Thursday, November 20, 2008

I like kissing...

I've mentioned this before, but it's one of those eternal truths. Kissing is an experience that brings me great joy. Last night I went out on a second date with someone, and at the end of the evening we were standing out in the freezing cold air talking and kissing was all I could think about. He'd continued to grow on me, a lot, over the course of the evening, I'd been restraining myself from touching him for hours (we were not alone on the date and people were already making uncomfortable assumptions), he looked warm and approachable, and I thought to myself to hell with it and said to him "I'm going to kiss you now, if you don't mind."

Oh, but it pays to be bold. It's always a good sign when I'm comfortable enough with someone to ask them for what I want, and he was warm indeed. Willing, too, and a very good kisser. I've mentioned before that I'm not really sure what makes a kiss good, but there are definitely certain things that make a kiss better. Laughing into each others mouths. Hands fisted in your hair or your clothing. Being pulled back again and again for just a little bit more.

"It's chill in the wind, but it's warm in your arms." - My Junk, Spring Awakening

There's something particularly delightful about kissing in the cold. The way the shivers recede, or move deeper, when you're close enough to someone that you can bask in their warmth and forget the wind and the winter air. The way it makes it just a little bit harder to let go.

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Leaving a bad taste in my mouth...

The Bush administration is at it again, trying to stealthily pass a rule that would allow providers to class contraception as abortion and extend the aggravating mockery of "moral" legislation known as "conscience clauses". Please consider signing the Planned Parenthood campaign, or otherwise speaking out. Want to know why this is an issue? Here's what I wrote about it the last time they tried to sneak this under everyone's radar.

Sunday, November 2, 2008

Mainstream

***Note: This piece has plot spoilers about the show Spring Awakening. If that is going to upset you, don't read it.***

A kinky friend and I went to see the Broadway musical Spring Awakening the other day, and I was reminded both about how mainstream some BDSM is and how little that means people actually understand it. There is a scene in the play where Wendla, a young woman, talks about how she fantasizes about being beaten and then begs her friend Melchior to beat her with a switch so that she will "feel something, anything." He eventually acquiesces and hits her. When he does, she repeatedly begs him to hit her harder until he ends up beating her with his fists and then, filled with horror at his actions, running away. This, by the way, is the controversial scene that got the original play banned for many, many years, although in this political climate I think that an earlier scene where the mother refuses to teach her daughter where babies come from may actually ring more true. But I digress...

What I found really fascinating about the scene was the audience reaction to it. A small minority of the audience - including my playmate and I, as well as the gorgeous pair of British queens sitting behind us - spent the scene giggling in recognition. We'd had that conversation, that experience, from one direction or the other. We'd fantasized about pain, understood that desire before or after we grasped our bodies' longing for gentler sensations, and seeing it on stage was a revelation not because it was unfamiliar but because it was so completely on target. "For every masochist, God makes a sadist," indeed. The vast majority of the audience just seemed vaguely mystified or uncomfortable, which was what I expected. Then there was the other group. The group, like the couple in front of us who were so disgusted that they talked, loudly enough for us to hear, about whether or not they should get up and leave.

I forget, sometimes, that this is often the reaction to my sexuality. Horror, disgust, derision, and an unshakeable belief that there is something wrong with me because one of the things that most profoundly sexually excites me is pain. It is bad enough, to much of society, that I am a woman who admits to liking sex, that I am aggressive about it, that I approach men, and women, with prurient intent. Still, for most of them, there is something about that they can at least understand. I may be improper, in their eyes, not womanly, not genteel, or whatever, but sex is a sensation they can generally understand desiring. The quest for the holy orgasm is sacred, or at least comprehensible. Seeking out pain, however, must be a sign of some fundamental deviance or flaw. It is proof that I am broken, and allows those who would find other reasons to despise me an easy nail on which to hang the less acceptable placards of their disgust (too smart for her own good, too loud for polite society, not pretty enough to get a normal man, too fat, too weird, too...)

The thing that sometimes makes it difficult to argue is that I am broken, and in the past I have used my masochism as a way to handle it. For a long time I found vanilla sexuality far more stressful than BDSM when it came to addressing my issues of risk vs. reward. In addition, I felt prettier, sexier, and more accepted in the kink community than I did among my more vanilla peers. I had discovered a community that valued differences, girls who were smart, loud, alt-pretty, weird, and ridiculous as much as those who were quiet, beautiful, normal, and sane, and I liked it. It was a glorious place to be, in part because of my flaws. But the counter-intuitive thing is this: in no way has my masochism ever rendered me broken, or wedged itself into little cracked pieces of my soul and forced them open the way that mainstream expectation has so often done. If anything, it has made me stronger, more self confident, healthier, and closer to whole. Still, the fact that I am broken makes it harder to convince people that my being a masochist has nothing to do with flaws in my character or my upbringing, holes in my psyche, active abuse, or benign neglect. It gives them an out from believing that I am just wired to like pain. That, for me, being beaten so hard I can't sit down comfortably for three days is simply a remarkable amount of fun.

