Secret Confessions of a Smart Girl

Sins (and cosines) of the flesh.

I really did not want to get out of bed this morning.

While watching Torchwood instead of working (and boy am I going to regret that at 3 a.m. when I’m still up writing,) I realized that what my life is really lacking at this moment is great heaping quantities of hot man-on-man action. Lots of sweat and muscles and men pushing each other around. Lots of rough and tumble kissing and wrestling and other skin-on-skin activities. I’m really quite happy most of the time to be a bisexual girl, but sometimes I do think it would be an awful lot of fun to be a gay man. Oh to be a fly on the wall in the corner of a gay leather bar right about now. I haven’t gotten a chance to watch really yummy kinky violent man-sex in ages. Mmm. Happy thoughts. Puts a girl in even more of a clothes-ripping-off mood than normal.

It’s like watching a good movie rape scene*. I do so like a sexy abuse of power. Some good, pinned down, teeth to throat, clothes ripped aside, “I want, I take, your desires are irrelevant,” brutality. “You shouldn’t be here, you little fly on the wall, we’re going to make you regret this indiscretion…”

Freaking Torchwood stirring my imagination like that. Now I’m all hot and bothered and I have to work!!!! Stupid work**.
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*real rape, not hot. Fictional depictions of rape, extremely hot. Even though I sometimes feel guilty for finding them so.
**Normally I’m not this much of a procrastinator, but I just can’t find my focus on this project and it’s kicking my ass.

Many moons ago I attended a women-only play party. I was supposed to go with a friend of mine, but she bailed, and I ended up attending on my own. While I was there, I started chatting with this girl and we had a conversation that was literary geek heaven. We compared favorite books, and then we started plotting a children’s book at the table while everyone around us pretty much sat and rolled their eyes. I had insta-crush, because she was all cute and smart and dorky and stuff*. After about 2 hours of chatting I got up the nerve to ask her if she was a top or a bottom, and she admitted that she was a top, but that she was nervous about playing at the party because she hadn’t actually really had a chance to top before. I volunteered that I was an experienced stunt-bottom, and told her that if she ever wanted someone to practice on I’d be happy to throw myself beneath her. She said “how about now?” and we wandered off to find some place to play.

I don’t remember all that much about the scene, the feel of her hands on my skin, my telling her it was okay to hit me harder, and making really stupid literary jokes at each other, but one thing sticks in my mind. I didn’t just want to play with her. I liked her, and was quite attracted to her, so I asked her “Have you seen The Princess Bride?” and when she said yes, I asked her “Is this a kissing scene?” in the voice of the young boy. After she stopped laughing, she asked me if I would like it to be a kissing scene, I admitted that that was the reason I had brought it up, and then she kissed me**.

Afterwards, several of her friends came up to her all excited, because she’d been going to parties for months and months and had never played. I felt all gleeful in a “corrupter of the innocent” way, and we ended up dating for a few months until I had my surgery and dropped out of circulation to freak and then heal. Oddly enough, the friend I was supposed to attend that initial play party with is now madly in love with one of the girl’s coworkers and friends (who she didn’t meet in a scene context). It’s a very small world.

Even though the relationship has faded away, I’m really glad it happened, and I don’t know if it would have had I not had the guts to ask her “Is this a kissing scene?” I need to take myself as an object lesson and remember to use that line next time I’m out with a geek and feeling disappointed that it isn’t.

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*So sue me. I have a type.
**I really like kissing. It’s one of my favorite things. Huh. Along the lines of my previous post, I’ve just realized that you can actually sing “Cock sucking, kissing, and cookies, and napping” to the tune of “these are a few of my favorite things.” It scans! I can’t decide whether to be happy at the fact that it works or horrified at the thought that some day I’m going to catch myself singing that out loud. In public. Oh gods. It’s started already… “Cock sucking, kissing, and cookies, and napping, beating and biting and fucking and slapping, knives that are edgy and canes that go sting, these are a few of my favorite thiiiiiiiiings”

I had a discussion the other day where we decided that cookies, cock-sucking, and a catnap would be a good recipe for an enjoyable afternoon… not necessarily in that order.

