Category Archives: answering questions

What are you afraid of?

I am asked what I am afraid of. I went to a party last night. I have known those people a long time. Shunning. That’s what I’m afraid of. I sat at the party and I listened to people I didn’t know bicker. I listened to the relationship dynamics. The things they were saying and the frustrations they appeared to be expressing. I listened to the passive aggressive shit.

I didn’t stay in the group after Tom and I broke up because I didn’t want to watch what happened when he started hunting and I didn’t want to hunt in front of him. I know less than half of the people who are there now. Now I don’t have to worry about the crowd knowing my whole history. I didn’t want to parade men through the group. I would have been ashamed of myself. I am ok with people having a theoretical knowledge that I am a slut but I don’t parade my business.

I don’t want to be a parent in an open relationship because I don’t want to parade my business and I don’t want to keep dirty secrets. The only way I see to do that is to create an unchanging set of roles that they primarily interact with. It is a choice to be that kind of person for my kids. Not because I think all polyamorous people are bad–that truly isn’t it.

I’m not polyamorous. I’m a slut. I pick up random people on the internet for sex. I have done a lot of it. I have hit three digits of sex partners but I don’t know for sure. I lost my list in a hard drive crash. I used to keep an excel document with check marks for what sexual activities I did with whom. I did that in case I needed to look people up and say, “I tested positive.” I thought it was the ethical thing to do. I did actually go back and contact everyone when I tested positive for herpes. Even the one night stands I otherwise would never fucking have talked to again. It was hella awkward. I explained that I used to get cold sores as a kid, so I have probably had it all my life. I thought I was getting tested for it when I said, “Test me for everything” but actually they don’t do the herpes test as a standard thing. Whoops.

Sometimes people say that they won’t sleep with someone who has had more than x number of partners. I have had guys tell me that completely out of the blue so they can explain why they won’t fuck me even though I am hot. Cause obviously I was hot for them, right? The fact that I was not remotely sexually attractive to them was irrelevant.

I had a different point when I started writing. Shunning. Moving as often I did as a child is a constant slow motion enaction of shunning scenes. There were large scale specific instances that stick in my mind. When I was in eighth grade we lived with Seventh Day Adventists. Living with Uncle Bob sucked because he was a verbally abusive asshole. The only people who would take my mom and I in were the religious folk. They were kind as long as you did what they wanted.

I went to church with them. I went a lot. I got very involved. I started following Joey like a puppy and he was very involved in the church life. I went with him everywhere. I tagged along on trips up the the SDA college in Northern California, I found out about the boarding high school in Mountain View. I had fantasies of going before the church elders and telling them about my life and asking for scholarships. Please, please save me. Joey and I did a lot of door to door missionary work. I helped in the production of a series of classes on spiritual matters. I read my fucking Bible. I could quote it chapter and verse.

I had this friend at school, Yvette. She was involved in a different church. She invited me to come with her to a lock-in. That’s where they lock a bunch of kids in a gym all night long. It was a lot of fun. We played games and sang songs and told stories. It was one of the best nights of my childhood.

I came to one of the leaders of the youth group for the SDA church. I asked if we could look into doing something like this at our church. She recoiled from me in horror. She said that she did not condone filth. She told me that I would be better served somewhere else.

If I couldn’t go with Joey to the Seventh Day Adventist church then I didn’t have a way to get to a church at all. I couldn’t get off the mountain.

To punish myself for being unlovable by God I would enact the most horrible things I could think of. Mostly this entailed reenacting scenes from Bertrice Small books. I would dress up in the closest things I could find to corsets. I would wear really tight tights in layers until they caused me a lot of back pain. Then I would put on layers and layers and layers of gauzy skirts. I was very into the peasant skirt thing. I would put on many layers of shirts and dresses. When I was done I would put on a very tight belt. I walked around in the house. I would pretend to encounter strange men.

I would then pretend to be raped over and over. I used a wide variety of different items to penetrate my vagina starting with pencils. Sometimes I would experiment and see how many pencils would fit. I fucked myself with the legs of a Barbie. It kind of skeeves me out to see my kids play with Barbies. (Obviously not the same dolls.)

I would call myself names for hours. I would chant that I was a worthless whore and no one would ever love me. Even God didn’t want me. I was dirty and bad and I wanted bad things to happen to me. I deserved to be hurt. I was disgusting.

Then I started calling the radio dj. He was twenty-five. We went out on several dates. I was twelve.  We didn’t have sex but he did ask me for a blow job. I gave it to him. I knew I was supposed to. I tried to be enthusiastic but it was really unpleasant. I tried to smile. I tried to not vomit in his car.

Not long after that my mother and I no longer were as friendly when the neighbors tried to tell us what to do and how to do it. We moved to the old house in the canyon for a while. I couldn’t stand living with my cousin’s girlfriend and her kids. I wasn’t nice to them and they weren’t nice to me. I think there is plenty of blame to go around for that situation sucking. Then Auntie and Uncle Bob bought the new house up in Redwood Estates and my mom and I joined them. It was like a palace. It was huge compared to the old house.

