Returning to Sexyland.

So this blog has been dark for a few weeks.  That's partly just because I'm a pathological procrastinator and I had a lot of schoolwork.  But it's also because my conflicted feelings about the sex and kink communities were coming to a critical point.



Over the last year (as some people may have noticed), I've been gradually withdrawing from public/communal sexiness.  Haven't been playing with new people, haven't been going to parties, haven't wanted to even write about my personal sex life as much.  I still have sex and play with Rowdy--my sexuality itself didn't go anywhere--but I've been less and less involved with Sexyland.

This is not something I planned or wanted.  I miss being able to have that kind of fun.  I miss the thrills and the camaraderie.  I miss the "I'm telling this one to the grandchildren" stories and the "I'm so turned on it feels like flying" highs.  I miss the M&Ms.

There's a few reasons I've been MIA.  The first is that there's been a lot of revelations of abusers and generally bad people in Sexyland, including people I've played with.  Knowing that I've played with people who've beaten their partners, who were using me to cheat, who've committed rape--it grosses me out and makes me question my ability to read people.  (It's also caused a lot of angst in the local scene that makes social events less fun.)

Coming out as genderqueer has been a factor too.  I was used to being in the role of "straight girl" in Sexyland, and I don't think I fully appreciated how much I would have to adapt to a new one.  Presenting masculine at events and having people not react the same way as when I looked femme shouldn't be a surprise, but it somehow was. (Maybe because, shit, I didn't feel any different.) For a long time, I didn't take that change in attitudes as a response to a change in my presentation, but as an "...is it my breath?" awkwardness.

But the biggest one has been the uncomfortable realization that I have done things for the wrong reasons.  I've let my boundaries be pushed so I could be "cool" and I've pushed my own boundaries so I could be "sexy."  Or I've done things that were entirely within my boundaries, but I've done them for validation instead of for pleasure.  Don't get me wrong--this is not my declaration that I was only kinky and poly for the attention and my true self was "normal" all along.  A lot of the validation I sought wasn't just "coolness," but validation of my kinks; I felt like I had to jump into the Sexyland deep end without a life vest to prove to myself that I really was a pervert.

At first this felt awesome--oh my god, I really am a pervert! I really can go to a party and get beaten and fucked by three guys! This is real life and it is amazing!  But then the ooky feelings started creeping up on me.  The regrets for times when I didn't say "no" and the resentment (mostly undeserved) at the people who kept going when I wish I'd said "no."  That's when I started fading out of the scene.



I've been feeling that regret and resentment for a while, but last night was the first time I worked it out in words.  (WORDS: THEY ARE FUCKING AMAZING.)  It was also the first time I started thinking about a solution.

I need to recognize that I am, in many ways, a newcomer to Sexyland.  I need to go to parties with the intent to dip my toe in the shallow end.  I need to tell partners "go slow with me, I'm still figuring out what I like."  I need to start learning what I want and what I need.  Because although I have been Officially Kinky since I was eighteen, although I have a goddamn kink blog, although I have read umpteen kink books and been to a gazillion and a half classes... in some ways, I'm kinda new here.

As a genderqueer person, as a cautious and risk-aware person, as a person still seeking her own desires and finding her own limits... I'm new here.

I'd like to start exploring.

The Valentine's Day Dilemma.

someecards

[Cosmocking is coming next!  They take a long time to write.  I'll have it up late today or sometime tomorrow.]

I have a dilemma every time I’m in a relationship when this day rolls around.

Part of me thinks: “This is a commercialized, manufactured holiday that celebrates oppressively inflexible gender roles, shames men who don't give the perfect gift and women who don't get the perfect gift, marginalizes queer people, marginalizes the shit of single people and people in closeted relationships, and ought to be completely unnecessary in a relationship where we express our love when and how we feel it rather than the way The Man tells us to. This holiday sucks and as someone who cares about conscious and intentional relationships, I should have no goddamn part of it.”

But a smaller yet deeper part of me feels sad about those words, because they're words that come from a sexual and romantic rebel, yes, but they're also words that come from a Perfect Girlfriend Who Never Wants Anything. (I have battled often with the Perfect Girlfriend Who Never Wants Anything inside me, desperately resisting her threats that I'm just one "can we go out somewhere nice tonight?" away from morphing into the High-Maintenance Girlfriend Who Wants Everything.)  That part of me wants to put my foot down and say “I know this is arbitrary, Rowdy*, but sometimes I need you to make small arbitrary gestures to prove you care about me even when I don't make sense.”