I was listening to the Spring Awakening soundtrack and thinking, earlier today, about how joyful masochism can be. Reminiscing, really, about recent experiences, playing masochist-in-the-middle, ending up in a pile of giggling, writhing, screaming biters and bitees on a floor, laughing hysterically from pain, and grinning shamelessly while cursing my head off. I don't think most people get that - that for some of us, at least, there can be a connection between a love of pain and the possibility of simple joy (to quote another musical.) I don't like stubbing my toe or walking into a wall* any more than anyone else does, but the skillful application of pain or other intense sensations is often the most direct neurological highway to a grand old time.

Submission often comes from a darker place in me, a place of untamed longing or restless discontent, but pure masochism is usually straightforward, light, and untainted joy. It's transporting in the same way as getting caught up in beautiful, intricate music - some small amount of which I experienced when listening to Spring Awakening**.

*Shut up. I know it happens to the rest of you too.
**Full disclosure, I enjoyed the show a lot, but I do not think it was the brilliant masterpiece that so many reviews have implied. It was a good show with some very good music and some very strange staging and choreography - one really annoying bit of which was explained by a remarkably useful review. Since I should not have to rely on written analysis to enjoy directorial choices, I actually think I may like the soundtrack better than the performance, but I am very glad I got to see it before it closed. I have access to cheap enough tickets that I might even be convinced to go again. Especially since I now know to think of it more as a play and concert than as a standard musical, something which will drastically change my experience and expectations.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

The Horror! The Horror!

In which, in celebration of Halloween, I try to write Hentai. Warning, if sex, bugs, or tentacles freak you out, you should really skip this post entirely. It's also far from my best writing.

--
It was dark in the corridor. Too dark to see more than a few inches in front of my face. My friends had gotten far enough ahead of me that I couldn't make out their shapes, and I cursed the fit of whimsy that had made me agree to go into the haunted mansion. I hate haunted houses. Horror movies do nothing for me, and I firmly believe that if fear isn't going to be a prelude to sex then it can stay the hell out of my psyche. Still, when I turned the corner and the hands reached out of the wall behind me, I screamed, and the sound was swallowed, utterly, in the velvety blanket of the dark.

I don't know why I noticed it, given that there were fingers wrapped around my biceps, wrists, and ankles, but the way my voice was eaten by the air felt wrong. It was unnatural. My scream should have bounced along the hallway the way it had when the skeleton swung across the entry way or the actor dressed like a goblin stuck his head out of the stomach of a plastic corpse. Instead it was sucked away into silence. I screamed again, as I felt the hands dragging me backwards into the black, and it must have been my imagination but I swear I saw the night itself come and soothe the sound away.

Quiet. Everywhere quiet. The darkness now was complete, and I began to struggle against the implacable hands that were dragging me back into the warm, dense night.

"Sssssstop," I heard. The syllables slid straight until my brain and I couldn't move. Something large moved up behind me, too warm, too big to be human, and I shuddered. The hands tightened on my limbs and, as my fear grew, my body began to react to the combination of touch and terror and I began to feel slick dampness forming between my thighs. "Oh yessssss," the voice continued, "thisss one will sssserve," and my spine twitched as a long, rough, sandpaper dry tongue rasped across the top of my spine. "Thisss one will sssserve very well."

The hands, all six of them, pulled me back against the figure behind me. I felt its skin writhe, and then I felt myself covered in thousands of little crawling feet. I screamed and screamed again, the sound eaten by the darkness the second it left my throat, as what seemed like thousands of bugs crawled across my skin and devoured my clothing, occasionally getting carried away in their hunger and taking a bite of the pale flesh beneath. They were everywhere, and it seemed like hours of horror passed before I was left naked and mewling in the being's arms, spots of blood clinging to my skin like paint, as I felt them swarm back over me and into the creature they had come from.

My body twitched repeatedly as that same sandpaper tongue licked up the drops of blood, leaving raw angry patches of skin behind. It rasped once, in passing, between my legs, and I realized to my horror that there was part of me that was actually enjoying this nightmare. As I shivered and began to cry, the tongue moved up to taste my tears, and I felt something in the creature behind me begin to shift. What I had thought were hands around my ankles began to slide, and twine, and shift their way up my legs, wrapping me like snakes. The skin that covered them was rough, abrasive, but they seemed to secrete some sort of slime that helped them drag their way along my flesh. I felt one slide, burning, inside my cunt, and as it did I screamed and came. It pulsed inside me and swelled to fill me as I felt the other tentacle push inside me from behind.

They moved inside me and I cried out, over and over. Each time it felt like they were sucking more of the liquid warmth from inside my body, and as tears poured down my face they were devoured too. When it felt like there was nothing left inside me, no energy, no moisture, barely even any life, the creature withdrew, and as it departed I shuddered again on the floor.

Suddenly, I could hear myself crying.