and change and learning is possible. I'm here because what I said here was my belief and no longer is:
I've been a little wary of feminism, because my initial exposure was way too academic and way too unrealistic. No, I don't feel that my life is unbearably suffused with phallic energy, and no, I don't believe that the world used to be a utopian matriarchy, and no, I don't think that having sex with boys--including nasty filthy sex, including sex on camera--is betraying the Sisters.
So I stand as living proof that people aren't lost causes if they don't agree with you, and they aren't lost causes if you try to teach them and they spit it back at you. Change is something that happens on a person's own schedule and not on yours, and often when they do change you won't even hear about it, but it happens. People really can learn.



I hope that what I'm writing now will embarrass the hell out of me in another four years.

Feels good.

When we had D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse something something don't do it kids) at my elementary school, they talked about reasons kids might start doing drugs: peer pressure, low self-esteem, media glamorization, dealers getting you hooked. There was one glaring, obvious omission from that list and from every other discussion in D.A.R.E. - drugs get you high.

Drugs, at least all the ones I've tried, feel good. Alcohol helps you laugh and socialize more easily. Cigarettes simultaneously wake you up and calm you down. Amphetamines make you euphoric and energetic (and skinny). Opiates make you utterly relax and feel like all is right with the world. Marijuana makes you think that you're really smart and deep and insightful, and so is everyone else here, oh my god we are like so connected you know right now and we're like connected to the Earth too you know, maybe connection itself is what connects us, whoa.

Obviously, I'm not saying to do drugs. Everything listed above comes with catch-22s ranging from "you should do it with caution and infrequently" to "you could seriously die." But I'm acknowledging that the temptation is real--that although they're not good for you, even dangerous drugs (maybe especially those) feel good. Because you just look like a liar who can't face up to the obvious if you don't admit that. The conversation on pros and cons is hopelessly stifled if you can't be honest about the pros.



When I had my first sex ed class, they told me that the man would get an erection and put it in the woman's vagina. (They did not tell me about other configurations, which is kind of a shame considering how much those other configurations have become a part of my life. It's like taking an Auto Shop class that has a moral stance against any discussion of the radiator.) What they didn't tell me was why people would do such a thing. To have kids, okay, and... peer pressure? Low self-esteem? Media glamorization? Dealers?

By the time sex ed rolled around again, I'd gone through puberty. (And gotten an Internet connection.) I understood quite well now. And I also understood that the teacher, being post-pubescent and married herself, probably was also familiar with those funny feelings that make you want to do the baby thing. And yet those funny feelings didn't come up at all in sex ed class this time either. In a room full of people who more or less all knew full well what it feels like to have a boner or get wet or masturbate or have a wet dream, we spent an entire semester pretending to wonder why people would do such a thing. Peer pressure, perhaps...



This stalwart denial of the bleeding obvious is still following me around as an adult. Almost every discussion about sex--even the ones by the "good guys"--seems to footnote pleasure if it doesn't ignore it altogether. We can talk about freedom and safety, but we rarely get direct about what exactly we want to be free and safe to do, and why it matters so much to us. Why am I kinky, why am I poly, why am I slutty, why do I support sexual diversity and self-expression, why do I think and write and talk about sex all the time?

Gosh. Peer pressure?

Barnacle Bill.

When I was in high school, they showed us a slideshow of various sexually transmitted infections. All of the pictures were outrageously gruesome and their sole purpose was to scare us out of having sex. Everything was red and swollen and dripping and crusted and ew--because sex is dirty and if you have sex you'll be dirty, kids! There was one in particular they called "Barnacle Bill." It was a penis covered in warts--warts upon warts upon warts until it didn't look like a penis anymore. Poor Bill was nothing but barnacles. We laughed but we also cringed. "Now who in this class thinks it's a good idea to have sex?"

The other day at work, I was leafing through a dermatology textbook. Right there, somewhere in "Infections and Infestations," was old Barnacle Bill! It was the very same picture. Except this time, it had a caption.

Human papillomavirus in an immunosuppressed patient. Patient suffered from dementia and was unaware of the progress of the infection.

Oh.

That changes the moral of the story a bit, doesn't it? It's no longer a matter of "this is what sluts look like under their slutty pants!" It's more like "sometimes life is cruel for no good reason."

Sometimes life is cruel for no good reason, and then after you're (probably) dead someone uses the most embarrassing picture imaginable of your body to lie to schoolkids and make them associate pleasure with filth.

I'm sorry, Barnacle Bill.

When love is more destructive than sex.

When I was 19, I had casual sex with a much older man for no good reason. I kind of regret it, but it didn't really hurt me; it was just sort of awkward and embarrassing. I thought it would be fun and it wasn't fun; but whatever, I could say the same thing about the Transformers movie. It wasn't coerced or painful, and a day later I was over it.

When I was 15, I fell in love with an older man. It was a huge fucking mess. He never had much connection with me except for sex, but I missed classes to be with him, got reported as a missing person when I was with him, my parents filed a restraining order against him, they tried to charge him with statutory rape, and the drama built to the one and only time in my life when I've threatened suicide. Basically, any kind of up that can be fucked, was.

I thought of these two men when I read that 51-year-old Doug Hutchinson married a 16-year-old, and I realized exactly why I was horrified.

