Friday, April 16, 2010

The dance effect

This may sound conceited, but I think that I could have sex with 80% of the men (and/or women) who see me dance. I'm not a professional dancer, by any means, but I know how to shake my ass. And I've picked up people/been hit on after someone has seen me do my thing, when they did not seem interested before.


I think an underlying issue is that there's something about a body in motion that both draws attention away from potential flaws, and draws attention TO what your body is capable of. This is part of why runners are so sexy--it's one activity we see (not just in a gym) all the time! They aren't just decorative, they're focused and determined and sweating and into it. Which is...very very very sexy. To me, anyway. Which is basically what counts. :D

They also tend to fit the slender ideal, which is kind of problematic, but on the other hand, seeing the men's running club go by shirtless is pretty awesome.

And both of these activities exude confidence; both in ability and general "I may be making a fool of myself but it's what *I* want to be doing". Which is tremendously attractive.

Embarassing?

I've had sex to the Bloodhound Gang's 'Bad Touch'...It was actually okay. We both came. And laughed a lot. And it makes a good story!

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Ellen Bass is one of my favorite poets ever

God and the G-Spot
by Ellen Bass

“He didn’t want to believe. He wanted to know.”
--Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan’s wife, on why he didn't believe in God.

I want to know too. Belief and disbelief
are a pair of tourists standing on swollen feet
in the Prado--I don't like it.
I do.--before the Picasso.

Or the tattoo artist with a silver stud
in her full red executive lips,
who, as she inked in the indigo blue, said,
I think the G-spot's one of those myths
men use to make us feel inferior.

God, the G-spot, falling in love. The earth round
and spinning, the galaxies speeding
in the glib flow of the Hubble expansion.
I'm an East Coast Jew. We all have our opinions.

But it was in the cabin at La Selva Beach
where I gave her the thirty tiny red glass hearts
I'd taken back from my husband when I left.
He'd never believed in them. She, though, scooped
them up like water, let them drip through her fingers
like someone who has so much she can afford to waste.

That's the day she reached inside me
for something I didn't think I had.
And like pulling a fat shining trout from the river
she pulled the river out of me. That's
the way I want to know God.

Sunday, January 31, 2010

Oh really

I once had an ex-lover attempt to reassure me that he didn't get fatigued giving oral sex, and to illustrate the fortitude of his mouth, he declared that "I once bit a trumpet in half".


Suffice to say, my pants stayed on because I laughed for a good half hour straight. (Apparently he had intended to say he had played trumpet, and it made his mouth strong enough to bite things in half..? Yeah, I don't know either.)

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Don't judge me!

I went to swim the other day. It was, as it very frequently is, fairly crowded (this is a large university's biggest gym). There was one lane with only one other person in it, so I went over, sat on the side of the pool, and asked the young guy standing there if I could split the lane with him. He looked at me--sitting, in a tight swimsuit, making no attempt to not slouch/pull in my belly/try to make myself look thinner--and gave me a kind of nonplussed expression. But he grudgingly said okay, and I jumped in.

And I was twice as fast as him. I made a point of passing him several times. Because I am pretty fucking fast and it's very satisfying to totally stomp on the stereotype of overweight ≠ active or in shape. It's not that I'm not super heavy, but I'm certainly an in-betweenie and not the image of the thin college athlete. Also, yay swimming!



Though, as a sidenote, I am trying to be vegetarian/as vegan as I can, and I'm worried about my athletic performance. :/

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Bloggy weirdness

Apparently, when I have started a draft of a post, then publish it a couple days later, it posts it in the order of when I started writing. So that's not cool, new stuff isn't at the top. Crankyface...Hopefully it is fixable.

Friday, January 1, 2010

Non-Needle Tattooing

I would love to have a henna session with a lover. Or even washable marker, if semi-lasting designs are a bad idea. I've always been fascinated with henna, and there are some designs that would look AMAZING if you had the whole body as a canvas. (Think bold tribal designs cupping a woman's breasts and swirling down around her hips and hipbones, or tiger stripes along the ribs).

Or, if you wanted to be funny, handprints on the ass. Or a "___ WAS HERE" graffiti.

Weird little internalized things

There is a line in Lady Chatterly's lover that is extremely contempteous of women who orgasm after their male partner, or more specifically, the arrangement that Lady Chatterly had with her Irish lover: He would come, but remain hard, and she would get herself off with him remaining passive.

In retrospect, Lawrence's disgust was probably aimed at the Irishman and meant as a critique of his masculinity. His mundane thrusting and subsequent manly spasms did not push her over the brink of passion! For shame! He must not be manly enough. And sure enough, when she meets her fated groundskeeper, he IS able to make her orgasm in the process of coming himself (and also explicitly forces her to be the passive participant, so it is his action that brings her to that point. She isn't allowed to have any autonomy in her own pleasure, he is in charge, etc. Very gendered sexuality. And the groundskeeper is totally an asshole, but I digress.)