I spent a lot of time angry at God. I felt very directly shunned by God. I wasn’t. I was shunned by a tight-ass ignorant woman. A mean spirited harpy. Unfortunately God wears many faces. It doesn’t matter that she doesn’t speak for God. No one wanted to help me. Police officers told me not to talk about what happened to me after being sexually assaulted. I was isolated and hunted.

I don’t think the dj sexually assaulted me. I think he exploited my low self esteem, but that’s not the same thing. He didn’t force or cajole. He didn’t pressure me. I wanted to. I was enthusiastic. I asked him out on a date. I think he should have been a good enough person to understand that it was pretty bad for me to be doing what I was doing.

My mom didn’t mind me dating the dj. I broke it off. I felt disgusting and dirty when he gave me an opal necklace for Christmas. I knew it was a cheap shitty necklace. It was a gift worthy of my status. I was that bad of a whore.

Which isn’t fair. It was probably what he could afford. He didn’t know me. We didn’t have a real relationship.

But … yeah.

I don’t want to teach my kids to be the kind of promiscuous I am. It hurts me. I am to a point where I am capable of doing nonmonogamy in an ethical and reasonably safe way because I have made a lot of mistakes and I have been hurt in a wide variety of ways.

I have learned lessons that not everyone needs to learn. My kids don’t need to grow up and be like me. It is not important that my legacy be carried on in such a way. But maybe it is still important for my experiences to be talked about. That isn’t the same thing.

My kids aren’t having a life like I had but other kids are.

I really should try to sleep. I was going to try to go to the Renaissance Faire with the kids. Hahahahaha. We’ll see.

working and sexual assault

On bart. Yesterday was a whole series of adventures. I didn’t sleep much on Thursday night. Lots of anxiety and fuss and such. But Friday morning Noah let me sleep on the couch for a few hours because I wasn’t scheduled till the afternoon.
Working is such an odd experience for me. Noah told me to enjoy my busman’s holiday. (There is an old joke about how bus drivers go on vacation and drive around the countryside.) I washed a lot of dishes yesterday. I made a lot of ice cream sandwiches and two quiches. It doesn’t really feel like I’m doing something important or useful only this is all work that has to be done for this business to succeed. I think that the fact that I won’t benefit from the business at any point no matter how hard I work is part of why I’m just… flat.
But being there was useful because one of my internet fans came in and gave me a fancy-pants keyboard. Whoo! We had a really nice chat. I figured out who he was and we are a lot closer than two degrees of separation. It’s always funny to meet those people and go, “Oh wait! I know stories about you! And I have questions!”
When I talk to people in the kink/freak communities the whole topic of monogamy/nonmonogamy comes up. I think partially because when people make different choices there is the natural response to consider how those choices would work for you. It’s hard to explain why I want Noah to never sleep with anyone again and yet that’s the important bit. It’s not that Iwant to be monogamous. It’s that I want Noah to be and I know I can’t ask him to be without doing it myself. I’m grudgingly willing to accept that what is good for the goose is good for the gander.
Noah sleeping with other people bothers me. It makes me feel unwanted and unloved. Sure those are feelings I could work on but don’t I have enough to freak out about having to work on? For the love of toast why do I have to work on that specific bit of awful? No thanks. So we are monogamous.
But then I go out in public. For the first while I was there and working there was this hoooooooootguy. I looked up and saw him and I started salivating and I flushed and uhm more moisture appeared. Not in my mouth. Ahem. He was really gorgeous. God he was my type. Nerdy—this guy had to be a geek. Any other profession would kick him out. He had dark hair that was on the shortish side and a white streak and dark framed glasses. He looked like he could would smile when making someone cry.
It’s kind of weird to react like that. To want like that out of the blue given that I’m not allowed to follow my pecker through life any more. Why is it more important for me to say that Noah can’t have extra sex than for either of us to be allowed to do things we enjoy? Because seriously I enjoy anonymous sex.
I’ve been trying to come up with the whole list of people who have sexually assaulted me since I turned 18. It feels like I should get to the point where at least I know who I have to worry about. Dan. Paul. Kevin. That coast guard guy.
With Dan I wanted to have sex with him but I told him no unprotected sex. He got me drunk and had unprotected sex with me while I was unconscious. With Paul I wanted to have sex but I told him no unprotected sex. I was on drugs and unable to physically force him off of me. GHB makes it really hard to fight back. That’s kind of the point. Kevin was one of the few friends I had during a time when I was scared and lonely. He likes giving massages and I have always been in a lot of pain. I knew fairly quickly that I would have to say no to sexual contact every single time I saw him no matter how clear I made it that I was not interested, ever. I would often have to reach down and remove his fingers from my vulva or vagina while he was giving me a massage. I had to tell him over and over that surpriseoral sex isn’t ok. The coast guard guy spiked my drink but at least he used a condom.
That is my adult sexual assault history. I have done a lot of very heavy play with people that falls into the ambiguous land of consensual nonconsent but I would not accuse any of those people of being out of bounds. They did what I negotiated. There were others, like Matthew, who was so brutal and nasty that I felt physically bad and emotionally bad about myself afterwards but I don’t think it was sexual assault. I negotiated and agreed. It just turned out to be much heavier play than I wanted. And I never have the balls to say in the middle of a scene, “Whoa—slow down.” I don’t safeword. I take what people feel like doing to me.
Last night Kevin came into the coffee shop. I asked the other owners who were on shift if I was allowed to kick someone out if he sexually assaulted me years ago. They offered to do it for me so I wouldn’t have to. I took several minutes to think about it and process and decide. Then I squared my shoulders and marched over to Kevin. I said, “I feel really uncomfortable doing this but…”
He broke into my sentence and said, “I have to go.”
I said, “Yes. What you did to me wasn’t ok. No one should have to tell you no over and over. It’s sexual assault. Get out.”
He started to argue but I turned on my heel and kind of ran back behind the counter. I ran all the way to the end where I could duck down behind the coffee machine and cash register. I hyperventilated for a while and felt like I was going to puke on the floor. I pretty much kept my crying under control. It took more than half an hour before I stopped shaking.
This was one of the few times in my life where I was in a position of having to deal with someone who hurt me and I had multiple men offer to rescue me and solve the problem. I told them no. It’s hard to understand why it has to be. Why do I have to be the one to do everything? They wanted to help. They would have done fine. They would have solved the problem and I could have quaked with fear on the far side of the room.
But that’s just the thing. I am no longer 23 and alone and scared. A lot has happened. I have had enough experiences that I know the difference between things I have agreed to and things I have refused. I have gotten to find out what that is like. I didn’t know before. It has always been true that I have to just do what I’m told and accept unwanted, painful sexual contact. That has just been life for me. But not any more. Now I can say “Get out.” I feel like no one will believe me. Who cares if a whore is raped any way. Heck, a lot of it wasn’t “rape rape” any way.
I may not get to actually feel safe this lifetime but I do get to say that people who have already hurt me have to get the fuck away from me.
Today is going to be another very long day. I ran ten miles this morning instead of twelve because I am going to have to walk across the city later and I think it will be ok. I’m going to go make food and food and food. I should eat before I start working. Yesterday I ate lunch at 11:30a and dinner at 9:30p. I can’t do that again.
I’m really weirded out by how much running is an appetite suppressant. Not what I expected. I have two offers of couch crash space tonight. I may go out after working. I brought one of those frightening 5 hour energy drink things Noah gets from work. I’m going to be going to bed at like 6pm on Sunday. I hope I have fun. I hope I don’t feel too anxious. I hope I feel like I am still interesting to talk to even if I won’t be sucking anyone off.
It’s hard to believe sometimes.
And after working all day Saturday I’m tired. Holy moly. Lots of working. Tired. But I want to go out!

