Secret Confessions of a Smart Girl

I’m in an odd place right now. While in many areas of my life things are falling apart, in my love life I actually have options. I may not be getting any (sex or play) right now, but there are multiple possibilities on the horizon and some of them are quite good. Others are excellent. Not that I’m surprised. This is how all aspects of my life work, both professional and personal. It’s never “opportunities spread out nicely through time” it’s always “clumps of possibilities” followed by long periods of “nothing (and no one) to do.”

I’m actually really excited that the boy from the Northern Lands who I’m all gushy about is going to be in town this week. I don’t know if I’m actually going to get to see him, but even the possibility makes me all glowy. It’s lame really. I haven’t even managed to kiss him yet, but I like him, he likes me, and one of these days I’m going to back him into the corner and see if we can translate some of our conversational chemistry into physical chemistry**. Regardless of what happens, in the meantime I’m going to enjoy having someone who I can Like without being all conflicted about it or having people ask me “what do you see in him?”

Moving 90 minutes or so South, there’s that other guy. The one who keeps surprising me by not being who I expect him to be, and being far more fun instead. The one who is so good on paper that it’s like he stepped out of my high school romantic fantasies. The one about whom I have the odd feeling that, if and when we progress to the clothes ripping off stage, he will pleasantly surprise me in the bedroom (and maybe even the dungeon) as well. Plus, he just sent me an e-mail that accidentally made a literary fantasy come true. I will not share it with you because it proves conclusively that I’m even more of a dork than you would expect from my twin obsessions with Doctor Who and Alton Brown, and I’m just not ready for hard evidence.

Still closer, in fact all the way past me and out less than an hour in the other direction, there’s that poly couple. They may be currently off limits, but it has been suggested to me that that will not be the case forever, at which point there will be much jumping. I like them, a lot, in a completely non-stressful way, and also seriously want to rip both of their clothes off. Thank goodness that I enjoy that delicious sense of sexual frustration when you know you both want, but are being good, because every time I hang out with one of them it’s just a constant struggle to keep my mouth to myself. Still, I have self control and respect for their relationship so I content myself with enjoying the little internal sizzle. But man it’s nice to have local friends who I want to, and may one day be able to, jump.

It’s odd, feeling like there’s hope out there, not just for hot sex and fun play, but possibly for even more. Not that I would turn down some hot sex or fun play right now if they were offered. Anything but! I really think I’m getting easier about including sex as part of my casual play. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s just that I’m finding more friends who I like enough, in the right way, to be easy with. I like being easy. Especially with this job.

Can I just say that getting paid to write and talk about sex all day when I’m not having any sex makes me want to believe in a sentient universe just so that I can picture it laughing at me and stick out my tongue in defiance? I really need to state, for the record, that I have not consented to submitting to the universe. If I’m going to get worked up into a state of extreme sexual frustration and just left to simmer there unfulfilled, I’d much rather it be for the pleasure of an actual human being. Not for some slightly sadistic, but not generally malevolent, force of nature. Oh. No. Wait. That’s actually a pretty good description of exactly what sort of person I prefer to take me to such places. Bloody universe. It’s not nice to take advantage of me just because I’m so damn predictable. I stick my tongue out at the sky.

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*Does anyone other than me remember the show referenced in the title? I always enjoyed it because it had a strong, sexy bisexual female character all of whose songs were in a key I could sing.

**Oddly enough, one of the things that physical chemistry focuses on is state changes. *sigh* That’s probably only going to be a funny comment to me and Patricia. Thank goodness she reads this blog and is as dorky as I am.

Sex blogger land comes to television, and it does very little for me. Maybe I’m just jealous that she got to make out with Captain Jack, and that the 10th Doctor is still in love with her, but Billie Piper just does not turn me on. All in all, I had more fun reading the blog.

