Secret Confessions of a Smart Girl

In the summer, I like to wander around in very little clothing. A pair of underwear (and why is it “a pair” when it’s one garment?) and maybe, if I think it’s likely that someone will wander up onto one of the decks and gaze through my window, a t-shirt. Or, sometimes, just a towel or nothing at all. I like being naked. It feels decadent.

The question, though, is why? Why does wandering around in my skin feel like an inherently hedonistic activity? I’ve lived alone the vast majority of the time since I was 17, and it’s only been in recent years that I had a dog who would take the backs of my knees being naked as an invitation to lick them, so overall there’s been little incentive to stay clothed.

It’s not that I don’t like my body. I’m not crazy about my face, but I’ve been pretty darn happy with my body for most of my life. Although that happiness certainly goes in cycles, improving when I’ve been working out more, I’ve pretty much always actually liked my body better out of clothes than in them. I’m hard to dress in modern styles in a way that’s flattering. I have hips, and a waist, and a rib cage that has grown ridiculously out of proportion the more I’ve been studying voice and working on my breath control, and clothes these days tend to either be shaped for sticks or apples. I’m not a small girl, but I’m also not particularly round. So I tend to feel like I look better naked. Not that, when I’m alone, I spend much time looking at myself in the mirror. The first two years I lived in NY I didn’t even own a mirror, and I’d have no idea what I looked like until I got to work and made certain I hadn’t put anything on backwards or inside out (shut up! It only happened a few times! I see you giggling down there Eileen.)

So why do I associate nakedness with hedonism, sensuality, and sex? I don’t know, but I do. That was one of the things that took me longest to acclimate to in BDSM spaces - having to be around naked people. I was never sure where I was supposed to look. From the beginning, I was largely comfortable being naked, or mostly naked, myself, but I was far more uncomfortable being around other naked individuals (Especially naked men. Naked women… well, they’re NAKED WOMEN. Hard to feel anything but happy getting to look at a naked woman.) I think it had a lot to do with my neuroses about sex. I was very innocent, for a very long time, and I always expected that people would think I knew what to do when I didn’t. So I didn’t want to be thought of in a sexual way, or take sexual opportunities, in part because I was afraid at being bad at them. Learning as a bottom and a submissive was acceptable, I thought, but surely a woman in her mid twenties should have known something about sex! Especially when, in many ways, it’s also her job.

As I’ve become less neurotic about sex, I’ve become far more comfortable with nudity, but I still tend to associate being naked with sexual thoughts. To be fair, I think about sex most of the time anyway, but I notice it more the less clothing I’m wearing. I think the fact that I’m spending more and more time naked lately reflects not my wanting sex more (really. I would explode and die) but my being more comfortable about wanting sex. Which is, in my mind, unquestionably a good thing. Especially since my current principal object of lust has gotten back into town and will hopefully allow me to rip his clothing off soon… within reason and previously negotiated limits, of course.

I haven’t been sleeping well lately. It’s too quiet in my house without the dog, but I am by no means ready to get a new dog yet. Still, I’m used to having cuddle time before bed, and weight-lifting time, although more productive, just doesn’t have the same salubrious effect. It’s odd, how much you get used to things.

I’m not ready to have a new dog… for several reasons, really. First off, it’s hard to imagine any dog as wonderful as my boo. Although in general I fall in love with every dog I meet, she was very special, and deep down in my heart I know it’s going to be a while before I’d stop wanting a new dog to be her. Second, I’d like to find a person to share my life with and, given where I live, that’s easier to do if I don’t have to worry about a dog waiting for me at home needing me. Finally, it’s a lot easier to pursue the performance side of my career if I can take calls and jobs without having to worry about being home at a specific time. Still… I miss having a dog around.

I had lost track of how much just having someone around to cuddle improved my moods. I know I ramble on about touch a lot, but things really do get all funky inside my brain when I don’t get to make physical connections with other living beings on a regular basis. I get trapped inside my head.