Sharing means caring.

People have asked me this more than once in the last week so I’ll just make a post about it. I’m ok with people linking to my journal. You don’t need to ask permission. I like credit for what I say (of course) but I’d be thrilled if people started sharing things.

Which is to say it would be really hard for my neurotic brain to convince me that I am still invisible if my stat page jumped. Just Saying.

Part of the road to Noah

This fine morning a friend asked me about a link on Facebook about Mansplaining.  It lead to an interesting conversation about whether men or women (sexist language abounds.  I’m going to do an aside to say that there is a really odd mixture of statistics on whether rape is a female problem or a problem that is closer to equal than anyone can handle admitting.  I am defaulting to standard sexist language because that is my experience base.  I do not mean to say that my experiences are universal–they are not.  Carry on.) bear responsibility for rape.

I’m going to call myself out for being an asshole, because I was, but I was a persuasive asshole.  I said, more or less, “Oh reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally?  How much responsibility do I bear for being raped?”  I then proceeded to go through a list of the times I have been arguably raped as an adult when I should be responsible for my ability to pick “safe” people.  I decided it was time to tell the story of Dan Morgan.  I haven’t before.  Not really.

On December 18th, 2005 I posted this in my livejournal:
I am about to climb out of my head with wanting sex. But I still don’t want casual sex. I feel kind of lame. It has been just over three weeks and I am already going batty? Damn the time is going to pass slow… This is longer than I have gone without sex in… oh god… uhhhhh… two years. For the record: I have really enjoyed how much sex I have had in the last two years. *sigh* Thank you to all the lovely people who have made the last two years so much fun. 🙂 I was asked on Friday if going back to casual sex would be better than waiting for more meaningful sex. I told the person that I am coming out of a relationship where I have had the best sex of my life and going back to more mediocre sex would be a serious let down and I am not quite ready to do that yet. I think a lot/most of what made that sex so awesome was I was more present for it than I usually am. I asked Puppy for what I wanted in ways that I have never been comfortable asking before. Other than the actual technical amount of time spent having sex I got exactly what I wanted pretty much when I wanted. There was also a variety that blew my mind. I kind of feel like I rediscovered vanilla sex. And it can be GOOD. 

I miss every part of sex. I miss having his body over mine. I miss the scary intensity of having him slide into my ass. I miss feeling a cock in my throat. I miss feeling his tongue on my clit. I really miss having a cock in my pussy. The discerning reader will notice the change in possessive pronouns in the previous statements. There are some sex acts that were very specific to him that I miss him for. There are some that I am just missing in general right now. He is the only sex partner I have ever received regular anal or oral from. 