Also, Valentine's Day sometimes feels like a one-day hyper-concentration of the "you poor dear, guess he doesn't love you that much" messages I get from the mainstream culture over the facts that we're not monogamous and not planning to get married or have kids.  It's not that I even want any of those things, but the relentless message of "non-traditional relationships are no way to treat a lady!" still seeps through to my sad little insecure place sometimes.  Celebrating Valentine's Day like giant saps is a relatively safe, cheap way to soothe that little sad place.  Or maybe it's a way to say screw you, society, see how our non-traditional love can be totally sappy.

I don’t want diamonds and I don’t want to receive without giving, but I think exchanging goofy heart candies** for goofy reasons is an opportunity to say “You know what? Sometimes validating feelings is more important than always fighting the good fight.”


This year, we’ve agreed to exchange presents on the 16th. That way we get to take advantage of day-after sales and uncrowded restaurants and feel like we’re getting something over on The Man, while still satisfying my irrational need to occasionally be allowed to have an irrational need.



*Rowdy is actually really good about validating things like "I need you to be here for me and I can't coherently explain why." This post is about my own tangled insecurities, not about him trying to convince me not to want anything. If anything, I think he gets upset when my Perfect Girlfriend Who Never Wants Anything self-enforcement goes into overdrive.  
Captain Awkward has a great post here on related issues, on why we pressure ourselves into pretending we never need anything from our friends and lovers, and why good friends and lovers don't actually want us to do that.


**But not Conversation Hearts. They're great cultural touchstones for representing the holiday and all, but they taste like chalk.

Pink just isn't my color.

A question I've been mulling over: Is the reason feminine things make me uncomfortable because I'm unfeminine, or because feminine things suck?

Makeup, for a forinstance. Am I annoyed by it because I don't like the way it makes me look and feel? Or is it a legitimate problem that women are expected to spend significant amounts of time and money masking their faces, often with an underlying message that their real face isn't good enough?

Do I like wearing men's clothes because they're generally more comfortable, practical, and dignified--or because I like dressing up in men's clothes?

Did I hate pink things and dolls as a child because boy's toys were more interesting and more empowering, or because I wanted to play like a boy?

Did I idolize (and dress up as) male superheroes and action heroes because they got all the best parts, or because they were hypermasculine?

Am I bothered by being called a "girl" because it's infantilizing, or because I don't want to be a girl?

I don't like being treated like a woman. But sometimes I don't see how anyone would like being treated like a woman, the way we treat women.



I think that it's some from column A, some from column B. Which is why I'm a feminist, and also, unrelatedly, unfeminine. I haven't yet decided on a label for my unfemininity--for right now, let's just go with "unfeminine woman."

(I also realize that my inability to distinguish has ticked off some happily-feminine people, probably even in this very post, and I'm sorry about that.)

Or... here are some things that I really haven't confessed to anyone, even Rowdy, but I guess I'll just have out with them. I've been, at home or out when I wouldn't run into anyone I know, binding my chest and packing. Just to see what it was like? And what it was like was... kinda gleeful. It made me happy. Some of that was just "I'm doing a different and unusual thing!" happiness, which I certainly do get. I don't know if it all was.

I know what my name would have been, if I were born male. I really like it.

Sometimes I pee standing up.

I don't know what this means, if anything. I'm really, really hesitant to say "hey everybody, I'm a guy now!", for about a million reasons. I don't feel strongly, certainly male. Although I'd love it if my overall body shape was more masculine--and in fact I lift weights partly for this reason--I'm fairly happy with my vagina. I've had some masculine tendencies for a long time, but this hardcore gender uncertainty is a relatively recent thing for me. And I sort of feel like I'd be trivializing trans people by taking myself super seriously when this is more like "a thing I've been fucking around with lately" than "a thing I have to do."

I keep wishing there was some kind of test you could take to determine your gender, but then I keep thinking that if I need a test and don't just know, it must not be that big a deal to me. (Also, I found several such tests, and they were all like "do you like pink and flowers, or do you like blue and trucks?" See the first half of this post...)

