The Sexcalator.

By the time I was out of my early twenties, I'd done some fairly hardcore BDSM.  I'd been beaten, whipped, cut, bound, shocked, peed on, done most of the above naked in front of strangers, and frequently during sex.  Which raises the question--where do you go from there?  When you're so young, and you've already had such intense experiences, what's left?

Cuddling on the couch, for one.  Or having slow sleepy sex at the end of the day.  Or--not to make this sound like "but then I discovered that sweet gentle love was the most daring of all!"--getting beaten some more, not necessarily in a harder or more shocking way than before.



One of the many, many unspoken assumptions out there about sex is that it's an escalating process.  Think about how kids talk about it when they're starting to experiment--how far did you go?  Did you get to second base?  Third?  Did you go all the way?  It implies a system where oral sex is more sex than a handjob, and should be an experience you have later.

(This ended up being rather hurtful for me when I gave a guy a handjob before ever having a real kiss, and went through quite a bit of "does that mean I'm too dirty and corrupt for anyone to kiss now?" internal strife before discovering that kissing was still available to me and quite nice.)

The assumption doesn't really go away when you grow up.  It just adds on the idea that you have to stop at an appropriate point on the escalator, or you'll end up on a slippery slope.  ...Which sounds like an awesome waterslide to me.  But the point is supposed to be that if you go "past" penis-in-vagina intercourse by too much, you'll have gone "too far" and you might never return.

Then the inclined planes metaphor turns into a drug metaphor, and you get the idea that "overdosing" on sexuality will make you build up a tolerance, and then "normal" sex won't get you high any more.  You'll have to start fucking donkeys or something just to feel anything.  (I think this has some kind of folkloric connection to the frat-boy myth that vaginas are single-use and will always be the size of the largest object that ever penetrated them.) If your sex tolerance gets too high, you'll keep doing more and more depraved things, until kinky has given way to outright evil, your life falls apart completely, and you become a sex addict and maybe a sexual predator.



There's all kinds of micro-fuckups built into this macro-fuckup paradigm.  Like how sex with people of the same gender, people of a different race, trans people, or people with certain disabilities gets moved to the "more depraved" side of the escalator.  Or how activities people didn't consent to are counted as moving them up the escalator; or someone's position on the escalator is used as an excuse to ignore their consent.  Or, of course, how all this is much more intensely and dangerously enforced against women than men.

Or how something's position on the escalator, rather than its potential to harm, is used as a benchmark of "obscenity."  Or how relationships are expected to escalate, and failure to gradually ramp up the escalator to a certain point ("spicy," which is just a couple steps above center) is taken as failure of the relationship.  Or how even individual sex acts are supposed to have their own escalation, and after you've started groping you're not ever supposed to go back to just kissing.

Or how child molestation and rape are sometimes described as the end of the escalator, like they're what happens when kinkiness goes "too far." and oh my god fuck everything about that.  Or how PIV intercourse is positioned at the exact center, the gold standard which no man should fall short of and no woman should exceed.

Or how lost you can get saying "we shouldn't consider X dirtier than Y," when you ought to be setting the entire idea of sex-as-escalation on fire.


(So it's a baseball game, an escalator, a waterslide, a drug, gold, and it's on fire.  Work with me here.  Take some Claritin if you can't handle analogy.)


In the end, sex is like... it's not really like anything.  Freed from analogies and paradigms and fixed linear progression, sex can get amorphous.  There's no order to do things in, no right or wrong (consensual) things to do, no guarantee of how it will or won't change you, no idea how it does or doesn't correlate with romantic attachment, no guide to what will come next.  It's not even entirely clear what sex is.  Sex could be freakin' anything if the people doing it want it to be.

Good.

Sex Menu.

[For those who missed it: I haven't been not-writing, I've been writing elsewhere!  Check out my post at Captain Awkward: Pretty Should Be Optional!]


So, I don't really know how to open this except to say: I made a sex menu!

Check it out here!
(if the font looks terrible, you probably need to zoom in farther.)

There's a reason, though, a reason going beyond "I liked writing all the funny captions."

It's because I'm not good at thinking of things on the spot.  There's all kinds of things I like in bed (as you can see...), but when the conversation comes down to "so, what do you want to do tonight?", I have a terrible habit of answering "Um, sex?"  Some horrible combination of shyness and choice-paralysis comes over me and I literally forget what kinks I have.  It's like holding a pen and staring at a blank page--the endlessness of the possibilities can easily slip from exciting to overwhelming.

This has led to me tragically having unadorned missionary intercourse on far too many occasions.

So I made a menu.  It's dorky--it might be reaching new theoretical limits of dorkiness--but it's also a really nice tool for communication.  It lays out the things we know work for us and it gives us a starting point to think of things that aren't on the menu.  It frees us from the daunting blank page.

I don't know if I can really end this post with "make one for yourself!", because your relationship probably has to work a very specific way for this to be awesome instead of hilariously awkward.  But I will end it with... getting away from the blank page, however you do that, is a very very good thing for keeping sex pervy.