There’s nothing I enjoy quite so much as sitting in a public place writing about sex. It’s one of the ways I embrace my exhibitionism. Anyone who looks over my shoulder while I’m writing has no cause to be shocked at what they read.

Why does it matter? I don’t think it’s polite to impose my sexuality on others - at least not outside of reasonable bounds. Making out with my girlfriend, at night in the park is fine. Kneeling in obedience in a public place, unless it is so disguised as a vanilla action that only my partner and I know what’s going on, is not. This is one reason why, despite my fantasies about public sex, I’ve never had it. I don’t like to non-consensually involve passersby in my sex life, no matter how hot I might find it.* Only where there’s a reasonable expectation of privacy… like in my notebook.

I’ve been sitting in the local diner eating lunch and writing about sex. Most of it has been for work, but some of it has been for fun. Yes, fun. It turns me on to sit here in my shorts and tank top, secret grin on my face, and write about the things I would rather be doing.

I have this persistent fantasy, you see, that the things that I write might turn on other people. That they might, even, turn them on to me and get me what I want. That I might, for example, be sitting on the sofa writing out my smutty thoughts about sex, submission, and pain when the person I’ve been waiting for walks in…

“What are you working on?” he’d ask and I’d show him.

Then, instead of looking at me askance, stopping calling, treating me like an alien instead of the girl he had said he found so “hot” he’d thing for a second, smile, and say,

“Really? This is what you want?”

I’d nod.

“Huh. I never would have asked you for any of this, but I find myself strangely intrigued and rather turned on. You’d really enjoy if I just took? Used you for my own pleasure instead of thinking about yours? Told you want I wanted you to do and expected you to do it? That would be a turn on for you? Really? You’d enjoy that?”

“Oh yes,” I’d respond. “I think I’d enjoy that very much.”

And then we’d both find out.

All because I share my desires with the world not through short skirts and loud voices, but through long sentences and quiet sighs.
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*my sex life, not shocking strangers. The exception to this is that I feel like I should be able to do anything I would do in public with a boy with a girl. And if that shocks people… well tough noogies. If they wouldn’t be surprised by heterosexual PDAs they should be able to suck up homosexual PDAs as easily.

You know, I don’t meet men who I want to jump all that often. Particularly not men who might actually want to jump me back, so I find it particularly sadistic of the Universe to dangle a gorgeous, intelligent, and insanely talented man in front of me and then just yank him right back again. Especially when it does so in a way that I can’t help but be fully supportive of. I really respect people who focus time and energy on their primary relationships in order to keep them healthy when that’s what they need to do, and so I am committed to squashing the little hormones jumping around in my body going “pretty! pretty! waaaaant!” (they sort of look like the Adipose babies from the early fourth season episode of Doctor Who. And they squash really satisfyingly with big gloopy sounds before they come bouncing and squealing right back out again.)

That having been said, damn, I want. But exercising restraint is good for me, and it’s very nice to have new friends who a) can be drooled over mentally, b) are really fun to hang out and be ridiculous with, and c) have their OWN awesome friends who you get to meet and hang around with. I’m perfectly capable of contentedly lusting after friends who I can’t have when it’s in the form of a Happy Fun Crush. I can even restrain myself from biting them, although it’s really hard. Hanging out with said man, and several of his utterly fabulous friends, last night, I was overcome with the nearly-overwhelming urge to bite him on the arm no fewer then three times and had to settle for smacking him with a pillow, or pinching him, instead. I am such a child. A violent child with very little control over her baser instincts.

Certain types of people make me very frisky. It’s nice to have some of those locally, especially when life has been so stressful as of late. The Adorable Girl is like that too, although I haven’t seen her lately because I am LAAAAAME (and busy, but mostly lame). Affectionate friendships are a really important part of my life. I’m an extremely touchy feely person with the people I care about. I tend to touch even my completely platonic friends a lot (well, the ones who are okay with that.) But I love having friends who I can roll around with like kittens. It’s not a sexual thing, it feeds my soul to be silly and rambunctious and put my teeth on people and wrestle over the ridiculous and just touch.

