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In literary studies there is a concept of writing “for the drawer”. It refers to writing that was done in a historical period or within a socio-political situation that did not allow for it to be published or even openly shared. Some of the greatest literary works produced in early Stalinist Russia were not published until 30-40 years after their initial inception.

People like Andrei Bely, Mikhael Bulgakov, and Anna Akhmatova had important things to say and vivid artistic expression that simply could not be expressed. Their ideas were not just unpopular, they were dangerous to the government. And, the simple knowledge of the existence of these writings would have been sufficient to cause them and their entire families to be imprisoned or killed. Writing for the drawer was a political reality and necessity.

People still write in this way today, but not for such dire reasons. The cloak of anonymity that most bloggers maintain is significant but sometimes even it isn’t sufficient. What if I told you that even on an anonymous blog, the community that exists is enough to cause some to self-censor?

If anonymous blogging is already writing for the drawer and this blog is a space for my most personal and difficult thoughts, then where do I write down the things that I can’t even say here? One solution is personal friendships. I have a friend that frequently sends me emails with pieces of writing and a subject line like, “I can’t blog this”. Sometimes he is correct. For social reasons or political ones or just “good taste”, he really can’t. Sometimes I convince him that he is wrong because I know his subject line is a challenge to both of us, of course he “can” blog it, but will he?

Me? I don’t even commit these dirtiest of thoughts to words in a publishable way. I may talk about them with friends or even allude to them on Twitter but the simple act of stringing words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs seems very risky and final to me. If I write and I don’t publish, I am admitting that the thoughts are unpublishable. And if I don’t publish the unpublishable, what am I doing here?

So, my challenge to myself and to every other reader, writer, and sexual being out there is to think about those controversial thoughts. The ones that are too provocative, too infuriating, too risky for even your anonymous self. If you’re brave, you’ll share them in the comments, if you’re braver you’ll commit it to posterity in some way.

I’ll be writing a series of posts that reveal these thoughts and ideas. They won’t be comfortable and they won’t be nice but they aren’t written in the spirit of burning bridges but rather in the hope of forging difficult and painful connections through honesty.

I am so pleased with the connections I have made and ideas that are arising as a result of this post. To get a full feel for what I am trying to get at, please read the comments thread as well as the post. My half-baked ideas are starting to form down there because the original post was written without editing and without structure.

It is official. The connection I find between knowledge/schooling and sex moves beyond the theoretical and beyond the fact that I want to fuck my professors.

My notes scribbled inside The History of Sexuality Volume 1 could be for a future paper and they could be for this blog and I’m not sure which venue is appropriate anymore. I’m not sure that my identity as a potential scholar is at all divorced from my identity here. Each day that identity gets more fluid. I tell one more person that I am a phone slut for hire or that I am polyamorous or that I am kinky or that I own sex toys or any number of other details that are starting to feel mundane.

This evening I went to a Foucault reading group. It was 6 graduate students plus Jack, a professor in my department. I refer to him now by the name I gave him in a piece of fiction I wrote 3 years ago (and by “fiction” I mean “daydream committed to blog“). That piece was written near the beginning of my graduate studies (and at the beginning of this blog) but I have known Jack since I was an undergraduate. I don’t kid myself that I have come full circle in some way, but over 3 years of documenting my feelings and thoughts about sex must mean something.

The nature of blogging is that it busts up our ideas about narrative, there often isn’t a clear story or arc of reasoning. Especially in the world of personal blogs, the evolution of emotions and ideas is what carries the real narrative quality. With each post I write I know that it will reach the readers that have read every word I have ever published here (a *very* small group) as well as those that stumble upon it in isolation of what comes before and what comes after. They may see it 5 minutes after I write or 5 years but it stands on its own in a way that it absolutely cannot. That is my cross to bear of course, but sometimes it makes the writing unbearable and impossible. An impenetrable wall of hyperlinks, exposition, caveats, and insecurity. But I still write.

This isn’t an essay about what compels me but this is rather a story about how I am longing to set myself free from this anonymity. It sounds like a contradiction, right? Anonymity is supposed to bestow my freedom on me, allow me to say and be the things that I never could be in the rest of the world. But what if I want to be those things out in the open, proudly, and productively. What then of my ubiquitous “head shot” that features my arm flung over my face? Where my body is capsized, the emphasis of my being not on my eyes but on my mouth and my tits. Am I just a mouth and tits? I have a voice and I have a sexuality (or at least desireable curves) but I can’t be seen and perhaps I can’t see out. Perhaps you didn’t come here for a deconstructive analysis of my own dirty photos. Perhaps you are the reader I cited above and (if you are even still reading) you are thinking “what is this chick on? what can I get off to? isn’t this supposed to be a sex blog?”