[EDIT: Some people report trouble getting Google Docs to open.  Here's an alternate link to the same file on Dropbox.]

Kinky philosophy for vanilla sex.

Via tumblr happybdsm, which is awesome

[Oh jeez it's been too long. I don't even have a good excuse this time.  The dog ate my blogging schedule? Bad dog.]


For all the problems in the reality of kink, I love the ideals.  Kinksters may not practice perfect consent and communication (or, sometimes, any), but at least we know we're supposed to.  We talk about these things, we have classes and workshops on them, we even pass out little flyers about consent and communication.  I wish everyone did that.  I wish everyone, in this way, had sex the way kinksters do.


You can't avoid communication in kink, because the category of "kink" is too wide open for there to be any "default" script for play.  "Wanna hmm-hmm y'know? [meaningful eyebrow wiggle]" is just not ever going to convey "wanna tie me to a chair and verbally humiliate and lightly beat me?"  You've got to come out and say it, because there's just no other way your partner will have a clue what you're thinking.

You can't be fuzzy about consent in kink, because what you're doing would be literally torture if it weren't for consent.  You can't beat a person black and blue with a cane because they seem like they want you to.  You really have to reconsider your life choices if you start tying a person immobile because they didn't tell you to stop.  I mean, that doesn't make you a little insensitive or "bad at communicating," that makes you a few steps shy of being the goddamn Jigsaw killer.

Is either of these things really unique to kink?  I don't think so.  There's certainly a cultural "default" script for heterosexual vanilla intercourse, but is that the only sex you want to have your whole life?  And there's certainly more tolerance in society for "I kissed him so he should've known I wanted to have sex" than there is for "I kissed him so he should've known to handcuff my wrists to my ankles," but I'm not sure the first is any less absurd or dangerous.



Sex is a scene.  Even if there's not a bit of kink to it, if it's entirely gentle and egalitarian and "normal," it's a scene.  It's an intense manipulation of another person's body purely (or hopefully at least partly) for the purpose of pleasure.

So what are the rules for a scene?
-You have to negotiate, whether you find negotiation sexy in itself or not.
-You have to be honest with your partner what you're looking for, and expect them to be honest with you.
-You have to take safety precautions, and consciously accept the risks that exist even with precautions.
-You have to respect safewords. ("No," "stop," "wait," and such are safewords unless otherwise negotiated.)
-You have to be aware of your partner's responses and check in with them if things seem off.
-You have to be able to distinguish--and doublethink a little bit--between the fantasy that makes it hot and the reality that makes it ethical.

That's a lot of concepts but not necessarily a ton of work.  In an established relationship you can do it with one sentence sometimes.  Zero sentences if you have pre-negotiated understandings.  What really matters is the mindset--that sex is not a thing that just happens.  Sex is a thing you do, and it's worth doing deliberately.


As with most of my "Cliff's Super Confident Sounding Guide To Life" posts, this is something I'm still working on myself.  I'm guilty of asking for sex with "mmhm y'know" when I really had a lot more to say, and I wish I hadn't, but I still do it sometimes.  Learning to have sex deliberately is a process and not an easy one.  But the rewards (amazing orgasms, snugglywugglies, no "does he really like this" doubts, no "that coulda been better" regrets) are so worth it.  And kink has helped me tremendously on this journey.

I don't think the specific activities of kink are any use to vanilla people.  If you're not wired for this stuff then you're not wired for it.  But I think everyone, kinky or vanilla, should learn how to practice Risk Aware Consensual Fuckin'.

95% of this game is 100% mental.

For all the supposed crassness of their gender, in my experience men are often incredibly giving in bed. "My experience" is always skewed, but most men I've been with view the stimulation of their own bodies as a side attraction, as something of an "eh, getting my cock rubbed is fun and all, but I can do that anytime." Most of the guys I've been with, good and bad, have been all about my physical stimulation.

The catch is, they may not be giving something you want to take. A guy saying "hey baby, let me finger you, let me go down on you, let me make your fantasies come true" is just as skeevy if he's not taking no for an answer, even if he's not being physically selfish.

Maybe this is why, when you go into a sex toy store, there'll be like eighty varieties of dildo and vibrator and three or four really sketchy-looking male stroker thingies.

Maybe it has to do with the perception that female sexual experience varies tremendously in quality, while male sexual experience is an on/ohbaby/off sort of deal.

Maybe it's a male gaze thing, where thinking too much about male physical experience and response would be, in some utterly unfathomable yet horribly plausible way, gay.

Either way, it puts me in sexual situations where the toughest performance expected of me is "have lots of orgasms!" and, gosh, I can't pretend to be too broke up about that. I hope this isn't one of those situations where I was supposed to be going "no, no, after me" all along, but I think it isn't. (Particularly with dominant men, who don't exactly have trouble telling me what they want.) I think I really do live in a world where a lot of guys' sexual desire manifests as wanting to give me pleasure.

DUDE.

Things you learn with an entire hand inside your vagina.

