How To Have Sex On Purpose.

Captain Awkward. Or Sue.  I might have gotten my notes switched.

I had an amazing time in Chicago this weekend.   Everyone at the University of Chicago was absolutely wonderful to me, and the talk went great; the room was packed, the audience was great, and besides my little monologue, we had a really good discussion about negotiating sex and relationships.  And then I got to go to the Field Museum and meet Captain Awkward (the blogger) and Sue (the dinosaur).  It was so ridiculously awesome that I'm all out of eloquence and just going "so ridiculously awesome, you guys!"

This is a (rough) transcript of the talk I gave.  It's on a separate page because it's quite a bit longer than my usual posts.  And that's saying something.

Circumstantial evidence.

A vaginal photoplethysmograph. It knows what you like.
Even if you disagree.

I got about fifteen pages into Sex at Dawn before giving up. Partly because it seemed to be breaking down "monogamy is natural and therefore good" only to replace it with equally narrow thinking about "polyamory is natural and therefore good."  Partly because the opening chapter is viciously snarky about how everyone is unhappy and bad at sex these days because of their stupid monogamy delusion, which, even though I'm poly, grates on me like condescending sandpaper.  Partly because some of their evidence for universal bad-at-sex-ness is the frequency of Viagra use and female sexual dysfunction--apparently physical genital problems are just proof of your hang-ups, man.

Partly because there's a part where they make the argument that a woman's "copulatory vocalizations" are supposed to excite other men and invite them to have sex with her too, and... NO and EW and WHAT.

But mostly, I gave up on Sex at Dawn because it's full of a problem a lot of sex research suffers from--the love of circumstantial evidence.


Want to know why women moan during sex?  (Or, for starters, whether all women moan during sex?)  What would your first step in answering this question be?

Well, if you're a Serious Sex Researcher, some approaches you might take:
• Watch female chimps having sex.
• Gather media about fictional women making sex noises.
• Dissect female cadavers, searching for the sex-noise node of the brain.
• Read anthropological accounts of the sex-noise practices of women in isolated hunter-gatherer societies.
• Search the literature for historical mentions of women making sex noises.
• Hook up men and women's genitalia to "arousal-measuring" equipment and scan their brains while they listen to sex noises.
• Speculate at length about the sex noises of "cavewomen."

And one approach you would never, ever take because it's just hopelessly unscientific:
• Ask some women "hey, why do you moan during sex?"


Don't get me wrong, I don't think sex science should consist entirely of self-reports, or that cross-cultural and biological perspectives don't have a place in it.  But too often, sex research seems to consist of everything but listening to people about their own experiences.  It's the meticulous aggregation of every possible piece of circumstantial evidence--and no questions for the eyewitnesses.


I have a special hatred for vaginal photoplethysmography, and not just because it's very hard to type.  This is a device that measures bloodflow in the vagina, and therefore purportedly the sexual arousal of the vagina's owner.  Except that study after study shows that subjects' self-reports of their arousal tend to correlate very badly with their photoplethingy readings.  The photothingy says they're aroused, the human beings say they're not feeling a thing.  Naturally, this is reported in the pop-sci press as "Vaginal Blood Flow Not A Reliable Indicator Of Arousal, New Method Needed."

Haha, I'm just messing with you.  I've never seen that headline.  It's always reported as "Women Not Aware Of Their Own Arousal."  (The first link opens with chimps, too!  Oh, those fucking chimps.  Fascinating creatures and all that, but I don't understand the compulsion to study chimps to understand human sexuality, when actual humans are readily available.)  You couldn't get away with this in other branches of science.  If you measured water ice at 20ºC and declared "my thermometer is perfect; this ice must be defective," you'd get laughed out of the lab.  But when it comes to confirming gross old "they don't know what they really want" stereotypes about women, anything goes.

(Don't worry, though; if you have a penis, its degree of erection will also be trusted over your word.  Because no one ever got a hard-on when they didn't want to have sex, right?)



I'm a science nerd at heart.  I like the idea of applying science to sex.  (I'm still trying to find the right excuse to post the pictures from that time we measured my Kegel Power.  About half a kilo, by the way.)  I have no ambition to replace rigorously analyzed data and reproducible double-blind experiments with poems about lilies unfolding.  I think expanding our knowledge of human sexuality is a noble goal in biology, psychology, and sociology, and objective measures are necessary to achieve that.