Nonetheless… as my body and mind begin to equilibrate to the heightened levels of stress, I’ve got to say that I would really appreciate getting beaten, fucked, or both sometime in the near future, so if the Universe could arrange that, instead of simply tormenting my hormones, I’d be very, very grateful. ‘K? Thanks. Bye!

Sex research is fascinating. One of the things I love about teaching my sexuality course is getting to read all of the new research that gets published each year. For example, the study that found that 65% of men have a style of masturbation that contains types of stimulation impossible to recreate during partner sex.

Now, that statistic isn’t, in and of itself, all that interesting. What is interesting is the recommendation it leads to - for both men and women. Specifically this : if you want to have more orgasms during partner sex, then bring yourself to orgasm in ways that are achievable during partner sex. For example, women who cross their legs tightly when masturbating can’t replicate that same sort of sensation during partner sex and this can inhibit their ability to orgasm with a partner.

This advice is both completely obvious and something that never would have occurred to me. It may also both explain some things about my sex life.

You know, I hate that I come from a culture that made me think being able to, basically, orgasm by thinking about sex was a bad thing that I had to train myself out of. Still, what can be done can theoretically be undone, and, if nothing else, the retraining should be enjoyable in and of itself.

…when you do it to yourself.

For much of the past few hours I have been singing the following song to the tune of “Oh, holy night”…

Oh, holey underwear!
My butt is showing throoooooough thee
How I hope, I am not hit by a car

From there it degenerates into a description of whatever I am currently failing to accomplish. *sigh* I really need to learn to throw out the holey underwear so that this sort of thing stops happening.

I worry, sometimes, about using BDSM as a crutch, and then I wonder why it feels like it’s a problem. I think it has to do with intentionality. I am firmly of the mind that BDSM, and all things sexual, should be chosen with intention. If you can’t say to yourself, “I want to do this,” then you shouldn’t be doing it. A lack of active choice seems to often lead to stupid choices, or at least choices which I regret. If I can’t put on the blindfold with open eyes, then I shouldn’t be wearing it.

The problem is that sometimes, I can’t quite manage intention. My life right now, the life outside the world of sex blogging where sensual explorations are a detour rather than the pathway, is suffused with a sort of looming horror. Serious illnesses are running rampant through what little remains of my family, and it feels like sometime very soon everything that I rely upon for stability is going to collapse. I’m not handling it well. Combine that with an unfortunate synchronicity in work deadlines that has me somewhat frantically scrabbling to stay on top of the shifting sands of obligation and I have pretty much exhausted my supply of cope.

So where does BDSM come into it? I need a vacation from myself. This morning I took a few hours to read a really engaging book (well, half of it, it’s a long book), and for a while I just wasn’t me, wasn’t worried about life or work, wasn’t thinking about anything even remotely related to my life and it was glorious. Books, music, dancing, all these things are great for that. So is masochism.

I keep thinking thoughts like “What I really want is for someone to beat me until I scream, until I bleed, until I have a reason for crying that isn’t this nebulous, preemptive sense of dread. I want to fight something real, something that can be fought, something unlike all these illness that I have no control over, and have something real to show for it - bruises and battle scars. I want to be mad at someone for hurting me in some concrete way, and hate them, and scream at them the way I can’t scream at all the things that are really hurting me right now. I want to physicalize the stuff that’s making me crazy in order to find some way of dealing with it.”

And that doesn’t feel healthy. I can’t quite articulate all the reasons. Intellectually it makes sense to seek some sort of catharsis in a manner that in some basic and underlying manner I would enjoy, but it makes my masochism feel like a perversion instead of something I embrace with intent and choice. More importantly, I don’t think it’s something I could justly, or safely, ask of anyone I know. It’s kind of a horrible thing to ask of a top, to take you to a place where you hate them, and even thinking about it sort of defies all of the wonderful positive things I find about the scene. It’s edge play in a way that all the stuff I love with knives and needles isn’t and never will be.