(Your mileage will vary. I realize some people can just throw a fist right in and some people could never do it in their lives, and some people are in the middle but the experience is in some way totally different for them. So these are really just things I learn.)


Trust. Someone with their entire hand inside your vagina could hurt you, deliberately or accidentally. You have to trust, not just that they aren't evil, but that they will read and respond to your signals and that they'll put your pleasure and safety above everything else. This is a trust that goes beyond being sure they won't go "now I've got you, mwa ha ha", and into being sure they won't go "but I've almost got it, just let me try a little longer pleeeeeaase."

Planning. You can't spontaneously decide to start fisting, and next thing you know, his hand just happened to be in there. You have to lube and relax and gradually add one finger after another. You have to talk about it. You have to work at it. This is an entirely intentional sex act.

Relaxation. You have to be way relaxed. Like nearly-asleep relaxed. If you're amped up, positively or negatively, your vagina will know. You can contract it at will like you can contract any muscle, but relaxing it has to come from somewhere deeper. Your fingers and toes have to be relaxed. Every worry and stray thought can be a twitch in your vaginal muscles. The right state of relaxation is very nearly a trance.

Communication. This isn't something you can just consent to, go "okay, stick your hand in me" and lie back. This is something that will make you acutely aware that even the best partner isn't psychic. They can do their best to read your face and your muscles, but they can't feel your pleasure or pain or minor discomfort. For them to know, you have to give constant, active, clear verbal feedback. "I'm ready for one more finger." "That hurts a little, give me a second." "Go slow slow slow, but keep going."

Humility. Sometimes it just doesn't work. All your beautiful trust and communication is for naught, because your vagina just doesn't have that extra half centimeter in it today. You have to be able to say "that's okay, I had fun" instead of barging ahead into frustration or pain.

Anatomy. Having a hand in you makes you acutely aware of your pelvis. You can feel the structure of your own vagina with incredible detail and experience its strength and resilience like never before. Fisting outlines in stark detail how your vagina presses against your bladder in front and rectum in back, and exactly where your g-spot is, and your cervix. Even the bones of your pelvic girdle suddenly become a very real consideration. The things that you're vaguely familiar with from diagrams become physical sensations.

Open-mindedness. The experience is nothing like what you think. I wouldn't even necessarily class it as a BDSM activity--the top has to be extremely responsive and ultimately obedient to the bottom, and when all goes well there is no pain. Before I had experience with fisting--even though I'd had my fingers in vaginas--I always thought of it as working with the pain tolerance of a basically stretchy gooey organ. It's not. It's working with how far an organ of rock-hard, unforgiving muscle will let you go. It's not a domination of the vagina; it's a meditation on the vagina.

Awe. There's just nothing like that moment of "holy shit it's in holy shit." Nothing like it on Earth.

Wrestling and model trains.

Last night Rowdy and Sprite and I went to a class on takedown and restraint--basically, how to use wrestling moves (and institutional restraint methods that, hilariously, I already knew from work) to take someone down and hold them down with your bare hands.

It was stupidly fun. Some in the kinky "now we could torment you or fuck you and what could you do?" sense, and some just in the "fun play wrestling" sense. A lot of kink has that overlap for me, between what's a hot sticky turn-on and what's just fun. Even if I had no intrinsic desire for violent sex, I'd still want a partner I could wrassle with on occasion.

But if I weren't a pervert, I wouldn't have been in that class in the first place. The class was organized by a kinky group, advertised on a kinky website, taught by a kinkster, and held in a kinky playspace. It would be damn difficult for a vanilla person to find out that class existed. Vanilla couples who wish to wrestle each other--and they do, right?--must do it without the benefit of professional instruction on how to to the Sexy Full Nelson and Sexy Armbar. (And yes, the Sexy CPI Control Position.)

It all reminds me of Bruno's spectacularly on-the-money quote about model trains:
Kinky sex is a hobby like model train building -- people labor for years in their basements to get good at it, and though most people don't want to hear about it, other aficionados happily visit to check out their work. Vanilla sex is like running -- it doesn't take much equipment, it's supposed to come naturally, it gets harder as we age, and it's socially approved, but few people really work at it.

Where do people who don't have any freaky fetishes go for sexual education and community? I guess the answer really is, nowhere. (I guess swingers' clubs come close, but they're focused on non-monogamy, not just sex in general.) If you're an ordinary average person, you don't really have a venue for talking about sex the way kinksters do. It's just sort of taken for granted.

I guess the problem is that it's hard to organize a club that could include practically everyone. It's like trying to hold a meeting of the People With Feet Society. If you're unlucky some hardcore foot freaks show up first and scare off everyone else; if you're lucky you just have a giant unruly mob with little in common and no set agenda. Most attempts at sexual community centers seem to be unlucky, and they become de facto kinky community centers.

I would like to teach ordinary people how to sexy-wrestle. I think they'd enjoy it, and it would make their home sexy-wrestling safer and more creative. But I don't know where to advertise the class and I don't know where to hold it.