So... "unfeminine woman." At least for now. Holly, she, her, and retaining the ability to thunder at Cosmo, "Why, I'm a woman, and I never..."

I'm a woman, and uncomfortable with a lot of the crap that comes with that, and some of that's me, and some of that's the crap.




I've gotten through this whole post without really facing the question of what "feminine" or "woman" even mean, but that's just because I don't have any freaking idea.

Face beyond beauty.

Rowdy got a new camera (this was a more involved process than most house purchases) and last night he was taking pictures of me and showing me the super-duper high-quality results.

At first, I was a little bit appalled. I'm aware that I don't look like the ladies in the magazines, but the photos made it so painfully obvious how little I look like them. If angular faces with big eyes and graceful expressions and coiffed hair are beautiful, I'm round-faced and narrow-eyed and guffawing and frizzy.

But you know, so I am. Is that why I'm not beautiful, or is it why I look like me and not somebody else? Is a linear scale from "good" to "bad" really a way to fairly describe anything in the world, much less a human being? When you go to the grocery store, you don't shop for "the best food"--you put carrots and potatoes and milk and chicken in your cart, because they're different things. Because the very best carrots are really shitty milk.

So I looked at the photos again, and made an effort to stop seeing them as not-Jessica-Alba for ten seconds and instead see what is there. It's me. It's a combination of genetics and luck and history and choices that exists nowhere else on Earth. I don't look like other people because I'm not other people.

We took some pictures of Rowdy too. One of them came out really nice; the focus is crisp, the pose is cool, and there's a lot of personality showing in his face. But Rowdy also has a weird discoloration in one eye, and this is very visible in the photo. "I'll retouch that out," he said. And I questioned: why would he? That's what his eye looks like. It's kind of cool. (It gives him eyes that are different colors! How awesome is that?) Is it more important to have a picture of the Theoretical Perfect Eye than of his eye?

I mean, there's a reason I took that photo of him and not of somebody else. If I just wanted the "best" possible photo, I would've put a picture of John Barrowman in the album. So is the best photo of Rowdy one that makes him look the most like John Barrowman while still being sort of recognizable--or is it a photo that shows what he looks like?

None of this is a protest that I'm beautiful, or that Rowdy is. (Although he so is.) Instead, it's about looking beyond beauty, as seeing appearances as conveying things in entirely different dimensions than "prettier" or "uglier." Not everything in my life is about who wants to bang me, so not everything in my face is about how bangable it is. (Not that bangability requires perfection anyway, considering what else happened last night.) I've posted about how I'm more than that, but even my appearance itself is more than that.

Am I hot or not? I'm Holly.

Gross Old People Sex Party Failure.

So I didn't have sex with anyone tonight. I went home early, and in a crappy mood.

The problem wasn't sexual, but social. The party basically consisted of about a hundred people in a big hall with very loud bad music. It was too loud to have a conversation, so I couldn't meet new people and I couldn't say much to my friends. My friends had all come with one or more partners and I was ranked at about ninth wheel. I'm not good at dancing and I'm not entertained by drinking. I never even made it to the part of the night with sex; after two and a half hours of reliving my middle-school dances I was too bored and lonely to stick it out any longer.

(I had an epically bad night at work the night before, too. Sometimes going straight from a bloodbath to play can be cathartic, but when the play situation ends up being itself stressful, I just melt down. Handling mutilated corpses and getting 3 hours of sleep is rather poor preparation for taking this shit gracefully.)

Ultimately it was really a hearing problem. I'm very bad at understanding conversation where there's loud music. My problem really isn't with swinging or my friends or any such drama; my problem was just that I couldn't communicate, and it left me feeling profoundly lonely. Maybe someday I'll try going again and bring a TTY machine.

Short iPod Post: Overstimulated.

So last night I was having sex, as I am so wont to do, and it was going really well--I was coming my brains out and then some. And then too much. Sometime after the tenth orgasm I just couldn't take any more. I was in that state where every touch is amplified, only the touch in question was fast hard fucking. I had to stop. I couldn't take it.

For some reason I feel worse having any sexual inadequacies when it's in a kinky context. Like I was somehow misrepresenting myself as kinky if I can't perform at a certain level. I'm not kinky, I can't even get fucked properly and sometimes I only want to be beaten a little bit! If I was really kinky I'd have a vagina like a Fleshlight and an ass like leather. Instead some asshole went and put way too many nerves in them.

