Fairly unfair.

Rowdy and I are not officially a mono/poly couple, but we're pretty close these days.  I've only had sex with other people a handful of times this year (so, uh, super monogamous) and no real dates, whereas he's seeing several other people on a regular basis.  More than once he's gone to a sex party while I've stayed home; many, many times he's been on a date with someone else while I've hung out with friends or watched DVDs.

This is awkward, because I used to disapprove of mono/poly relationships.  They struck me as unfair and kind of icky, especially when they were between a polyamorous man and a monogamous woman--"boys will be boys, stand by your man" has all kinds of really nasty sexist implications.  I always worry there's a coercive element, that the man is too jealous to let the woman spread her wings and have her own fun, or that the woman wants monogamy but is too powerless to negotiate for it.  ...And now it's my life.

But here's the choice I was faced with:

A) Run out and date people just to be dating them, so I could go "ha! I'm polyamorous too! our relationship is symmetrical!"  Crappy for me, double crappy for the people I'd be using just to keep my Poly Enlightenment Cred.

or

B) Embrace the asymmetry as something that, despite looking the same as some really shitty unfair situations, works for me.  I don't want other partners right now, I'm happy for my partner that he does, and that's good enough.

So screw fair.  I'll settle for happy.



Our favorite stupid joke to make before sex is "Dude!  I just had an idea how we can both get laid!"  And then we fistbump and go "score, bro!"

That's what being partners really means to me.  It's about beating the system, the ugly sexist system that tries to pit us against each other, and working together to build our own system.  Sometimes it's a messy and patched-together system, the way homebuilt things tend to be, and it takes constant tinkering, but it's custom-fit to us and our weird contradictory ways.  And when it works, god damn do I feel like I'm getting away with something.

Why have sex?

Rowdy and I had another little relationship summit last night.  We're trying to make it a monthly thing.  It's quickly gone from "well, that's a little silly, we can talk whenever something comes up" to "oh my God I'm so glad we have a designated time to air everything out."  Doing it once a month also means that the airing-outs are relatively small; with only a month of conflict backlog, there's no big "here's everything about you that bothers me, all at once" emotion-dump.


We had two important discussions at this meeting.  (Well, two that are any of your business.)

The first one went a little like this:

"I feel like we're not having as much sex as I'd like lately."
"Yeah, me too, I'd like to have a lot more sex."
"Really? I haven't been initiating because I thought you weren't interested and I didn't want to pressure you!"
"...I wasn't initiating because I thought you weren't interested and I didn't want to pressure you!"

So that was nice to clear up before our little sexual "who's on first" turned tragic.


The second big discussion came when I whipped out my kink worksheet for us to do together. Again, it seemed a little silly, considering we've been together a year and a half.  And again... turns out we've been together a year and a half and there were still things we didn't know about each other's sexuality.

The most interesting one had very little to do with kink.  Rowdy and I found out that we have sex for completely different reasons.

The question of "why do you want to have sex?"* sometimes sounds silly--because you've got a sex drive, right?  Hormones and stuff.  And because you're attracted to your partner and hopefully like them at least a little. Emotions and stuff.

It sounds self-evident, but when you start asking "okay, so why do you want to have sex, rather than just masturbate for the hormones and cuddle for the emotions?", it gets complicated fast.  And it gets diverse.

In my case, it's about escapism.  I'm a person who spends a lot of time in my head, criticizing and analyzing, and I love something that yanks me out of my head into my body, puts me in the here and now, narrows my focus to nothing but sensation.  For Rowdy, it's about pleasing.  He's very much of a service top and even something of a service fucker--he wants to see me come more than he wants to come.

And for me it's also a little bit about validation--about knowing someone finds me sexy, holy shit, sexy enough to actually fuck, whoa.  (Somehow it's still a surprise.)  And for him it's also a little bit about sensation; a very specific sensation, the muscularity of our play and sex, the whumph of muscle on muscle, the dull thudding impact of fucking.

The sex we had after this little meeting was amazing.  It went whumph and it drove me out of my mind.


So I think "why do you want to have sex?" is a good question to ask your partner and yourself.  When you treat it like a foregone conclusion then it's harder to know exactly what you want out of sex.  When you think "I want it for the usual reasons" it's too easy to have what you assume is the usual sex--instead of your sex.

Plus I just think it's sort of funny: when I tell someone (outside Kinkland) I like to get punched and flogged and thrown around like a ragdoll and kicked in the crotch, the first and most obvious question is "why? what's in that for you?"  But when I tell them I like to have a penis in my vagina, nobody thinks to ask.

Why not?



*All this is assuming that you do want to have sex.  Which shouldn't be a foregone conclusion either.  There's also a universe of reasons to not want sex.

The Valentine's Day Dilemma.

someecards

[Cosmocking is coming next!  They take a long time to write.  I'll have it up late today or sometime tomorrow.]

I have a dilemma every time I’m in a relationship when this day rolls around.