I don't think an older person having sex with a teenager is that bad. It's kind of icky to me, but if it's consensual and legal, you have the right to be icky.

I think an older person saying "I love you" to a teenager is horrifically wrong.

Of course there's a special place in Hell for people who do this intentionally just to get some of that hot teenager sex, but I think it's wrong even if it's true. Because what a teenager thinks of as "love" is very rarely the same thing an adult means by that word. I might only be speaking for white suburban middle-class girls here, but at least in my experience, teenage love is stupid. It's idealized, over-dramatic, volatile, impractical, and often destructive. When two teenagers fall in love, they may do stupid things, but they really didn't know any better. An adult should know better.

I don't think it's always about sex, either. I think the experience of being idealized by someone, having them treat you like you're Edward Cullen and you're made of unicorn kisses and it's so cool that you have a car, can be an even bigger draw for adults who aren't very good at coping with other adults--or are so narcissistic that they don't see why they should have to.

When I was a teenager, I thought True Love conquered all. I thought if it was really True maybe it would last forever and we'd get married and have babies and a house of our own. I wanted to be by my True Love's side all the time, damn the damage to the rest of my life--in fact, I even thought the damage was sort of romantic, because it meant I was sacrificing for Love. I thought that True Love means thinking that your Lover is perfect and worshipping them. And if he asked me to do things I didn't want to (rarely sexual, more often in terms of disrupting my studies and friendships), saying "no" wouldn't be very Loving, would it?

I slept on his floor. We'd have sex, and he told me he wasn't comfortable sharing a bed, so I slept on the wooden floor next to his bed, like a dog. I don't want to make him out to be a complete monster here; I could have gone out and slept on the couch, but I preferred the floor. At 15, that was my idea of Love.

It took me quite a few years, and getting burned rather badly, and a whole lot of learning and thinking, to get to the point where I could be cool about love. To go from saying "I love you so much I'd jump in front of a train for you" to saying "I love you so much that I trust you to get off the goddamn tracks." To be able to argue with someone--and not back down, and maybe not ever completely resolve it--and still love them. To be able to say "no, I don't want to do this" (and I'm not just talking about sex acts; I'm also talking about "can you take the day off Tuesday to help me out?") and know that real love, if not True Love, is when they say "well, that's a bummer for me, but I understand you have a life too."

When I read about Doug Hutchinson marrying a 16-year-old, I don't worry that it's "gross" or that they're in different "leagues" or even that they won't have much to talk about over the dinner table. I worry that she's sleeping on his floor.



(Metaphorically. You guys.)

Growing up ugly.

I was, from about the time that appearance mattered (about middle school) up until I got into the kink scene, an ugly kid. Not three-eyes-ugly, but there were some things going against me: I've been fat since I was a baby, I had no idea how to dress myself, I have really weird hair, I hit puberty relatively late, and I'd skipped so many grades I was three years younger than everyone in my class. So when I got to high school, everyone else was in hot pink belly shirts and long blond ponytails and had breasts, and I was in an XXL denim shirt with hair like a tumbleweed and two years away from even a trainer bra.

I didn't get laid in high school. (Admittedly I was fifteen when I graduated. But still, when you're twelve years old and people tell you that you're unfuckable, you don't have the perspective to go "duh, I'm a child." I was devastated.) I had a brief, clandestine, and extremely chaste thing with another girl at the absolute bottom of the social ladder and I graduated.

And now, with the gift of hindsight and the much larger gift of never having to relive those days, I'm kind of glad. Being an ugly kid taught me a lot. Things like:

I am horny.
Duh, right? But never really going through the "boys will want you now" phase means that I got to experience my own horniness as a thing completely separate from male desire. Being sexually frustrated for years on end is no fun, but it teaches you to appreciate the realness of your own sex drive like nothing else. How could I buy into crap about "girls only put out for money/emotional stuff/social status" when my own vagina was going nuts with the desire just to get some goddamn cock already?

I can make the first move.
I did eventually get laid, at age 15, which may not sound like "eventually" to you, but for me it was the culmination of an absolute lifetime of frustration. I didn't do it by sitting around looking pretty and waiting for a boy to approach me. I had a crush on a male friend and I came on to him pretty hard. Even after we were sexual, having intercourse was my decision and something that I planned. I bought the condoms and I started out on top of him. The fact that boys weren't showing up at my doorstep with Boyfriend Applications didn't mean I had to hide in a hole; I just had to bypass this whole bullshit "boys approach, girls consent" protocol and go out there to work out some handshake deals with some sexy boys.

I am more than my looks.
So I wasn't pretty, or even socially acceptable, in high school. That didn't mean that I didn't exist. I had friends--"loser" friends, sure, but friends I loved absolutely dearly--my academic achievements were frankly amazing, and I generally had a full life that I was reasonably successful at. I didn't spend my time not-getting-laid but had a hell of a lot else to occupy myself with. I spent a summer before I'd even been kissed planting trees in clearcuts in the Cascades. I had never touched a penis when I got a 1580 (out of 1600) on the SAT. While I did feel down about not being sexy, I had a self-worth that had nothing to do with sex.