It's funny how I can have sex that involves knives and pee and being pounded with lead-filled sap gloves, then worry I just wasn't kinky enough.

Anyway, we took a break, he hit me a bit as my partners are so wont to do, and then we started fucking again. And this time I held back. Which kind of sucks--trying not to grind my hips against a guy or tighten my pussy around his cock is just wrong! But that meant I only came a couple times, so I was able to go the distance.

When a guy brags about having a huge cock and being able to go full throttle for hours, I don't think "wow, heavenly." I think, "wow, that's so much more than I need." When average sex is amazing for me, amazing sex is... just too damn much.

Incompetent cowgirl.

You know what I'm shockingly bad at? Fucking on top. I just don't know how to do it right. I think everyone has a few surprising gaps in their knowledge--someone gets to be a mostly competent adult and just never learned how to use a record player, or how to crack ice cubes out of the tray--and this is one of mine. I was out sick on the day they covered it in school, or something.

(Pointless digression: I actually was out sick for my first sex-ed class. They just gave me the book to read at home. My mom came by and asked very awkwardly if I had any, um, questions. I said "no" and we were both greatly relieved by this lie.)

Part of the problem is that it doesn't actually feel good to me. It's relatively difficult for me to come when I'm on top; the whole "you can control the speed and depth precisely" thing so often used as a selling point is no fun at all for me. Who wants control? But a lot of guys seem to particularly enjoy being ridden, so I feel it's a skill I ought to have in my repertoire. Plus, asking guys to always be on top is lazy! I don't want to seem lazy!

To be fair, there's two kinds of fucking on top, and I'm only bad at one of them. I'm fine at the kind where the guy is thrusting upward, and I only have to respond to his movements. But the kind where he just lies there--I don't know what the fuck to do with myself. Bounce straight up and down? Lean forward and kinda slide back and forth? Do my hands brace on him or the bed or myself or nowhere? Do I rotate at the hips or knees or both? Is there a way to just move my pelvis or does my whole self have to move? Why does this look so easy in porn? Is it a problem that I have absolutely no innate sense of rhythm? Does he really expect me to go that fast with my entire body? Is it supposed to be this goddamn tiring?

Maybe the problem is that I've never really been taught. In every situation where I'd been expected to perform girl-on-top, the guy just lay back and waited for me to do my thing, and I never admitted I didn't know the thing, I just climbed on and half-heartededly wiggled around until he flipped me over in exasperation. I need someone who's willing to actually tutor me here, allow me a few mistakes and give me pointers until I succeed.

...then lay me down and fuck me in a way I actually enjoy.



(Weird fact: I can give a lap dance like nobody's business. It's only when it actually becomes penetrative that my mind and body lapse into total stupidity.)

More on social skills.

I've been frustrated with my social skills--or complete lack thereof--lately. People keep dropping me hints that I don't get until they spell it out in very loud small words, and I keep unintentionally insulting or annoying people. It sucks speaking fluent English but only beginner Human.

But here are two things I've noticed when berating myself for being denser than osmium on Pluto:

1) Most other people's social skills aren't so great.
The other day at work, I was uncertain whether I should do a particular test or if it had already been done. A coworker was checking records while I set up to do the test just in case, and then she looked across the room at me, smiled and nodded. So I did the test.

Then I got yelled at for doing the test twice when she'd just clearly signaled me not to. (It wasn't anything painful or expensive, just a waste of time.) And I was kicking myself, going "stupid stupid Holly, you can't read basic body language," when I realized--my coworker had given me a really lousy signal. I wasn't unskilled for misinterpreting it; she was unskilled for thinking that a smile and a nod would mean "no."

Sometimes I go around thinking that I'm in a world of tremendously subtle people who can all communicate volumes with a single look and I'm the only one who doesn't get it. It's important to remember that most other people actually aren't so suave themselves. Most communications in my life aren't suave person to galoot, but galoot to galoot. We'd do better just saying "NO DON'T DO THE TEST IT HAS BEEN DONE" than pretending that we're all suave here and galoots are an unexpected exception.