But I also think that if you want to study humans, study humans.  If you want to study people's feelings, ask them about their feelings.  Cadavers and fMRIs and chimps should be secondary tools to validate what you learn from humans, not the other way around.

In nursing, the definition of pain is simply "whatever the patient says it is," and yet we've still been able to create a massive body of work about the causes, effects, and control of pain.  Our understanding of pain is human and subjective, and still manages to produce precise and meaningful data.  There's no reason we can't study sex this way as well.

Fairly unfair.

Rowdy and I are not officially a mono/poly couple, but we're pretty close these days.  I've only had sex with other people a handful of times this year (so, uh, super monogamous) and no real dates, whereas he's seeing several other people on a regular basis.  More than once he's gone to a sex party while I've stayed home; many, many times he's been on a date with someone else while I've hung out with friends or watched DVDs.

This is awkward, because I used to disapprove of mono/poly relationships.  They struck me as unfair and kind of icky, especially when they were between a polyamorous man and a monogamous woman--"boys will be boys, stand by your man" has all kinds of really nasty sexist implications.  I always worry there's a coercive element, that the man is too jealous to let the woman spread her wings and have her own fun, or that the woman wants monogamy but is too powerless to negotiate for it.  ...And now it's my life.

But here's the choice I was faced with:

A) Run out and date people just to be dating them, so I could go "ha! I'm polyamorous too! our relationship is symmetrical!"  Crappy for me, double crappy for the people I'd be using just to keep my Poly Enlightenment Cred.

or

B) Embrace the asymmetry as something that, despite looking the same as some really shitty unfair situations, works for me.  I don't want other partners right now, I'm happy for my partner that he does, and that's good enough.

So screw fair.  I'll settle for happy.



Our favorite stupid joke to make before sex is "Dude!  I just had an idea how we can both get laid!"  And then we fistbump and go "score, bro!"

That's what being partners really means to me.  It's about beating the system, the ugly sexist system that tries to pit us against each other, and working together to build our own system.  Sometimes it's a messy and patched-together system, the way homebuilt things tend to be, and it takes constant tinkering, but it's custom-fit to us and our weird contradictory ways.  And when it works, god damn do I feel like I'm getting away with something.

The end of normal.

Us polyamorous folk can get a little bit... evangelical, sometimes.  We're so enlightened, you know.  So evolved.  We deal with our jealousy like rational beings, we don't attempt to impose control on our partners, we base everything in open communication and trust--we're so goddamn more advanced than the average human, we ought to glow blue or something.  Right?

Well, kinda.  But what this poly boosterism is missing (other than its manners) is that you don't actually have to date other people to do any of this.  For that matter, dating other people doesn't guarantee that you'll do this--oh boy does it not.  Dating other people is just somewhat more likely to bring these issues into the open.

Likewise, you don't have to actually hit each other to use BDSM methods of negotiation and consent-centrism.  "What kind of play do you want today?" is an important question to ask of someone who doesn't have any Officially Designated Fetishes, but still has desires and limits--which would be, yeah, everyone.

And you don't have to be non-heterosexual to question what gender means to your relationship.  If "which one of y'all does the dishes?" is a stupid question to ask a gay couple, it ought to be an equally stupid assumption to make about a straight one.  The fact that assigned gender roles are available for a straight couple doesn't mean they ought to take them on without question.

What kind of relationship you have is your choice, and one choice isn't better than another.  What's important is that you make a choice.  That even if you're you're monogamous, vanilla, and heterosexual--you're doing it because it's what you want and because you and your partner have agreed to it, not because that's what people do.  What's important isn't what path you take, but that you know there are paths.

Paths?  Fuck, there's an entire open world out there once you get past "man buys dinner, woman agrees to missionary PIV until he ejaculates.  (Or rather, a world including "man buys dinner, woman agrees to missionary PIV until he ejaculates," because, hey, if that's your thing.)  There's a million goddamn ways to love, a billion things  "partner" or "lover" or "fuckbuddy" or "spouse" can mean to you, and you get to decide.

How fucking cool is that?

When there is no "normal," there's no reason to take pride in being "abnormal."  You just are.  People who have heterosexual PIV sex for 3.5 minutes once a week just are.  Poly/kinky/queer enlightenment wouldn't mean anything at all if everyone were responsible for choice and communication in their relationships.

Who cares how many people you fuck or how you do it?  The only thing worth being evangelical about is consciousamory.