Part of me thinks: “This is a commercialized, manufactured holiday that celebrates oppressively inflexible gender roles, shames men who don't give the perfect gift and women who don't get the perfect gift, marginalizes queer people, marginalizes the shit of single people and people in closeted relationships, and ought to be completely unnecessary in a relationship where we express our love when and how we feel it rather than the way The Man tells us to. This holiday sucks and as someone who cares about conscious and intentional relationships, I should have no goddamn part of it.”

But a smaller yet deeper part of me feels sad about those words, because they're words that come from a sexual and romantic rebel, yes, but they're also words that come from a Perfect Girlfriend Who Never Wants Anything. (I have battled often with the Perfect Girlfriend Who Never Wants Anything inside me, desperately resisting her threats that I'm just one "can we go out somewhere nice tonight?" away from morphing into the High-Maintenance Girlfriend Who Wants Everything.)  That part of me wants to put my foot down and say “I know this is arbitrary, Rowdy*, but sometimes I need you to make small arbitrary gestures to prove you care about me even when I don't make sense.”

Also, Valentine's Day sometimes feels like a one-day hyper-concentration of the "you poor dear, guess he doesn't love you that much" messages I get from the mainstream culture over the facts that we're not monogamous and not planning to get married or have kids.  It's not that I even want any of those things, but the relentless message of "non-traditional relationships are no way to treat a lady!" still seeps through to my sad little insecure place sometimes.  Celebrating Valentine's Day like giant saps is a relatively safe, cheap way to soothe that little sad place.  Or maybe it's a way to say screw you, society, see how our non-traditional love can be totally sappy.

I don’t want diamonds and I don’t want to receive without giving, but I think exchanging goofy heart candies** for goofy reasons is an opportunity to say “You know what? Sometimes validating feelings is more important than always fighting the good fight.”


This year, we’ve agreed to exchange presents on the 16th. That way we get to take advantage of day-after sales and uncrowded restaurants and feel like we’re getting something over on The Man, while still satisfying my irrational need to occasionally be allowed to have an irrational need.



*Rowdy is actually really good about validating things like "I need you to be here for me and I can't coherently explain why." This post is about my own tangled insecurities, not about him trying to convince me not to want anything. If anything, I think he gets upset when my Perfect Girlfriend Who Never Wants Anything self-enforcement goes into overdrive.  
Captain Awkward has a great post here on related issues, on why we pressure ourselves into pretending we never need anything from our friends and lovers, and why good friends and lovers don't actually want us to do that.


**But not Conversation Hearts. They're great cultural touchstones for representing the holiday and all, but they taste like chalk.

A different kind of love.

Love songs don't work too well for Rowdy and me.  Romantic movies neither.  It's hard to pick out Valentine's cards.  All these things--pretty much any trapping of romance that contains more text than "you're awesome, I love you"--seem to define love very differently than we do.

There's so many things that get associated with "love" that aren't part of our experience of loving each other.

Exclusivity.  Both of us are sleeping with other people right now, he's dating other people, and there's not a damn thing wrong with that.  I've started to love the feeling of "coming home" to Rowdy after fooling around with someone else; it's a wonderful warm thing to be able to say "I like going off and having adventures, but your dick is where I hang my hat."

"...metaphorically."

So it's weird to me to see "I'm all yours" and "you're my one, my only" used as expressions of just how sincere and true a love is.  They can certainly be definitions of a particular couple's love, but that doesn't make it lovier.  Exclusive love isn't deeper or more serious (or worse!) than open love, it's just different.

Permanence. Stuff ends.  And when stuff is a relationship, it really only ends in two ways--you break up or somebody dies.  Rowdy and I are in our twenties, we're not getting married, and we both have a bit of the "maybe I'll move to Alaska next" wanderlust in us.  We'd like to be long-term but realistically we're not forever.

And I'm okay with this.  I don't love to think about it, but I'm at peace with it.  Which is why stuff like "I'm yours forever" grates on me as a romantic sentiment.  No.  I'm not yours forever.  I'm with you now. Now matters too.  Let's treasure today, and accept tomorrow.

Ownership. I realize that "I'm yours" doesn't literally mean "I am your possession," but a lot of romance language does come weirdly close to that.  It weirds me out.  I'm starting to think this entire post is just me being painfully literal, but it's hard to think clearly if you don't think literally sometimes, and I don't like hearing that lovers "belong" to each other.  Rowdy's not mine, nor am I his--he has no authority over me and no rights to me.  We're just two people who enjoy being together.

I know there's not much room for nuance on a Conversation Heart, but I don't want to tell my lover "be mine."  I only want to tell him "be with me."

Obsession. Rowdy isn't my life.  I mean, how goddamn boring would that be?  Rowdy is just one wonderful part of my life.  Of course I could live without him; of course life would go on; of course we're not everything to each other.  And to me, that's not less meaningful but more.  One of the most romantic sentences I know is "I don't need you; I want you."



So without these things--without every part of "be my only one forever," what's left?  Funny thing is, there's a shitload of things left.

There's simple, raw affection.  Rowdy makes me happy and he makes me want to make him happy and whenever we're together we make a little Happiness Feedback Loop.  This is the main thing and it's why I say "love" at all.  Being with Rowdy just plain feels good.