2) The best social skills in the world won't make people do what I want.
So there's a couple people in my life right now that I would like to date and fuck. But my relations with these people are, while very friendly and enjoyable, not really on a date/fuck level. And there's some horrible PUA part of my brain that wants me to think this is purely a failure of my social skills. Like if I could communicate in just the right way, drop just the right hints, it would change everything and "I like you, but I'm not sure if I feel that way about you" would instantly become "after our long romantic walk down the beach at sunset, you wanna do it doggy or cowgirl?"

(It's also horrible and PUA of me to even speak of a friendship as a "failure" because there is no penis-in-vagina. It's a very successful friendship! Sheesh.)

Now, there's no question that social skills do influence how people think of me. They have nothing to judge me by except how I present myself, so a good presentation definitely matters. But there's a lot of other things that matter too--factors in their own life situations and sexualities and thought processes that I can't even know about, much less change. Blaming everything on my own social skills makes me berate myself unnecessarily and it makes me disrespect the autonomy of my sexy friends.

I can--and should--be likeable, but I can't make people like me. They're social skills, not Social Fucking Magic.

In so many words.

For the longest time I agonized about how to say certain things. How do you ask a boy if he likes you? How do you ask for freaky things in bed? How do you tell your friends, when it's relevant or it's just gnawing at you, that your love life is a little different? How can you possibly communicate these concepts?

The answer, I'm finding is, "in so many words." Just say it. So how do you find out if a boy likes you? Turns out the magic words are: "[Boy], do you like me?" There's no trick to it, there's no secret code; the way to say a difficult thing is simply to say it.

What I was really asking, of course, is how I could say these things without taking any risks. I didn't want to know how to tell if a boy liked me, I wanted him to like me. I wanted to know some magical way to ask that the answer would always be yes. My pretended difficulty in asking was really a difficulty in hearing the truth.

There were two separate difficulties within that: the fear of opening Schrödinger's box, and the fear of asking wrong. The first fear is real, but useless. It's the feeling that "right now there's a 50% chance that he likes me, so I can enjoy the feeling of being theoretically 50% liked! If I find out for sure, he could say "no" and the waveform will collapse and I'll have 0% of a boy!" I was so afraid of finding a dead cat that I never looked in the box and ended up with no cat at all.

The second fear, that of asking wrong, was even harder to get over. This is the idea--the hallucination, really--that there's a way to phrase the question that will make a "no" into a "aww, you're really sweet but I don't feel that way right now, but things are still developing"; and another way that will make a "no" into a "no way, not ever, how could you even ask, in fact I hate you." Or worse yet, that the way I asked could somehow in itself make the difference between "yes" and "no."

But the truth is, I think, that people aren't really that subtly and dramatically influenced by my phrasing or timing. People's opinions aren't subatomic particles; they aren't irreparably changed by being observed. Even a clumsy question will get a sweet response out of a sweet guy, and there's definitely no remotely honest way to ask that will turn a "no" into a "yes." The question is simply "do you like me?" and the answer has already been formed in his mind and all your previous interactions.

The search for the magical phrase is over. The search for the way to suss things out without asking asking is finished. The way to say a thing is to simply say it, and whether things go your way or not (sometimes really not), at least you know what the hell is going on.

What's the opposite of "sour grapes?" Greener grass, maybe.

It's 4 AM. I have to get up for work at 6 AM. (FML and all that. But I slept all day, so it's not as bad as it could be, this is really just a nap.) I am, at this moment, about the horniest I've been all year. I want it so bad and I would give it so good.

But tomorrow night! Tomorrow night I'm off all night and all of the next day. If I can secure a partner, I can hump like a crazy monkey tomorrow night.

The only question is, tomorrow night, will I still feel like it, or will I have a sudden compulsion to rearrange the spice rack and play Wii Fit and do some beading? Or will I try and find no one, or no one appealing?

The way I feel right now, when I'm can't just go out and have sex--man I want to hang on to this until I can.

Pretty.

Being around kinky people tends to make me feel pretty. Which is not something I feel around normal people; there's some part of my brain that internalized the message "you are a total dog" around age 12 and will never totally let it go. But around kinky people, even when I'm not getting any play, I feel desirable. Even if nobody at all is saying "yes" to me, at least I feel like I'm being taken seriously as a sexual being.

I guess it's because in Kinkland, I have something to offer. Sometimes I feel (unfairly, I'm sure) that in Vanilla-land, because the range of activities is narrower, appearance matters more. In Kinkland, just the fact that I'm an eager and horny submissive gets me some points. (And likewise, a guy I might not give the time of day under other circumstances gets a whole lot of bonus points for being sexily dominant or super-skilled with rope.)