***at this point Rona realizes it’s early enough that she can go for a ralk (run/walk) without dying and goes to do her circuit. Her circuit is designed so that at the midpoint, approximately 2.2 miles in, she ends up at the dog park, where she can at least look at dogs if not play with them. Today, she bumps into a gorgeous Gordon Setter named Duncan, snuggles him for a few minutes, and immediately feels better. Dogs improve the day***

Ok. Apparently I was a little more inebriated last night than I thought I was… or at least more exhausted, since I don’t think that even I can get drunk on half a bottle of beer. I’ve edited this blog post for incomprehensibility. My apologies to anyone who read it already.
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I went to see a friend’s play tonight (well, 5 friends’ play) and the lickability quotient of the members of the cast who I didn’t know was way too high. There was pretty much no one in the show who wasn’t fuckable (in a theoretical sense), and I stupidly went out to drinks and dinner with all of them after my incredibly long day (I got up at 6 AM and headed into the city to tech and perform my own show today so at that point I had been up for 16 hours of constant running around) . I was bad. I was very bad. I groped one boy repeatedly, because he was as tactile as I am and it was fun (Alas, he has a girlfriend so I had to restrain myself to decorous molestation. It was not easy. I bit his quadricep. But I didn’t kiss him. or touch him anywhere inappropriate. Even though I wanted to.) And then I discovered at the end of the night that Insanely Hot Girl was not, in fact, heterosexual. Fucking mistaken friend. That girl had the most incredible legs, and ass, and… man. Not that “not heterosexual” implies interested, but…. SHINY. I wanted to do inappropriate things to her body. In particular I wanted to lick her thigh, and….

AHEM.

I’m overtired and overstressed and for some unknown reason that means that my sex drive is even higher than normal (so helpful!). Stick me at a table of oversexed theater folks who have just finished doing a highly erotically charged play and it makes it very difficult for me to act like a lady. Case in point: I spent around 30 minutes at dinner sitting in a gay man’s lap while he tried to figure out if he could use my hair clips as nipple clamps. My impression is that he’s something of an omnivorous gay man - mostly interested in men, but primarily just really fucking horny. For obvious reasons, I appreciate that in a person. According to a text message he sent after he left, his boyfriend is okay with my jumping him. I wonder if that’s true. I’ve always wanted to have sweaty naked time with a gay man*, and he’d be an excellent choice… all goofy and ridiculous. Probably never going to happen, but… man would it be fun.

I would like to say that I only had half a beer (and a few experimental tastes of other people’s drinks), so there’s no way I’m drunk, at least not on alcohol. Still, I’m acting like it, because I’m going to admit to the world that I’m so fucking horny that I might explode. A little touch tends to make me want a lot more. It’s quite easy to get me worked up and into attack mode. And, man, hands. HANDS.

I have developed a thing about strong hands. Strong hands grabbing my back muscles for a massage makes me want them to grab other things, and I get a bit… fixated. I just really enjoy being manhandled and when I see strong hands, I want them on me. A lot. Like that date I had 6 months ago where I spent the entire time looking at his hands and imagining them on me. Hurting me. Pleasing me. Maybe both at once. I just like the feeling of hands on my skin. It’s such an intimate kind of pain and control.

The boy of molestation walked back with me most of my way to my car, because his bus was leaving from along my route, and it took every inch of willpower I had not to shove him up against a building and do things I could have been arrested for doing in public.

I think I really have changed in the last year. I hope it’s for the better.

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*I certainly know a lot of lesbians who occasionally fuck men. It’s not completely a ridiculous thought. Although it’s less about sex, most of the time, than finding the gay leather scene really fucking hot. Still, getting to fool around with a frisky gay puppy… how would that not be fun for me?

I often wish to beat my students about the head and shoulders with a stick emblazoned with the words “subject-verb agreement” in order to get the concept into their thick little skulls.