"Is this spot taken?"

Far too often, patients at the ER try to hit on me. (If you are picturing someone cute and polite who is in the ER for reasons that have nothing to do with being in a drunken bottle fight, then you are picturing the exact opposite of the sort of person who does this.) And most of the time, they do it in the format: "Gosh, ain't you a little sweet thing... do you have a boyfriend?"

I just say "yes." But that's a partial answer, because they asked the wrong question. They asked something like five different kinds of the wrong question.

The full answer is: "Yes, but he doesn't care who I sleep with, but I bloody well care who I sleep with!"

Perhaps I'm reading too much into the drunken advances of the sort of guy who tries to hit on the person who's picking glass out of his wounds, but it unnerves me that my boyfriend's right to my body is counted as more important than my own, even when he's not around. They're trying to establish whether I'm owned, not whether I'm interested.

Sometimes, for extra comedy/discouragement value, I'll say "yes, and he's really mean." This is a straight up lie, as Rowdy is barely mean enough to use sternly worded I-statements with a fly. (And the implications here are horrifying; am I suggesting that Rowdy would beat someone up for having consensual sex with me, or that only his "meanness" protects me from sexual assault?)

So the real answer is: "Yes, and he's not mean at all, but Roger The 250-Pound Security Guard sure is. If you try something, guess which one I'm going to call?"

Internalization.

This weekend, I walked in the Boston Dyke March as an ally. It was a wonderful, powerful atmosphere. And one, literally, of pride; of thousands of people being able to go out and say "no, I'm not ashamed to be a lesbian, and why the hell should I be?" Women held hands and kissed in public, because people are allowed to hold hands and kiss in public.

I had no trouble supporting this in public, because I feel like it's a totally legitimate and worthy cause; there's no doubt in my mind that women who have relationships with other women are doing something that's Okay, that's Allowed, and I wish the world at large would acknowledge this.

But when it comes to my own relationship--to polyamory, specifically--I am ashamed. I'm fine talking about it on the Internet or in Kinkland, but when it comes to real life and hostile places, to family and coworkers and society at large, I can't say "I'm here, I'm dating a dude who's dating another chick but it's not like cheating it's actually cool with everyone, get over it." Except for my parents and one coworker I trust, I'm closeted. And when I have come out to people who weren't "cool," I wasn't a warrior. I was embarrassed, even apologetic. Explaining my relationship to, for example, my doctor didn't make me feel like I was spreading awareness. It made me feel like I was disclosing a secret disgusting perversion, a naughty peccadillo, a dirty and decadent habit.

The problem is that on some level, I don't feel like my own relationship is Okay and Allowed. I feel as if it's a thing we're getting away with, not a thing we damn well should get away with. Some part of me has internalized the belief that polyamory is a shameful sexual habit, rather than a completely legitimate relationship style. Or I feel like it's not important, not a Real Big Deal, not worth getting all mouthy about, even though it actually has a huge impact on my life.

I don't want to draw too much of an equivalence with the Dyke March, because I can be happy in a monogamous relationship, and many of the people at the Dyke March couldn't be happy in a heterosexual one. And poly people may be underground but we don't face violence and discrimination on anywhere near the level gay people do. Nonetheless, I do think that the model of going from shame to pride, of changing people's perspective from "that's a perversion" to "that's a relationship" could be a valuable one for polyamory. And not just for outsiders. For poly people ourselves.

I hope someday polyamory can come more into the light, that it will become understood as a legitimate lifestyle, just another way for people to love each other. I suspect the poly community couldn't field as many people as a the gay one, but I hope someday those people who are with us won't be afraid or ashamed to admit it. I hope someday I can say "my boyfriend's other girlfriend" outside kink circles and not only will other people be comfortable with it, I'll be comfortable with it.

My Polyamorous Heart.

[Guest post by Rowdy]

One of the typical assumptions about monogamy is that the heart is a defined quantity, to love more than one person is to divide it, to find a new love is to push the last completely out, and each person it's given to gets the same thing.

That’s never felt true for me, the way I experience love. When describing my heart, I’ve found this metaphor works pretty well:

I like to think of my polyamorous heart as a house with many rooms. It’s constructed by the people I love, and filled with warmth and memories. It grows as each person I love adds something to my house, maybe a decoration or boardgame, maybe an entire new room.