It's also because the kink world in general is pretty size-positive. It's almost impossible to go to a munch and feel like "the big girl," and it's pretty hard to go to one and not meet a guy who likes big girls.

In a funny way, I also feel prettier in Boston than I did in Seattle. I don't know if it's because I've been moving in kinkier circles here, or I was older and more confident when I got here, but I also feel like there's more women here who look like me, and more men willing to take me seriously. I'm not sure if this perception is true or not, but either way... I feel much prettier now than ever before in my life, and I really love it.

Excuses.

I can't date now, I'm about to move across the country.
I can't date now, I'm unemployed.
I can't date now, I just started a new job.
I can't date now, I'm moving again.
I can't date now, my room is full of boxes. (What? This makes perfect sense!)
I can't date now, I should lose like 50 pounds first.
I can't date now, then I might not be able to have random sex.
I can't date now, what if he's not okay with me being kinky and having a sex blog.
I can't date now, then I'll be stuck with him if he's not perfect.

And most evil of all: I can date now, but only if a date falls into my fucking lap, because looking for dates, that's pathetic. Apparently the only thing that's non-pathetic is if a guy just stops me on the street and is smitten with my beauty without me even saying hi.

So yeah, I should probably start looking for dates, because even though part of me clearly likes being single, I also kind of miss the fun you can have in a relationship. My life is never going to be 100% stable and perfect, and waiting for it to be is just a lousy excuse.

Prickly.

Sometimes I worry that feminism is making me too prickly. Taking offense at things rarely produces immediate wonderful change in the world--even when those things really are offensive--and it makes the thing-sayers and me into instant adversaries.

Say that someone mentions he's managing a project and starts gleefully talking about how he's going to pick his hottest female subordinate to be his personal assistant, woo woo. There's shit-all some random acquaintance can say to make him change his actions. But if I go "come on, that's not right, it's her job dude and she can't get away from you," I'm being pretty socially unpleasant. I'm being a grouchy buzzkill and I'm not really sparing that poor girl anything.

Likewise even with my personal boundaries. Which are, right now, based on an ironclad rule: you ask. If you lay a hand on me (with the slight exception of a quick tap to get my attention, but even that can get weird), you're drawing back a fucking stump unless you get my permission. Which is widely given; I love human contact, and I do understand how the asking and permission can be effected through body language or flirting rather than strictly explicitly. But if my permission isn't given through some mutually understood medium, you're getting a jerk away and cold stare at best, with shoving you away and yelling not out of the question.

(And no, this isn't an appearance or even a sexual-attraction thing. I'm happy [though not obligated!] to touch lots of non-conventionally-hot people when they ask, and no one on Earth, not even Nathan Fillion, is hot enough to not need to ask.)

By feminist and sex-positive doctrine, this is exactly correct and I have every right. But sometimes in social situations I feel like a stuck-up bitch for enforcing the rule too literally. Dude didn't mean anything by it and you bit his freakin' head off, jeez. It was just your shoulder, are you really that special, Princess?

Mostly I worry about the opinions of observers. I don't much care what Sexually Harassing Grabby Man thinks of me, but I worry that being seen biting his head off will make other people think of me as a habitual head-biter. I'm totally sweet when I'm not provoked, I swear... I just wish I had more times when I wasn't being provoked so I could prove that.

Benny is in a relationship!

Awkward Facebook moment: seeing that the guy who tried to fist me after I safeworded and left me tied up is listed as "in a relationship."

It's fairly clear that there's nothing I can say to her. I don't know the girl at all, and I'd come off as a psycho ex, or just plain psycho. And maybe it would be psycho; I don't have the right to go around trying to sabotage his relationships.

Hell, maybe he won't hurt her. He was (at least in the latter half of the relationship, at the beginning we actually dated but by the end he wouldn't go outdoors with me) very clear about me being a sex girl, not a respectable girl. If they're Facebook-official, that probably means she's a respectable girl and will be treated totally differently. (Besides, she's skinny; Benny was pretty clear that being fat was up there with being kinky on why I was not a respectable girl.)