I’ve been working a lot lately on finding my inner slut and figuring out how I can have more sex with less stress. There was a time in the not so distant past when I was utterly incapable of doing the sex-without-a-relationship thing. Over the past year or so, however, I have gotten substantially sluttier*, to my great satisfaction.

I really like sex when I’m not emotionally or mentally conflicted about it. I think that the recipe for said lack of conflict is as follows.

1. Being seriously attracted to the person I’m going to be having sex with. Not just mildly attracted, I have to really want to fling myself at them and rip their clothes off.
2. Deciding, in concert, that sex may occur before we’re in a place together where sex could occur.
3. Having a comfortable and competent discussion about STD testing and sexual history well in advance of the actual sex. If the conversation isn’t comfortable than I’m not going to feel comfortable sleeping with them. If the conversation doesn’t occur in advance then I haven’t really made an informed decision and I’m going to end up beating myself up.**
4. Not feeling like I’m talking my partner into sex. Sometimes begging can be fun, but I don’t like feeling that they wouldn’t have wanted to have sex with me if I hadn’t been so pushy.
5. Not feeling like I’m being talked into sex. If my instinct isn’t to give an enthusiastic yes then my answer should be no.

I really need the first four, and the fifth has never even been an issue for me except in retrospect***. When I’ve compromised on one or more points in the past I’ve ended up feeling bad about the decisions I’ve made (even if the sex was great). When I haven’t compromised, I’ve ended up all purry and wanting to jump people more often. Jumping people is fun.

I think part of what has confused me in the past is that what attracts me to people for play is very different than what attracts me to people for sex, and I’ve felt that shouldn’t be the case. Realistically, however, there are lots of people who I really enjoy playing with who I’m not even remotely sexually attracted to. I’m far more rarely sexually attracted to someone who I don’t think I’d like playing with, but it does happen****. Attraction aside, the thing that’s most essential in making me happy about sex is practicing what I preach.

I was a sex educator before I ever started having sex, and I am still one to this day. It may have warped me a little bit, but I choose to think that warping was for the good. Mostly, I just like to avoid being a hypocrite. If I can’t do something myself, I shouldn’t be telling anyone else that they need to do it. So when I follow all my rules when trying to lure someone into sweaty naked time, I end up feeling pleased on multiple fronts.

Speaking of pleased on multiple fronts… I spent way too much time this weekend talking about boobs. By the end of the weekend I’d spent so much time talking about boobs that I was having meta-conversations about talking about boobs. Oh god. Now I’m blogging about my meta-conversations. Does that mean I’m meta-once-removed? I need to remove myself from this blog at once. Good night, and good riddance (to my consciousness)!
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*Which on the grand scale of sluttiness still isn’t very. I can no longer count the number of people I’ve slept with on one hand, but I’ve still got a finger or two to go on the other.
** It’s much more fun if someone else does that. Seriously. It’s an enormous turn on when someone is turned on by hurting me.
*** Still, I’d rather regret sex I didn’t have than sex I did have.
****Names withheld to protect the not even remotely innocent… and my ego.

So, while chatting with a recently post-breakup friend on my drive home from the Northern Lands, I commented that sleep-deprived, hormone-and-tummy-ache-addled blog posting is a lot like drunk dialing. After writing my last post, I fell asleep for a whole hour and a half and woke up feeling substantially better. Less fried, emotionally and physically, and less sick as well. Which meant that I didn’t cancel my play date, and thank goodness for that.

Play dates are fun, and that was exactly what I needed. Fun play, stupid jokes, packing peanuts, and absolutely no stress. The only thing it really was lacking was a teleportation device for post-play travel. Still, you can’t have _everything_. What I can have, now, is a shower and then I just may have to bake some cookies. For some inexplicable* reason, I’m having a horrible craving for cookies.

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*I’m lying. It’s not actually inexplicable, I’m just too tired to explain it.

This weekend, I packed my bags and drove to the Northern Lands to accost the long-time crush* for a first date. I’m still there. It’s 6 AM, and I’m wide awake, lying in my friends’ (not the crush’s) bed typing on my laptop wishing I were either asleep or already back at home without more plans and the drive looming before me. Why am I up at this ungodly hour? I’m overcome by disappointment. The level of overcome is probably a reflection of the fact that I’m PMSing (and aren’t you all glad to know that!), but the fact is that I had a goal and I didn’t accomplish it. I didn’t get to kiss him, and, despite otherwise having a fabulous weekend, I’m feeling more than a bit sad and undesirable.