There's trust.  Trust that means we show each other all our soft vulnerable parts--the bad stuff in our pasts, the screwed-up stuff in our heads, the things that make us cry and the things that turn us on--and we know we're safe when we do.  We know it's not going to be used against us or taken lightly.

There's loyalty.  When I was sick Rowdy came and comforted me.  When Rowdy moved I came and hauled boxes.  We've cried on each other's shoulders and we've gotten each other's backs.

And yeah, there's sexual chemistry. I don't think that defines our love but it sure makes it a whole lot more fun.

How is this different from being really good friends who are physically intimate?  Honestly, it isn't.  Which brings me to the last thing our love isn't:


Magic. There's nothing special about being in love.  It's only a matter of gradation away from being very close friends.  The feelings I have for Rowdy are different only in degree, not character, from the feelings I have for other people with whom I share affection, trust, and loyalty.  Being with my friends just plain feels good, too.

Love is wonderful, but love is not ineffable.  Love is powerful, but love is not mysterious.  Love is a rock in storms and an open meadow on sunny days, but love is not a bolt from the blue.  Love is just really really really really liking someone.  And that's enough.

Maybe our problem isn't that we think love is too magical.  Maybe our problem is that we don't realize how magical every human connection is.



...Wow, that was pretty Care Bears even for me.  But fuck it, I'll be Care Bears.  Caring about someone is fucking awesome.

This is what negotiation looks like.

Friday night, Rowdy and I had a pretty major re-negotiation of our relationship.  It was a hard conversation to have, the kind with a lot of sentences like "I want... well, I shouldn't want... but I'll just tell you... I mean to say... nnngh," but ultimately a productive one.  So I figured I'd post the meeting notes up here to give a concrete example of what relationship negotiation looks like.  (A couple items are omitted for privacy, but you get the idea.)  I talk big about this kind of negotiation, but what does it actually look like?





Minutes on 12/30/11 Meeting Between Holly and Rowdy at Boston's Most Generically Irish Pub
1. We love each other super-much. Yay.

2. Because it's not sex but relationships that make me insecure, you will keep me in the loop about your relationship status/prospects with other people you're seeing.
(2b. You are not actively seeking a new partner, but have not ruled out the development of a new relationship, and I am not asking you to rule it out.)

3. I will tell you when I'm uncomfortable or feel ignored instead of just making mopeyface.
(3b. When you're following our agreements and there's nothing I actually want changed, I will not go around making mopeyface anyway.)

4. Because always planning our dates makes me feel unwanted, you will ask me out on dates sometimes.

5. Yep, I'm genderqueer, and I'm not entirely sure what that means, but something along the lines of "I'm still 'officially' a woman and don't plan to change that, but I want to start expressing myself more as a boy."  You are outstandingly understanding and supportive about this.

6. Because both of us feel our current sex life is too vanilla but we've had difficulty developing a repertoire of kinky activities we enjoy together, we will specifically and explicitly negotiate new kinky things to try.

7. We will make an effort to do fun and interesting activities together, because a "shlump around the bedroom all day" date is kind of the relationship equivalent of eating an entire jar of peanut butter in one sitting--tastes good but you just feel wrong afterwards.

8. Neither of us really knows how much time together is good vs. overdose, so we still need to figure out by experimentation how many dates per week works for us.

It's difficult exposing and working on the guts of a relationship--if this stuff comes naturally and painlessly to you, you're probably the Kwisatz Haderach--but God do you feel better afterwards.  The only thing more uncomfortable than making explicit agreements is trying to live without them.

Economics vs. apples.

A day doesn't go by I don't see an article like this one.  I'm not going to try to deconstruct it point by point, because it's the same old shit.  I'm just going to pull some quotes and talk about my weekend.  I suspect you'll get my point.

Women are jumping into the sack faster and with fewer expectations about long-term commitments than ever, effectively discounting the “price” of sex to a record low, according to social psychologists.

Rowdy and I had agreed to a date, but neither of us was feeling in the mood for a "date" date on the night.  Instead, we just got snacks and juice at the drugstore and sat together on the cover of the subway tunnel, listening to street musicians in the square, laughing at little kids playing run-in-circles-really-fast games, laying back and cuddling on the concrete.  Because of the kids around, I whispered the dirty things into his ear, very quietly, so they wouldn't know why he was laughing.

“The price of sex is about how much one party has to do in order to entice the other into being sexual,” said Kathleen Vohs, of the University of Minnesota, who has authored several papers on “sexual economics.” “It might mean buying her a drink or an engagement ring. These behaviors vary in how costly they are to the man, and that is how we quantify the price of sex.”

We split up to head back to his home; he biked and I drove.  On the way I stopped at the liquor store to surprise him with a pack of beer from his hometown.  At home we drank the beer (he dressed his in a little lederhosen first), undressed, and cuddled naked while watching porn.  It didn't turn into sex.  The porn was too ridiculous for that.  It turned into giggling--helpless, naked, wiggly giggling.