Now, since I teach graduate students, I think this should be allowed. After all, if you’ve graduated from college you should be able to manage to proofread your formal writing well enough to avoid saying things like “methods includes” … a phrase which I have had the misfortune to read in 3 of the last 5 papers I’ve graded.

Next time I write up a syllabus I’m going to include a consent page that students are required to sign in order to enroll in the class. It will say, “Professor Rona is allowed to hit me with her subject-verb agreement paddle once for every really egregious subject-verb agreement error I make. I promise I will not sue her. Instead, I will thank her for each stroke by saying ‘Yes Professor,’ and then rewriting the sentence with the correct grammar.”

Do you think I could get it through the curriculum committee? Because if I could, I would totally hire someone to make me a subject-verb agreement paddle, like the ones that say “brat” and leave the word stamped into the bottom’s skin if you hit them hard enough.

I’m not really a switch, I just play one on (closed-circuit campus) TV.

Lately when I’ve had things on my mind that I want to get off my mind I only have one thing on my mind… fucking.

To which I say, what the fuck?

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m quite fond of fucking, but for most of my life I’ve been far more interested in pain than I have been in sex. Not lately. Lately all I’ve been thinking about is sex, and, in particular, sex with penises. Which is not necessarily sex with men. It’s just that my brain has been very cock-centric lately.

And that is odd in and of itself, because while I really enjoy sucking cock, I often prefer to be fucked with other things… like fingers, or whip handles, or knives. But lately, when I want to get out of my head, my preferred methods of travel are low tech. Hands in my hair, teeth in my shoulder, what I’m longing for is to be fucked senseless. A little pain, a lot of control, and my brain too dissolved by desire to even contemplate contemplating anything else.

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Two other thoughts:

1. I need someone to come over to my house right now and tie me up so that I stop injuring myself. In the last hour I’ve spilled boiling water on my thumb and bashed my funny bone into the car door. There are much more pleasant ways to be in pain, and I suspect some of them might start after I were tied up and unable to damage myself further.

2. I resent stealth porn. I was reading “The Queen’s Bastard” while experiencing commercial hair removal, and suddenly found myself in the middle of some incredibly hot implied kinky sex. I had to try and think myself into a cold shower, because that was not the right moment to let myself get turned on as my brain wandered away to follow the implied action. A violent sexual encounter with the master of the house. The servant’s envious hands pressing on the welts left behind, wishing he dared to be so bold. The formerly gentle lover digging his hands into the wounds, asking”Do you like this?” and knowing that the answer is yes.

Hurt me more.

Take out your anger at his residue on my skin.

Let me see how much my pain arouses you and then use my poor aching and abused body until I scream.

…

Um. Yes. That was where I was trying not to go when there was some random woman hanging out in the general vicinity of my bikini area. Still, I’m home now… so I have absolutely no idea why I’m still sitting at the computer when there are perfectly good sex toys in the other room. Bye!!!

The government is pissing me off again, by trying to introduce a policy change at HHS (health and human services) that will turn what is already a non-trivial problem (conscience clauses) into a full on nightmare for women’s health. (the New York Times coverage, if you prefer)

Basically, for those of you who don’t want to end up with an overwhelming desire to throw your computer through the nearest window and then stomp off to hit a politician over the head, what the proposal amounts to is as follows:

1. People can decide use their conscience to decide what constitutes abortion as long as their decision is reasonable - and hormonal contraception is explicitly included as an example of something reasonable people might equate with abortion.

2. Organizations can not refuse to hire people who refuse to provide abortions (see above) and still accept money from the HHS. In fact, they must sign a certification saying that they will hire anyone regardless of their views on abortion. And granting organizations are similarly not allowed to discriminate in their provision of funds.

This may seem harmless, on the face of it, but it’s not. Conscience clauses, which is the general category of laws into which this falls, kill people. When doctors are allowed to prevent a woman from getting proper care because their morals do not allow them to provide that care, women die. Not all abortions are elective. Sometimes they’re medically necessary, and sometimes women still are denied the care they need - or it’s withheld until it’s too late.