I didn’t mention this part to the person who asked, but I actually don’t really want to go back to casual sex because I don’t want to go back to the fanaticism I have when I am being a slut. I don’t particularly like getting STD tested every three months. I don’t particularly like condoms. I really really really like unprotected sex–which is a scary and dangerous thing. I can’t have it casually because I am not willing to risk my life. I am still on the pill. The first time he tried to break up with me I asked him if I could maintain booty call rights. I think I have it in the back of my mind that waiting a couple of months until I am less emotionally attached is a good thing, but eventually having him as a booty call would be a good thing. Although this is just mental masturbation. I really think that in order to not hurt myself emotionally it would have to be 4-6 months before I would be able to have sex with him and not cry through the entire event. And yeah. I am well aware that I technically can wait that long to have sex but I really don’t have to and I won’t go back to unprotected sex with him if I sleep with someone else. Ethics are annoying.

Right now, all I know is that I have a stronger desire right now for being beaten, for being held down and fucked unmercilessly than I have had in a very long time. I want to be slapped and taunted with how very horny I am right now. I want to have someone revel in my lustiness and appreciate the fact that I can wear someone out right now. I want to have someone fuck me until I beg them to stop because I am so sore. I want to be restrained and hurt and threatened. I want… sex.

The person I had been talking to on Friday was Dan Morgan.  I don’t know how we started talking.  I’m sure we met through Dickens Fair.  No!  Tribe?  Was it Tribe?  I don’t remember for sure.  That sounds right, though.  We were having these really awesome long conversations over IM about fun kinky sex stuff we were interested in doing.  I was adamant about casual sex meaning condoms.  He didn’t like that bit.  He told me quite a bit about how condoms were annoying.  My response: tough.  No cover, no entry.

Our first date was on Christmas Day in Disneyland.  I uhhh kind of bought his ticket in.  He was really broke and said he couldn’t afford the trip if he had to pay for theme park tickets, though he had friends he could go crash with who would go with him to the park if I got him in.  I didn’t have a problem with this.

We had a really fun date.  Involving upsetting his friends when Dan fingered me in the Tiki Room.  We were shit-faced drunk from the bar in downtown Disney.  Disneyland as an adult is very different. Other people go and treat it very differently than I do.  Anyway.

He went off with his friends and I went off with mine.  On December 27th I posted:
Disneyland is still cool.
First dates… are interesting.
Still not up for sex even though I am crawling the walls.
I went to the gym and I am proud of myself.
I haven’t made one itty bitty movement towards cleaning my apartment.
I have food now.
Tomorrow I have three netflix movies to send back.
My cat is hella clingy.
My family sucks even more than usual.
I am really drunk.
I told Puppy that he is an elitist piece of shit tonight.
I am tired of planes.
I am really tired and uninterested in sleeping for some strange reason… I think I am going to lose that battle in the next 10 minutes though.
I missed country music.
Zzzzzzzzz
sleep. 
I love my friends.

And then on December 29th I posted:
Tiki Bar TV

London Fogcutter, episode 8. That is the reason for my hangover.

I didn’t bother to mention that the real reason for my hangover was because Dan came over.  We had a pleasant afternoon together.  We dealt with a motorcycle gear acquisition for him.  There was a good store near me.  We tried to get to know one another.  By evening he said we should start watching the show.  He started making drinks.  He made more and more.  Dan is a really serious alcoholic.  I don’t drink much and never have.  Alcohol makes my stomach hurt.  He kept topping up my glass.  “Oh come on.  You don’t want to get behind now, do you?”  He was very antagonistic towards me trying to get me to drink more.

I wanted him to like me.  I will freely say that.  I thought he was shiny.  I’m sure there was an element of star-fucking in it.  He seemed well-liked.  Maybe if I stood next to him I would feel like not-poison for a while.

I woke up at about 3am in my bed confused.  I couldn’t remember anything past Tiki Bar TV.  And I don’t know that I remember more than two episodes of it.  I reached down between my legs and felt a lot of wet.  I rolled out of bed (because I had no other way of getting to the floor) and crawled into the bathroom.  There I proceeded to vomit until I thought I would die.  It was awesome.  This was when I was living in San Jose by myself for the only time in my life.

Puppy dumped me on Thanksgiving day.  Noah asked me to marry him in March.  Dan was right in the middle.  Of-fucking-course I said yes to Noah.

Anyway.  When I stopped puking I looked for my phone.  I sent Dan a text message asking where he was, when he left, and uhm, did we have sex?  He said he was at home.  He had left at 2.  Yes, we had sex.  I sent back another message saying: …unprotected sex?  He said, “Well you are on the pill so it doesn’t matter, right?”

I said basically nothing about this event to anyone who knew me.  It wasn’t exactly rape, right?  Only legally it was.  Regardless of whether I intended to have sex or not, once I was passed out drunk it wasn’t ok.  I had text evidence that I wasn’t interested in unprotected sex.  And I bloody well thought about the fact that I could go in for a rape kit and it would be bloody obvious that we had unprotected sex.