I know that risk. I know that being a sex worker I have this privilege of being myself that I can only exercise to a certain degree. I do have to be always on, always willing to serve, I do have to present an image of myself that is both real and hyper-real at the same time. Am I horny? Generally, yes. This moment, of course. With you, absolutely. That is my mantra and it reflects who I am to a degree. It also determines me. Is it a fabrication if I have *become* what I strove to represent myself as?

So I was talking about Jack and the Foucault group. I sat with a group of my peers today and I talked about Foucault. Simple enough, something that graduate students do. But it felt like I had so much more at stake. Every fiber of my being was screaming to really dig into the implications of these ideas. What about sex workers? What about BDSM? What about bisexuality? What about a million other predilections/perversions that are all around us but I may not be personally invested in?

But we talked about power. And there is nothing wrong with that, it is the guiding idea in Foucault’s work and it is crucial to understanding what he says about sexuality and sexual identity/orientation. But I craved something else, an honesty that would shock and impress and be productive. I wanted to share knowledge, an ars erotica, with my peers but instead I operated in my usual capacity. I listened to Jack, I nodded my head, and occasionally I re-phrased what he said in order to make sure I understood it. He agreed and all was well but my insides were screaming and my mind was racing with ideas and questions that were both on the tip of my tongue and impossible to articulate.

So, I’m left in this chasm between my academic authority and the authenticity of my experience. Neither is represented here or there and I feel incomplete.

I know this post went in a million different directions and there are more still streaming around in my mind. What would Foucault say about this? Why do I even care what Foucault would say about this? Really, it is an absurd and laughable question but I still find myself clinging to it.

Oh, and happy fucking Half-Naked Thursday, here is a picture of my ass splattered with come. It was taken with Jay’s camera phone after he fucked me during a call with a client. Posting this feels so mundane.

I’ve been reading everyone’s Sex 2.0 wrap-ups the last few days and been trying to decide if I should podcast my thoughts or write them. I figure I’ll do both and you can hear more detail in the podcasted version that I’ll get to a bit later.

The event was an interesting one for me personally because I have never appeared publicly in relation to this blog or my work in phone sex. I was both excited and nervous but luckily I met some of the most amazing people during the process and therefore felt totally safe.

The weekend began for us on Friday afternoon when Jay and I arrived at our hotel, I had time for a quick cleaning up after the car ride and then ran to the airport to pick up Melissa who I’ve been waiting to meet forever. You know how you meet some people and they are nothing like you expected them to be based on their writing? Well, this was not the situation with Melissa. She is bright, cheerful, sarcastic, and carries this amazing presence given her tiny frame. After getting Melissa to the hotel I met up with Match for a drink before the pole dancing party.

The pole party was a blast, again I expected to feel self-conscious and worried but everyone was gorgeous and sexy and uninhibited and that sort of thing rubs off on you. This is where I met Mistress Maeve, who happens to be one of the most stunning women I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, she doesn’t do pictures but here is everyone at the party (excluding myself and Maeve.)

While I was pole dancing, Jay was at the Clermont Lounge with a bunch of people from the conference. The original plan was to head over there after the party was over but I was so exhausted that we headed back to the hotel instead. We went to a lot of trouble to get a nice hotel room with a whirlpool tub and all sorts of neat features but we didn’t use them at all and instead just crashed. I was surprised to realize that I had actually gotten sore from pole dancing. The front of my thighs were in rough shape because I guess that a lot of what I had been doing was basically squats.

We woke up bright and early, had some breakfast at the hotel, and headed to the conference. I got to see 1763 for the first time and was pretty impressed. When they said that the conference was happening at a dungeon, they weren’t just messing around. This place was, as they like to say on the internet, serious business. There were several rooms outfitted with lots of different equipment and the central space was huge and featured a giant shower in one corner (that Viviane quipped was the size of a New York studio apartment.) We arrived as Amber was giving the opening comments and then got to see Dacia give her keynote remarks. At this point it was time for the first session and I chose to attend Melissa’s. She trotted out her bag of tricks from being a sexual health educator and assigned us to perform roleplays of various sex and internet problems that people might have. I got the joy of performing a creative piece that Match and I developed to deal with jealousy that insignificant others might have over blog fans. I don’t remember much of it other than Match cracking everyone up with his request that I “@ him while I do it“. This was the first sign that Twitter was going to be a driving force of the weekend.