By boiling dating down to an economic model, researchers have found that men are literally getting lots of bang for their buck. Women, meanwhile, are getting very little tat for their . . . well, you get the idea.

At the end of the night, I stroked his cock, at first slowly and gently, almost comfortingly, then for real.  I kissed the tip of his cock and when he groaned appreciatively I took the whole thing in my mouth.  It was a long, sloppy blowjob, popping his cock out of my mouth and then swallowing it down again, both of us still a little giggly.

Men want sex more than women do. It’s a fact that sounds sexist and outdated. But it is a fact all the same -- one that women used for centuries to keep the price of sex high (if you liked it back in the day, you really had to put a ring on it). With gender equality, the Pill and the advent of Internet porn, women’s control of the meet market has been butchered. 

It was my turn next.  I slipped a condom on his vibrator and went to town while he held me, stroked my breasts, gently pulled my hair, and whispered fucking filthy sweet nothings in my ear.  I came and didn't want to stop.  So I didn't.  I just kept pleasuring myself over and over, Rowdy's hands on my ass and his lips on my cheek, until I was exhausted.

“Every sex act is part of a ‘pricing’ of sex for subsequent relationships,” Regnerus said. “If sex has been very easy to get for a particular young man for many years and over the course of multiple relationships, what would eventually prompt him to pay a lot for it in the future -- that is, committing to marry?”

We slept late into the morning, curled around each other.  It's been more than a year of nights like this and I'm still stupid in love--the kind of love where I think his snoring is cute, the kind where I'm charmed and a little turned on when he scratches his balls.  When he woke up he held me and kissed me and reminded me that with him I'm safe enough to be that stupid.

Did you answer, “Love”? You’re adorable. “Sexual strategies for making men ‘fall in love’ typically backfire, because men don’t often work like that,” Regnerus says.

Later in the day, Sprite came over and we went apple picking.  It really makes no sense to pick your own apples, economically; I'm sure we paid three times what it would have cost at the store.  What we were really paying for was a day in the orchard, walking through rows of trees in light misty rain, eating impossibly sweet and crisp apples right off the trees.

So, what can women do to return the balance of sexual power in their favor? Stop putting out, experts say. If women collectively decided to cross their legs, the price of sex would soar and women would regain control of the market. Like a whoopie cartel.

After we gathered our apples, we sat together at a picnic bench under a tree, drinking hot mulled apple cider, talking about our childhoods and our schoolwork and tractors (that one was mostly Rowdy) and various forms of perverted sex we were planning to have.



The point here isn't that my relationship is super special, or that my relationship represents every relationship.  But my relationship exists in the real world--the messy, complicated, wonderful real world.  It's a place that has masturbation and apples, cuddles and really bad street musicians, group sex parties and muddy shoes.

I'm sure there are relationships in this big ol' world where women coldly trade sex to men for commitment and compete joylessly to see who can get the biggest diamond for the fewest fucks.  It's just that there's a universe of other relationships out there, and they're way more fun.  I mean, shit, if the woman's withholding sex strategically or having it pried out of her economically, when does she get to enjoy feeling a man's arms tighten around her as she comes?  And if the man's only giving as much love as he needs to get sex, when does he get to enjoy sneaking kisses behind an apple tree?

So I don't just want to brag here.  I want to tell stories to show that no one has to live that way.  And oh my God is life better when you don't.

Next time we're together, we're going to bake apple crisp.

How I met Holly

[Guest post by Rowdy]
(a not-rape-culture narrative, and why we need more of them)

I’d seen her before, she’s in my group of friends - a bouncy-happy girl with a cherubic face and bright red hair. We were out for coffee with a group of friends, and we started talking. The conversation was easy and engaging, meandering through various topics in feminism, kink, and affirmative consent. It was getting late, and it was time for the coffee shop to close. We stood out in the brisk nighttime air as our friends said goodbye for the night while others made plans to meet at Denny’s.

“Yeah, I never quite know how to bring up my interest in a person," I said. "I’m not the best at reading people, so I don’t know if they’re into me, and I usually end up not saying anything. Sometimes I’ll find out later that they were into me, but they thought I wasn’t into them. It’s a conundrum.”
“Well, which way do you live?” she asked.
“Just up the road by the parkway, not too far.”
“Want to head back and have sex?”
“Absolutely.”

The conversation continued as we walked, turning to experiences of new partner sex and communicating interest. Then, standing in my room, the conversation continued a bit and then died down into an awkward moment, both of us caught in an instant of “um, what now?” We embraced and kissed, tentatively at first and then passionately.

She spoke up. “Ok, thing you should know. I really really don’t like direct clit stimulation; it’s so intense it’s unpleasant. Any things I should know about you?”
“Not that I can think of; if anything comes up I’ll let you know”, I said.
We wrassled each other’s clothes off, joking and laughing and touching and kissing the whole time. "So, how do you like to masturbate?” I asked.
“Usually indirect pressure, on the pubic mound.”
“Like this?” I asked as I pressed my hand just above her vulva and tried to imitate the motion she made.