We actually did have our first date on Friday night. I met him at 8:30 at the train station. When I saw him standing up at the top of the stairs waiting for me, I was unaccountably nervous and could only thing “God. He really is cute. I thought I might have misremembered.” At midnight, when he pointed out that we’d been sitting at the tragically hip bar having decidedly non-tragically hip conversations for more than 3 hours all I could think was “Wow. That dinner 3 years ago where I first met him and was utterly enamored of his mind was not a fluke. I really want to kiss him, but I have surpassed the limits within which I can be bold.” I’d asked him out. I’d informed him in no uncertain terms that I was asking him out on a date. I’d put my hands on his knees and found him delightful and tried to be charming, and when we got to the train station I was so worried about getting back to my friends’ house that I flung my arms around him, gave him a hug and a kiss on the cheek, and ran off into the bowels of the city. When my friend came to pick me up at the train stop on the other end I said “No. Don’t even ask what you called and asked me when you left the two of us alone after dinner 3 months ago. There was no kissing.”

Far too few hours later, I woke up and headed out for a fabulous day visiting other friends (looking like the world’s biggest schlub, since when your primary plan for the day is to get covered in the adoration and fur of 3 dogs it’s hard to motivate to be high maintenance.) I had a great day, talking dogs and boobs and sex and politics, and then I returned home to my friends’ house to help them cook dinner. The crush, who I met through these friends, walked in at 6:30 and I thought, once again, “damn, he’s cute,” and hugged him and kept on cooking and chatting with my girl-friend while the men had their work discussion. (An oddly traditionally gendered experience for my life, where such things are often entirely irrelevant). I thought to myself, “I should offer to drive him home later, so that I can spend some more time with him alone,” but when later eventually came I was too tired to function (I’d actually fallen asleep curled up in a blanket on the floor watching TV) and feeling more than vaguely ill. Besides, I had more than half convinced myself that he’d decided I was just some sort of an alien life form belonging to his friends, and the thought of driving him home through a strange city and getting a pat on the head for my troubles was just too depressing to contemplate. So I hugged him, one more time than I really should have for propriety’s sake, kissed him on the cheek, and went to bed while my friend took him home. I lay in the bed thinking sadly “well that was a failed gamble,” until I fell asleep and woke up less than 5 hours later feeling the same way.

I’m tired, frustrated, and my stomach hurts, but mostly I’m disappointed enough that I’m tempted to actually cancel the play date I’m supposed to be having after brunch to drive home early and throw myself into my work as emotional consolation. Right now, I’m feeling neither beautiful nor clever enough to be desirable**, and that makes me want to at least start feeling productive. I want to do something that I’m good at, which dating isn’t. If I care at all, I try too hard at the things that don’t matter that much to my dates (being clever) and not enough at the things that do (being pretty and normal enough to be desirable). Fortunately, I do realize that the PMS and exhaustion are blowing my feelings out of proportion and so I am not sending him the “It was really wonderful spending time with you this weekend. While we were together, I kept wanting to kiss you, but all I could think were things like a) ‘he’s too dignified,’ b) ‘this isn’t an appropriate place,’ and c) ‘I’m not at all certain that he’d want me to.’ Perhaps if one day we manage to do this again…” e-mail I woke up composing in my head this morning.

Maybe now that I’ve gotten all this out I can manage to spend a little time falling back asleep. I haven’t managed more than 4-5 hours of sleep in days. It’s no wonder I’m feeling a wee bit fried.

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*Who, to the best of my knowledge, has no way of knowing about this blog. He’s not friends with any of the friends who know about this blog, and I haven’t told him about it.

**Bloody PMS isn’t helping either

As a biologist, I understand that we are constantly at the mercy of chemistry and hormones, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. I find it quite aggravating that despite having had a phenomenally productive week (which is normally the best recipe for happy) and having made plans for a mad, whirlwind weekend of visiting, relaxation, and fun, I have spent much of the past two days in a mood that could best be described as “blah.” I peaked too early. Last week I was ready for vacation! This week, I am ready for a nap. I blame brain chemicals. I would really appreciate it if my hormones would coincide temporally with my opportunities. My Want!Want!Want! moods only rarely seem to coincide with the times when I’m actually going to see the people to whom they apply. It’s very frustrating !!!