I was afraid of people saying that I was having second thoughts.  I was afraid of people saying that I was stupid or that I deserved it.  I believe that unprotected sex is a disease vector.  At that point in my life I was still really focused on the fact that I wanted to have children.  I didn’t risk any more disease than I had to.  I already have herpes and I’ve already had an hpv outbreak.  That damage was done long before.  I did the best I could with the information that I had.

Do you know why I was so afraid of going to the police?  Well.  That’s another story.  I can’t give you a name because I honestly don’t remember it.  I don’t really want to.  I wouldn’t remember Dan’s if he wasn’t a trusted member of my extended community I thought was safe.

The summer I was 18 I was drunk with the sexual power of being a woman.  Finally, for the first time in my life what I was doing and mine to decide about.  I finally had the legal right to consent.  It did actually matter to me.  It has always bothered me that my early partners could have gone to jail for what we did.  It feels like an unfair balance of responsibility.  Anyway.

So when I was 18 I was on match.com.  Don’t judge.  I was hanging out in the chat rooms a lot.  I met up with several people.  The first was a guy who was in the Coast Guard.  He lived in Alameda.  Anna was housesitting for a family way the heck up Summit Road.  The other side, not the same side as Redwood Estates.  Way up in the fancy-pants part of the mountains.  The house was beautiful.  I can’t remember if there were three or four stories.  Elaborate wine cellar (like a huge vault that was about 1/3 the size of the bottom floor of the house), sauna, steam room, exercise room, pool, hot tub… everything.  The family was having a lot of work done on the house.  They gave Anna permission to have me stay up there with her.

I know they regretted that.  It was all my fault.  Anna had worked for them successfully for years at that point.  I ruined a very profitable relationship for her and I still feel bad about that.  That is part of what I mean when I say I am poison.  Anna bore a lot of the brunt of the backlash for this.  But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

We invited a couple of my theater friends and this random guy from match.com up to the house for a party.  It wasn’t that wild because my theater friends were young and sweet and inexperienced.  I think back on them with this really nostalgic color.  They were really awesome and I didn’t know how to stay one of them.

Of course there was drinking.  Unless I snuck off behind Anna’s back she said I had three shots of tequila and then I begged off because my stomach hurt.  Everyone else kept drinking.  I don’t remember much after the second shot.  I woke up in the morning feeling fierce and disgusting.  I couldn’t remember any sex and I was kind of sad.  I was confused though because I couldn’t remember much of anything, really.  But I had to hurry up and get moving.  I was working at Pride in San Francisco.  I was working a booth for the Same Sex Marriage organization.  It was awesome.  I met people and did things I’m really glad I did.  In between doing all of them I had to run to Port-A-Potties to vomit.  I did that all day long.  When I went back up to the house in the mountains I took another shower and curled up on the bed.  I happened to lean over and look in the trash can.  There were three used condoms.

Funny.  I didn’t remember having sex.  I asked Anna what happened.  She told me about the party and said that eventually I stumbled back up to the room with the help of this guy.  I asked her how I looked and she said, “You looked really out of it.”  I nodded.  I told her that I think that what happened technically qualifies as rape.  I called the Sheriff.  She was dubious.  She was right.

The particular officer who showed up is one I have met before.  When I was 11 Al Smith, my next door neighbor at the time, asked me if I would have sex with him.  Our other neighbor overheard the whole exchange and reported it.  That’s why the officer came to my house when I was 11.  When I was 11 he told my family I was crazy and that I needed help.  He wouldn’t prosecute Al.

When I was 18 he told me, “What did you expect when you bring a boy up to a house to drink?”  He took the (outrageously expensive) sheets as “evidence” and then told me he was not going to fuck up the life of some nice Coast Guard boy for a girl like me who gets cold feet after the fact.

The fall out was really bad.  The family had to be told why we disappeared their sheets.  We would have been better off lying.  Given the response of the sheriff it looked really bad and hysterical.  It was even worse because I had gone skinny dipping in the pool and flirted with the guy painting the house. I was obviously horrible.  The family was really angry with Anna for bringing someone like me into their house.  They told her if she wanted to know people like me they didn’t want to know her.

Years later I was behind their car on the freeway.  The license plate has their last name on it.  I felt such a sickening wave of shame.

Why didn’t I call the police after Dan fucked me without a condom?  Uhm…. good pattern recognition skills?  Every time someone tells me that women bear some of the responsibility for being raped I want to scream.  I HAVEN’T EVEN BEEN ALLOWED TO GIVE CONSENT WHEN I WANTED TO SO SHUT THE FUCK UP.  Rape is an abuse of power.  Rape is putting a body part into someone else when they have not consented.  That is not something that is about mutual responsibility.

That asshole when I was 18 raped me.  I could not consent by the time he had sex with me, but at least he used condoms.  When I was 24 I was raped because having unprotected sex with me after I had it in writing many times that I don’t do that is illegal.  And I was too chicken shit to say anything because I am well aware that no one in power gives a shit what happens to white trash whores like me.