Many people enter my heart, friends and strangers, and hang around in the common spaces... sometimes just a short while, and sometimes much longer. They wear down the floors and scuff the walls, they throw parties and help me fix the place up.

Each new romantic love builds their own room, an addition onto my house. We work on it together and it grows over time, a special place filled with emotions, experiences, and memories. There is always space to add another room, and build additions onto the rooms already built - it only takes time and energy, the material provided by our lives. No two rooms are alike, each one shaped by the person who built it.

Some of those people may leave my life, but the room they built in my heart stays, like the bedroom of a child moved off to college, a place of growth, accomplishments, and warm memories - saved just for that person who made it their home for a while. Some people leave their room nicely as a place for fond memories, others trash the room on their way out, but the place they built in my heart stays.

They may come by occasionally, or they may make their life in other hearts and never return, but there will always be a place of happiness that they built in my heart, a place they are always welcome to visit.

Sometimes my house is a loud party, sometimes it is lonely and quiet; there are parts of it I visit every day, and others I haven’t visited in ages.

This is my poly heart. A house built by the people who’ve lived there, filled with the warmth of life, love, and memories.

Model minority.

One of the subtler nastinesses about having an "alternative" lifestyle is the fear of revealing any personal conflict or angst to any "normal" people, even the nominally friendly ones, for fear that the answer will always be "See, this proves your whole lifestyle is flawed!"

If I'm arguing with my boyfriend, he's being a jerk or you two just need to work this out. If I'm arguing with my poly boyfriend, well, sounds like this poly thing just doesn't work in the long term, huh?

Out.

I told my family about being poly. I didn't mention being kinky and I didn't get into gritty details--lots of "the three of us go out together, like a family!" not so much group sex and "well, it's not just us three exactly"--but I let them know that Sprite exists, at least.

My dad was fine with it, mostly because he and I long struck a "we're both adults and there's no judgement here, but it would be best if we didn't share details" pact. He went "huh, okay" and moved on.

My mom went through all five stages of grief, each of which might have been upsetting to me at an earlier age, but were just amusing at this point:

Denial. "Well, lots of people date around casually."
Anger. "You're better than this! I don't want you to diminish yourself!"
Bargaining. "Okay, which one of you is really his girlfriend?"
Depression. "If you do this you're never going to have a real relationship and never have a family and I'm just so worried about your future now."
And finally, a halfhearted acceptance. "Well, I guess I can't stop you, can I?"

The funny part now, though, is that every time I bring up my relationships--again, not in an outrageous way, just a "oh, Sprite hates this cold weather" way--my mom just freezes. It's like I used a racial slur and she's trying to not make a scene but she can't quite stifle her outrage. Just mentioning Rowdy or Sprite's existence brings any lively conversation to an instant "Oh. Fine. Whatever."

I suppose in her hilariously rude way she is being decent. She still talks to me (yay?) and I haven't been written out of any wills or crossed off any Bar Mitzvah guest lists. She doesn't even try to argue about it that much.

On the whole I'm relieved, just because I don't have to tell weird little lies of omission to my family all the time. Having a dirty secret can be sort of fun sometimes, but ultimately it's wonderful to feel like you have nothing to hide.

Well, not as much, anyway.

Poly Morality.

"If you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, it's yours. If it doesn't, it never was."

I believe that. It's hard sometimes to reconcile with the toddler part of my brain, the part that can't distinguish "want" from "should have," but it's right, and I think ultimately it's inescapable. Having someone's love because they're not allowed to do anything else is as untenable as it is pointless.

I also believe love is about what you do, not what you don't do. If someone gives me kindness and affection and companionship and spectacular sex, what right does that give me to tell him what to do in the rest of his life? "You love me? Oh, that's wonderful. Don't take up fencing."

And I find in my own heart, what I feel for one doesn't diminish what I feel for another. Playing with one person never made me less horny for another, and being close to one never made me farther from another. To have multiple lovers seems as natural to me as having multiple friends--no one of them means exactly the same thing to you, but it would be ridiculous to say that means only one of them is "real."

It wouldn't be fair to say I think only polyamory is moral--certainly lots of people make a considered choice to only be with each other romantically and sexually, and hell, I've seen weirder things.

But I'm starting to think it's the only thing that's moral for me. It's not even about dating multiple people. It's about accepting that your partners are not your property, extensions of yourself, employees, or anything you can control or even fully understand. They're just people you happen to love.