Holly adjusted my hand a bit and it was clear to my neighbors I’d hit the spot. We fucked, cuddled, exchanged backrubs, and fucked some more into the wee hours of the morning. In Holly’s words:

It was by turns cuddly and athletic, and always... happy. I love happy sex. There was something so delightfully straightforward about it.

That’s how I met Holly a year ago last night. We had sex purely for fun; there was apprehension and passion, it had its awkward moments, but both of us wanted it, both of us communicated it, and look what disastrous things came of such casual and communicative sex! It’s been an amazing year filled with more love than I can put to words, and more good times than I can count. Dinosaurs and robots and hovercrafts and sex, lots of sex.



Stories like this are important: narratives are how we learn to interact and relate. When we don’t have the time or inclination to think critically about our actions, or when we’re looking for direction or affirmation, we look to the behavior of others to model our own actions after. If our sex-positive, affirmative consent, relationship self-deterministic culture is to gain traction in the mainstream, we need our narratives to get out there - for examples of how it’s done (even partially or imperfectly) to be readily at hand.

I’ll write more on narratives later. If you’ve got a narrative to share, I encourage you to do so: on your blog, in your feed, or in the comments.

Relationship Ed.

I'm glad schools teach Sex Ed, even if they do make an awful mess of it; knowing how your sexy parts work, what risks sex carries, and how to use contraception are important life skills. They're skills the kids may need right away, or may not need until they're married, but either way, they're safer and better prepared.

But one of the things I'm realizing lately is that for all the drama and angst and danger it can entail, sex is easy. Love is hard. So here's a message I wish kids got:

"Our society sends a lot of confusing messages about love, and you may feel pressured to fall in love. And that's a natural urge; it's okay. But you have to be careful. Make sure you're ready for love. Make sure you're doing it with the right person, and for the right reasons. And above all else, make sure you're being safe."

Of course, I would never advocate abstinence-only Relationship Ed. So here's some other things I'd like to see on the curriculum:


-The different types of relationships that you can have. This would include mention of sexual orientation, but wouldn't mainly be about that. It would be about the spectrum from a casual date to a lifelong love commitment, and the many, many options in between. We'd talk about how one relationship script--even an "enlightened" one, Science Club members, I'm on to you--can never work for everybody and there is no "ideal" relationship.

-How to negotiate, communicate, and argue with your partner. The biggest focus here would be on the difference between "an argument" and "a fight." You know the way you talk to a guy talking shit about your mom, or the way you talk to a customer service agent who's not giving you what you want, or the way you talk to a cop who's pulling you over? None of these are how you talk to your partner when you disagree.

-How to identify a destructive relationship. This would include a lot of discussion about abusive relationship dynamics, but not only that; it would also go through the warning signs of a relationship that's turning to crap or ruining your life even if there's no abuse involved. If it was me teaching the class, I don't think I could get through this unit without a screening of Twilight.

-How to not abuse someone. "Don't hit them" would be mentioned but wouldn't be the focus. The focus would be on "don't try to control them." We'd talk about the fears relationships can stir up--fear of cheating, fear of losing their respect, fear of losing the relationship--and appropriate and inappropriate responses to these fears.

-How to end a relationship. Students would be given a script for ending a relationship peacefully, if not painlessly; for separating from someone even though they don't hate them. Maybe more than anything, they'd be told that it's normal and okay for a relationship to end, and that a relationship can be meaningful even though it's temporary.

-"It's okay to be single." This wouldn't be pushing singledom, but it would be destigmatizing it. Now, class, let's talk about some bad stereotypes of people who are single, and why those are wrong. Let's talk about how a romantic relationship can be a good thing, but it can never complete you. Let's talk about how whether you're a "real" man or woman is defined by you, and not by the relationships you have. Let's talk about why--especially at your young age, but really any time--it's better to be single than to be in a relationship just for the sake of being in a relationship.


These are all crucial skills, yet they're ones that most people have to learn by trial and error, from the dubious and pseudoscience-ridden mess of self-help books and websites, or when they're already in therapy. If we really want to prepare kids for the adult world of sex, dating, and even marriage, teaching them how to put on a condom is the very tip of the iceberg. Teaching them how to say "I don't agree with you and I'm not changing my mind, but I still love you"--now that's a life skill.

This isn't just fuzzy stuff. It's public health. Good relationship ed could cut down massively on teen pregnancy, STI transmission, intimate partner violence, suicide, and sexual assault. Knowing how to have a respectful relationship isn't just about self-help. It can save lives.

The best things in life.

I'm in bed with Rowdy, half-asleep, curled up against his warm skin, his head on my arm and my other hand on his belly, and I can feel his breathing deepen as he falls asleep and softly snores. I untied him before he fell asleep, taking off the thick black rope that had been bound around his chest and shoulders, the rope I'd held while we fucked, at first using it to tease and restrain him and then losing all control and just hanging on as he pounded me into ecstasy.

And I don't want to cheapen this. It's a wonderful feeling--the best feeling--to share physical and emotional joy with someone I love, and I don't want to make it be about anything else. Trying to apply some dry ulterior motive to this, making it all be about economics or competition or gender dynamics or reproductive urges, just feels to me like the ultimate party pooping. Making sex into a rational transaction is the "why go trick-or-treating when you can just buy a bag of candy?" of armchair sociology.