Submitting, because I choose to submit, gives me power. Although some people will never understand it, it gives me power to say to someone, “I want to give you what you want to have, and I want you to enjoy taking it.” Bottoming to someone is, for me, usually a joyous exchange of desires. They want to inflict sensation, I want to experience it, and everyone leaves happy. That’s powerful in its own way too - asking for and getting something that you want.

Huh. That’s it. Right there. That’s the explanation. This desire bothers me so much, because at it’s most basic it’s a desire to have someone take away my power, which is the antithesis of my usual view of seeing BDSM sexually empowering. Normally, if I want to give up control, I am making that choice from a position of strength. Right now, I don’t have any control to give up. Also, it just feels somewhat squicky to use BDSM as therapy or a crutch. When I see other people doing it, it often makes me worry about them.

There’s something else, too. All of this is an extremely selfish desire. Although, were it to take place, it would probably appear to a fly on the wall to be a very submissive scene, in reality it would be anything but. What I want isn’t about giving anyone else what they desire, it’s about taking advantage of someone to get something I (and I hesitate to use this word in this context) need. I hate being selfish. It makes me get angry with myself, but the thing is this…

There are maybe 2-3 people in the world who I would trust enough to ask something like this of. None of them are people I’ve dated. Hell, none of them are people I’ve slept with. But I know them each well enough to know that were I to ask, they’d understand what I was asking and be flattered at the trust. They might not say yes, which is part of why they’re on the list, but they’d understand that I wouldn’t ask something like this of someone who I didn’t trust and respect completely and be honored by it.

It’s kind of nice to know that I have people like that in my life, even if I don’t take advantage of it. Because, as I mentioned earlier, even with those people it wouldn’t feel fair, or safe, to them.

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And on a less serious note, I just realized this sort of thing may be the BDSM equivalent of “Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.”

About a half an hour ago I was in an awful mood. The dog was crying and I couldn’t do anything to help her. With each noise I’d get more twitchy, and cranky, and stressed out, and so I decided to put on my headphones and blast some Great Big Sea into my head with the idea of drowning out her sorrows for a while so that I could finish my work… it was half successful.

I forget how susceptible I am to music. It works better on my mood than any drug. I get high off of good harmony. When I’m making music with people and everything clicks and we build a cathedral of sound that is bigger and stronger than anything we could individually create it’s an almost sexual high. And when I listen to great music, there’s only so long I can sustain my personal issues before it gets deep into my bones. It might make me sing, it might make me scream, it might make me want to rip someone’s clothes off, or it might make me dance.

I think I was three songs into my playlist when the desire to get out of my chair and dance became overpowering, and it was four more before I could bring myself to sit down. There is music that it is just impossible to sit still to. It signals to something deep down in the recesses of my brain, and makes my hips twitch, my shoulders shift, and my fingers weave, and at some point, when I start dancing, everything goes away. It’s just me, and the music, and the movement, and the universe around me stills in a way I can almost not even imagine in times of silence.

I love dancing. It brings out endorphins in the same way that really good pain does. Dancing by myself, to music that moves me, is a physically arousing experience. Partner dancing, with someone who hears the music, who feels the beat, who connects to it in the same way I do stimulates some of the same feelings of connection as really good sex. There is something shared in the eye contact, the intimacy, and the creation of a shared, private world of movement, music, inspiration, instinct, and touch. Someone who dances well, who has a firm lead, holds my eyes with theirs, and makes me feel both safe and inspired to passion with their touch, is going to be sexually attractive to me - whether or not off the dance floor I’d have any interest in being skin to skin.