Sexy has nothing to do with sex.
When I started having sex, I was not appreciably hotter than I'd been before. Puberty had left me with small mismatched breasts and that was about it; I still had the body of a very small refrigerator with an untrimmed bush on top. And the sex was fucking amazing. Turns out that I can come from vaginal penetration just the way they claim women can't. Maybe "can come" is understating it. I can come fast, hard, and loud, over and over again. I wasn't sexy and my boyfriend wasn't sexy, but the actual sex we had was fantastic. I don't know if the sex bikini models have is good or not, but I don't think it could be much better.

When people give you shit, it's not because you deserve it, it's because they're shit-givers.
In high school, I got bullied a lot. People would openly make fun of me in the hallways. They'd chuck stuff at me from their cars when I was walking home. I have vivid memories of two guys in my freshman math class loudly discussing the money they'd pay to fuck various girls, then ending it on "Holly? Twelve cents." (Realizing how many things are fucked-up about that story is like one of those "count the triangles" pictures.) People spit in my food, they Sharpied my clothes, they threw trash in my hair, and at one point a group of kids actually threatened to set me on fire.

Then I got to college, and the relief was amazing. People in general didn't necessarily like me, but they were decent. Being unpopular meant that you didn't get invited to parties, not that you got passed love notes with "ha ha just kidding you are an ugly pig" inside. I realized this wasn't because I was better-looking or more "confident" or whatever. It was because college students are adults and they don't do that shit.

I didn't report most of the things that happened to me in high school because I was embarrassed to. I felt like any adult I told would respond with some polite version of either "and you just let them do this and didn't say anything?" or "well, things like this are going to keep happening until you get some confidence and learn to fit in better." It was only when the bullying stopped that I realized it wasn't about me. It wasn't the universe at large meting out things I had earned. It was just a bunch of fucked-up little assholes.

Some of those same kids also shot several pet bunnies and cats in my neighborhood. I'm glad I at least had the perspective not to react with "wow, those bunnies must have really sucked."

It gets better.
This isn't the Ugly Duckling story. I have a little bit more style and social skills now, but I'm no swan. I never did grow nice tits. I never did lose the weight. I didn't even get my hair under control. But nonetheless I grew up. And although I don't think I got pretty, I got to feeling pretty. I became first unafraid to wear normal clothes (i.e., the correct size instead of XXL, colors and designs other than "please don't notice me"), then unafraid to be naked when the situation called for it. I stopped trying to hide my belly during sex. I stopped apologizing for my appearance. I started expecting people to treat me decently.

For the longest time, I had this fantasy that I'd be beautiful someday. That I was just in my "awkward stage" and then one of these years I'd really get my shit together and lose 80 pounds and my hair would be straight and long and blonde and my face would be all lips and eyelashes and cheekbones. I was just a weirdo right now, but around 25 I'd have lots of friends and be married and own a house and maybe be pregnant and I'd have a good job as vice-president of something.

Well... I have lots of friends. Besides that, no, not so much. No conventionality, no perfect fitting in, not much conventional "success," and definitely no rapid settling-down into suburban placidity. I didn't get the life I wanted.

I got something way better.

Baby's First Cosmocking!

I was sorting out my old personal papers today, and I came across some comics I drew in 2000, at age 14. (No scan, because the one in question is almost all text, and my handwriting in high school was... something. My handwriting's bad now, but was I holding the pen in my teeth? Had I ever even seen the Latin alphabet? Trust me, you're much better off with a transcription.)



Female character holds up a copy of "Cosmo Girl."
F: Lookit this: "What his kisses really mean." It's about finding if your boyfriend really likes you from how he kisses you.
Male character: Jeez. That is scary. Think you can do better?
F: Of course!

Magazine cover mockup, with female character in a "Girl Power!" top surrounded by headlines.

POPULAR GIRL
The magazine that would never advocate sex, drugs, violence, or anything else that all the cool people do.



Are you insecure? Take our quiz and find out!
-----------
Plastic surgery: a natural, healthy step in every teenager's life
-----------
How to act dumber than you actually are
-----------
George W. Bush vs. Al Gore: Which one would be a cuter President?
-----------
How to decipher "Guyspeak?" Innocent comments reveal his true thoughts!
-----------
How to cope with a breakup: a 3-month heartbreak calendar
-----------
Perfect hair in under 3 hours
-----------
Do you have a crush on him? The 47-part quiz continues
-----------
How to pretend to be scared at horror flicks
-----------
Platonic friends: Myth, lie, or delusion?



Man, age 14, not exactly a polished satirist, but I had the exact same bugs up my ass about these magazines. I'm so proud of little proto-Holly.

Punnett squares.

In my tenth grade biology class, while we were learning about genetics, our teacher gave us an interesting take-home assignment. It was a list of genetic traits where the inheritance is relatively simple in humans--attached vs. unattached earlobes, curlable vs. uncurlable tongue, that kind of thing--and instructions to document which we had and which each of our parents had.

The awkwardness this might cause adopted kids, or kids who had no contact with one parent, was evident at the time and the teacher did kind of skate around it with a "well, just list your traits if there's, like, an issue." But I didn't realize until just now why else it might have been a bad idea.

"Mommy, if you're blood type A, and daddy is type O, why am I type AB?"