And then Noah showed up.  I would have been manifestly stupid and crazy to continue the life path I was on without him.

The outliers

I was asked about those people who came into my life outside of the groups and communities I loudly claim.  Oh, I wasn’t directly asked.  But it was mentioned.

I have been through a lot of different phases.  I know people from different times in my life.  In almost every time in my life I have acquired a close male friend.  How that relationship goes depends on which man from a community takes an interest in me.  It’s really interesting how that goes.  Mostly I am only picked up by guys who are socially extremely aggressive.  Once in a while I find an honest to god nice guy.  Amusingly enough, I have found them nearly exclusively in English departments.

There are two in particular, J and P.  I worked with J when I was a teacher.  He had the classroom next to mine.  He was my buddy.  I met P in my first semester of graduate school in a writing class.  He gave me writing feedback on my porn with a straight face.  He’s a keeper.

I haven’t seen J much since I stopped teaching.  I miss him.  He and I traded stories of way back when and reminded one another that even though we felt boring right now, we really aren’t boring people.  He was able to talk shop with me about my job and yet I told him really private things.  He was the only coworker I let myself get close to.  He was the only one emotionally available in the way I needed.  I’m hoping that some day we will get to go out to dinner and hang out for multiple hours.  It would be nice.

P has stayed.  That’s been interesting.  He is the only one of “my boys” that isn’t an asshole.  No, that’s not true.  But he is the only one who has stayed and been a really consistent part of my life who isn’t an asshole.  Most of the other nice guys fall away.  I get the impression I intimidate them.  I don’t mean to.  But I don’t intimidate P.  Or at least not enough so that he minds.  Do you know why I got P in my life?  Because he had no choice to talk about the things I wanted to write about and he was positive towards me.  That doesn’t happen very often.  Very few people talk to me seriously about what I write.

Let me give you a tip.  If you want to give me a metaphorical woody, talk about my writing.  It means you are seeing all the secret hidden backways in my brain.  Knowing that people care enough to look at that is very uhh rewarding.  I don’t understand neutralish but positive feedback.  It bewilders me.  How can you read what I write and feel neutrally towards me!?  It’s a challenge.  It makes me want to win you over.

Do you know why I have so much more sex with assholes than nice guys?  Because the assholes ask.  The nice guys aggressively stand still near me.  It makes for really good friends and not helpful lovers.  I need my lovers to ask.

I think I am undesirable.  I think I constantly need to work harder because whatever I am, it’s not desirable enough.  It’s interesting to me to look at the outliers because it shows me different things about what I am interested in.  Near as I can tell the fail mode of my interactions with P is for him to get frustrated and shake his head.  He is very gentle with me.  There is a part of me that has wondered for eight years what he is like undone with passion.  I’m not even sure I can do it.  I’m not sure if I would be able to get the rhythms right.

I don’t sleep with nice guys because I don’t have the courage to ask (rejection sucks) and I’m afraid I wouldn’t know how to be a good lover anyway.  I hunt for the kind of men I hunt for because I know what to do.  Whether men like to admit it or not there really are categories of sexual interest.  I’m good at a couple of categories, but certainly not everything.

You see, the outliers help me understand that having sex is a physical activity.  Physical activities take practice and can become skills.  I more or less got a PhD in sex, but I had a very narrow concentration.  I feel like sleeping with a nice guy is taking someone with a Marine Biology PhD and asking them to write a 1,000 page book on the history of China from 375AD-450AD.  They will probably say, “Uhhhh not so much.”  They aren’t stupid though, right?  They just don’t know this subject.

I don’t know nice guys.  Do you know why sex with Noah is so consistently good?  Because he’s a pushy asshole who bodily shoves me around so that the sex feels as good as possible for him.  Yeah, that’s going to get me off.  No really.  One of the very hottest feelings is when he manages to make it feel like he is using my cunt to masturbate his cock.  I’m not even going to bother with the whole “I don’t know why I do that” thing.  He’s objectifying me.  Noah is happy to objectify me for sex a couple of times a week for the rest of my life.  While handing me ridiculous amounts of time and money and telling me to go be whatever kind of person I want to be.  I already won the lottery.

Where do the outliers fit into this?  I sit around and think about them.  I think about what it would be like to be in a relationship with someone who was simply not comfortable ever objectifying me.  Would I be ok with it?  What would sex actually be like with someone who was so… passive.  Would we ever actually get to intercourse?  How in the hell do people manage to have sex anyway?!  This is all very confusing.  I don’t think I would have been able to do nice girl dating.  Either I want to have sex with you or I don’t.  And if I do, right now is as good of a time as three weeks from now.  This isn’t entirely true, of course.  I’m moody.  But anytime I’m in the mood is a good time.

The outliers are safe fantasy material.  I can beat my head against that wall for years and years and they tolerate me.  They (both P and J) often looked kind of bewildered by things I say, but I get the impression they like the titillation.  I never know what to do with being liked by people who don’t want to fuck me.  I feel this constant tension of… I have nothing to offer you.  How in the world could you like me.  But they do.  And eight years in I have consistent fantasy material about P and he’s a close friend and some day when Calli is older I may have to risk rejection and find out what it’s like to have sex with a nice guy.