Then again, I would also like to teach ordinary people how to use a singletail and how to do suspension bondage, because I really honestly think they'd enjoy it how could anyone not? so maybe my concept of "ordinary" needs work.

About last night.

Last night was a five-way cuddle pile that turned into a three-way fuck pile. It was awesome. I'm going to call my partners Rowdy and Sprite, for entirely idiosyncratic reasons. I don't think I can get things in chronological order, but the pieces are delicious.

-My clothing is gone. I think someone else took my clothing (a blue cotton dress, if "someone else" is reading; my email is in the upper right so please let me know) and now I have no clothing to go home in. Fortunately I can borrow some.

-There are seriously twelve kinky people in Boston, tops. I can't take my pants off in this town without seeing someone I already know from a totally different venue. Which is sometimes disconcerting but mostly great, because when it's cool people who keep popping up, it's nice to be part of a community like that.

-You know what's awesome? Tying Sprite down, teasing her, and then fucking her boyfriend on top of her--that's kind of awesome. Then Rowdy and I both fucked her. Because we aren't inconsiderate.

-More for the "I never" list: fucking a guy while a girl fingers his ass--wow did that get a delightful reaction out of him--and fucking him while she fingered me. Like, both in my pussy at once. Like wow.

I have been writing about sex for four years. "Like wow." That's all I've got. Like WOW, y'all. But Rowdy was the guy with the Coke-can cock, so like being stretched as far as I possibly could and then being stretched that little bit and with the exquisite dexterity of a finger. Like wow.

-To be honest--maybe brutally so--this is the first time a threesome has really worked for me. I've had ones before that were fun, but this was no-reservations awesome happy fun. I think it was because it was the first time I've had good chemistry with the girl as well as the guy. Because I like Sprite, like like her, pretty much as much as I like Rowdy. When you're fucking the girl to please the guy, it's just not the same as when you're fucking them both. A triangle is so much more comfortable than a V.

And every time we had sex, it really was three ways. It wasn't "me now her" (although at one point we did rock-paper-scissors for firsties), it was "me and her and him and us in a big happy sexy tangle."

-At one point we were flipping through Cosmopolitan's list of sexual positions and reenacting them in giggling naked but non-penetrative fashion. Cosmo doesn't do threesome positions, though. There's exponentially more. At one point Sprite was in my lap getting fucked, at another I was rubbing her clit from the front while she got fucked from behind, at another I was sucking Rowdy's cock while I fingered Sprite, and all through the night we were just rolling around over each other and kissing and cuddle and oh it was awesome.

-I'm loud when I come. Like real loud and real enthusiastic and kind of... intense, so I've been told. And the amazing thing was that while I was fucking Rowdy and coming my brains out and thus moaning and screaming all over, Sprite started getting into it. Really into it. Like masturbating just watching us and talking dirty to me and moaning just about as hard as I was. It was hot as fuck.

-Total number of empty condom wrappers in the pile at the end of the night: ten. That's accounted for by just one guy. One very impressive guy. Rowdy's got some stamina. The way the ocean's got some water.

-Alright, I have clothes! They're not entirely appropriate to my gender or size, but I am not naked! Alright!

Gross Old People Sex Party.

So in the near future I'm invited to a swingers' party, which I have taken to referring to as a "gross old people sex party" just to be annoying. Because ain't no one gonna accuse me of being too mature. For the most part I'm looking forward too it--in a worst case scenario it'll be an interesting observational experience, and in a "99.9% probability" scenario I'll have sex with 500 people.

But the one thing that sorta weirds me out (well, the second thing, after "the possibility of encountering greasy gold-chainy chest-hairy swinger types and having one of them touch me") is that these things have a "no single men" policy. Now, I understand the necessity, on one level, of not letting in a pack of ravening wolves whose only knowledge of the lifestyle is that this is where the totally slutty easy chicks are at. I do see the potential there for turning a clusterfuck into a metaphorical clusterfuck. But allowing no single men is kind of creepy, because I feel like I'm being stocked. Like a sport fish. The woman supply is being artificially inflated, and even though I'm sure I'll have plenty of selection if I want it, it still sort of weirds me out to be used as a supply.

Although, to be fair to the ravening wolves, all I really know about swingers is that they fuck around a lot and stuff. It's a different culture and mindset than the sex communities I've been involved in before, and I have learning to do at this party.

It's been like a year since I had sex with no hitting, too. I wonder what that's even like.



EDIT: I forgot to mention that I'm going with a group of pervert friends, so I won't be entirely adrift in the sea of gross old people. That makes a big difference in these kinds of adventures.

Bibimbap.

Have you ever eaten bibimbap? It's a Korean food created by mixing a whole bunch of ingredients and meat and rice and sauce, and it looks like a complete mess. If there's any presentation factor to it to begin with--and there usually isn't--the moment you start stirring it up and take a few bites it's going to look like the stuff you find when the garbage disposal jams up. It's just not pretty food. But it's delicious.

