Welcome back!

The last few months have been a rough time in my life. I started this blog as a sex blog and it has meandered through so much more than the bodily machinations associated with the sexual act. Recently, I’ve been grappling with incredibly difficult relationship issues among the people I love. I’ve been afraid to say much about any of it for fear of burning bridges and hurting the people I love and am working so hard to cling to.

At the same time, it has seemed disengenious to segment my sexuality out from my loving relationships and chatter idly about funny news stories, sex toys, or jerk-off fantasies. I’m hoping to find the courage soon to break my silence through some vignettes of particularly poignant moments that have transpired in the last few months. It might not be particularly sexy (unless you get off on emotional masochism) but I’ll be as honest as a can.

So, bear with me as this blog transitions into something that is, at once, a protest song and a love letter to the fears, insecurities, and joys in my life.

At Frolicon I got the chance to attend a discussion on domestic violence and abuse in the BDSM community. This is a poignant topic for me personally and I learned some things about emotional and verbal abuse along the way. I’m coming to realize first hand that words can truly wound in ways that are unfathomable. Emotional abuse victims often suffer depression and post traumatic stress disorder. Here are some resources related to the topic of you or someone you love is in an abusive situation:

Warning Signs of Emotional Abuse

Verbal Abuse Assessment

Examples of Abusive Behavior

A study proving that emotional abuse can be even more harmful than physical violence

My Google reader has been on 1000+ for weeks now as I deal with relationship drama ad nauseum and other parts of life (good and bad) getting in the way of blogging. But I have some progress and news to report.

• The gorgeous and sexy Thursday wrote this really pretty water sex post and dedicated it to me. Swoon.


• I avoided a total fangirl moment and played it cool when Jayme Waxman asked to interview me for a piece on phone sex at YourTango.


• Apparently, I am one of the best sex toy reviewers of 2008. I do know that my boyfriend loves listening to me snark on all the crap toys available in the average porn store.


• March 26th was the four year anniversary of this blog. I missed that fucker again. How frustrating. Maybe I’ll make it up to you with a new episode of Bedroom Radio. But, if you’ve never listened before, the old ones are new to you.


• Next week our entire quad is packing off to Frolicon. I’ve never attended before but I’m pretty excited. Turns out some people that I really admire and enjoy will be there: Lolita Wolf, Sharrin Spector, and Nina (my preferred leather pusher.) If you are going to be there and have been ignoring my queries on Twitter, please speak up!


• Sex 2.0 is coming up again next month and we’re 95% sure that we’re attending. Assuming nothing goes ridiculously wrong financially, I’m so excited to get to go again. I’m not sure if I’ll be leading a session or just actively participating but I can’t wait to see all of my friends again. Too many to mention here easily but if you look at my blogroll, it gives you a pretty good idea.

Today I see the people I love being ripped away from me. I see scenarios for losing the dreams I have let myself build over the past six months. I even see scenarios for losing the dreams that Jay and I have built over our three year relationship. People are taking sides, factions are forming, and the teams are all wrong.

In the past, Jay and I have told Michael and Ariel that if their primary relationship wasn’t strong and solid, that we couldn’t be with them. We’ve told them that we would all have to take a break while they worked things out to whatever conclusion they needed to reach. That system has never been engaged before, we’ve always been convinced to stick around. Sometimes we’ve helped, sometimes I think we’ve hurt things. I always feel like a bandaid.

This time around, I don’t think I can bear to pull the bandaid off. Michael and I are clinging to our relationship desperately. Jay and Ariel seem to be doing the same thing. For the first time today I felt like I might lose Jay if this all breaks. What is worse, he refuses to talk about it any further as of this moment. I’m looking down the track and I’m seeing the obstacles instead of the destinations.

It has become very clear to me that the people I write about here are real people that I have complex relationships with. Meanwhile, there is still some way in which I am a character. I’m pasted together with flippant comments on sex and dirty pictures and the occasional glimpse into my professional life via Twitter. But really, mostly I’m a self-constructed person. On the other hand, Jay and Michael and Ariel don’t have as much agency in their representations here. I try to tell my stories honestly and I try to make them beautiful and I try to see them as imperfect and very partial glimpses into my experience.

Lately, I’ve been hungering to show off the bad with the good. The petty feelings and fears and nasty fights. When this all started we were tripping through daisies and in many ways we still are. I thrill at memories of snuggling Jay in another couple’s bed and sliding Ariel’s hand up my thigh at the dinner table and shivering in an abandoned park with Michael while recreating his first kiss. But I also know that the other moments are what make those so beautiful. Jay calling me an insensitive bitch at 5am and Ariel clattering across my living room floor telling me in stark detail the ways I had hurt her and Michael coldly acusing me of devaluing his love.

There are times when the four of us tear ourselves apart and I think that we won’t make it. That something fundamental will break and we will drift, cut lose from our cores. There are other times when I think that we grow stronger each time we bleed out pain in this way. More honest, more real, more committed. That perhaps scar tissue is stronger than baby soft flesh and our battle scars are really growing pains. Hard fought and hard won. It knocks the idealism and fairy tale ending further out of my reach every time but I suspect that a dream more permanent may grow in its place.