But the outliers aren’t casual.  Once someone is in my inner monkey sphere… it’s different.  It can’t be casual.  Sex becomes dangerous because I don’t want to emotionally damage my people.  I worry about the structural integrity of nice guys whereas I don’t worry about assholes.  I find it interesting that all of the assholes deny that they are assholes.  (Except for Noah!)  I worry too much about whether or not I am responsible if the nice guys feel emotional pain.  Honestly, I expect the assholes to handle themselves.  I get codependent and wishy washy with people who appear “nice”.  I need to know that someone can handle the full intensity of my tactless communication.  I don’t know very many nice people who want to sign on for that.

J, my coworker, was different.  He is an intensely quiet man, which I find kind of hilarious from a high school teacher.  I have kind of this weird thing with him.  I think he is the only guy I know that I would describe as, “I think he has thought about me really intensely for a long time without ever picturing sex with me.”  I very rarely feel like that happens.  If people are going to think about me intensely, they add in the sex.  If they aren’t interested in sex with me, I feel like that means people won’t bother to think about me.

Sex is a way of increasing the likelihood that someone will think of me, even when I’m not there.  I feel more alive.  I feel like part of my spirit stays with the people I sleep with and then, forever, I have the promise of immortality.  I have touched them and something of me changed them.

Without the sex that feels impossible.  But then there are the outliers.  I guarantee you that P has thought about sex with me (yay!).  I have no actual idea about J.  I’m not going to be tacky enough to ask any year soon but maybe some day.  And yet, they both think about me a lot.  Without me having to fuck them.

That’s why the outliers matter.  Because maybe it’s all a big lie.  Maybe I don’t have to fuck people in order to be important.  Only it’s not a big lie.  Sex is important and it does change things.  But it’s not the be-all, end-all.  I need the random people from random groups who decide to pay attention to me because it gives lie to “I only appeal to ‘x’ kind of people in ‘y’ small subgroup.  Obviously I am a mutant who should be rejected by ‘normal’ people”.  BS.  I’m not because if anyone is not kinky, it’s J.  And he likes me a lot.  He thinks I am inspirational.  I don’t know whether or not P is interested in anything “kinky” but he’s interested in me.  He’s interested enough to read a torrent of words year after year.  Even though I’ve never gotten him off.

Interesting.

I got a question!

Picture me doing my happy Snoopy dance.  Ahem.

I’m afraid that I don’t know how to talk to people. I’m too blunt.

Do you prefer that other people interact with you in this way? Directly, I mean; sometimes that comes off as blunt. Personally, I find it easier than guessing most of the time, but I weigh that against the discomfort of saying/asking right out. What do you think?

The honest answer is I want people to be blunt with weird verbal ticks where they remind me that they are being blunt so I shouldn’t over react emotionally.  What I mean is, when Noah is about to hand me my ass he says: “I don’t have a good way to say this.  So I’m going to use a bad one and I hope you can understand what I am getting at.”  That’s my cue that he is about to say something that sounds like an attack but he honest-to-goodness doesn’t mean it as an attack so please don’t freakin yell at him.  At least that is what I hear.  When he says that I cock my head over to one side and listen intently and I can be rational no matter how much I am freaking out.  It’s handy.

But yes, of course I want people to be blunt.  I like it when people randomly announce what they are thinking, because most of the time I am honestly curious.  I wish like hell I could sit inside someone else’s brain for a day and listen to the random things that go around.  It’s great when people tell me.

If people have expectations of me, you’d better tell me what they are in blunt ways or I will miss it.  I have all the subtlety of a falling anvil.  So yes, I would say.  Blunt is generally always better than it’s opposite, which I consider to be misdirection.  Don’t be vague or passive agressive.  Tell me what you want.  Then I can decide if I want to give it to you or not.  I like yes or no questions.

And I’ll tell you, as much as I felt pissy in the moment… I’m glad Sarah greeted me with, “The last few days has been over my threshold for alone time with the kids right now and I need to have help with them for a while.”  Because now I know for absolute certain she is monitoring her ability to be safe with the kids and now I know what the wall looks like.  I can work with a wall.  If I’m honest I know that if Sarah had been kind of twitchy but hadn’t said anything… I probably would have ignored her twitching.  I’m a jerk too.  I have to treat my needs like they are important enough to push for.  No one is volunteering the stuff that fills my needs.  I need to push for more space.  Knowing how far I can push is really important.  I don’t want to be a chicken shit and short change myself because I’m afraid that I will ask too much and she won’t tell me and start to resent me.  I don’t want to live with that fear.  I want to push her to her boundaries so that I can have allllllllllll the space available to me.  Damnit.  She said she is ok with that.  I have to trust her.

Have I mentioned how hard trust is?  I have been struggling like mad since I had kids because I am no longer reliable.  It makes my stomach clench with frustration.  If my kids start melting down as I am trying to put them into the car when I am off to do something social I freak out.  I get into these cycles where I’m convinced that I am going to go to the event and the kids will be assholes and I will feel social pressure from all my anti-kid friends to deal with my little brats and I will then be angry with my kids because they are kids.