Whatever it is that you might find out about your family, that's a hell of a way to find out.

Tales from the set.

Before I was an EMT, before I was a sexblogger, but considerably after I was a pervert, I spent several months working as propmaster and assistant art director on an independent horror film. A very independent horror film. (Because I'm about to dish dirt, some of which may be of dubious veracity, and because my real name and the real names of the dirted are in the credits, I can't post the title. Just think of it as Evil Dead, only without the breakout success or the Bruce Campbell.)

----

It was shot in northern Washington State, up near the Canadian border. Two of the producers, a couple with Actual Hollywood Experience, housed me in their guest room and took me under their wing as a sort of surrogate daughter--a sometimes cluelessly awkward daughter, but a dreadfully earnest and energetic worker with an almost puppylike devotion to my surrogate producer-parents.

The other producer--let's say "Muffy"--was woman with extremely rich parents whom she still lived with, and it was their money she put into the project. She even made her mom cook most of the "catering" for the crew. (At other times, we were fed by a real catering company--which gave us the leftovers from various weddings and events.) She also cast herself as the female lead, and pushed for the script to be the Muffy Story Featuring Muffy.

Other characters on the film:
-The director, who used a pseudonym comparable to "Robert Nightshade" and insisted that it be used exclusively on the set, although his actual name was more like Bobby Shmuckler. He was most notorious for asking the camera operator to widen out a bit on a bikini shoot, because, well, "Uncle Bobby likes the feet." He was also notorious for... I'll get to that.
-A Big Name Hollywood Actor from a very famous TV series who made our lives hell by being usually stoned, sometimes drunk, and constantly obnoxious. No-name community theater actors would painfully and precisely soldier through take after take until he finally deigned to say something sort of close to his lines. Midway through the production he unexpectedly shaved his head, which created a serious continuity problem for us. We solved it by painting his head brown.
-An endless supply of identical blonde Canadian model-actress-whatevers, who showed up, cried about having to do a nude scene, did a nude scene, died, and went back to Canada.
-Our "stunt coordinator," who ended up doing more security and general grunt work than stunts, and was a Special Ops veteran and Hell's Angel (I'm still fairly convinced he really was both) who had a lot of stories about killing people. Once we were startled by a sudden noise outside, and he leapt to the window, literally growling and pacing like an animal.

---

Fully aware that he had neither a great story nor lush visuals to sell, Bobby Schmuckler wrote in plenty of lush visuals of the other kind. There were a lot of nude scenes on the film. On one of them, we were between shots and the Canadian model-actress-whatever was wandering around in that fluffy white bathrobe that signifies "nude scene" in the movie world.

We were shooting in an actual abandoned asylum. A small corner of it had been niced up and secured for production purposes, but the rest of this vast building was empty and crumbling. Excursions through it always brought up surprises--a huge number of dead cats (one with three eyes), an operating room where lobotomies were performed, squatter nests, places where the walls were entirely broken through and plants grew into the building, and for some reason, one room with a giant knee-deep pile of broken glass. It was also so thoroughly, so blatantly haunted as to make me believe in haunting. But although this building was abandoned, two other facilities were still active on the campus: a center for troubled youth, and a Level 3 sex offender facility.

During filming, one of the sex offenders snuck into the facility kitchen, covered himself entirely in aluminum foil, and escaped. He was later caught on the other side of our set, still foil-wrapped for freshness. Not one of us had noticed him.

Anyway. Back to this nude scene. The lights for the next shot were taking a while to set up, and the model-actress-whatever wandered off in her bathrobe. She went to the fence of the sex-offender facility, where the guys were out in the yard, and gave them all an eyeful.

And that's how our movie production caused a prison riot.

The model-actress-whatever was sent back to Canada and our makeup artist was recast in the part.

---

As propmaster, I had many... unique... tasks on the film. One of my favorite was being asked to craft a realistic poop ("get me some Taco Bell and I'll craft that for ya"), then being asked to make it edible. Tootsie Rolls and some patient, truly loving sculpting saved the day.

There was also the problem of a tunnel that was supposed to be yards and yards long, but was, in reality, maybe fifteen feet. We put up pipes in the background and rearranged them for each shot, so the actress ran past the same wall with different pipes three or four times. It kinda worked.

Our best props failure came when it was time to kill off one of our favorite actors, a local theater guy who'd always been exceptionally helpful and decent to the crew. As our twisted way of giving him a good sendoff, we resolved to give him the messiest, nastiest death in the movie. We decided to use a cannister of compressed air and literally gallons of fake blood to create a spectacular arterial spray. On the second try, the rig worked perfectly and the spray was enormous, ceiling-staining, red-raining, beautiful.

On the first try, during testing out in the parking lot, we over-pressurized the cannister and it exploded. No one was seriously injured, but boy, did it look bad.

---

Another casting problem concerned the main monster of the movie, an evil female ghost. Our first actress disappeared. Our second actress drunkenly climbed a lamppost and swung from the top, then disappeared. (I mean, not immediately. But like the next day.) Our third actress disappeared. At his wits' end, or maybe just seizing the moment, Bobby Schmuckler decided to cast the only performer he could really rely on: himself.