I also believe that chosen families make for the best warmfuzzies.

...Giant whiteboards?

Man, how did people ever manage polyamory before Google Calendar?

Quiet night.

Last night Sprite and Rowdy and I got together and... pretty much just stayed in. We ate some takeout, exchanged belated Christmas presents (Sprite gave me a huggy dinosaur and Rowdy gave me a subscription to MAKE magazine; I gave Sprite a flogger and Rowdy a robot kit), and then we just hung out. We fucked a little, slept in a big warm pile, fucked a little more and watched Muppet Show clips and cuddled a lot.

Sometimes happiness is just that simple.

It's not much to write about, I guess. But it's kind of... part of what I always wanted for my life. (I might not have always envisioned certain details.) Not to be boring all the time, but to be happy even when it's boring. To be able to have promiscuous public kinky sex with the people I love, and to be able to take a nap with them. And in particular, to take a nap with them and not find myself saying "bleh, you guys aren't any fun unless we're having promiscuous public kinky sex." Love is love and happy is happy, and sex is just the cherry on top. Fuckin' awesome cherry though.



Also: Sprite and I have finally, I think, settled the terminology question of what to call our relationship. We're not really girlfriends with each other. But "my boyfriend's other girlfriend" is cumbersome and indirect. Apparently common poly terminology is "metamour," but eh. Or "paramour," which is kind of clever except it's already a word.

Anyway. We are "sister girlfriends."

Freely given.

It's a little scary at first, but awesome when I think about it, that Rowdy not only can but does get sex and love elsewhere.

Because he still wants to get it with me.

I don't want to be needed. I want to be wanted.

Nothing to reconcile.

Man, I've come up with better answers in the past, but really, being asked to "reconcile" being a feminist and being a polyamorous kinkster just feels irrelevant. Like being asked "How can you wear baseball caps and also own a cat? Don't you feel like a hypocrite?" They're two such separate things in my life.

It's possible to be polyamorous in a misogynist matter, and treat multiple partners as a harem, as multiple possessions and proof of your "status." (I always like that Rowdy's attitude has never been "I'm dating two women--I'm so cool," but "I'm dating two women--these two women are so cool.") It's also possible to be polyamorous because you're so damn feminist that exclusivity seems like oppressive ownership to you.

It's possible to be kinky because you like an excuse to hurt people and deep down you really don't like them--or because you think you really deserve to be hurt. It's also possible to be kinky because you simply like to play with intense and dramatic dynamics and sensations.

Although it's interesting to note that in both of the examples above, people acting in the unfeminist ways tend to be perceived as just plain bad and generally aren't popular in their respective communities. You may be kinky for bad reasons and maybe that's not going away, but very few people who come to be known in The Kink Community (patchwork as it is) are the bad-reasons type. If kink is neither feminist nor anti-feminist, The Kink Community tends to skew feminist. I'm less familiar with The Poly Community but I believe that they are even more so.

Two things contribute further to this:
1) Being in a sexual minority means that you can't hide behind "normal." Saying "well, gender roles are normally XYZ" sounds a little hypocritical when you're wearing floor-length latex and carrying two hundred and forty feet of lovingly coiled hemp rope. You're in no position to be enforcing the status quo.
2) The kink and poly communities are diverse. Although there are probably horrible little enclaves somewhere for people who only align themselves one way, in most kink communities you're going to run into dominant women and submissive men, in poly communities you're going to run into women with multiple male partners, and in both communities there are queer and non-gender-conforming people. Anyone who thinks kink is about putting women in their place would have that clarified for them right quick after about ten seconds with some of my kinky friends.

Finally, the main reason that I don't worry too much about the feminist cred of my sexual activities is that they feel good. Not "I deserved that and my inner pain has found catharsis" good. Like "warm fuzzies" good. I go to work and things get difficult or boring and I think about the bruises on my breasts, the little cuts healing on my back, and I'm happy. It gives me strength through the day.

I don't have the ability or authority to designate every activity on Earth "feminist" or not, but when something gives me as much simple joy as my sex life does, I'm just gonna go ahead and enjoy the hell out of it.

98% normal.

It's weird sometimes to think of my relationship with Rowdy and Sprite as weird. We're still alien enough to society to be worthy of detachedly anthropological, vaguely freakshowish human interest articles, to experience fear and difficulty explaining our relationship to our families and some friends, to be unable to marry even in Massachusetts, to be unable to list our relationship on Facebook, and to be generally so far removed from the public consciousness that most people who see us out in public don't even consider that we could all be together.