Don’t believe me? The ACLU report on religious refusals and reproductive rights, reports on, among other incidents, the case of a Nebraska woman was admitted to a Catholic hospital in 1994 with a life-threatening condition that was aggravated by her pregnancy. She was given two choices - a 6+ month hospital stay, or a first trimester abortion. She chose the abortion so that she could go home to her 2 year old child, but then the hospital lawyers refused to provide it. Despite the enormous risk of moving her, the fact that the doctors agreed that the procedure was medically necessary, and the fact that even Medicaid agreed the abortion was necessary, the hospital stood its ground. She was eventually taken to another doctor’s office for the procedure to be performed, but the fact that she didn’t die during the move was more luck than anything else.

Rape victims who are refused emergency contraception by the ER, or not even told it’s an option.

Doctors who refuse to tie a woman’s tubes after she’s had a c-section.

Pharmacists who refuse to fill the prescriptions of women seeking contraception or emergency contraception.

Hospitals that don’t allow physicians to practice life saving techniques.

Nurses who refuse to scrub in on procedures required as part of their jobs, and leave patients bleeding on a table waiting for care.

These things aren’t myths. They’re not exaggerations. They happen in states with Conscience Clauses and now the federal government wants to make those travesties a requirement to get health care funding?

It’s inexcusable. It’s unjustifiable.

It’s appalling.

The Bush administration has systematically undermined the use of science in the formation of public policy when it comes to issues of reproductive and women’s health. From putting out inaccurate data about condom efficacy, to promoting abstinence-only education in the face of overwhelming evidence that it doesn’t work, to this ridiculous bastardization of an “anti-discrimination” policy, the administration has consistently shown that when it comes to reproductive rights (not to mention other issues) science isn’t nearly as important as what the pissy little popinjay wants.

I’m willing to admit that I’m wrong. In the face of overwhelming scientific evidence, I will change my opinions and dearly held beliefs. That is part of being not just a scientist, but simply a rational and good human being. It’s a shame that none of those adjectives can be used to describe our current president.

Just taking a momentary break from the sex blogging to share a little dorkiness with my Geek Peeps*. I just planned a weekend trip to Boston for the sole purpose of getting to see Doctor Who on the big screen. Giant 10th Doctor! Giant 9th Doctor! Terrifying attack statues of doom!!!!! I’m a little bit mad, you see, but I suspect that, when push comes to shove, we’re all mad here.

To close, I suppose I should say something sex-bloggy, just to stay remotely on target for everyone who isn’t part of the Girl Geek Coalition. Hmm…

I am terribly sad to say that all my bite marks from the other day have faded away to nothing. Alas poor bruises! I knew them, Horatio. To poke them was infinite jest.

Was that sex-bloggy enough?

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*You know who you are, ladies… and may I just say that I have an overwhelming desire to design a “My Geek Peeps” t-shirt, but I don’t really draw well enough to do an effective peep in glasses and a pocket protector? I can see the design in my head, I just can’t get it down on paper/computer. So frustrating. Witness my truly pathetic attempt here.

I was lying in bed thinking last night, instead of sleeping or masturbating or doing something else productive, about how externally focused my sexual fantasies often are. Which is not, entirely, an accurate conception, because the external focus is actually relatively egocentric.* The pervasive fantasy, as I’m certain I’ve mentioned before, is that my partner wants me enough to take exactly what they want from me (or ask me to give it) irregardless of my own desire. The pervasive fantasy is that my partner trusts the truth of my submission enough to make demands, because they understand that being assumed about is the turn-on, and pleasing them is the satisfaction.

In other words, the vast majority of the time I want it to be all about them.

It’s not just the active fantasies:
“Come over here and get me off”
“I’m in the mood to hurt someone and I don’t want you to like it”

It’s the little passive assumptions. The hand under the skirt out of the blue. The clothes coming of without asking. The acceptance that, within our boundaries, if they want, and I can, I probably will.

