A puppy, and maybe-jokes.

I just got back from Christmas with Rowdy's family!  It was happy and cozy and his parents cooked like they were fattening us up to eat us.  And Rowdy gave me a 350-million-year-old fossil trilobite for a present. It was good times. I hope you all had good times in your own ways as well.

Rowdy's sister and her husband stayed with the family as well, and they brought a puppy with them!  An adorable, hyperactive, cuddlywuddly, toe-nipping little puppy!  (They were claiming it was an "Olde English Bulldogge," but it was clearly not.  We're guessing boxer-pitbull mix.  Cute, whatever it was.)  This struck Rowdy a little bit odd, because his sister never liked dogs.

So Rowdy asked his brother-in-law what was up.  He said, laughing, "Your sister said the only way we'd ever have a dog is if I'd already brought one home and she had no choice.  The next day, I brought home the puppy!"

Ew.

Concerned, Rowdy asked his sister about this, and she said, "Oh, we talked for a long time about getting a dog and we agreed we'd do it around now.  I didn't use to be a dog person, but I love this puppy!"

Huh.

The brother-in-law had been kidding, but the weird thing is, he was kidding in a way that made him sound like a kinda scary asshole.  He would've come off as a much better person if he'd told the truth.  So why did he make up this story about forcing an unwanted burden on his wife?  And why, on some level, does the fact that he made up the story not really bother me, but strike me as a pretty ordinary bit of humor?



There's this widely told jokey narrative that marriage is a state of passive-aggressive warfare where the wife has to be pressured into allowing fun things and the husband has to be nagged into doing responsible things.  People in relationships, good and bad, joke about getting along like the Lockhorns.  See also: every sitcom ever, every issue of Cosmo ever, every social gathering where "my husband is such a manchild/my wife is such a ball-and-chain" is a joke about as edgy as "airline food tastes bad."

The problem is, it's not a joke for everyone.  It's one of those insidious things that hits some people as "ha ha, yeah, I kid about him being a manchild, but really we talk stuff out," and hits others as "so I see, husbands are supposed to be irresponsible and you're supposed to berate them for it."  Even though Rowdy's brother-in-law wasn't really coercing his wife into a major responsibility she didn't want, he was cheerfully playing into a story created by, and validating for, men who really would.



Credit where credit's due, this is Rowdy's theory: One of the major steps toward creating a consent culture is making consent look different from coercion.  It's making a man who respects his wife's right to participate in decisions sound so different in casual conversation from a man who doesn't, that no one could confuse them.

Because our values aren't that screwed up, really.  If you ask people, point-blank and not-joking, if a man should listen to his wife when making a decision that affects her life, people are going to say yes.  Most people--even most not-at-all-feminist people--are going to say, yeah, of course that's basic respect.

So imagine a world where it was really, really obvious who respected their wife (husband, partner) and who didn't.  If people who respected their partners never told these maybe-jokes, people who didn't wouldn't have that maybe-joke plausible-deniability to hide behind.  They'd either have to tell outright lies (which some would, but it would require them to be consciously aware that they had something to lie about) or their "she didn't want it, but I did it anyway" story wouldn't be jokey, it would be a straight-up confession of evil.

Making the distinction between respectful and abusive relationships blunt wouldn't end abusive relationships.  But it sure as hell would make them a whole lot less popular at parties.

Everyone else is doing it... right?

Now someone, somewhere, thinks it's
normal to slut-shame a steak.

Rowdy and I watched porn together last night.  Because Rowdy is a gentle soul in ways I am not, I tend to watch hardcore kinky porn and he tends to watch porn of real couples having sweet lovey sex.  We were watching his porn.

The woman in the video had sex the way I do.  When she was on top, she didn't pump her whole body up and down, she just moved her hips rhythmically.  And she didn't stay on top forever going poundpoundpound like a champ; she did it for a few minutes and then switched positions.  I think that's the first time I've seen a woman in porn do that.