He took this role very seriously. He got fitted for a bra. Although the ghost only appears in shadows and flashes and wears a floor-length dress anyway, he demanded the makeup girl shave his entire body. (They later ended up dating.) With a flowing wig, ruby red lips and pale cheeks, and long acrylic fingernails, he made a darling ghost. Although it could be hard to take him seriously when he directed in costume.

---

Places we set off fire alarms on this movie: the asylum, the public library, the best hotel in town at midnight, and the producer's house. But the only one that we actually set on fire was the asylum. It didn't burn down or anything. It was just, you know, a little bit on fire.

---

Amazingly, the movie was finished and distributed and I now own the DVD. Muffy took over the editing (via the editor's penis, you heard it here, folks) and it was made into the Muffy Story Featuring Muffy, but there's still plenty of drag-monster action, Canadian titties, and for me, so many happy and strange memories. It's kind of a terrible and nonsensical movie, but even to an outsider it has that wild, improvised, 3 AM, let's-put-on-a-show spirit in it, and I love it.

The Fear.

I get a little bit terrified when I know I'm going to have sex later. When I was younger, it was stomach-churning (literally; I lost 15 pounds from pre-sex puking during my first relationship), but even now, knowing that I'm on my way to fuck someone gives me a weird sense of nervousness.

It's emotional, not cognitive; I'm not afraid of anything in particular. I don't think of bad scenarios, I just feel my stomach knot up and my hands shake. I have to push through that feeling to go ahead with the sex. Once things start, once we're past the first couple kisses, the feeling disappears. But it's almost always there beforehand, no matter how well I know my partner or how many times we've done it.

In Mary Roach's Bonk, there's a compelling description of a young female monkey, in her first heat, making advances to an older dominant male. She's very small and very low-ranking and thus absolutely terrified of both the male and his mate, but she's also experiencing desire for the first time in her life. So she screws up her courage and makes the smallest, subtlest gestures toward him, sitting a little closer to him than usual, sliding a hand slightly toward him, her combination of fear and lust just this side of paralyzing and lust only barely winning out. I can sympathize with that little monkey.

This is the sort of thing that comes to me when I hear stereotypes about women being supremely sexually powerful, about us using our sexuality to pull men's strings--me, freshman year of college, cheerfully taking--or making!--a "hey baby why doncha come over" phone call from my boyfriend, then puking in the bushes because my stomach wouldn't even let me get to a bathroom. And then cleaning myself up and going over anyway, because I just wanted it that bad.

I was a young girl dating an older man and frequently initiating sex with him--shouldn't I have been a minx, a vixen, a little seductress? Shouldn't I have been calmly, almost smugly doling it out to him at my leisure? There's nothing in romance novels and nothing in Cosmo (and wow, definitely nothing in the PUA world) about being so nervous you puke and so horny you rinse out your mouth and fuck him anyway.

It wasn't just that relationship. I've got a better handle on my stomach these days, but I still feel the fear every time. It's a quiver through my whole body. I don't know exactly where it comes from, but it has a grip on me from the moment I know I'm having sex soon, to the moment the sex actually starts.

It's all very well to say "women have desire!" But I, at least, have crazy-making desire; I have desire that overpowers fear and common sense and sometimes common decency. My attitude toward sex isn't "I can take it or leave it, so I should get something out of it"--it's "oh God I want it so bad I can't stand it." I want it so bad that I shake, and embrace a man with shaking arms, and at least I have the goddamn insight not to imagine that he's some stone-souled cruel overlord doing this to me deliberately.

First Spanking.

I was sixteen. At the time, I didn't identify as kinky--I didn't even know what kinky was. I was still a prude in some ways, and things like anal sex or group sex or even one-night-stands were firmly in the "ooh, I would never" category for me.

But Kevin had awoken a monster in me. He was the first to fuck me, and once I got used to it, I didn't want to stop. Kevin was not a good person, but he was a good fuck, in a mostly-missionary sort of way.

(Digression: I love missionary. I don't want to make it some synonym for "boring," because missionary is comfortable and intimate and feels fucking fantastic. I love having a man's weight on me and I love wrapping my legs around his ass or planting my feet and grinding up against him. That said... Kevin didn't do much besides missionary.)

One day in early summer, near the end of our relationship, we had the house to ourselves all day. We started fucking missionary, and he couldn't come. It would fit the narrative better if it was mediocre for me, but actually it was amazing. We did it slow and close, belly on belly, chest on chest, cheeks pressed together like slow dancers. His cock was finding new spots inside me and I was coming, over and over, quick little orgasms, shuddering against him. I couldn't stop moaning, my hips turning in slow circles against his thrusts. And it just went on. Minutes were like hours, but I think it really was an hour. Eventually he just stopped. It was amazing but he couldn't finish.

We lay in bed for a while, quietly, him stroking my breasts and starting into space, a little frustrated but peaceful. His cat jumped up on the bed, walked delicately between our naked bodies, rubbed her head on each of us, and jumped down again. "Would you spank me?" I asked Kevin. It was the first time I'd asked for anything like that, but he was game.

I can remember every detail very clearly. I crouched down on knees and elbows and he stood beside the bed. His first touch was tentative, rapid gentle little slaps. Not like that, I told him. Go for it. And he did. He smacked my ass and the sound seemed to fill the house. I don't remember it hurting at all, but my ass was hot and pink afterwards. Kevin spanked me again, and again, my sharp little intakes of breath with each blow becoming moans.