This weekend we went had hot three-way sex and slept three to a bed, yes, but we also went shopping for drapes and a carpet. We practiced our wild and crazy alternative lifestyle at the warehouse store, where our society expects that only one man and one woman should debate getting one large carpet versus tiling small ones. It was perverted.

And pleasant, because even when it's something mundane, I enjoy doing things with all three of us. I like the fact that we can all three get along and work together even when it's not hot sexy fun. We make each other laugh and we always have something to talk about. They're not just two people I fuck, they're two people who make me happy.

Then Sunday Sprite was busy, so Rowdy and I had to answer the question "what do two bi poly kinksters do when they have a whole day to themselves?" The answer is that they rearrange and clean the bedroom, cut and place the carpet, and install the drapes. I mean, we certainly fucked, boy did we fuck, but it's not the only way we spend our time and it's not the only thing we can do together. I feel a little ridiculous saying that--would someone in a monogamous vanilla relationship have to clarify such a thing?--but I've been asked in so many words and more than once if this stuff I do is really all about sex. It's exactly as much "about sex" as dating is. Because it is dating.

I don't mean to protest too much that I'm so super normal. I am kinda weird and I enjoy it. I don't keep a sex blog to talk about how boring and housewares-oriented I am. But I think it's important to always keep in mind that 24/7 live-in slaves still have old family recipes they treasure and latex-fetishizing ponyboys still have to go to the dentist. Even when you live a totally wacky alternative lifestyle, 98% of your life will still be... life.

Unexpected Poly Challenges.

There are many complications to being in a relationship that involves two other people. And I don't mean the big ones like time management or societal acceptance or emotional issues. I mean the silly little stuff. Things like:

-Blanket wars become epic.

-Only the back seat on the bus can fit three across. (And it smells funny.)

-You have to cc all your emails.

-English has no second-person-plural pronoun. "Aw, I love spending time with... y'all. Youse. You guys."

-Anything less than a king-size bed and you're going to have someone's elbow up your nose all night.

-"I already told this story to you, but she hasn't heard it, so I'm gonna go from the beginning..."

-Three-way kisses seem like they would be adorable, but there's just too many noses.

-Hotels won't give you a room with one bed unless someone hides during check-in.

-Someone has to ride in the back seat of the car.

-Snoring... in stereo.

-"Psst... look, I don't really know you, but I feel like you should know, your boyfriend was here with another woman yesterday."

-My phone doesn't do conference calls.

-"Whose leg am I touching?"

-No one ever suggests that monogamy is only a valid lifestyle if every monogamous relationship is totally equitable and trouble-free.



These were just the first few that came to mind, and I'm relatively new to this particular kind of poly relationship. I'm sure there will be many more. And I'm sure the Unexpected Poly Joys will continue to far outweigh them.



P.S.: Today Rowdy and I were kinda tired and got in bed to "just cuddle and maybe see where it goes," and within fifteen minutes or so he had five fingers up to the knuckles in me. My life is awesome.

Also awesome, by the way: putting one finger in my vagina now, only a couple hours later, and feeling myself close tightly around it. Vaginas are so cool.

Stamina.

I'm starting to believe that Rowdy is poly not just because of personal convictions, emotional makeup, or sexual proclivities, but because getting him off is literally shift work.




EDIT: I feel sort of obligated to add, for people who aren't familiar with the whole poly thing, that it's not another word for "unlimited three-way sex." There's actually a lot of two-way sex, and even more three-way dinners and naps and walks and museum visits and other such wild sexy adventures. Rowdy may have sex with two chicks, dudebro, but he also visited Times Square and saw the Statue of Liberty and discussed the role of Jesuits in the Catholic Church with two chicks, dudebro. Do dudebros care about that sort of thing?

I think their lives would be a whole lot richer and more beautiful--and more likely to involve two chicks, for that matter--if they did.

Good clean fun.

When guys picture sex with two women, they probably imagine a lot of what happened last night:

-Sprite and me, lying side by side on the bed masturbating as Rowdy watched and took pictures. (You can't see, sorry. Sprite and Rowdy are not quite as freely exhibitionistic as I am.)