Is this an anti-science, anti-intellectual, "fuckin' magnets, how do they work?" sort of thought? Maybe it is. Maybe it'll advance human knowledge to analyze sexual desire and interaction in ways other than "gosh, sexual desire and interaction are so beautiful." But that knowledge should never take the place of the beauty. If I learn that, say, smell has a place in sexual attraction, I don't want to throw that out because it doesn't fit my personal ideology--but I also don't want to run my fingers through Rowdy's hair and think "really, this is all just about smell." There is still some magic left in it.

Rowdy's skin is smooth and freckled and feels like electricity everywhere it touches me. This isn't something I won. This isn't something I bought. This isn't the mindless, joyless enactment of hormonal urges or sexual politics. This is just awesome.

Step One.

There's a lot of talk out there about how to meet the person of your dreams. Or how to pick up someone to screw. Or a whole lot of things in between--how to initiate the sexual/romantic relationship you desire, and how to "upgrade" that relationship to greater intimacy.

Not a lot about maintenance. There's discourse about how to fix a failing relationship or spice up a boring one, but when's the last time you read a book or an article or had a discussion about how to simply have an ongoing relationship? Whether you're one-night-stand partners or lifetime spouses, the primary task of a relationship--and it's a learned skill and a difficult one--is simply being in that relationship. Doin' some relating.

Meeting Rowdy was not, in itself, super rewarding. It was nice and all, but filled with apprehension and eagerness about what was to come--I didn't go "I MET A DUDE!", fist-pump, and accept my trophy. Meeting was nothing but the beginning. And the moment Rowdy and I first said "I love you" was wonderful, but it had nothing, absolutely nothing on the following months of going around actually being in love.

Yep, those months have been wonderful, but they've also been full of challenges and questions. How much time do we spend together, and what are we going to do with that time? Now that we've agreed we're going to have sex, what kind of sex do we have and how often? What does being in love mean to us and how do we express it? I've got this boyfriend now--what the hell do I do with him?

If we can't answer these questions, the fact that we merely started being in lust/love is... worthless.

"How to find sex/love" is only Step One. Steps Two through--through until you break up or someone dies--are "now that you've got sex/love, what the hell do you do with it?"

Search term.

I was going through my site analytics the other day, looking at my traffic and the search terms that bring people to the blog--both to give me an idea of what content works for readers, and to amuse myself with the fact that I get searches for "i am a 30 year old female and whatever deorderant i use its not helping what can i use"and"woman anus poo blog."

One search term stood out to me; someone had searched on it thirty-one different times.

"rowdy loves holly pervocracy."

All of the searches were from one person, in rapid succession, using different search engines. One person who lived in the same town as me. And one person who had done this on purpose, knowing I check my search terms, to send me a message. A message written in Google and Yahoo, Bing and Ask.



Rowdy had sent me a love note through the Internet.

My Polyamorous Heart.

[Guest post by Rowdy]

One of the typical assumptions about monogamy is that the heart is a defined quantity, to love more than one person is to divide it, to find a new love is to push the last completely out, and each person it's given to gets the same thing.

That’s never felt true for me, the way I experience love. When describing my heart, I’ve found this metaphor works pretty well:

I like to think of my polyamorous heart as a house with many rooms. It’s constructed by the people I love, and filled with warmth and memories. It grows as each person I love adds something to my house, maybe a decoration or boardgame, maybe an entire new room.

Many people enter my heart, friends and strangers, and hang around in the common spaces... sometimes just a short while, and sometimes much longer. They wear down the floors and scuff the walls, they throw parties and help me fix the place up.

Each new romantic love builds their own room, an addition onto my house. We work on it together and it grows over time, a special place filled with emotions, experiences, and memories. There is always space to add another room, and build additions onto the rooms already built - it only takes time and energy, the material provided by our lives. No two rooms are alike, each one shaped by the person who built it.

Some of those people may leave my life, but the room they built in my heart stays, like the bedroom of a child moved off to college, a place of growth, accomplishments, and warm memories - saved just for that person who made it their home for a while. Some people leave their room nicely as a place for fond memories, others trash the room on their way out, but the place they built in my heart stays.

They may come by occasionally, or they may make their life in other hearts and never return, but there will always be a place of happiness that they built in my heart, a place they are always welcome to visit.

Sometimes my house is a loud party, sometimes it is lonely and quiet; there are parts of it I visit every day, and others I haven’t visited in ages.

This is my poly heart. A house built by the people who’ve lived there, filled with the warmth of life, love, and memories.

The death of desperation.

At the beginning of a sexual relationship, you tend to have sex pretty much any time you see each other and you've got more than 10 minutes of privacy. (You do, right? I probably shouldn't be using the presumptive "you." I do, anyway.) Some of it is the thrill of a new relationship, but some of it is that feeling that you haven't had this kind of sex in a while and maybe you won't get so many chances to do it, so you better grab when you can. It's sex that's partly based on wanting to have sex, and partly based on fear of not having sex.