I fantasize about dancing in the same ways that I fantasize about sex and BDSM. And good music… if I were prettier and better about casual sex, I’d be the groupie from hell - going around trying to fuck the members of every band that has a direct line to my limbic system. Oh, and Great Big Sea… they’d all be on the top of my list with their pitch perfect harmonies, sense of humor, and sheer contagious delight. How could you not want to get close to people who can make you feel this good, feel this much, from the other side of a CD?

Gods. I want to be able to do this to people - make this kind of musical connection. I want it so much that it makes me want to scream and rant and rail every time I hit a flat note, overshoot on a bit of vibrato, or fail, in some way, to hold up the musical cathedral I’m helping to build when I am creating music with a group. I’ve never had any desire to be a solo artist, performing by myself does nothing for me. What turns me on is creating something more, connecting fragile strands of noise into solid structures of harmony and rhythm. Playing with an orchestra, singing with a group, listening and creating and making a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts and lives… it’s like visiting another world. And gods only know, I’m not good enough. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do this to people, but I’m sure as hell going to keep trying.

Okay. Now that I’ve danced myself into exhaustion, sung myself to a place of quiet, and written myself back to harmony, I’m going to try and finish my work. I think I have to switch my soundtrack to something more conducive to the right sort of productivity, because Great Big Sea is just too distracting from logic. George Winston, here I come…

(Well… after I dance my head off one more time to Paddy Murphy. How could I NOT?)

There’s nothing as thoroughly destructive to my sex drive as stress, and my life has been so stressful over the past two weeks that if Alton Brown had come to my house and propositioned me I probably would have just sighed and turned him down. That’s a sad, sad statement. Things are calming down now, though. The worst culprit - the health of my beloved dog, which I had been told was dire - seems to be improving, and I’m beginning to feel the vague stirrings of lustful impulses again. Which means I must once again go in search of options.

That’s more difficult than it should be, because apparently I have absolutely no ability to judge how dates, or un-dates, go. The fabulous time I had at coffee with the poly couple seems to have been not at all mutual, which is a disappointment since they were both remarkably jumpable. Alas. Low maintenance, local jumpability is in very short supply in my life.

I did end up going on my date with A. on Wednesday and it went exactly as I predicted. In other words, I was surprised into having a far better time then I expected to. He is… outside my experience. He comes from a culture with which I am not familiar, and keeps failing to be appalled by me in the ways that I expect. For example, when it came up that I had published erotic stories (he asked me if any of the books I had published were likely to be in the bookstore that we were browsing), he sincerely wanted to know the book title (although I couldn’t quite bring myself to tell him - I’m sometimes weird about people reading my fiction) and wasn’t bothered by it being lesbian vampire porn. I do wonder if he, in fact, used his prodigious research skills to figure it out as he threatened. I should ask. Or possibly I shouldn’t. I don’t know. I have to be at least a little impressed by someone who wasn’t thrown by the fact that, every time I walked past a book of which I am particular fond, I stopped to pet it and say “good book.*”

I’ll go out with him again, I’m reasonably sure. He seems to still be interested and although I was not initially consumed by a desire to rip his clothing off, or even attack snog him, our history suggests that if I did, I would be pleasantly surprised (just as I have been with our e-mail conversations and date.) Not in the next few weeks, however, since he’s only loosely local and both of us are consumed by book deadlines (and, in my case, the incipient start of the class I teach - for which I am not even remotely ready.) In the meantime, we are socializing by playing online scrabble. It’s geek flirting - and tends to, like most flirting, be both frustrating and exhilarating in turns.

While that possibility is on hold, I have a different online flirtation to pickup again. I had let it lapse during the worst of the stress, but the person in question is… interesting and local. Moreover, my kinkyness has come up in conversation, and he has asked me to explain what I mean by it, which I take as a good sign. I haven’t felt up to that explanation over the past few weeks, when my entire capacity for emotion was drowned by stress and distress, but perhaps I will answer that e-mail this afternoon and see where we go from there.
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*I really like books. This is, sadly, standard bookstore behavior for me - whether or not I am shopping in company.