Then he started fingering me. There's two ways men finger women--the tentative, intimate way with one or two fingers curling from the front into my pussy, and the way that just means fucking, where the hand is straight and brutal and the force begins at his shoulder. This was the second. With his fingers in me he kept spanking, hard, and I came so hard, harder than I ever had before, and I screamed.

I turned up and grabbed him, and kissed him hard, and dragged him down on the bed. "Now," I said and meant it. I got on top of him and I started fucking him. It wasn't cowgirl but missionary upside-down; I lay over his body and we were face to face as I slid slowly up and down his cock.

And I leaned down to his ear and I whispered terrible things. Things I had never thought or felt before. I told him that I wanted him to suffer. I knew he couldn't come and I didn't care. I would fuck him for hours and leave him in agony, that was just fine, because I was using his cock now. He was just the man attached to my cock and he meant nothing to me.

Reverse psychology, although I hadn't planned it: he started coming. He grabbed my hips and made me fuck him the way he wanted, hard and fast, and I started coming and we were both screaming together and at the instant of both our orgasms he bit me hard on the shoulder, drawing blood, and the pain felt like another orgasm again.

The next week we broke up. Unrelated reasons. We never had that kind of sex again.

Socially Awkward.

I used to be a very, very socially awkward child. Not "I couldn't ask out my crush" socially awkward--this was the real thing. I would, literally, crawl around on all fours pretending to be a cat, or roll around on the floor of the classroom making my markers walk like people on the carpet. In middle school. And I wasn't just eccentric but absolutely terrible at making friends--I've gone several years of my life with literally zero friends. In 7th and 9th grades, and my freshman and sophomore year of college, I didn't know anyone well enough to go over to their house or have them at mine even once.

Let me put this in some perspective, something that will partially explain it: I skipped 3 grades. 4th, 8th, and 11th. I was 15 when I graduated high school, 19 when I graduated college. Yeah, yeah, supergenius, got in the paper, awesome, except for this: if you were in college, and there was a 15-year-old in your dorm (a really weird one who would do things like stick needles through her hands and walk around going "hey look!" to people) which parties would you invite her to?

I don't want to blame it all on circumstances, though; I was a social moron. I was never socially phobic or antisocial--I always wanted to be liked--but until about age 20 I had absolutely no idea how. I was simultaneously so loud and inappropriate that people cringed, and so meek and shy that I could never ask someone to do anything social with me.

I also realize, although I was largely oblivious at the time, that my appearance reflected my general eccentricity. I wore nothing but relaxed-fit jeans and solid-colored baggy t-shirts until I was maybe 19. I had some sort of incomprehensible moral objection to using any products on my hair or any makeup on my face until about the same time, and my standing order at Supercuts was "as short as you can make it and I still look like a girl."

The worst part, though, was I simply didn't know how to hold a conversation. For many years something as simple as phoning the registrar's office to ask a question was a daunting task. And talking socially? Ugh. My two modes were "total silence" and "HI I LIKE CATS DO YOU LIKE CATS I LIKE CATS AND ALSO WOLVES I SHOULD BE A CAT WOLF MEOW AHWOOO HA HA."



But here's the interesting part of this sob story: I got better.

It's still an ongoing process, but around age 20 I started being able to talk to people. I started dressing and wearing my hair normally, and I started attending social events. I started dating guys who weren't weirdos. I started having a lot more friends. Maybe most significantly, I started being able to understand how people reacted to a behavior, and became able to predict in advance whether something would go over well. My struggles went from "why don't they like me yelling POOP when other people are talking, poop is funny" to "should we hug or just shake hands?" I wasn't unable to learn social cues after all; I was just very, very slow.



I still embarrass myself more than I think normal people do. I'm still learning to find the line between being meek and being self-centered, and I know I cross it all the time. I can't always tell when I'm taking a joke too far or when I'm not taking a friendly or sexy advance far enough. The worst part, right now, is the paranoia: did I just do something terrible and they're just humoring me to be polite? Will I only know I was wrong when I don't get invited back ever again? Will I never know but secretly they all think I'm a floor-crawling Special Child?

(I was crawling on the floor last night, too, but I don't usually, it was kind of a silly semi-kinky thing--I was only following orders!--and other people were playing along, so I think it was okay. I'm honestly uncertain though.)

But even that is fading, it's more of a joke by now. I'm getting, at age 24, to be a regular sort of person. I look regular, I talk regular, I can eat lunch with you or come to your party and not be That Girl. I can go on first dates and job interviews and by the end of them the person will actually like me. I think I'm emotionally ready for high school now.



How this impacted my sex life is probably another entire post (or this entire blog, really), but clearly there was a big-time impact. From fucking only the weirdest freaks during my freak years, to developing bizarre fantasies through my eccentricity, to the sudden and sometimes overwhelming explosion of possibilities as I become socially competent, the story of my social awkwardness is all tangled up in my sex life.

I don't want to get all bootstrappy, to be "I did it so can anyone!" about my recovery from weirdness, because a lot of people in my situation have real disorders and bigger challenges, so I'll just say that I'm so fucking glad that I was able to do it.