A little while back, I was messing around with a friend in bed. He's a big chunky dude and was mostly dressed except for his cock sticking out of his fly; I had a skirt rolled up to my waist and a shirt rolled up to my neck. And we were just rolling around and groping and almost idly humping. It wasn't the kind of hump where you go for the gold but the kind where you cuddle a bit, hump a bit, cuddle some more, tell some dumb jokes, hump a bit. And at some point we got in a position where he was on top of me, but not "missionary position" on top, more like "mattress" on top. He was just sprawled over me and I was sprawled and we were both alternatingly moaning and giggling from all the groping and grinding.

"This must look ridiculous," he said. And I realized he was right. From the outside, we didn't look like anything pornographic or erotic but just an ungainly pile of disarrayed flesh and hair and clothing. We were a mess.

"And yet... ahhhh," he added. Because we might not have been good to look at but looking wasn't the point anyway. It was a delicious mess. Bibimbap.

Vanilla Life: Three Stories.

Junior year of college, I spend spring break at a "retreat" to a Zen monastery. It's much weirder than I expected--everyone, male and female, sleeps on the floor in a big pile, for about five hours a night. Our days are split between the chores and maintenance of the monastery and hours of meditation. Hours. This is how I discover I am unable to meditate. I kneel, and am quiet, and cannot still my mind. I feel every minute of those hours. I flit through sexual fantasies, recounting the plots of movies in my head, doing math, wondering if everyone besides me is in some state of transcendent bliss while I just wish I had something to read.

I am very uncomfortable and very concerned about being polite. The idea that I could simply leave--either in the sense of catching a ride back to town, or merely stepping outside the meditation hall when I damn well feel like it--does not cross my mind. The monks are harsh as drill sergeants, chastising anyone who moves out of the prescribed position for an instant. My feet fall asleep, so badly once that I can't get up because my foot is completely dead, numb and paralyzed and floppy for a minute before it can bear weight, and they tell me to stop being disruptive. They tell a lactose intolerant student that he will eat cheese or not eat; they tell all of us that the only water we may have with meals is the water we rinse our bowls with, and without complaining we drink warm dishwater. I am consumed with the idea that all my fellow students are deriving great pleasure from this experience and viewing it as a great privilege, and I am the only exception. I must not be taking this in good faith, I must not be trying hard enough.

I never do figure out what to make of this experience. It's not a simple case of "then it all turned out to be an evil cult!" The monks put a lot of effort into us and didn't get an inordinate amount of money or work from us. Most of what they did was accepted Zen practice. Maybe it was me; maybe I was not culturally or psychologically prepared for spiritual self-deprivation, and so it became plain old deprivation. Maybe if I had been able to experience meditation the entire character of the trip would have been changed for me. Maybe Zen practice itself is actually kinda fucked up.

They hit us with a stick. This is called Keisaku, it's a real thing. It's supposed to shock and focus your mind. They hit you only upon request, but they hit quite hard, a gigantic thud across your entire back. I request one every time they come down the line of students with the stick. It's not to clear my mind--I've given up on that--and it's not for some kinky thrill. It's just to get some stimulation.


---





---


Eight years old. I've just read about Harry Houdini. His life sounds so exciting! MAGIC! I get some rope and beg everyone I know to tie me to a chair so I can escape. If I get out, I tell them to do it better. If I can't get out, I don't really mind; in a weird way it's comforting. This is one of my favorite games.

Another one is getting into the cages at the vet's office (where I nominally "volunteer" but mostly just hang out). The other volunteer can only fit in the dog cages, but I'm kind of a tiny kid and can get in the cat cages with effort. I don't come out until I have to.

Any time I watch cartoons, my favorite parts are the ones where the heroes get tortured. The scene in Star Wars where the Emperor electrocutes Luke, or various cartoon shows where the enemies imprison or interrogate their captives using an Ill-Defined Blue Force Field Of Pain, hold a special fascination for me. I masturbate (although I don't know that's what it is at the time; I just touch myself a place that feels good and then there's wet stuff, masturbation is some icky complicated grownup thing) thinking about these scenes. I grind myself on the floor when I reenact them with my action figures.

Normal?

My social circle these days is pretty much all perverts. I got to Boston and I met people three ways: through the blog (perverts), through munches and other BDSM activities (perverts), and through the friends I already had here (disgusting, dangerous perverts). If I didn't have to work I think I would have forgotten what normal even looks like.

In fact, in some senses I don't know what normal is like. Like hair-pulling. Do normal people pull hair during sex? I have no idea. I think of hair-pulling as a mildly kinky thing, but then I hear that apparently it's not weird at all to some people? And there's that bumper sticker, "If you're going to ride my ass, at least pull my hair." If it's a bumper sticker that means it must be normal, right?

Or, conversely, scritching. Casually scratching someone on the scalp or behind the ear doesn't seem like a particularly perverted thing to do, but I've only ever seen perverts do it. Does it have to do with the "pet" connotations? Is it just a subcultural thing? Or is it my hallucination and normal people scritch too?