The next session I went to was run by Elizabeth Wood and was on Creating the Sex Commons. This was definitely the most thought-provoking and emotionally difficult sessions that I attended because we talked about responsibility. And I thought a lot about my responsibilities as a sex positive person when I step into a classroom and when I open a blog post and how (if ever) those two things are meant to interact. (I have written about this before). I also thought a lot about my responsibilities to my clients and friends and this session made me realize what important group of people were missing from Sex 2.0 - the clients. We were many of us there sex workers but none of us were paid consumers and I really wished that perspective had been present. Maybe next year!

After lunch I attended a session by the lovely Cunning Minx of Poly Weekly. Since Jay and I have struggled with our open relationship I thought that some tips might be helpful and Minx was encouraging and helpful while remaining quite realistic. I appreciated her sense of humor and grace in discussing icky emotions such as jealousy.

After this session, it was time for my own. I felt under-prepared but the vibe at the conference was so pleasant and open that I was really excited and confident anyway. In preparation, I had surveyed some phone sex operators and asked them about their personal phone sex habits and histories. I found out some interesting tidbits about the industry and how the average operator feels about phone sex. Some said that they regularly get off during calls, some said that they would never ever get off because phone sex doesn’t turn them on at all. Some said that they have NEVER done phone sex before being hired as a professional, others had done it recreationally for years. These statistics were interesting to my audience but what they really wanted to know was the nitty gritty of the job. How to get started, how to promote yourself, what to do to get the caller to tell you what they want and make them happy. I enjoyed sharing my expertise and it seems like there might be some more bloggers cum phone sex operators on the scene in the near future. Certainly a lot of women decide to do phone sex (as themselves or as a character) and the blog and promotional efforts come later. This is a logical way to go about things but I’m really grateful for the route that I ended up taking. This blog is too important to me to be reduced to a pure marketing effort. The minimal planning that I did for the session went out the window when I realized that we had run out of time just on me answering questions.

The last session that I attended was Viviane’s sex blogging session. Since I’ve been doing this for a few years, I had covered most of the ground that she did but it was amazingly informative. I can imagine that people just starting out with blogging got an amazing leg up because Viviane was sharing things with them that it took me *years* to figure out. Also, she is hot and amazing and brilliant so I wanted to bask in her presence.

Honestly, the day ended too soon. As it was wrapping up I was wishing that there was more but luckily the social opportunities had just begun. More on that later but for now check out Sakura Sarashi’s account of the evening and Sunday as she was with me the entire time.

Posted by mobile phone:
I have been reading a book that was sent to me for review recently. Like many things that I read, I dip into it in stops and starts between classes. Except this book is pretty naughty and has naked lovers on the cover. Needless to say, I’ve been spending a lot of time feeling naughty and worrying about getting caught. Doesn’t that make things better. When I finish the book, I’ll have to compare the experience of sneaking glances before my students shuffle into the room with climbing into bed with it the rest of this rainy afternoon. My bed might be a more socially acceptable place to read erotica but what it lacks in daring it makes up for in ready access to sex toys.

During a lecture today on phonation, my hot linguistics professor described a murmur as “that raspy, sexy voice”.

Oh, that one, I thought, as a conspiratorial smile spread across my face. Finally a concept I can fully grasp in this course.

Our textbook describes four basic types of phonation: voiced, voiceless, whisper, and murmur. When I read the text before class I didn’t imagine that it was *that* sort of murmur. Technically, a murmur is a combination of the vibration of a voiced sound and the voicelessness of a whisper. Place your fingers on your throat and say the sound /f/ and then the sound /v/ - you should feel a vibration on the /v/ because it is voiced. When we murmur (sweet nothings preferably) our vocal cords do not close along their entire length and the air that flows through adds whisper to our voiced sounds.

At first it seemed a bit antiseptic to turn something that, for me, was almost second nature into something scientific and classifiable. Then I thought of the bodily nature of this thing, the murmur. The movement of the tongue in the mouth and across pearly teeth. The breath sent through pursed lips to caress any vulnerable and exposed bit of a lover. The vibrations of the vocal chords that carry through our entire bodies. Perhaps understanding this little bit of biology, anatomy, and the marvel of the human capacity to communicate draws me closer to understanding the communication between bodies and minds during lovemaking.

This little lesson in the phonation is part of the science of arousal and seduction. Especially vocally. That murmur that we love to hear, the breathiness and raspiness of it, signals something in our psyche, an utterance between voice and whisper that points to a similar longing.

I guess I always knew that my voice was an instrument but I never quite knew how it was tuned. And now, with this awareness, I’m ready to stretch the vocal chords again.