Lost Rituals.

I just realized that it's been many, many years since I last slow danced. It was such a big deal in middle school--I got used to awkwardly sitting out slow dances until one day a boy I didn't even know asked me to dance. He put his arms around my waist, I put my arms around his waist, he gently corrected me, and we wobbled around to "My Heart Will Go On" for a few minutes. His name was Kevin, he wasn't in any of my classes, and we didn't really get to know each other after that either. But for a good four or five minutes, our bodies were together and we were touching each other. When you're twelve it's a pretty big deal.

It's absolutely insane for me to realize that just three years later I would have an actual sex life with the full range of adult activities. Or that ten years later I would be a kinky slut with a two-digit "number" and a sex blog. I was such a mouse.

But it's funny to realize that with the huge range of erotic activities I can participate in these days when I can talk to boys and everything, there's some things I don't do any more. I don't slow dance. (Short of bar mitzvahs and weddings, I'm not sure where I would slow dance.) I don't make out--I get smoochy and slobbery with boys, but it's foreplay, I don't make out to make out. I don't dry hump much either, I don't have sex in cars, and I don't make a big deal out of doing "everything but" intercourse like there's a giant invisible line. I don't observe the "bases." And I think I've completely lost the skill of getting dressed in 0.12 seconds at the sound of the front door unlocking.

Maybe the real lost ritual is the sense of "oh my God I can't believe I'm actually doing this." For so many years, getting laid seemed as likely as walking on the moon--so when I actually had an Everquest player shove his hand down my pants in his mom's basement, I felt like Neil Fucking Armstrong. It wasn't just a first-time thing; for probably the first year of sex, sheer novelty and the sense of getting away with something nearly outweighed the physical pleasure.

But on some level I expected that to go away. I knew sex couldn't be new forever, and I figured that once you have your own place you don't have to sneak around. (This turned out to be partly true. Bringing home someone new with nosy roommates or neighbors won't get you in "trouble" per se, but it can be awkward.) What I didn't expect is that unless I was at a wedding or a bar mitzvah or something, I'd never slow dance again.

All the grownup stuff I do get to do is totally better though.

Butt Sex Thoughts.

Okay. Too many dour, thinky, unsexy entries. Let's talk assfucking. Let's even do it with bullet points. On second thought, let's use asterisks.

*I have a huge fetish for theoretical assfucking. The only porn site I pay for is Everything Butt and when I read erotica I look for stories with butt. If it's a story with other stuff then anal, I often come just as the characters get to the butt, just thinking about it. I'd say that 90% of the porn I've gotten off to in the last year is anal.

*This fetish doesn't seamlessly translate to reality. I like the idea of being assfucked, but the actual experience? Fun, but kind of awkward and not transcendent. The "oh God I'm getting my specific fetish buttons pushed SO GOOD" feeling doesn't come up the same way it does when I watch anal porn.

*I do get that "specific fetish buttons" feeling more when I'm having my butt fingered or penetrated with relatively unchallenging toys, or just stroked on the outside. I've only had full-on buttsex a single-digit number of times, so maybe I'm just not used to it, or haven't had practice relaxing for it--I think I just get distracted by the physical challenge and the intensity of the sensations.

*I hate it when guys are jerks about anal. If you go around acting like it's the ultimate conquest of a woman, instead of just another way for us to enjoy our time together, of course I'm not going to let you into my butt. Or anywhere else.

*I think the poop issue is way overstated by people who haven't tried it. I've never given myself an enema for sex and yet I've never had any ickiness. Your butt isn't constantly full of poo; poo only appears when it's time to have a bowel movement and you can feel it when that happens. If you don't have an urge to poop right now, you probably don't have any poop within penis-reach.

*My first ever anal experience was with a guy who thought he was fingering my vagina. I liked it just fine and was making happy noises, and he asked "hmm, what is that?" I was embarrassed (and kind of amazed that someone could not know, seriously) and said something along the lines of "think about it, genius," and he caught on. And stopped! The entire rest of the time I dated him he wouldn't touch my butt again. Jerk.

*My butt always feels weird for a while afterwards. Not painful, just... weird.

*I always wanted to pound a guy in the ass. Benny let me play with his butt sometimes, but he was pretty ginger about it; I couldn't let loose and pound. One of these days I want to find a guy who's experienced and gung-ho enough to let me do that.

*I don't think ass sex is going the "furthest" on some imaginary scale-o-sex that begins at holding hands and heads outward from there. It requires more trust and communication than oral or vaginal, it's not a first-date thing for that reason, but I don't think it's somehow the naughtiest pinnacle of all. It's just a fun alternative activity.

*I was once required by my work to go to a lecture on HIV/AIDS that was taught by, of all people, a nun. She went on at some length about the dangers of "rectal sex." Ewww.

*I also hate it when anal porn stories refer to the "colon," "rectum," "bowels," "intestines," anything to do with poop, or anything supposedly humorous like "Hershey Highway." Ass, butt, and anus will do just fine for my erotic vocabulary, thanks.

*I've always secretly thought the "ass-to-ass" scene in Requiem for a Dream is super hot.

How did you learn to fuck?