Far more than wanting to be pleased, I want to be pleasing.

The flip side of all of which being that I’m afraid of imposing. I’m leery of offering myself to people in ways they don’t want. It’s why I’m so tight-assed about asking before I sir or ma’am someone. I want to give, but not to anyone who doesn’t want to take. Which makes me leery of offering to people, unless I’m pretty comfortable about their ability to say no, even aside from my worries about scaring someone off by approaching them too enthusiastically or wanting them too much**. And yet still, I ask.

Because here is my dirty little secret. If you’re someone I want, in a visceral physical sense, if I’m near you, I probably want you all the time. I may go without sex, or even touch, for months or years at a time, but if there’s a person, or people, in my life with whom I have that sort of connection, it’s pretty guaranteed that being near them is going to put sex on my brain. Often, even a passing thought of them will turn me on, flush my face with heat, and send a quick shiver down my spine. In some ways I’m like a 12 year old boy. Thank goodness no one can tell how often I’m distracted by thoughts of sex, or my life would be even more embarrassing that it already so often is.

What all that means is that it’s pretty safe to assume. If you’ve had me in your bed, if I’ve expressed a clear interest in ending up back there again, it’s a pretty safe bet that if you call, and I can, I will come willingly, and enthusiastically, to do what you want.

And that thought turned me on so thoroughly that I’m going to head back to bed for a little while to do what I want. When I’m with a partner, what pleases me the most may be pleasing them, but when I’m home I’m perfectly willing to settle for orgasms from my little plug in friend (which is not a Hitachi, and which is actually the worst vibrator I own, but at least I never have to hunt for charged batteries).

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*Man, I’ve been reading too many social science papers lately. It’s affecting my sex blogging. Only 5 more weeks until this course is over and then, hopefully, I’ll get back to more visceral communication styles.

**Which are pretty substantial worries, let me tell you. They have the heft of mountains. I tend to be… very enthusiastic, and I scare people.

…of my massive net-crush on Monk*, an offhanded remark he made on the most recent Mistress’ Podcast inspired me to e-mail my favorite piercing partner and ask her if she might want to do a scene involving her piercing me in artistic patterns and then attaching googly eyes to the piercings so that I can run around pretending to be the avatar of a vengeful all-seeing goddess. She, being the sort of giddy and ridiculous person she is, gleefully assented. Unfortunately, I’m probably not going to see her for another 8 months or so (*weep* - I miss her a lot), but at least that gives me a lot of time to acquire supplies.
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*Monk, Alton Brown, Eddie Izzard, the 10th Doctor… no, when it comes to having crushes on men I will probably never meet, I don’t have a type at all. Highly verbal, geeky, and goofy much? *sigh* I’m so predictable.

I stumbled into polyamory when I was in graduate school. At that point, I hadn’t dated much. The furthest I’d gone with anyone was kissing, or possibly some mild clothed groping, and I was not feeling like that was likely to change any time in the near future. I knew I was kinky, and after moving to my new city had started to explore the local scene, but I was still aggressively single and terribly shy. I had vaguely heard of polyamory - primarily as a plot device in Heinlien novels - but it didn’t see to have any relevance to me. Until I met my first serious boyfriend… who had two other girlfriends of his own.

For the next few years of poly dating, I felt mostly like I was a monogamous person who just happened to fall in love with poly people. In retrospect, I think this was because of two things:

1. I’m picky almost to the point of pathology.
2. My graduate degree was my primary partner

Oddly enough, although I used to joke around about the second factor, I don’t really think I had any clue of how true it was until earlier this year. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t have the time for a major relationship, as that I didn’t have the emotional energy. Doing my Ph.D. had to be my first priority, because I didn’t want to be a perpetual grad student. I wanted in, out, and done, and in order to accomplish that I needed to have focus. I had so much focus, in fact, that I think I may have set a record in my program for graduation speed. Most people took 7 or more years to get out, and I finished in just under 4.5. At that point, the kind of relationships I was having were perfect for me. I was almost always involved with people who had live-in primaries, and I was the other girlfriend. Which worked well, but I still thought of myself as basically monogamous. I would be dating X who would be living with Y and maybe X (or Y) also had a couple of other girl/boyfriends, but I was generally pretty content to focus on one person at a time… and my Ph.D. I was monogamous; I just happened to be in love with someone who wasn’t. Or two someones, since quite often I would end up at least as strongly emotionally attached to my partner’s primary partner as to my partner, if not more so.