I have a very visual memory. I think it comes from growing up with a father that was taking snapshots constantly. I take my own snapshots of moments. And short videos of them as well. I can see faces displaying certain expressions or particular words being delivered from the mouths of friends and loved ones. Today I laid on the bed reading a book and lazily stroking my clit. Eventually I tossed the book aside to concentrate more fully on my pleasure and an image flashed into my head. At first I ascribe it to my visual memory but quickly realize that this is an image I’ve concocted to illustrate a moment that I experienced but didn’t actually see. As I work my own fingers across my cunt I imagine Michael’s hands. I have an image of them, long graceful fingers and dark hairs and rounded nails that are just barely too long. Then I can see a vivid image of these fingers insistently prodding at my wetness, grazing my clit and filling me. I realize, as I come, that this image is invented. I’ve never actually seen what his fingers look like as they touch me but the memory is still clear enough to conjure the feeling again.

Jay and I haven’t spent much time apart since we first got together. I took a two day business trip almost three years ago and otherwise we have spent our nights under the same roof (even if not in the same bed). This weekend I’m visiting Michael and Ariel by myself because Jay has to work. I’m doing it because there is no reason not to. I’m doing it because I desperately need some time with Ariel that we haven’t had much of lately.

I’m also anxious about it. Jay will go on dates while I am gone. Everyone will likely fret about this. I’m going to miss him and feel a bit untethered on my own. I’m going to worry about him and if he is lonely or hungry or bored. Nonetheless, I think this will be a positive experience and I won’t be far away from the arms of people that I love and who love me.

I’ve been grappling with something over the past few months as I embark on a serious relationship with a woman for the first time. My femininity feels under fire by my own fucked up gender programming. The reality is that it doesn’t matter how much Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick I read. It doesn’t matter that I have idols like Tristan Taormino, Lee Harrington, and Bear Bergman. It doesn’t matter that I love genderbenders and all level of gender fucking. I have some fucked up assumptions and ideas about sex and gender and sexuality that infect my ability to be as fearless as I want to be.

This is a confession of sorts but also a cry for help. I think about myself in reference to kink and sex and realize that I associate submission and service with being feminine. I associate beauty, weakness, and delicacy with being feminine. And I also realize that I am so terrified of being seen as anything other than feminine that I put up some strange defenses against this.

Case study A: Ariel

Ariel is my gorgeous girlfriend. She is beautiful and petite and has long flowing hair. She moves gracefully on high heels. She also has a powerful job in a male-dominated industry and changes car batteries and asserts herself aggressively in conversations. She looks high femme but has always thought of herself as butch. Still, when I touch her I sometimes feel huge, ham-fisted, rough, and all-together ugly. I know she longs for me and I fail her because I don’t know how to be. On the one hand, strapping on a pretty dildo and fucking her for hours sounds like pure bliss but I know that getting to that point will be full of second-guessing myself and my desires and my actions.

Am I being entirely heterosexist in my view of this sexual relationship? Abso-fucking-lutely! Because she is feminine, I feel masculine. (We won’t even get into the terrible fact that I associate masculinity [on myself!] with ugliness) I don’t want to feel this way. It isn’t enlightened, it isn’t sex positive. I wouldn’t teach it to my students. But it infects my reality and I don’t know how to deprogram it.

Case study B: Michael

[Note: This section has been edited for nuance. The lack it previously exhibited, though, is likely symptomatic of my issues with binary thinking.]

Michael is a petite man. We are the same height and I outweigh him significantly. When we first met I didn’t think the relationship would work because of this. I thought I would feel huge and be self-conscious and afraid. So I submitted myself to him. He felt like he was capable of being in charge and I let him be. Even if I couldn’t be delicate and small by comparison physically, I knew I could shrink myself mentally. It works out well that he has discovered enjoyment of beating me until I cry, pulling my hair, grabbing my throat. (Again we won’t get into how fucked up it is that my way of feeling feminine involves simulated victimization) Even when I am initiating sex with him, it feels like an act of service and devotion. He often gives me feedback on how to touch and where and when. I siddle up to him and slither a limb around his body. I kiss gently. The touches are a seduction and they are a worship and only in my most wanton and least self-conscious moments do I allow myself to be aggressive and take up space.

Taking up space

I haven’t really defined what this means to me just yet. You may have guessed some of it by now, though. I think of it in terms of physical space – my body is larger and I attempt to diminish that regularly. I also think of it terms of political space – my voice should be smaller, my needs should be less important, my desires should be locked away.

This might seem ridiculous to some of you that have met me or read this blog. Of course I take up space in terms of talking about sex. Here I am now with this presence on the internet. Blabbing, opining, discussing in detail, issuing edicts and judgments and ideas. But some of that strength leaves me when I’m making love to some of the people I adore most in the world.

I know that every relationship goes through growing pains and these are no exception, but this issue feels bigger and scarier and more about me being fucked in the head than any I have run into before. So, dear reader, tell me what you think. How do I get my theory to line up with my practice? How do I deschool myself of gender? How do I embrace femininity in a way that doesn’t make me need to masculinize others? How have you done it or how do you wish you could?