I have this problem, sometimes, in scene spaces. In the rest of my life, I sometimes jokingly throw out a “yes, sir!” or “yes, ma’am!” as seems appropriately comedic/snarky in various circumstances - like when someone tells me to do something instead of asking or makes a particularly ridiculous request (”I say this with all due respect and appreciation, but you, sir, are an enormous dork.”). It’s not a scene thing, and I do it without thinking. I also “sir” and “ma’am” my elders sometimes, since it’s how I was raised.

The problem comes about when I’m playing with someone and they do something that sets of my “yes, sir!” button in the snarky sense. Normally, because it’s scene space, I remember to not say it. A “yes, sir!” or “yes, ma’am!” in scene space means something completely different, and I’m actually really careful not to “sir” or “ma’am” someone in a way intended to establish or confirm their dominance over me unless it has been negotiated in advance. As I’ve written about before, it seems, to me, incredibly rude to presume a relationship that has not been explicitly established.

Still, sometimes someone does or says something that so sets off my snarky “yes, sir!” button that it slips out before I have anything to say about it. At which point Awkward Conversation may ensue. This happened to me last night. I can’t remember what the person I was playing with said to me (or possibly did) that prompted it, but when “yes, ma’am” slipped out, she said “don’t ma’am me!” and I went “Oh god! I didn’t mean it that way. I meant it in the kindergarten teacher way.” Other than the momentary mutual discomfort it was all fine, but it, as usual, fascinates me when phrases that are semantically neutral in one context are so incredibly loaded in another.

I had fun last night. Lots of girl gabbing. Fun playing. Attack biting. Good stuff. The only disappointment was that I didn’t actually manage to have the scene I was supposed to have, because by the time everyone involved was available I was way too tired. We tried, but I made a Very Important Discovery. When every muscle in your body hurts (from a workout, not from playing) and there’s a little voice in your head whispering “you need to go home and go to bed,” and you’re so twitchy from physical and mental exhaustion that you don’t even want the people you normally fling yourself on touching you… it is not a good time to start a piercing scene. Even if you arranged it in advance. I only very rarely have had to tap out of a scene that quickly, and I don’t think I’ve ever had to tap out of a scene for feeling that physically unpleasant - at least not in recent memory. It wasn’t even the scene. The full body muscle aches, that were just beginning to peak from the killer workout the day before, and the low blood sugar were much worse than the needles, but suddenly I was utterly not in the right space to have a bunch of people poking holes in me and I started to feel like crap. And when I realized that not only did I feel physically ill but might be about to have a meltdown into crankyland… it was time to go. So I did. And then when I got home, Eileen was online and I stayed up talking to her until almost 4 a.m., because I miss her and I am a masochist.

I figured out this morning that the reason I felt so phenomenally crappy last night was that my brain, when tired, has a lot of trouble telling the difference between “every muscle in my body aches from working on the silks and trapeze” and “I’m getting the flu.” Now that I’ve had a whole 5-6 hours sleep I can recognize why my ribs hurt and my arms hurt and my back hurts and my abs are screaming and that other than that I feel completely fine. Well other than my overwhelming, and destined to be thwarted, desire to go back to bed. Oh mattress, I hardly knew ye!

I’m wearing my slutty pants this week. My play-slutty pants that is. So far I have 2 (or 3) play dates scheduled in the next 7 days, both of which I am really looking forward to. One is going to involve singletails & submission and the other one is going to involve needles and distraction by The Adorable Girl. I have no idea what said distraction will entail, but as long as she’s involved in it it will probably be both goofy and enjoyable. The third one may be postponed for a week so that I can travel up to the Northern Lands for a few days, where I already have one play date (presumably involving my being mind-fucked, since that’s what she seems to enjoy) and one actual date* (presumably involving no type of fucking at all, sadly enough) scheduled, and I am hoping to have the chance to attack a few more people while I am there**. I’m getting tired just thinking about it!