The part that blew my mind: the guy in the video was way into that.  And Rowdy was way into that. And it was in porn, which gave it the official stamp of People Think This Is A Sexy Thing.  I was astonished, because I always thought wiggling my hips on top meant I was incompetent at sex.  I thought you were supposed to bounce full-length on a guy until he came, and since my thigh muscles can't do that, I thought I was too weak to do me-on-top sex correctly.  It was amazing to see people accepting a less athletic method as a totally valid, hot way to have sex.  Hell, it was amazing just to find out that I wasn't the only person on Earth who has sex that way.

It was also amazing, although it probably shouldn't have been, to voice these thoughts to Rowdy and have him reply basically "you think there's a wrong way to ride my dick? and you've been doing it less because of this?" *facepalm* (He was more polite than that.)  A few minutes later, we were having delightful sex with considerably better understanding of each other.



The point of this story is not "if you see something in porn then it's good sex."  Oh god no.  The point is that it's easy-- especially in areas as private and emotionally loaded as sex--to have a totally skewed idea of what everyone else is doing, and to try to conform to that skewed idea.  (Not that conformity is a great thing.  But being able to make realistic comparisons to others, then decide whether you want to emulate them or not, is still useful.)




And I'm probably going to make a whole post about this so I won't belabor the point right now, but this is why feminists care about media and memes that normalize rape.  (Or that stigmatize the words "rape" and "rapist," but enthusiastically normalize the act of forcing sex on people, as long as you don't call it that.)  Because it tells people that rape  is normal, that it's a popular and accepted way to express romance and/or dominance, and we can't assume that everyone absorbing this culture knows "of course that's not how it really works."



It's easy to look around your little corner of the world, and the bits of patchy evidence you get from other places, and think that you know how the world is.  It's easy to conclude on the most threadbare evidence that you're hideously abnormal or that the suffering you're enduring or causing is normal.  The ultimate solution to this is to transcend "normal" and replace it with "good."  But the proximate solution is to be conscious and careful of what we normalize.

Being imperfect is normal.  Being miserable is not.  Being a predator is not.  As long as "normal" is a thing that people care about, we need to get this news out.

Why have sex?

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


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

The first one went a little like this:

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Why not?



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

A different kind of love.

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

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

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

"...metaphorically."

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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



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

This is what negotiation looks like.

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





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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Economics vs. apples.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

How I met Holly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

"Is this spot taken?"

Far too often, patients at the ER try to hit on me. (If you are picturing someone cute and polite who is in the ER for reasons that have nothing to do with being in a drunken bottle fight, then you are picturing the exact opposite of the sort of person who does this.) And most of the time, they do it in the format: "Gosh, ain't you a little sweet thing... do you have a boyfriend?"

I just say "yes." But that's a partial answer, because they asked the wrong question. They asked something like five different kinds of the wrong question.

The full answer is: "Yes, but he doesn't care who I sleep with, but I bloody well care who I sleep with!"

Perhaps I'm reading too much into the drunken advances of the sort of guy who tries to hit on the person who's picking glass out of his wounds, but it unnerves me that my boyfriend's right to my body is counted as more important than my own, even when he's not around. They're trying to establish whether I'm owned, not whether I'm interested.

Sometimes, for extra comedy/discouragement value, I'll say "yes, and he's really mean." This is a straight up lie, as Rowdy is barely mean enough to use sternly worded I-statements with a fly. (And the implications here are horrifying; am I suggesting that Rowdy would beat someone up for having consensual sex with me, or that only his "meanness" protects me from sexual assault?)

So the real answer is: "Yes, and he's not mean at all, but Roger The 250-Pound Security Guard sure is. If you try something, guess which one I'm going to call?"

The best things in life.

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

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

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

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

Why I want to fuck my boyfriend up the ass.

Because he enthusiastically consents to it, yeah yeah, and because it's a morally neutral act that carries no shame, sure sure, of course. But these are only reasons not to not do it. Let's talk about why I want to do it.

I want to do it because I love my boyfriend's butt. I love my boyfriend, much more--but I love his butt in a completely separate way. Frankly, my relationship with my boyfriend and his butt is nearly polyamory. Rowdy has an exceptional butt, a truly world-class ass, round and strong and smooth, and it's a joy just to touch. To outright fuck it, to have that amazing ass tightening beneath me and that smooth skin pressing against my groin, would satisfy a primal lust for a thing of beauty.