Of course the "right" answer is that there is no normal and people who like BDSM and people who don't all touch in a variety of ways according to their own habits and desires. But still, normal people sometimes seem very concerned with what is normal, so I figure they have standards. And I'm drifting farther and farther from being able to remember what those standards are.

All I know is that if I have to sit through another conversation at work on the topic of "my husband and I are never in bed together and that's awesome because gosh it's such a pain having to deal with those icky things he wants", I'm going to explode and tell them everything.

(I already did let slip that I own a vibrator--they were judging just a little too harshly on a patient who had one in their pocket--and everyone was like "OOOH SO INTRIGUING HOLLY IS A WILD GIRL WHOAAAA." There goes any hope of talking about what I did this very evening, let alone on weekends.)

Action reaction.

Some guys, getting a blowjob, squeeze their eyes shut and go "oh oh oh nnnggghhh ahhh yes." Some guys pretty much go "yep, you're blowing me alright, how bout that" in a totally unfazed tone of voice. Some guys start out unfazed but let out a few grunts just as they get up to their orgasm. And a surprising number of guys seem unfazed by their orgasms! I have a couple of male friends whose external reaction to coming amounts to not much more than "welp, there it goes."

This is particularly hard for me to understand because I'm way over at the other end of the spectrum, the one where a fingertip brushing against me sends me into the Screams Of The Damned. Sometimes I try to suss out how voluntary this is for me. (I've sometimes fantasized about a scene where I was strongly encouraged not to make a peep; I have no idea how successful I'd be at that.) I know I'm able to get the noise level down to relatively subdued pants and moans, but I don't know if I'm capable of keeping a totally level face and voice. I suspect I'm not. The sheer intensity of what I feel during sex is just too goddamn much for me to keep inside.

I've only seen one woman able to do the "welp, there it goes," and it was tremendously frustrating for me. I was plowing away at her with an enormous strap-on, and she was kinda just lying there like I was doing her nails, then gave out a single little "oh" like she was almost starting to feel something, but stopped. Afterwards she told me that I made her come. That was the "oh." Wow.

The funny thing is that the noise a guy makes seems utterly unconnected to how sexually enthusiastic he is. I have a friend who does the "yep, I just came, how bout that," and he's a horny bastard who absolutely loves to fuck and is famed for jerking off any time he's not fucking. So clearly he's feeling something intense internally. I always wonder if sex actually feels different to more reactive people or if only their reactions are different, but ultimately it's a "does the blue I see look like the blue you see?" problem--there's no way to know.

All I know is that when fucking makes me literally scream, it's not a form of attention-seeking or even deliberate self-expression; it's just one of many things my body does pretty much without me when it's getting fucked. I just can't feel "OH MY GOD OOOHHHHHH" without saying "OH MY GOD OOOOHHHHH," and I'm fascinated that anyone can.

Four worlds.

There's this world, online. Everything's very dramatic here--we're very open with our viewpoints and our self-disclosure, very quick to argue, very willing to let emotions run ridiculously high in a world where there's little risk or embarrassment associated with turning into a screaming moonbat at any provocation. But even as anonymity and distance make moonbats of us, they also form unlikely communities, places where people who could never talk about sex or gender with each other in reality create forums to share the things you just can't talk about.


There's pervert world. That world is the best. It's like the online world--full of geeks and openness and not over-encumbered by shame--except there's much less acrimony because of the face-to-face nature of things. Most people don't have the balls or jerkitude to get into a screaming argument face-to-face over the sort of thing they do online, and those that do tend to not get invited to a lot of parties.

Also, in pervert world you can have sex for real. So that's a major plus.


There's square world. For me, this consists mostly of my coworkers and my family, and my experience of it includes a lot of self-censorship. It seems like it should be easy not to say "so I was getting fucked up the ass the other day..." but honestly, that's how a lot of my best stories start. Even when things aren't sexual, there's still stuff I feel like I can't bring up in front of the squares--something as simple as hanging out with my friend, his wife, and his girlfriend requires a quick mental edit. Of course it's no big deal to just say "three of my friends" but the necessity of catching myself and making that kind of edit always weighs me down a little.

More than anything, I have to restrain myself from chipping in on any conversation about sex. If I just don't talk about sex I'm okay, but every time a sexual subject comes up in gossip I have trouble not sharing my actual scandalous opinions. When The Girls at work are talking about "fellatio: gross, or so gross?" I just don't feel safe chipping in with in with "actually, for me it's completely awesome and I genuinely love the feeling and the taste." It would be weird.


And then there's the real world. I have no idea what goes on out there.

Soothing.

(Posts may be scarce for a few days, I'm moving and stuff's all crazypants.)

When I'm tired enough, sex is sometimes not exciting but soothing--sometimes very soothing, like the perfect way to drift off to sleep. Not hard fast sex, but slow sleepy sex is positively lulling. And napping together is a whole new kind of intimacy, one that's harder for me to relax for than just sex. I can fuck a guy I don't totally trust, but if I try to sleep with him I'll be awake or barely dozing all night; I have to really trust someone to be able to fall all the way asleep.