My kids are not assholes.  My kids are not brats.  They do push limits because they are trying to find out where they are.  When Shanna feels the wrath of God she backs off of a limit.  But oh boy she likes to find that limit.  Given that the wrath of God mostly involves me breathing hard because I am really angry and trying not to speak and I point to her room… she goes.  But it takes until I am ready to punch her in the face before she backs off.

I’m torn between consternation and delight.  That’s MY girl!  I honestly don’t want her to stop.  Even though it drives me insane.  I want her to be that person.  I want her to have the courage to push people.  What I mean by the wrath of God is that I want her to go through life rarely having to deal with my minor displeasures.  Mostly I do a lot of disclaimers about how awesome she is and I’m not upset with her I’m upset because blah grown up thing is happening and I’m sorry if I’m short tempered.  I try to buffer my irritation levels as much as possible.  Sometimes she crosses the line and I really don’t care that it upsets her when I am fucking pissed off.

Lately she has decided that an awesome game is to hit me in the face with sharp objects, basically as hard as she can.  One can understand why I might object.  After the last time she did it I picked her up ubruptly and moved her off of me while roaring in pain.  It scared the shit out of her.  She started wailing about how I hit her.  I did a lot of rolling my eyes.  I’m sorry kiddo, but picking you up and moving you far enough away that you cannot injure me again while otherwise not touching you and getting my hands off of you as fast as possible is not the same thing as hitting.  I told her that I had not intended to scare her when I yelled but I wasn’t going to apologize.  Hitting me in the face isn’t ok and I am very upset about it.  Don’t do it again.

Then I stomped off.  To me, that’s a Wrath of God moment.  It made a huge impression on her.  And I’m glad.  I think parents are allowed to just be human beings.  When someone hits me in the face I get to yell at them to stop it and I don’t have to apologize for hurting their feelings.  I did not sign a fucking piece of paper giving up this right just because I had crotch droppings.  I get the feeling from the AP and Gentle Parenting folk that it is bad that I did this.  Yelling Is Violence, they say.

I have to say that I think they can bite me.  I do my utmost to not make yelling a regular habit because it’s a really annoying thing to have to live with.  I think that having to live with someone who yells a lot sucks.  It’s unpleasant.  I try very hard to keep my volume at a reasonable level.  Yelling when you are in pain is not the same thing.  It’s allowed.  It’s allowed.  It’s allowed.

My dad used to make me be quiet.  I got in trouble if I made noise or moved while he was hurting me.  He would play painful games and the goal was for me to sit as still as a stone while he did it.  That wasn’t part of the sexual abuse.  That was casually sitting around in the living room when he visited.

I never have to be silent and take it when someone hurts me again.  I don’t.  It doesn’t matter that they are kids.  I get to defend my body.

That said, Shanna got lots of cuddles afterwards.  Obviously I am still feeling defensive.  You see, my actions square with my values.  I think that was a reasonable natural consequence of hitting someone in the face.  But I can find people on the internet who would tell me that I am an abusive monster for doing that.  Let me tell you, whenever people accuse me of being an abusive monster I chuckle.  I know what that actually looks like and the pompous windbag who is talking to me doesn’t.  I’m afraid of being like them, but I do rationally know that I’m not.  My kids will not have anything like the abuse I received.  Defending yourself when someone hurts you is not abusing them.  It’s letting them know that they crossed a big boundary in a way that is a serious problem.  Shanna hasn’t done it since.  We kiss and cuddle lots and I’m pretty sure she’s confident in my regard for her.

So anyway.  Shanna likes to test boundaries occasionally.  It’s pretty clear that she is doing it in a scientific way and there is no malice in her heart.  She is, however, a wild little savage and her scientific experiments frequently suck for me.  When we are out in public reams of people turn and stare.  I feel completely self conscious and judged.  I have no idea what they are thinking.  If people volunteered helpful little thoughts like, “Dear God you have the patience of Job” then I know that people aren’t judging me because it does bother me.  I do get nasty little comments about how if I can’t control my brats I shouldn’t take them out.  Uhh… do you really think I should have complete control over my children?  How do you think that will go for them in life?  I want autonomous little people, thank you ver much, and that means that they have to figure out how to interact with the world.  That means hitting some brick walls of social taboos.  She will need to find out What happens when I whack someone in the face?  That’s how she will know not to do it later.  And then she went off to school and on her first day a boy kicked her in the face.

I have to tell you… I wasn’t very upset.  I told her, “These things happen.  So, what did you say to him when this happened?”  People hurting your body in ways you don’t like just happens.  You have to learn to navigate it.  This seems to be something that my child-free friends were never taught or have forgotten.  When a careening child falls out of orbit they act as if they have been assaulted with acid.  Get over yourself, people.  No, she is not yet a masterful member of the social sphere.  She’s fucking three, give her a break.

All that to say, yeah blunt is good.  And maybe I’m ready to go to a kid friendly dance event.  I’ll have to find one that is within an hours driving range.  Hm.