A modern day Lysistrata:

Gang members in one of Colombia’s most violent cities face an ultimatum: give up guns or give up sex. In what is being called a “strike of crossed legs”, supported by the Pereira mayor’s office, the wives and girlfriends of gang members have said they will not have sex with their partners until they vow to give up violence.

[...]

The city’s security secretary, Julio César Gómez, said surveys of gang members showed that their favourite activity was having sex and their membership of gangs was more about power and sexual seduction than money.

Read the rest (via Sexoteric)

It is interesting to think of women successfully using their bodies to deter violence. However, one has to wonder if this concept of so many women as blockades will lead to them being literal punching bags. The women interviewed in the article claim that they are not afraid of violence from their partners but I wouldn’t be so sure. People that thrive on sex for power might not take well to it being witheld. This is an intriquing story, I hope it gets followed after the initial coverage. It could signal a new method of direct action. Well, as new as anything that Aristophanes wrote about over 2,000 years ago.

It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. - Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

This semester I will take a seminar on Gilles Deleuze it is being taught by two of my favorite professors, Thomas and Jack. These are also professors that I have no small level of longing for. Afterall, how could I resist them, I am young and impressionable, eager to please and desiring to be intellectually sexy to my idols. They are freshly minted PhDs with good looks, charisma, and a laid-back approach to instruction. They intentionally blur the line between teacher and student. They cultivate casual relationships with students, curse in class, and teach incredibly sexy theory. In the bar a few nights ago, I ran into Thomas and my friends and I sat down with him for a drink.

One drink became several, the conversation got intense and personal, and everyone I had come there with trickled away to go home. Thomas and I were alone at the bar now and continued to talk. Then Thomas made a remark that changed everything.

I wish I remember the exact thing that I said directly beforehand but I can’t. It was hopefully insightful and sexy. Perhaps it was relatively mundane but regardless it elicited a significant response.

Thomas shrugged his shoulders forward, resting his head in his hands with his elbows on the bar and said, “I have to keep reminding myself that you are my student.”

I look away, facing forward, bars are good for diverting a gaze in that way. “So that’s where we are,” I reply.

We said some more things in the following minutes, they were pithy and flirtatious and in the spirit of negotiation. I knew I wanted him but I also knew it would put both of us in a peculiar position starting on Monday.

In a moment of courage and brilliance, I look up from my drink, gesture to the bartender and say, “Hey Paul, can I borrow a pen?”

Paul used to fuck a roommate of mine, they aren’t dating anymore and she doesn’t live with me but I still feel guilty when I see him since I was the one that convinced her to break up with him. Paul delivers the pen and I murmur my thanks.

I take two cocktail napkins from the stack in front of us and put one in front of Thomas and one in front of myself. I write down the URL for this website, fold the napkin in half and pass it to him along with the pen, “Your turn.”

He writes something and passes it back to me.

I look in his eyes and desperately want him to kiss me but I gather the resolve to say, “That is all I can give you tonight.”

But by way of consolation (and perhaps to convince myself as well) I continue, “The best stories like this climax at the moment of desire being expressed, I always end up writing them that way.”

He nods, seemingly unconvinced.

I know that there are other possible endings to this story: outright rejection, a torrid affair, kinky sex that is never repeated, a teary regretful morning after, he has done this with half a dozen students before, I am not special, someone falls in love, everything is peachy, or many hot encounters. They flare out before my mind as possibilities that are entwined and intersecting, weaving their way through the landscape of my sexual consciousness. I feel a surge of warmth like the first sip of a coctail but I know I’m on my fifth.

I know that I’ll see him on Monday, that this is far from over, that my resolve might not be sustained through another night of coctails. But for that evening, the story is over and I stand up and say, “Goodnight.”

When I was in high school I was a debater. I was serious about it too - I spent my weekends cramped up in high school classrooms across the country from my own school arguing the merits of the US foreign policy to Russia, renewable energy, and secondary school achievment. I used to spend my summers in the basement of libraries at major universities doing work for “debate camp”. I picked my undergraduate university based on being recruited by the debate team. It was pretty serious. I first read Foucault, Gramsci, and de Beauvoir because of the debate team.

One ideology I encountered in debate was Objectivism. Objectivism seems to be a pretty easy philosophical system for white, affluent, argumentative teens to grab onto. For this reason, the objectivist society actively recruits high school debaters to brainwash with their Randian message of greed. I never thought of it as something that someone would hang onto once they became an adult nor of something that could get you laid.

I was wrong.