-Rowdy fucking Sprite while fingering me, and fucking me while fingering her, and her fingering him while he fucked me, and vice versa, and every conceivable other confguration. Including him fingering me while fucking me. That was new and sort of amazing.

-Rowdy and I making an, er, Eiffel tower over Sprite, and Spirte and me making a slightly diffrent one over him.

-Me working all five fingers into Sprite--an experience that left me amazed at the sheer strength of her vagina, which seemed more likely to hurt my hand than vice versa. Vaginas are awesome.

But I don't know if they picture all the three-way cuddling and talking and joking that goes on. Things that might not be on your Threesome Bucket List:

-An a capella rendition of Green Day's "Time Of Your Life.

-Pillsbury Doughboy impressions.

-Me, just after fucking Sprite and bending down to kiss her: "That was amazing, baby. No homo."

-Just as we were drifting of to sleep in a big pile and a warm fuzzy haze, a wayyyyy too extensive discussion of everyone's pooping habits.

-Me in the bed with Rowdy and Sprite as they fucked, about 98% asleep and feeling... okay with it. I was neither impelled to engage with them nor ignore them, but just to let it happen and feel happy and calm about it. It's a wonderful and funny thing to be 6 inches away while two people you're attracted to are having sex, and feel neither awkward nor jealous nor really aroused, but cosy.

Unrelated.

I kind of want someone to do the PUA thing to me. Just for the experience. But I realize that this is essentially a paradoxical wish, because I think part of the mythology is that the woman has to not know what's going on. (Nothing creepy about that...) Still, I'm curious what it would be like, and what my reactions to it would be. Maybe I've misjudged myself and in the face of True PUA Magic I'd just melt? I can't know unless I try.

---

You know what's an awesome feeling? Walking into a really podunk Denny's early in the morning under a guy's arm, and another girl under his other arm, with ten thousand pounds of swagger between you. Even if no one really notices or cares. Even if you didn't have sex! Just the feeling. Top of the goddamn world.

(I do not support "freaking the mundanes," but if someone has worked at Denny's for more than two weeks, they are not mundane and cannot be freaked by anything.)

---

I'm amazed that people are defending Mel Gibson. And I'm creeped right the fuck out that people can hear a tape of a man admitting he hit a woman and threatening to kill her, and immediately start thinking about what the woman is doing wrong.

The thing about "she's baiting him in this conversation just so she can tape him being crazy" is, most of the really nice people I know can't be baited into death threats. Maybe if you threatened their lives or their loved ones? Maybe. Definitely not just by being "too calm" and "saying just the things to work him up." It may be true that if you're nice to Mel Gibson then he doesn't hit you, but your real top-quality guys don't hit you whether you're nice or not.

Labrat has more.

Four worlds.

There's this world, online. Everything's very dramatic here--we're very open with our viewpoints and our self-disclosure, very quick to argue, very willing to let emotions run ridiculously high in a world where there's little risk or embarrassment associated with turning into a screaming moonbat at any provocation. But even as anonymity and distance make moonbats of us, they also form unlikely communities, places where people who could never talk about sex or gender with each other in reality create forums to share the things you just can't talk about.


There's pervert world. That world is the best. It's like the online world--full of geeks and openness and not over-encumbered by shame--except there's much less acrimony because of the face-to-face nature of things. Most people don't have the balls or jerkitude to get into a screaming argument face-to-face over the sort of thing they do online, and those that do tend to not get invited to a lot of parties.

Also, in pervert world you can have sex for real. So that's a major plus.


There's square world. For me, this consists mostly of my coworkers and my family, and my experience of it includes a lot of self-censorship. It seems like it should be easy not to say "so I was getting fucked up the ass the other day..." but honestly, that's how a lot of my best stories start. Even when things aren't sexual, there's still stuff I feel like I can't bring up in front of the squares--something as simple as hanging out with my friend, his wife, and his girlfriend requires a quick mental edit. Of course it's no big deal to just say "three of my friends" but the necessity of catching myself and making that kind of edit always weighs me down a little.

More than anything, I have to restrain myself from chipping in on any conversation about sex. If I just don't talk about sex I'm okay, but every time a sexual subject comes up in gossip I have trouble not sharing my actual scandalous opinions. When The Girls at work are talking about "fellatio: gross, or so gross?" I just don't feel safe chipping in with in with "actually, for me it's completely awesome and I genuinely love the feeling and the taste." It would be weird.


And then there's the real world. I have no idea what goes on out there.