Anyway, I ended up internalizing that as a "something shameful"*. Okay, taking tips from D.H. Lawrence, terrible idea, yes. But I think it was the utter repulsion that this guy obviously felt for women who happened to orgasm in this way. And I had fairly recently started having sex, and that was one of the ways in which I could orgasm, and it was damaging to discover that maybe my partners think it's weird and unnatural for me to do this and perhaps I am a flawed person and they are secretly disgusted oh god. Which didn't really make all that much sense on a number of levels: my partners were not disgusted by me, we had good sex, they liked it when I orgasmed in whatever way I needed to. I was able to understand and remain unaffected by the other questionable/archaic aspects of LCL. But that idea stuck around until pretty recently, and I have no idea why. Perhaps because it was so personal, and something that I did engage in, that it was a low blow (ha!) and so carried more weight.

Now I'm somewhat older and can unpack that with a more jaded, feminist outlook, it's...well, I don't know what it is. A testament to the fact that I had weird thoughts and clung to the strangest ideas. I still do, mind. Being able to contextualize on that front is helped by the knowledge that while I'm sure there are people out there who think it is unnatural and repulsive to orgasm that way, they are a) people I'm not interested in having sex with and b) probably outnumbered by people who have MUCH stranger habits, who have happy and healthy sex lives in defiance of what we are "supposed" to like and do. And that's okay, and power to them (and us!).

On a very broad level, I'd just like to say orgasming? Good. You aren't hurting anyone? Go for it. And fuck anyone who wants to shame you out of doing what is best or works for you. ^^


*And Lawrence apparently did think that any autonomy a woman had over her own participation in a sexual encounter was repugnant and unnatural so I don't think that it was entirely off base of me to latch on to that.

Not at all kinky shit

I would love to be one of those wildly kinky people who has a closet full of toys/props and an infinite repertoire of positions and tricks. But if there's one thing that makes you feel any sympathy towards the writers at Cosmo (if anything) is that coming up with new, feasible ideas is difficult, goddammit. And then there's also my own personal foibles. Impatience with things that don't work immediately, being overly sensitive of my dignity, and a desire to be having sex RIGHT NOW all tend to lead to a "oh fuck it, let's just have sex in missionary" moment.

But what this is really leading up to is to say that I just orgasmed from girl on top for what is probably the 5th time in my life. Which is, uh, awesome. And it wasn't from lack of trying or inability to orgasm (trust me on that one), but it did get me thinking about why I hadn't before, and what made the difference. Now, perhaps I am just super behind the learning curve and so no one else would be interested in 'how to orgasm from being on top if you couldn't before' so that particular post might not be at all useful to anybody else.* But I believe a lot of my frustration with that position can be applied to sexual experimentation in general, and therefore is worth saying.

A little thing that had nothing to do with me or my partner was that we switched what kind of condoms we were using. Our usual sex store was closed, ended up with a different brand and a different style. I'm certainly happy about it :P. Entirely coincidental, but it emphasized the difference little things can make. Different lube, different condoms, it's worth playing around. And fun, did I mention fun? Sidenote: Don't settle for Trojans, agh, I hate Trojan condoms, that is an entirely different post.
So for some reason, I have better luck orgasming on top when I'm using a different brand of condoms. Who knew! (And if you did, and didn't tell me, I will be very sad.)

The other thing that made a huge difference was who I was having sex with. While physical differences do play a significant role in what positions work, it was the attitude that played a determining factor here. My current partner is remarkably chill and nonjudgemental--he doesn't mind switching to missionary so I can come when he does, so there was no pressure to say 'I need to come from this new position, he really seems to like it so I don't feel like I can ask to mess around with what we're doing, why am I not coming, let's overthink this to the point that I'm not going to come at all, etc'. Having an environment where I could switch things up to do what *I* needed to do, and where that was not an issue at all? Tremendously important.

This is not to say that I hadn't tried or succeeded in orgasming from other positions, just that it was pretty hard for me to come and by no means a guaranteed thing. I did/still do enjoy switching things up. I like variety, and it felt anywhere from "okay" to "pretty good", but I wouldn't come and so it could end up being frustrating...There was also the pressure to keep doing new things even with the high likelihood that it wouldn't end up being a winner. And I think it was a sign that my communication/comfort with previous partners was subpar (see aforementioned chillness) that changing positions would become an exercise in pleasing who I was having sex with. In that mindset, there was the tendency to give up trying to make it work at all-- (for fear of seeming too demanding? Being afraid of how long it might take to come, if ever? How many unsuccessful attempts would it take? Not wanting to admit that reverse cowgirl is about as interesting as doing laundry, without the sense of accomplishment?). Which leads to feeling like it's a favor, or resentment, and all manner of bad things. Possibly the moral of that is that I suck at communicating sometimes. BUT that even simple shit can take a while to get right. And by "a while" I mean bloody YEARS ugh what was I doing with my time.
(Answer: Everything but having enough really good sex)


Anyway, the really cool thing about this is that it's a confidence booster, which leads to even more positive effects, namely; having figured this one out, I'm so much more likely to want to try other snazzy things. I guess I didn't realize quite how much everything was contingent on mindset. Deciding beforehand that it's not gonna work can really impair the desire to experiment and more importantly, have those experiments succeed. Even with completely mundane vanilla sex. And I am all for ways to have better sex. Even if I don't take Cosmo's absolutely original new tip to have sex on a trapeze wearing sea urchin costumes.


*What made the box-blocking particularly frustrating is that, apparently women are supposed to come from being on top with great facility. I must have been at the end of the line on that one too, or something.