It’s just more evidence that I have mad skillz when it comes to denial, but I really didn’t see myself as inherently polyamorous. These days, however, while I think I could probably do monogamy with the right person, I’m pretty sure it isn’t my ideal. It’s not about the sex. Although god knows it’s nice to have options, and I would be thrilled to have someone to be close to every single day, I can (and have) gone for years without getting any when there’s been no one I had any mutual interest in sleeping with. It’s about the connections and the closing of doors.

I’m an affectionate monkey. I form connections with people through touch, and it would be very hard for me to turn that off if I had a monogamous partner who was threatened by it. If I like someone, I have to work to not touch them when they’re nearby. I hold hands like a child, even when I’m just walking down the street with my friends. I touch shoulders, and snuggle, and lean in. I kiss, and I cuddle, and I seek sustenance from touch. Plus, in the past, my partners have had awesome taste in partners and I’ve gotten to meet some amazing people through them. Connections leading to connection.

As for the other, I have an almost visceral fear not of commitment, but of the loss of possibility. This isn’t just an issue in my romantic life, it’s true for me at work as well. “If I take this show, will I lose the chance to do something else?” So, particularly in recent years, I’ve tried to make choices that don’t close doors. It’s an unattractive admission, but it’s true. To put it in physics geek terms, I don’t like to collapse my probabilities. But what I actually like in my work life is commitments that don’t close doors. My four main jobs, at the moment, are jobs that I should be able to keep for the indefinite future, but which don’t restrict me from seizing any really shiny opportunities that pass my way. The vast majority of the year, although they may take up a lot of time, they don’t take up any _specific_ time, and the only thing that limits the amount of additional work I take on is my need for sleep. I could keep my jobs if I booked a national tour, or had to travel for a TV gig, or fell in love and moved to the west end of nowhere - as long as the west end of nowhere (or a hotel room on the road) had a halfway decent internet connection and I could occasionally find time to plug in. I may work my ass off, but the reward I get for it is freedom and possibility.

Which, the more I think about it, is not really the same thing as what I want in my personal life. I would love to find someone to love and share a commitment with, someone to build a family with. I just don’t feel like family needs to be exclusionary. The relationships I’ve had have always been strengthened by having tertiary partners, when they’ve fallen apart it’s never been because of anyone other than the two people sharing the break. I suppose it might be different if I was in a different role (I’ve never been the primary partner with a new person coming in, although I’ve been a strong secondary relationship with new people coming and going), but I suspect my fundamental feelings about all of it would probably remain the same. I guess, when it comes down to it, I am pretty inherently polyamorous after all. I still don’t think it’s for everyone, but it does seem to be for me.

Despite the fact that I tend to talk in something of a hierarchical model of polyamory, I don’t think that’s the only, or the ideal, way of doing it… it’s just the way I’ve experienced poly in the past. I’m actually really attracted o the notion of stable non dyadic relationships, but they are not terribly common and very hard to come by. I have to say, this has been a very big year for personal growth for me in terms of figuring out what is, and what is not, important to me in terms of relationships and what I do and don’t want. Why couldn’t I have figured all this out when I was 25? Not that figuring it out necessarily gets me any closer to having it, but it’s nice to have emptied out so much baggage so that I can stick it back into the closet where it belongs. Closet’s nice and big too, given that I’ve cleaned out many of the skeletons and haven’t lived in there myself for years. I’m here. I’m queer. I need to stop writing and go to rehearsal.