When I count up all my blessings

I count you twice
And then twice more
I leave a full blessing for 

1: your willingness to let
2: your breath catch and rattle in my
3: hearing ears, and on my
4: unbroken skin, with that
5: bite mark from before

What a gift.

Happy Fashion Week To Both Of Us

How is it so different and so the same? A few years gone by since last we touched, last I decided to trust you. The answer is obvious. Me. I’m different. Transformed, transfigured.

You much the same. Trading on mystery. Charm. I feel more heard in your arms than I have. But I always remembered that about you, sought it in others, came up disappointed. The only way to have a partner. A leo happy to fall in line and follow me. Ears always perked for the hair on my back to indicate danger.

The quickest way to earn my trust; pause, check in, kick my ass. Your hands, your accent, your hair. I’m a honey lazy river for your growl.

You think about me.

I know because you tell me.

Call it stroking my ego.

But you’re actually dancing with me in cloud space. Foreplay 3,000 miles away.

Each of us painting on different sides of the same vellum. Two artists sharing the same work, folding down the page to cover what has been drawn before,

At the bottom of my lines you should draw feet.

Who is to call it dangerous if it’s supportive and oh so healing. Grounding and revelatory. Intimacy rediscovered, reimagined.

Making Sex Normal

Asian Sex Stereotypes Make Me Mad

New Mantra: You Are Caramelized Onions

So I met this lovely guy and upon our first meeting things got physical.

Afterwards, we talked for a while, realized, who knows, this could be a real thing, lets exchange numbers and hang out sometime.

And for a week he pestered me to come over.

Why don’t we go out, get tea or something?

Or I could come over. Late.

And I kinda lost it.

I told a friend the whole story.

He has already had the greatest dessert in the world

and wants seconds

before dinner

To which my response was:

THANK YOU

With a teeny tiny side dish of “WHY MUST MY PERSONALITY BE THE BROCCOLI AND MY VAGINA BE THE ICE CREAM?!”

I’m pretty sure my friend thought I was mad at him. I’m not mad at him, I’m mad that I made the same analogy in my head.

I think that every dating person (maybe just every person) has a thing that their lizard brain is afraid of, your body is the only part of you anyone has ever loved all the way up to you’re too ugly/fat/short/tall to be deserving of love. A thing that lurks there in the back of your mind leeching that feeling into your body and waiting for words to put to it. And as soon as you feed it such a phrase it grows to 5 times it’s size and takes up residence in your inner ear, flooding your brain with it’s particular brand of sweet sweet nothings.

My personality isn’t broccoli, my vagina isn’t ice cream. All of me is caramelized onions, delicious in every way.

But when I scream that at the lizard she doesn’t cower, I need a sentence that can put the lizard back in her cage. I’ll never be rid of her but I can learn to be louder than her.

The lizard is your friend, but a little scary, too. She lurks deep within, operating on millennia of aggregated evolutionary knowledge, so she remembers a lot. Like how for thousands of generations, women required strong relationships with strong men in order to simply survive. How, without someone to protect them, our foremothers were vulnerable in every way. How dearly so many of them suffered for it.

So when a liberated modern gal such as yourself contemplates leaving a romantic relationship, even a middling-to-shitty one, the lizard feels she is honor-bound to make you stop, to get right up in your face and scream stuff like you’ll never do better and you’re not getting any younger and you’re lucky to have anyone at all and any man is better than no man and THESE ARE FACTS DAMMIT!

Now, given what she’s seen, her reaction is completely understandable. But it screws up your life, too! Because she ensures that even here in the future that is now, and even when you know you’d be far better off on your own, it still feels like the act of breaking up might actually kill you.

… it slithers up from the the dankest sub-basement of consciousnes and demands our attention whether we like it or not. And if we want to be able to operate rationally in this realm, to have enough faith to let go of bad stuff so we can find better stuff, we have to learn how to handle it.

Thankfully, this can be done! How? You just never let the lizard be in charge. She is trying to protect you in her loving creepy way, so hear her out and be sweet to her and maybe give her some nice bugs to eat. But don’t forget that she is willing to make tradeoffs that you are not. Really awful tradeoffs. For her, any man really is better than no man, and that is bananas!! So listen to the lizard but decide what to do with the rest of your brain. Never ever let her get wet or eat after midnight or take control. [x]

Wall, Body, Foot

I keep forgetting to write about this experience I had last week. I keep forgetting that it happened. I keep forgetting about this moment.

I met a guy, I brought him home. This wasn’t the first time I had been with this guy. He’s a sweet guy, nice hair, big nose, remembered facts I had told him the last time we met. Jewish to boot!

And a bit on the rough side. And rougher and rougher as he starts to lose himself.

Which wasn’t doing it for me that night. And which was reaching my brain as pain instead of pleasure.

“That hurts, no harder than that.”

“Ok, I’m sorry.”

And he backed off.

Until he was nearing the finish line and starting losing himself again.

But, no, this is not an excuse I’m going to make for him.

I bucked him off and kicked him into my wall. Literally, pinned him to the wall with my foot.

“Did I hurt you?”