I can’t decide if it would be really great to always be this socially active or if I would never get any work done at all. As it is, I must now force myself to get at least two weeks ahead on all my contract writing so that I don’t feel guilty if I get nothing at all done while I’m in travel mode (not to mention write the 4 articles that are due while I’ll be out of town). Huzzah motivation!

Speaking of getting work done, this week I got a really nice bunch of sex toys in the mail for review. The Lucid Dreams #54 is my second vibrator from the collection (the first being the #69) and if these two are anything to go by, Doc Johnson deserves to be a very wealthy company indeed. They’re both shaped really, um, effectively, and if you ever get around to turning them on they are also reasonably powerful and quiet. The vibrators are also waterproof, which is a glorious thing since the only downside to these toys is that the material they’re made of smells completely vile. The company would do well to let the things outgas for a week or two before boxing them up and sending them out to distributors. The other exciting toy for the week was a glass dildo. I’ve never had a glass dildo before, even though I’ve heard many people sing their praises - for, among other things, their ability to take and hold temperature changes. I apologize for not believing all of you earlier, because … wow. The combination of the weight and the fact that it’s made up of an utterly unyielding material is rather intense, and go well with fantasies involving violation and domination. At least they do for me. My third toy of the week was a Hitachi knock off, which does nothing for me as a sex toy but feels absolutely glorious on my overworked muscles. This will be my last round of toys for a few weeks. I owe everyone (including the toy site) paid content and I asked them to hold off sending me anything new until April so that I can get caught up on my obligations.

I must say, this has turned into an awfully long post for something that was just supposed to be “I get to play a lot, soon, and should therefore have interesting things to talk about!” I would, however, sincerely like to solicit comments on my first footnote. I’ve found coming out about my kink to be relatively awkward in the past***, and I don’t want to fuck this one up.
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*Finally! I’ve been trying to go out with this boy for, depending on how you calculate it, either 2 months or 2 years, and it’s finally going to happen. I hope. If I manage not to muck it up somehow. Can I wait to come out to him as kinky until after we’ve had the date and discover if we like each other as anything other than just friends? I’m pretty sure he already knows I am bisexual. Besides, with this much time for expectation to build, we’ll probably have no chemistry whatsoever.

**As well as hang out with some non-attackable friends and snuggle a small child and some cats. I need my current plans to firm up so I can start sending out the next round of scheduling e-mails.

***One evening in grad school, the girl I was about to have a second date with called for directions to my house and I, in a fit of self revelation, came out about being kinky on the phone. Two hours after she was due to show there was no sign of her, and so I had to invite over a friend to enjoy my stood-up meal of Caesar salad, homemade pasta sauce, cilantro pesto bread, and apple pie. It made me a wee bit paranoid. The food, however, was fantastic.

That almost all of my really satisfying sex dreams take place in cars. I’ve never had sex in a car, and I know they don’t have nearly as much room for fooling around as my unconscious self would like to believe, but most of my really memorable sex dreams have either started in a car or been entirely enacted in one. One day I should have sex in a car just to show my subconscious that it’s overly optimistic.

On second thought, that sounds like a seriously dumb-ass idea. I rather enjoy the car sex dreams and do not want to give them up.

I feel like I should apologize to the random woman on OKCupid who I had a sex dream about last night. I was on the site futzing with quizzes before I went to bed, and apparently her picture (androgynous leaning towards butch, strong eye contact with the camera, nice jawline) really did something for me, since in my dream last night I had, completely out of context, multi-orgasmic sex with her in a car. I’m not complaining. The lesbian sex was unquestionably the best part of a dream that could otherwise only be described as “surreal in the extreme.” I think it might have been the only element that saved it from being a nightmare. So maybe I should thank her instead… No, random e-mails to some chick I’ve never met saying “I just had a really hot sex dream about you for no apparent reason, thank you for vastly improving the quality of my sleep experience.” would put me way too far into the crazy camp.

Speaking of really hot lesbian sex, if you like reading about it, or even if you simply appreciate well written thoughts about gender politics and related issues, you should be reading The Sugarbutch Chronicles. This random shout out is brought to you by the fact that I’m morally certain some of Sinclair’s posts helped to inspire the better parts of that dream.