And then comes the point when you're comfortable coming over, having plenty of time and privacy, and you share some dinner and talk a bit and hug a bit and go home. It's easy for this to feel like you're getting desexualized, domesticated, like the lust and passion are dying. But I don't think it's necessarily so. A little bit is the loss of that initial flame, but it's also the loss of that initial desperation, that worry that "I could lose this at any moment, gotta get while the getting's good." Having someone you can fuck, and not fucking them, can be an act not of passivity but of fearlessness.

Fucking like there's no tomorrow can be awesome. But there's great comfort and strength in the way you can live when you believe there is a tomorrow.





(Also: Hi JM's mom! I hope you are feeling better soon! Stay strong!)

Zoe and Wash.

In the sci-fi series Firefly, two of the main characters--tough-girl first mate Zoe and goofy pilot Wash--are married to each other. They start the series as a long-married couple and they finish it married. They're obviously nuts about each other and they have plenty of sex, and they don't go through any drama with their relationship.

Or rather, they go through lots of drama--attacks by crazed space barbarians and traitorous space pirates and the evil space empire--but their relationship is stable through it all. The series isn't about their relationship; it's about wacky space action and they just happen to be happily married.

(I acknowledge that this is probably because the series didn't run long enough for Joss Whedon to put them through the most miserable, wrenching breakup imaginable, and he probably only kept them together so long so it would hurt more. But let's work with what's on the screen, not what we damn well know was coming.)

Zoe and Wash's marriage made me realize how rare this is in fiction--the depiction of a stable couple as still being interesting people. So often, the formation of a couple is the end of the story--our hero got the girl, credits roll. It's rare enough to see "our hero got the girl, but they still have space pirates to fight," much less "our hero got the girl before the story even started, but they still have space pirates to fight." (It's also significant that Zoe and Wash got together because they were attracted to each other, not because Wash was so good at fighting space pirates that he "got" Zoe.) The idea that life and struggle don't culminate in love, but that your story continues after even you fall in love, is very rarely found in Hollywood.

And it's too bad, because in real life, relationships are not the end. The credits don't roll and you don't get to enter your high score. Life doesn't get magically easier or simpler, and the relationship itself is an ongoing process. Love becomes not a reward that you can sit back and enjoy, but a part of your life. (Oh, and people in relationships still have sex like whoa.) So you're in love, true lasting love; good for you, but together and on your own, you've still got a hell of a lot of battles left to fight.

Quiet night.

Last night Sprite and Rowdy and I got together and... pretty much just stayed in. We ate some takeout, exchanged belated Christmas presents (Sprite gave me a huggy dinosaur and Rowdy gave me a subscription to MAKE magazine; I gave Sprite a flogger and Rowdy a robot kit), and then we just hung out. We fucked a little, slept in a big warm pile, fucked a little more and watched Muppet Show clips and cuddled a lot.

Sometimes happiness is just that simple.

It's not much to write about, I guess. But it's kind of... part of what I always wanted for my life. (I might not have always envisioned certain details.) Not to be boring all the time, but to be happy even when it's boring. To be able to have promiscuous public kinky sex with the people I love, and to be able to take a nap with them. And in particular, to take a nap with them and not find myself saying "bleh, you guys aren't any fun unless we're having promiscuous public kinky sex." Love is love and happy is happy, and sex is just the cherry on top. Fuckin' awesome cherry though.



Also: Sprite and I have finally, I think, settled the terminology question of what to call our relationship. We're not really girlfriends with each other. But "my boyfriend's other girlfriend" is cumbersome and indirect. Apparently common poly terminology is "metamour," but eh. Or "paramour," which is kind of clever except it's already a word.

Anyway. We are "sister girlfriends."

Autographs, photographs, and love.

I've come to realize that getting a celebrity's autograph is pointless. Meeting a celebrity in person can be a giddy experience, but the scratchy signature they make--probably you'll never even look at it again, and if you do, the only joy in it is remembering the meeting. And what a waste if the only thing you remember about the meeting is "oh yeah, Bruce Campbell--I made him write his name on some paper and then I walked away." I've met a couple famous people since and I've shook hands or exchanged a few words, left without any souvenir, and been happy.

For the same reason, I don't take a lot of photos. Occasionally I'll take touristy (or naked) pics to share with people, or I'll take a stab at artsy photography, but I almost never take photos of my friends; I don't do bar pics or party pics. Looking at the photo won't take me back to the day when "MOOSE EARS!" was the funniest joke ever told. Nothing will take me back to that day. And that's okay. I had that day. And do I really want to relive "MOOSE EARS!" forever when the future might hold, say, "T-REX HANDS!"?

It's a shame to waste a moment by trying to make it into an artifact. Life is ephemeral, memories don't have shit on experiences, and any artifacts that don't rot or demagnetize will be incinerated when the sun swallows the earth. Realizing this is what made me able to fall in love.

Love is wonderful and warmfuzzy and joyous, and it always ends in pain. There's no "happily ever after," because in real life, the story keeps going until you break up or someone dies. The best you can hope for is to get hit by a bus together.