“Yes, I told you not to do that.”

A tumble of very breathless apologies. He’s still against the wall, catching his breath, apologizing.

I hear the words “I’m sorry” rise to the back of my throat and I bite down hard.

Because I’m not sorry. I’m not even sorry I’m not sorry. How do I really feel?

I rise to my feet and join him at the wall to whisper in his ear, “I don’t make a habit of placating men.”

More apologies tumble out, “I don’t want you to placate me.”

I go get two glasses of water.

We drink the water and talk naked for 45 minutes or so, with our heads resting on each others knees like a yin yang. A yin yang of pale jewish skin but nonetheless. There was no resentment, there was no fear, no anger, it was the best conversation we’ve ever had.

And I keep forgetting about it. This could have turned into a moment I played back for the rest of my life. If I hadn’t said something in that moment I would have hated him. I would have hated me. I would have been full on anger and empty on self-esteem.

And instead it’s a moment that I don’t even conjure up unless reminded of how pleased I am with it.

The thing that keeps striking me in the retelling is how easy it was, and how well-received. I know this makes me lucky. These things make me lucky. But also, if every woman could feel how easy it was to react that way then maybe it would be easier to convince ourselves that we’re allowed to be active participants in our sex lives, to convince our partners that we’re active participants in our sex lives. Perhaps it would go some way towards not being treated like chattel. Towards being treated like subjects in our own spaces.

It’s worth a try anyway.

 

FemaleGazing’s Bona Fide Get-Over-Him Routine, Step…Later

Sleep with someone new!

My “relationship” went from love to loss in 30 days and now, 30 days after the breakup, I find myself having amazing, love-less sex with someone new. Someone who is just invested in my pleasure and in some ways even more intuitive about my body. And boy does it feel great.

In fact, this really strange thing happened and I’m curious if anyone out there has had this experience.

It kinda gave me synesthesia. The things we did together felt like different colors. And when he would hold or touch me a different way the color would change. There was nothing I could do about it, I couldn’t change the color at will and I couldn’t even specifically tell you what prompted the change but it has never happened before and it was great.

On to bigger and better things.

“Sexually Enlightened R&B Song” Because Sex Is A Conversation

Have you met my new boyfriend yet?

He’s a R&B singer and I’m ridiculously obsessed with his ability to treat me actually, sociopolitically right.

Getting Out From In Between

Friday’s post was about the word crazy.

Getting over the fear of being labeled crazy by a guy, because really it just means that you’re a person who stands up for herself, and that is nothing to be ashamed of.

The post was inspired by this article which argues that there is a kind of sex that isn’t exactly consensual but also isn’t exactly rape. The word she is looking for is pressure. She felt pressured to have sex with him. Maybe not by him directly, but by society’s suggestion that if she stopped what was happening then she’d be a tease/disappointing/awkward/making a big deal out of nothing.

I’ve experienced this weird kind of pressurey sex before. I usually end up in it once I’ve fallen out of like with someone I’m dating. I’ll get physical with them again to try to convince myself that I’m still attracted to them. And then I’ll feel like I’m in too deep and I can’t go back even though I’m not really enjoying this and I should probably just end things (the sex and the relationship) right now. It’s always that moment when I realize they have no idea how not really here I am that I know I need out.

But when I’m in a similar situation involving alcohol I have another trick. I hesitate to write this even now, for fear that it will be misconstrued as judgement or blame on women who didn’t do what I did.

However, in case I have any young readers out there who have not experienced this and who are going to be around guys and alcohol, I want to tell you the one sentence that has worked for me a number of times. I want you to memorize it, tattoo it on the back of your eyelids. Because the kind of guy who will listen to this statement is the kind of guy who doesn’t want to have non-consensual sex with someone. And the kind of guy who will ignore this sentence… you should run.

If you are drinking with a guy and you end up in bed and things are moving a little faster than you’d like, then try this sentence out.

“You’re not useful to me when you’re this drunk. That’s what the morning is for.”

Fumbling with my boobs is easy but pleasing me? That takes effort, a clear head, and a complete lack of ‘whiskey dick.’

In the morning you can make clearer decisions. Maybe you’ll both wake up and realize that this is a bad idea. Maybe you’ll wake up, realize that he’s your cousin and run screaming. Maybe you’ll wake up and realize that he listened to you and change your mind. Either way, that statement has never been a bad decision for me and it has never gotten a bad reaction. Of course your mileage may vary, but considering how well it’s worked for me, I couldn’t keep it to myself.

The Amazon

I got a text last night “Have you heard of the sub-missionary position?”

No.

The next text I got was a link. NSFW (porn gifs).

Turns out that this position isn’t called ‘the sub-missionary,’ it’s called The Amazon, which kind of has all the same connotations only classier.

A quick google search brought up this how-to video about it.

I like this pair’s approach to sex and her appeal to male viewers to open their minds to submission and vulnerability.

I like that miss Glamazon and her partner are clear that there’s a difference between being made to ‘be the girl’ and choosing to be a bit submissive. In a free society submissive and female are not the same thing. So put that in your pipe and think about why it makes you feel awkward.