I want to do it because it fucks around with gender. I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but I'm not very comfortable with being a girl? I love the feeling of having a cock. Obviously I can't feel it exactly (although with the base right up against my clit, quite a bit of sensation gets through), but I love having my cock stroked and sucked. And fucked. It's the thrill of sex mixed with the thrill of violating gender roles, and that's a lot of thrill right there. (I'd have to ask my boyfriend to get his perspective on this, but I don't think of it as making him more feminine. I want to look down and watch a man get fucked.)

I want to do it because it could hurt him. Not that I would! Psychologically, I can't. I've tried to hit him several times (with his agreement and encouragement), and the relevant Batman sound effect is not "bam" but "piff." I can't bring myself to do it. Nor could I bring myself to cause him pain by fucking his ass, but the fact that I could is powerful. It means that I have to be conscious of myself during sex, be responsible rather than impulsive in my actions, and be highly, highly sensitive to his reactions. I'm usually pretty uninhibited, so that's a new way for me to experience sex. It's also sexy as hell to have someone at my mercy because I am inside his body.

I want to do it because it turns me the fuck on for reasons I can't even elaborate here because I don't understand them myself. I want to do it because thinking about it gets me wet and squirming. I want to do it because I've had dreams about it. I want to do it because every time I've played with a man's ass is a crystal clear and thrilling memory in my mind. I want to do it because it's fucking hot and hotness is a thing unto itself.

I want to do it because umf. Yeah.

Search term.

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

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

"rowdy loves holly pervocracy."

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



Rowdy had sent me a love note through the Internet.

Anatomy of a Scene.

Rowdy and I are at a play party. We start flirting, playing around, him pulling my hair, pinching my breasts, shoving me up against the wall and kissing me. He tells me to go get the flogger.

We sit on the couch and talk before doing anything. Our negotiation is brief, because we know each other well and have played before. I tell him I want a flogging; he asks if he can punch me too, and I enthusiastically agree. He asks if he can spank me, and I say I'm not really into that. If we were new to each other, we'd clarify more--he already knows that I can't take heavy pain and prefer to be hit on the back and shoulders more than the butt, that I like it when play gets sexual, and that I love being bitten.

We go to a St. Andrew's cross in the playspace, a seven-foot-tall wooden "X" shape with metal loops to attach ropes or cuffs. I undress. Rowdy takes two coils of rope out of his bag and ties a knot around each of my wrists, then ties them up to the cross. I end up facing away from him, into the cross, my arms stretched high over my head and outward in each direction. It's a longish process and to be honest I'm a bit fidgety, even distracted, looking around at my surroundings, passively holding my wrists for his convenience but not emotionally taken up into the scene yet.

Midway through tying me he uses the ropes to hold my wrists over my head and kisses me, and that helps, though.

Then I'm tied, and he starts out with just his hands, running up and down the length of my body, warming me up, waking me up to the feeling in my skin. It's sweet and sensual and gentle, and at the same time just a little frightening, knowing he's priming me to fully feel what comes next.

What comes next is the flogger. The first time it lands on me it's soft, just a dusting, soft flexible leather gently stroking down my back. The next time is not quite as soft. Soon the flogger is landing hard and fast on my shoulders, my back, my ass and thighs. It's not truly painful--I'm not much into heavy pain--but it's a constant pounding, a warm slap into my muscles each time the tails land on my skin.

And then--WHAM--I'm in subspace. It's that strangely detached place I go when I'm high or heavily drunk, when I'm under hypnosis, and during intense sex; I'm aware of everything that's going on and can think about it lucidly, but my reactions are not lucid and there's a powerful sense of otherness to the experience, a folding in on myself, a shift to an emotional parallel universe. I'm nearly limp in the ropes, and aware of my limpness, but unable or unwilling to compose my body. I can sort of babble out words with great effort, but without that effort I just moan. For reasons I can't possibly explain, it's wonderful.

The character of the blows changes in my mind, then. I'm no longer experiencing them physically but as a lulling sensation, a periodic thump at my brain, a feeling at once sustaining and intruding upon my trance. Now and then one stings a little too much and I can feel that on my skin, but the ones that are just right, and that's most of them, are not blows at all. They're words, pulses, thoughts, something abstract. They're feelings.