Alone, I find that a vibrator helps me sleep. On the lowest setting, just holding it still, it doesn't make me come but it makes me comfy. It's sort of embarrassing to wake up with the cord wrapped around me and the vibrator wedged into the small of my back, though. A few times it's still been going.

Man. Can you spot the subtle hints in this post that I just switched to graveyard shifts? I'm going to take a nap now.

Dangerous Flavors.

I love kissing a man who's been smoking. Like licking an ashtray? Hah. Like licking a mouth sharp and bitter with the thick flavor of the forbidden. A man who smokes has an edge of compulsion to him, of self-destruction, of being at once a bad boy and powerless before his desires.

I like drinkers too. Not when they're full-on drunk, not when they've gotten to the stage of being over-emotional or uncoordinated, but a guy who's had a few drinks just tastes good. And I love that little hint of clumsiness in a slightly drunken man, the way he puts just a little more or less force than he'd intended into everything.

Even coffee. As vices go it's milder, but it symbolizes another kind of self-destruction, the self-destruction of the good boy. You drink alcohol to play, but you drink coffee to work, and you drink a lot of coffee when work is draining you. A man full of coffee is a man without time for sex--oh, but he made time for me.

Then again, conversely, stank-breath says it's not all about me. It says he didn't put his lifestyle on hold for me, that when I breathe him in I'm taking him as he is. He doesn't need to make himself pretty. (Note, however, that this only applies to the bad-boy scents above, and if you have stank-breath from onions or bad teeth, for the love of God eat a freaking Altoid.)

The flavors of tobacco, of beer, and of coffee are bitter and a little brutal, and for that reason sexy as all hell.

Elbe / Hookup Culture.

Lovely day today. Dad and I walked out on a dike by the Elbe, still in the city of Hamburg but surrounded by farmland on one side and tall reeds on the other. A big herd of sheep was grazing on the dike, with adorable little lambs frisking about.

We had lunch by the entrance to Hamburg's port, watching the big ships come in. An announcer at the little tourist-trap house announced, very importantly, the name and nationality of every ship that came in and played the appropriate national anthem each time.



And the link of the day is Tiger Beatdown, on hookup culture. The gist is that the real question isn't "is casual sex wrong?" but "how can casual sex be done right?" Hookups are fun, but hookups used as a pretext for a screwjob suck.

Money quote: Not just “sex” or “not sex,” when you’ve heard that “sex” consist of “giving a guy who refuses to be your boyfriend a million blow jobs that are never reciprocated.”

It's not really that hard to have non-screwjob casual sex. Just be... friendly. Be generous in bed like you'd be generous with a friend, and be nice to them the way you'd be nice to a friend. Ask what they're into and (within your own comfort zone etc.) do it for them. Unless they explicitly ask you not to, do your damnedest to give them an orgasm. Be honest before and after about the relationship potential you are or aren't considering. If they turn out to be expecting more than you were afterwards, let them down explicitly and politely; if it turns out you feel like seeing more of them, discuss it with them once and then let it go if it's clear they don't feel the same way.



Public service announcement for the guys: you all should start a little cooperative project where whenever you have casual sex, you try really hard to leave your partner happy with the experience. I'm surprised how many guys put a lot of effort into picking up chicks, then put no effort at all into pleasing the ones they succeeded with--even making it a point of pride to burn bridges. Every guy who turns into a clingy creeper or a callous douchebag the instant he comes is drastically reducing the number of women who will be up for casual sex in the future.

There's no point complaining that women won't sleep with you if you don't make the ones who do glad that they did.

Hamburg / Intentional Vanilla

(Experimenting with dual post format. Unsure of wisdom of approach.)

Today was ordinary. I went with my dad to work, we had lunch with one of his friends (he's a paramedic and we were trading call stories in "neither of us knows medical terms in the other language"-ese, which was fun) and afterwards we went for a long walk and went shopping. Which I enjoyed; I'd rather have a slice of life in a different place than do the Official Designated Tourist Activities. We're going to go to the zoo and do a boat ride and all that, but it's not "doing Hamburg" so much as just living in it for a little while.

This trip is a little like being a kid again, in a weird way. I don't have any real responsibilities of my own, I follow my dad around because I'd get lost in five minutes alone, I let him do all the talking, and (me not having Euros) I have to ask him for anything I want. It's not a bad thing, but it's strange; I'm so used to setting my own agenda.

For some horrible IP-confusion reason Google is now speaking to me in Finnish. At least with the German I had a chance at guessing my way around. Finnish just looks like Martian.

---------

Anyway:
You know who I really respect? I have a couple friends who are strictly-heterosexual, monogamous, and vanilla as the day is long--but not by default. They're aware of other options, they've either tried or seriously considered them, and they've realized it's not how they're wired.

I think it's cool when people are in touch enough with their own needs that they don't take for granted that they're vanilla, but they're willing to accept it and assert it even when well acquainted with the pansexual/poly/kinky world.