I suppose I could message him, although I don't really know what I'd say; any form of "you better watch it" is a very empty threat at 3200 miles and just cements me as crazy in his mind. Maybe I just need to let him know, in an almost-friendly way, that what he did was abusive in my mind, because I'm not sure he knows he did anything wrong. It's hard to do even that without being psycho though.

I guess the easy answer is to unfriend him and put it all out of my mind. It drives me crazy when otherwise politically-active people refuse to take any action against the abusers in their own lives, but I figure that Benny's, I don't know, only sort of a real mild borderline case, he didn't like beat me or whatever, my vagina didn't actually tear it just bled a little, so I should mind my own business. Ugh.



Dear Internets: if someone only abuses you a little bit and it's like really borderline and probably not like abuse abuse or anything, do I:
A) Message his girlfriend with a detailed account and warning, and maybe a mention of that birthmark on his thigh
B) Message him with "hey, just so you know, what you did to me was so not cool and I really hope you remember that so you can be cool with this girl"
C) Go about my business and not make waves

Cruel to be kind.

I have to get better at saying "no." I spent so much of my life being awkward that I'm still not used to men hitting on me. I never developed a script for politely rejecting someone.

And I think that in trying to be nice, in trying to avoid the arrogance of saying "stop hitting on me" to a guy who might just be chatting or the meanness of saying "leave me alone" to a guy who's been friendly to me, I end up being much crueler. I go from being a rejecting bitch to being a stringing-along bitch.

This is only an issue, of course, with guys who won't shit or get off the pot. If someone actually asks me if I want to fuck/play, I can say "no." But it's hard to find the right point in a theoretically innocent conversation to say "hey, I just figured out that you're flirting with me, and you need to stop now."

I really hate not fucking people. It's lose-lose. It's awkward, the guy's unhappy, I feel bad that he's unhappy, I feel scared that he'll be angry, and my vagina goes home sad and empty. But I find that fucking people I'm not attracted to is physically and emotionally intolerable, so I'm kinda stuck.

Maybe the worst part is wondering if the guy thinks I'm enjoying the whole deal. A lot of guys seem to think that stringing a guy along is like multiple chocolate-coated orgasms for a girl, that we really dig on the power trip and we giddily high-five each other for it. God no. It might be true that I have "power" over a guy who wants to fuck me, but I didn't ask for it, I won't exploit it, and it feels about as pleasant as those dreams where you didn't study for the test.



I just have to get quicker and harsher about saying "I'm not interested." That sucks balls too, but at least it ends the torment for both of us.

The Situation.

Emo Post.

(Still in Taylor, MI. But moving on soon! ETA in Mass: Tuesday night.)

I want to be a cool chick. I really want to approach sex with perfect naivete. I want to be the sort of person who can say "sex is fun! let's have fun together!" and really mean it and nothing else. But the more times people dick with me, the more times I get my good nature used to make me into a "take it or leave it, use it and ditch it, plastic don't care" sex toy, the harder it is to be that sort of person.

I don't want--couldn't stand--to become conventional and withholding in my sex, to agree only to fucking one guy, only in a relationship with "commitment", only after he sucks up a little. But I'm starting to understand it. Being a happy hippie about sex, but also having all these inconvenient feelings where I react negatively (like a psycho!) when people get my hopes up and then decide that my desire is inconvenient for them, could start to wear me down one day.

There's a difference between a one-night stand and being used once and thrown out, and the more times the latter happens, the worse I get at accepting it with perfect "hey, it happens! no big! I'm a cool chick!" grace. Everyone has the right to say no to me at any time for any reason, but--if you really don't like me well enough to tell me your realistic expectations, and turn me down kindly and openly if things don't work out--maybe you just shouldn't get my hopes up in the first place.

I hope I don't sound like the "cockteasing is like rape" guys or some psycho bunny-boiler girl. I'm really not asking to be fucked any time I get horny, or carried away into a Forever Love every time I get schmoopy. I'm just asking to have these emotions respected a little. There's a difference between just not fucking me, and leaving me fucking hanging, scared to even point out that I'm hanging for fear of looking "psycho," and I think it's actually not that hard for guys to know which they're doing.