At some point I guess Rowdy puts down the flogger. He comes up close behind me, his whole front against my back, kisses me, and punches me. I have a great back for punching, broad and strong, with big meaty muscles over my shoulderblades. Perfect for catching a fist with a lovely thump. These impacts hit me harder than the flogging, physically and emotionally, and I grunt with each one, almost roaring. It is not a sound of surrender. It is a sound, despite my hands still tied over my head and my body obediently receiving the blows, of fighting. I'm roaring and Rowdy is roaring back, growling at me as his fists pound into my back.

There just aren't words for some things. It's... good. Let's go with good.

But too soon my back starts getting bruised and the punching can't go on forever without crossing the line into real pain. So Rowdy comes in close again, sets his teeth on my back, and bites down hard and holds. It hurts, and it's wonderful, and it's the first thing that edges completely over the line into sexual pleasure, and I'm about to come just from having my back bitten. It feels like my back is coming.

On the second bite he rubs my pussy while he bites me, and then I come the regular way.

Finally I say--babble--that I've had enough. My face is slumped forward into the rough wood of the St. Andrew's cross. Rowdy runs his hands up and down my body, then his nails just barely graze me and I gasp, and he kisses me and unties me. I'm half-aware and giddy as he helps me down.

We lie down on a mattress and cuddle for a long while afterwards. At first I'm just flying, maybe even more so than while we were playing. His body feels warm and wonderful against mine. Then again, everything feels warm and wonderful. I am deeply, deeply inside myself mentally, and yet I'm acutely sensitive to every touch and every word. It's a long and delightfully gradual process to come back to Earth, to where I can walk and talk and do stuff and pretend to be a normal person.




So when I say half-jokingly that "my boyfriend hits me," this is what I mean. It's a carefully constrained and constructed process, far more complicated inside and out than just hitting, and the end result is nothing like just hitting.

The end result is the complete bliss of mind and body.

My Polyamorous Heart.

[Guest post by Rowdy]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zero-sum gender.

Rowdy mentioned to a coworker that I have more power tools than he does. "Wow," the coworker said, "doesn't that kinda challenge your masculinity?"

In one sentence, so many layers!
1) Power tools are masculine. Owning power tools indicates, or perhaps causes, masculinity.
2) One would not expect a woman to do anything masculine.
3) If a woman is masculine, this makes her partner less masculine.
4) If a man isn't masculine, that's terrible.

All of which is particularly unfortunate considering that power tools are so useful. I didn't buy an electric drill to feel like I had a big swingin' cock (when I wanted that, I bought a big swingin' cock); I bought it because I was assembling furniture for my old apartment. Is it feminine to sleep on the floor?

But the interesting part for me is step 3. It's the idea that there's a limited amount of each gender role in a relationship, so if one partner is more masculine, the other must be more feminine. You see this a lot in the way certain people approach homosexuality--the idea that every lesbian relationship is butch/femme, or every gay relationship top/bottom. "Which one of you is the 'man'?" I think it even underlies more outright homophobia--how can you have a marriage or raise a child if you don't have people playing two distinct roles?

It's a bizarre extension of this thinking to be in a heterosexual relationship, but violate the unwritten rules just a tiny bit, and get "which one of you is the 'man'?"

Cock.

Man I love strapping on a cock. It's not that I am or want to be a guy, just that it's nice to have the option from time to time. There's something fundamentally pleasing and satisfying, even comforting, about having a nice chunky piece of sexual equipment filling up my pants.

(I've always felt like this comic describes a fun way to be.)

It's not about dominance either, by the way. Having a cock does not make you automatically the top, as quite a few boys I know could tell you. I have had my cock ridden by a guy who was holding me down.

And I love having a boyfriend who is nearly as enthused as I am about the whole subject. He has a little hesitancy about the physical implications of playing with my cock, which is understandable, but not about the "oh no, if I enjoy having sex with a girl, but it's the wrong kind of sex, then that's like gay sex, which might make me gay, which would be terrible."