(And the pan/poly/kinky world can be kind of jerks about "vanillas," if you couldn't tell by the name. The versions of "whatsamatta baby, you uptight?" that I've heard used to accost people--generally women--who declare they respect you very much but it's not for them, are positively shameful. Clearly if you don't want to get spanked by somebody else's girlfriend you just have a narrow view of sexuality and are probably some kind of *ptooey* Christian.)

Don't Fuck Me Gently.

Life lesson learned: gentle sex can leave me painfully sore. The problem is that roughness turns me on. Call me ruined for life by my perverted ways, but roughness is the only thing that turns me on. It doesn't have to be brutality, I don't have to be grabbed by the hair and thrown on the floor (although, God, I wouldn't mind that) but you gotta handle me like you know I'm not gonna break. I'm a chew toy, not an eggshell, yanno?

When a guy is ridiculously gentle, when he just sort of skims his hands over me with tremendous delicacy and reserve, I don't get turned on. I don't get wet and my vagina doesn't relax. My pussy is a wondrously changeable thing, and when I'm having a good time you can get the Edmonton Oilers in there; when I'm not having a good time a pencil is way too much.

So if you treat me like some sort of delicate tissue-paper woman, then try to penetrate me, it's going to hurt. In the bad way. It's a weird thing, pain from being overstretched never strikes me exactly as pain, but more as a strong unpleasant sensation, like tasting something too sour. With my vagina. It's not super fun.



I think there's some crypto-sexism in handling women like they're delicate china toys. Certainly not all women want it painfully rough, but when you're touching a woman super mega tentatively, I think you're failing on some level to think of her as a human being like yourself. Do you jerk off with dainty little butterfly tickles? I'm not some delicate creature, man. What a person can take, I can take.

How to give a blowjob.

In my limited experience, of course. Your mileage will vary and men are all unique penis snowflakes. So tip number zero is communicate--listen to his reactions and straight-up ask him what he likes, and always take his word over what you think guys like. But these are some hints I've found useful.



1. Want it. Love it. Very few of the mechanical details matter if you don't love his cock. This isn't you doing something for him, this is the two of you doing it together. Take pleasure in through your mouth. Explore his cock and enjoy it.

2. Start slow and build. If you start at 500 RPM you'll either finish him before he's begun or tire yourself out. Start with an "I could do this all day" pace and mindset, then get worked up as he does.

3. A gentle--really gentle!--hand on the base of the cock and the balls is nice for most guys. You can lick the balls too, but generally don't suck on them.

4. For that matter, don't suck too much at all. A little suction can be nice I guess, but most guys don't like hard vacu-sucking. A blowjob is neither blowing nor sucking; it's fucking with your mouth.

5. Careful of your teeth. Practice on your thumb to figure out how to do this comfortably--it's easier for me to just use relaxed lips and an open jaw than to actually wrap my lips over my teeth.

6. Get and keep everything absolutely sloppy wet. You can't drool too much here. It's hard to give a blowjob when you're dehydrated and I don't recommend it.

7. Depending on the guy and your own preferences, this can be halfway a handjob. Your hand isn't as soft and wet as your mouth, but it can provide much firmer pressure and reach further back. Giving a handjob with your mouth just on the head can be fun.

8. I can't say much about deep throating because, honestly, it makes me gag really bad. But based on that, I can tell you that guys are quite satisfied if you don't deep throat.

9. If it feels natural and you want to, masturbate or stroke your breasts, or take his hand and put it on your fun bits. Or do the whole deal with a toy in a fun place. He'll be more excited, but that's a side effect--it'll be a whole lot more fun for you.

10. Again, if it's natural, make some noise. An excited little moan around his cock will mean a lot.

11. Spit, swallow, or facial, I don't think it matters that much (although I always swallow because it's like some point of pride with me). The important thing is to keep up some sort of stimulation while he's coming and taper down fast as he finishes. Guys go pretty quickly from "please don't stop" to "please don't touch it," and it took me some practice to learn to finish gracefully.



Ugh. I should go fucking write for fucking Cosmo or something. At least none of these are generally painful.

Cleanliness.

I had a one-night-stand a little ways back with a guy who seemed normal enough: cute curly hair, the not-socially-hopeless kind of geek, super cuddly and sweet. And the sex itself was okay if terribly ordinary--if I moan and say "ooh, I like that" after you spank me once, that is not your cue to never spank me again--but afterwards, he immediately ripped the sheets off his bed and stuffed them in the laundry bin. Then jumped in the shower and scrubbed himself down, and asked me "aren't you going to shower now?" and more or less made me shower.

And then bid me good night and was very sweet and cuddly again.

Huh. It's not like we got fluids all over. Maybe I'm gross, but I definitely would rate vanilla sex with no spillage as a Kleenex and shower-in-the-morning situation, not something requiring immediate decontamination. I don't think it was an insult to me, but there was definitely some weird hangup going on there.