Except that's not true. The best you can hope for is to spend a summer evening lying in the grass with your head on his belly, hands loosely entwined, talking about nothing, watching the orange glow of sunset wash over the clouds. The moment isn't forever; it's only good. Better to love and lose and all that. Better to go through the cycle of suffering, to want and not have, to have and not keep, to endure the pain every time around, than never to have those moments at all.

At the end there's nothing. I don't have a damn thing to paste in my scrapbook or frame on my shelf. Even the memories cause more grief than joy to think about. Why the fuck did I even bother? Because I was happy. And that time is as real as now.

I don't want to lose love. I want those ephemeral good parts to be as long and as many as possible. I don't like that love--or life, for that matter--is temporary. But I accept it. It's worth it.



This isn't a breakup or pre-breakup post or anything like that. It's just a reflection. Right now I'm in a happy relationship, and I worry sometimes that it'll hurt when it ends. Telling myself "don't think about that" doesn't work with my model of thinker, and telling myself "maybe it'll last forever" sells about as well as saying that my kitty went to a nice farm upstate. (Also, I feel like staying with someone forever no matter what is about as pleasant as a thirty-year-old crippled cat with cancer still staggering helplessly around some farm.) So instead I tell myself "it will hurt. That's the price you pay."

I'm willing to pay. The price is fair--no, not fair, it's a goddamn steal for all this joy. Just bill me later, please.

Freely given.

It's a little scary at first, but awesome when I think about it, that Rowdy not only can but does get sex and love elsewhere.

Because he still wants to get it with me.

I don't want to be needed. I want to be wanted.

Union and Intersection.

I don't have a favorite sexual position. I have, however, a favorite sexual position with everyone I've been with. With Keith it was missionary, with Alan it was me on top and him thrusting from beneath, with Tommy it was doggy-style, and so on. And the funny thing is, in these people's other relationships, they had different go-to positions.

The geometry of bodies, genitalia, and personalities always fits together differently. It's hard, and not too common, to truly be "a doggy-style guy" who carries doggy-style from partner to partner and fits it in with whatever they are. It's the relationship, and not either (or should I say any) person in it, that dictates these things. (Also, the relative length of your thighs.)

Of course it goes beyond just positions. One of the things that I've been thinking about a lot lately is how it applies to kink. The reason I'm waffly about whether I'm a switch, bottom, sub, or just really horny is because I'm each of these things to different people. I like to be dominated, but only by the people I like to dominate me, if you get my drift. It's 20% "can I tell that they genuinely enjoy being dominant," 20% "are they any damn good at it," and 60% "I don't know, fucking magic." And I'm not describing simple attraction here--I can love fucking someone but not particularly want them to dominate me, just because the magic is different with them.

And of course it goes beyond sex. Alan and I liked nothing better than to cuddle up on the couch and watch 5 continuous hours of "Intervention" and "COPS." (I was filmed by "COPS" once. Funny story.) Rowdy would probably start chewing off his own arm after ten minutes. Neither one of them is wrong, and more importantly, neither one of them is less me. They're just different sides of me, brought out by different people, in whom I myself bring out different sides.

I don't know if it's right to say I'm a different person with every partner. I'm a different person with every relationship.

Happy Spanksgiving!

I'm going to a kinky Thanksgiving this year. It's Rowdy, Sprite, and a few of our kinky friends. The idea makes me more genuinely thankful than I've been in a few years--this holiday will be a true celebration, not an obligation. Even the shopping trip, the stupid last-minute "oh god it's 9 PM on Wednesday and we don't have enough potatoes" shopping trip, was fun and happy and sexy.

I'm thankful for good people. They make all the difference in the world.

Hope your Thanksgiving is safe, happy, harmonious, and doesn't involve anything with the word "lite" on the label.


P.S.: Naamah is here also! Naamah is one of our Thanksgiving buddies and she wanted to be on the blog so hi Naamah! You are a very fun awesome person to have at Pervsgiving!

Sick sex.

Rowdy came over, and although I am by no means better, we fucked. It was kind of awkward, definitely not one for the record books; we didn't kiss on the mouth because we didn't want to swap spit, and in my crappy physical condition I didn't get wet, didn't move around much, and didn't last super long.

But I was grinning like a lunatic all the way through this lousy sex, because it was just such a relief to be sexual again. There's few things more desexualizing than being a sick person; not only are you physically incapable, but the medical establishment makes it very clear that you have to focus on Important Things right now, and sex isn't possibly one of those.

I had gone a full week without an orgasm. A week! That may be a personal record, at least since puberty. Last Saturday morning I fucked Rowdy, and that evening I started feeling sick, and by Monday I was in the hospital, and after getting out I was just too exhausted and demoralized to even knock off a quick one. I was actually relatively subdued in my reactions (as I go), but the first time Rowdy got me off today, it was like a fucking dam breaking.

No. It was like coming home. Back to the place where I'm desirable, desiring, fuckable, fucking. Back to where pleasure matters. Back to where bodies are wonderful beautiful things for joy and exploration. Back to being a person.