Then again, I'm amazed at the things Rowdy actually enjoys that in other relationships I would hope to "get away with" at best. Sexual perversion, of course, but also my enduring lack of competence or enthusiasm in the realm of femininity. Finding out that he actually thinks I look good with no makeup in cargo pants, rather than just putting up with it when I'm too "lazy" to get into drag proper feminine attire, is such a "you can have chocolate every day" feeling. Also, farting: not a dealbreaker. (Don't laugh; "girls don't fart" is a fucking issue. God knows how many belly cramps we've suffered holding it in over the years.)

Last night Rowdy and I were watching porn and cuddling and he was alternating between stroking my cock and playing with my pussy, and all I could think was, shit, what the hell deodorant should I be wearing?

Awesome.

Kind of awesome: having a theme date.
Awesome: the theme is "Robo Date."
Very awesome: as in "let's have a date where we build a robot."
Super awesome: the date culminates in fucking involving, in keeping with the theme, a stainless steel dildo.
Wicked awesome: having completed the mechanics but not the electronics for the robot, we make a second date entitled "Solder & Sodomy."

Quiet night.

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

Sometimes happiness is just that simple.

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



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

Anyway. We are "sister girlfriends."

Freely given.

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

Because he still wants to get it with me.

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

Weekend.

Events from this weekend:

-I went to an undisclosed location with undisclosed persons to engage in mostly undisclosed activities, and I am honestly worried that I'm saying too much by admitting it was this weekend. It does make me feel kind of cool to be engaging in dark secret underground shenanigans, but it also makes me incredibly sad that we have to. Pressure from the law and "morals" on one side, and creepy perverts-in-the-bad-way on the other, forces the Massachusetts kink community into this sketchy marginal existence.

-On the drive over, Rowdy was making out with a friend in the backseat. I couldn't look because I was driving, and asked Sprite to provide a play-by-play, which she did admirably. "Okay, they're kissing, they're kissing, there's some general petting going on... hang on, folks, he's reaching under her shirt now, and HE'S SAFE ON SECOND! THIS ONE COULD GO ALL THE WAY!"

-A fellow kinky Jew and I sang the Chanukkah blessings over a fireplay scene. Chag sameach!

-I got sealed in a vacuum cube. (Like this, but without the goofy hood.) It was... interesting. It starts out as just a cube of latex, and then as the air is pumped out it feels like six giant balloons inflating around you, so tightly that for a moment you worry they'll crush you, and then the latex seals to your body and you can't move. At all. This isn't "I can't run away" bondage, this is "I can't wiggle my toes" bondage.

It was a unique physical sensation, but ultimately it was more frightening than exciting for me. My preferred play style is intimately physical, body to body, skin and leather, so this very detached and technological restraint didn't really turn my buttons. And being stuck in total can't-wiggle immobilization is a little bit nightmarish. As I write this, I'm stretching out my limbs and taking deep breaths just thinking about it.

-I'd worked overnight and hadn't had much rest the day before, so as the night went on I got sleepy. I curled up in a dog-crate-sized steel cage and had a nice nap.

-I accidentally got a bit of flesh torn off my back. Ewwww, but not particularly painful or upsetting. What was upsetting was being stuck in a bent-over position (so as not to drip on a white carpet) while my friends made Keystone Kop efforts at first aid. At one point I came within a confusingly labeled bottle of being wiped down with kitchen cleaner.

-I got to run around all night and socialize quasi-normally with my tits out, and all on its own that's fun. Not even sexy fun. It's just freeing.

-The next day, with just Sprite and Rowdy, a discussion of phlebotomy somehow degenerated into examining Rowdy's superficial dorsal vein ("yeah, I could get blood from that, but he probably wouldn't like it"), which degenerated into a more general inspection and contemplation of the male anatomy, which of course degenerated into a double blowjob. As discussions of phleobotomy so often do.

-Oh yeah, and at one point I was getting flogged with a jingly bell clamped to my nipple and I was singing "Jingle Bells" very very enthusiastically. 'Tis the season.

Unstoppable force, immovable object.

You know what the not-so-great part is about being a girl who can have repeated orgasms in rapid succession, having sex with a guy who has both the muscular and sexual stamina to fuck for literally hours without stopping?

NOT A GOD DAMN THING.


ahhhhhh