There isn't really a good way to learn sex. Sex ed in school covers the "Tab A, Slot B" basics and hopefully some of the safety measures, but you're lucky if they admit oral sex exists, let alone get into the intricacies of foreplay and kinks and social nuances. Parents, unless you grew up in of those weird "we're just very open" families, probably were even less help. So where do you learn these things?

Peers? Maybe it's because I hung out with a seriously nerdy crowd, but in middle and even high school my peers didn't know much more than I did and they spread ridiculous misinformation about sex. This is why "can you get pregnant from giving a blowjob" is always in my Google search terms.

Porn? Porn doesn't depict sex. Mainstream porn tells you nothing about foreplay, nothing about how to get someone in bed if just showing up wasn't sufficient, nothing about how sex is positioned or how it will go, and absolutely nothing about what women or men actually enjoy.

Reading? Eh, some. I read a bunch of sex advice books and websites before I had sex, and I guess I learned some things, but it was hard to sort out the misinformation there as well, and a lot of it was about the controversial and difficult aspects of sex, not the basics that they assumed everyone already knew. I could read "how to give an excellent blowjob," but I couldn't read what exactly a blowjob was supposed to be like in the first place. It took me some time to understand that you don't just stick it in your mouth and suck.

In the end, it's 99% on-the-job education. Which, as on the job, is a euphemism for "learning by screwing up." Everything I know about sex, I learned by making some poor guy go "ow!" or "what the heck?" or "uh, honey, that's not doing it for me." And the guys in turn didn't really know what they were doing. I bumbled around for about five years before becoming remotely competent at sex. And I'm not talking fancy moves here, I'm talking stuff like how to move my hips and how to tell if a guy is close to orgasm.

The weirdest part is, because sex "education" is so private and haphazard, it never really gets standardized. I've run into a lot of people who thought they were bizarre because of something that was very common, or who had bizarre practices they thought were standard. If your education is all from women's magazines and personal experience, it's easy to come to believe you're the only woman on earth who comes in less than twenty minutes. Or, conversely, that every guy comes in thirty seconds and that's totally normal when you're young.

Some of this is the joy of discovery, and most of it gets sorted out by age thirty at the latest, but I do wish there was a "Sex for Virgins" book that went through all the basics of "after he gets all panty and his dick gets sorta extra hard and purpley, about a tablespoon of white stuff will come out in several diminishing squirts" and so on. It would have been fantastically useful.

Teenage.

Labrat and Quizzical Pussy both have up excellent posts about sex and adolescence, so I'm joining that bandwagon.


The thing that amazes me most about my memories of teenage sex was that I couldn't talk. I knew what I wanted, but I was terrible at putting it into words. "I really like you, we should spend time together" became "uh, hi... never mind," "I want to try something different in bed" became "uh, let's do... hee hee, stuff," and "I don't like that, please stop" became "oh baby, come for me now." (I was meek, but cunning.) But most often, all of the above became nothing more than "...". I could express myself a bit more physically, I had less trouble crawling all over a guy or pushing him away, but when I tried to use words I felt like shame and awkwardness were choking away my voice.

(Also, it took me a surprisingly long time to figure out that "harder" and "faster" were actual directions, rather than meaningless words of encouragement. Porn kinda led me astray there.)

I blame Ms. Conrad. She was my "health" teacher, which in high school mostly meant sex ed. She drilled into us, over and over, that sex happens because you don't have self-respect. If you have other reasons to like yourself, if you have accomplishments to take pride in and friends and family to do right by, you won't give in to sex. Girls really just want love and approval, you see, and evil boys use this to manipulate the weak ones into sex.

So imagine my horror at discovering that I wanted sex. I must be weak! In the game where girls win by not "giving in" to boys, I was playing to lose. What a sucker. It was bad enough just to have sexual desires, but talking about them would be flaunting my weakness. I was distressingly embarrassed to be horny.

I don't have a whole lot of shame issues these days, but as a teenager I was embarrassed by everything. I wouldn't take off my shirt in the locker room. I was furtive and red-faced when I bought underwear, gripped by the terror that if I chose anything too sexy the clerk would be "on to me"--would realize that I had sexual thoughts--and that would be terrible. Even as I made an erotica website with my friends, I never mentioned the possibility that any of this could turn me on. Porn could be interesting, or well-made, or funny, but the one thing I could never admit was that it was hot. Hey, I wasn't a loser. I respected myself.

Before long, my hormones and my curiosity--and, hey, my desire for love and approval too, Ms. Conrad wasn't all wrong--were far more powerful than shame. I took off my shirt in front of a boy and I let him see my (white, plain, high-waisted) underwear. But I just couldn't talk to him about what turned me on. That was going way too far. Having a libido was my secret shame.

I can't put this all on Ms. Conrad and her ilk. I was also just plain young, and confidence and communication didn't come to me at an early age. And my boyfriend wasn't much help, being a little too ready to take "um" for "yes" when it suited him. And I simply had no role models or social scripting for sex. The private nature of sex means that there's no learning by example, there's no picking up the way sex is "usually" done, but everyone (especially if they lose their virginity to another virgin, as I did) has to make it all up from scratch.

"Self-respect means saying no when you don't want sex" is true. But it's half the story. Self-respect means saying what you want, no matter what it is. It took me a long time to learn that.