I guess the TL;DR is "Holly is a psycho who will sulk if she doesn't get laid," and admittedly history does sometimes bear that out, but... I wouldn't mind being rejected as much if I could at least get properly rejected like a person you're letting down, instead of fucking discarded like a sex toy you decided you didn't want to use. This bullshit--this kicking me out after you come, this keeping me around as an optional extra instead of a legitimate third, this treating me like a psychopath for calling back after you were finished with me, this utter fucking disrespect for my own wants because cool chicks shouldn't want anything because the coolest thing is a chick who's really convenient to use--this could wear the "cool chick" right out of me someday.

Mommy Issues.

temporarily locked post, sorry

Caught up in everything.

I just can't post about sex right now. It's nothing horrible, no one's dead and no one's even unhappy, my life is just... changing big time.

Oy. That made it sound like I was pregnant or something. I'm really just overwhelmed by the move. Here are the milestones: my last day at my job is the 22nd. My last night in this apartment is the 27th. Everything I own goes in bags and boxes and the guinea pigs go in a little airline crate. First thing in the morning on the 28th, I type "Massachusetts" into the GPS and hope it doesn't send me via Mexico or something.

Somewhere around the 8th or 9th of March, I

I

I arrive, and unpack, and look for work, and contact people I know in the area, and explore the sights and people of a whole new city, but what I'm really there for, what I ultimately want to do with myself is

...I just don't know, man. I feel like this move is making me contemplate big old "but what do you want to do with your life?" questions, questions that cannot be answered by references to career or family or picket fences, big thudding "you've only got a few decades to work with, you've gotta do something!" questions. I'm planning to move for life, and I just don't know what that means.





Or maybe I'm just angsty because I just realized how much all this shit weighs, and I have no freaking idea how I'm getting it up the stairs over there.

The problem with BBW.

I guess I'm a BBW? I'm never sure if I really count. I'm pretty fat, but if I Google "BBW" they're all way bigger than me. (Except for the depressing few who are tagged "BBW" and are, like, 135.) More importantly, they're not really shaped like me. It seems like a lot of the appeal is "they may be fat, but hey, big ol' titties," and I don't work that way. My titties are extremely moderate in scope. And my ass, although not precisely small, fails to provide the desirable "bubble" effect as it isn't really round and it's not much wider than my waist. My fat is mostly belly. I'm like 38-38-38.

So even though it's relegated to the ghetto of shameful fetish interest to begin with, I don't find much solace in the BBW label. It's not acceptance of fat chicks, it's just another, larger beauty standard. I can't measure up to 40DDDs and big shakin' booties any more than I can measure up to 32Ds and lithe little waists. I'm a third creature entirely.

(It sucks buying clothes too. Tops that are cut to gracefully cover a belly are always also cut to display ginormous boobs that I don't have. All those square-neckline "peasant" tops would be great if they didn't display a giant square of flat ribcage on me.)

Then again, I can't ask society to create the Holly Pervocracy Beauty Standard in which short big-bellied B-cup girls with weightlifter biceps and frizzy red hair are the most sexiest thing ever. There's not enough girls like me, and anyway, where would that leave girls with frizzy blonde hair? You can't make the beauty standard cover everyone or it stops being a standard.

So I'd rather raise the question, why do we need a standard anyway? It's hardly fair to demand a breed standard in the shows when the breeding is random. More importantly, though no group has ever held my type up as a paragon, plenty of individuals have been quite enthusiastic about it. There may not be Holly-type porn sites, but I know a few guys who liked my naked pictures just fine.

Individual preference isn't the only problem with standards. The other problem is that it's really unhealthy to create the idea of the perfect mate in your head and then try to find humans who match. I didn't know that short blond men were sexy to me until I met Tommy. In fact I still don't know that they are--I just know that Tommy is, and I think a tall dark Tommy would appeal to me more than a short blond random guy. We don't live in a world of types but people.

So "standards" suck, but that doesn't mean everyone has to find everyone equally attractive. That's silly and it's not going to happen. Plus it leads to creepers going "you can't find me unattractive, that's discrimination!" This also doesn't mean that "everyone's got someone"; the vast majority of people do but I can't make you promises. What it really means is that sexiness is the chemistry between individuals. "Society" isn't going to date me no matter how thin and busty I am; the intersection of one person's unique appearance and one person's unique and malleable preferences is all that matters.

Asking if I'm "sexy" is, ultimately, like asking if I'm "a friend." The answer isn't yes, no, kinda, or even "depends by what standards"; it's "to whom?"