I’m a princess.
This is kind of hard to admit. When I write it without a “fucking” to harden it, I cringe. I was raised on Tonka trucks and overalls, playing in the dirt, no-Barbies-allowed, on self-sufficiency and confidence, on competence. When Nic and I started dating, she used to say, “Anything for you, princess,” and my knee-jerk reaction was to object…until I realized I kind of liked it. When I recently sent Andy an email with “Okay I admit” in the subject line and “I am a princess” in the body, her response was: “No effin’ shit. And what made you finally admit the thing that I’ve been saying since, oh, our second date?”
Um. Honestly, I sent that email from my couch, where I was lying in my bathrobe watching Red put new tires on my bike with the same hard, calloused hands that’d been all over my body when she was fucking my ass until I begged to come on three different occasions in the previous eighteen hours. I was rather content, to say the least; it was time to admit that one of my favorite ways to be cared for is to lie in bed letting other people do shit for me and getting banged. But really what made me finally admit that I’m a princess was that I realized the only thing holding me back was internalized misogyny.
What does a princess do? To answer that question, probably we should just rephrase it as: What do people do for princesses? Everything. They meet her needs. They prepare and serve her food, so she is sated with favorites. They perform for her, so she is not bored. They take care of her transportation, keeping her horse or car or bicycle in fine condition so she can go where she wishes. They fuck her into the pillows so she experiences pleasure in her body. The assumption is that because other people do these things for her, she cannot do them herself, and therefore she both reinforces and falls victim to sexist views of femininity as weak, incapable, and passive.
Whatever, man. We don’t assume that dudes who want their wives to prepare and serve their favorite dinner or who want to lie around getting blowjobs and playing video games are weak, incapable, and passive. We assume they like being spoiled. Except that we’d never use that word, because it’s for princesses and children who enjoy the same things.
(This is part of a three-post series. If you missed Femme Post I: Pin-Ups Today or Femme Post II: Lineage, check them out!)
My femme is voracious.
I am hungry all the time. Hungry for words and information, satiated only when I’ve found the precise right words in the precise right order to convey what I need to know or say; articulate. Hungry for sex, constantly aware of my clit against my clothes or the cool air against the wetness of my empty cunt when I lounge naked. Hungry for food, both what nourishes and what gives pleasure. Hungry for space; I take it up and it is mine. I slouch in my métro seat, prop my black-leather-booted feet up on the seat across from me, drape an arm across the seat next to me.
My femme is strong.
The tattoo I’ve wanted since I read H.D.’s poem “Sheltered Garden” in winter 2009: “beauty without strength, / chokes out life,” in my own handwriting blown up to curl up my entire spine–an ordeal to obtain, needle on bone. I am competent and self-contained; I put together my own fucking furniture and drill my own damn holes. I am a bitch; my opinionated confidence earned me that label at least ten years ago. I get shit done. I move powerfully–my arms are cut and muscled, my legs are long, my body slips past you with long strides even on winter-snow-narrowed streets. My height gives me a panoramic view over your head.
My femme is intentional.
I am always femme: whether I am wearing a short skirt, men’s pants, or nothing at all, you should be able to tell. Why? Because of how I walk. Because of the space my femininity takes up. Because of the way I have subsumed masculinity and remade it into my femininity. Because of how I look at you, sizing you up, deciding if I want to fuck, deciding whether to pull you or push you. Because of the way I talk to you, touch you, exist in space with you. Because of the way I play off your gender, whether you’re a butch or a boi or another femme or something else entirely.
What I am saying here is this: don’t just open your eyes. It’s not enough.
Seeing my pencil skirt isn’t enough to tell you I’m femme. Seeing me with a butch isn’t enough to tell you I’m femme. These signifiers can be hints–take them as an invitation to your senses, all of them. Especially the senses that are deeper than the usual five, your sense of space, of proximity, of vibes, if you will. Noting the aesthetics of clothing or makeup or hair is not enough, because aesthetics are not enough to convey something as complex as one’s gender/identity. When we rely on aesthetics, we get lazy and reductive. When we are lazy, we make people invisible by refusing to recognize them, as what they are and as part of our communities–for identities are intelligible only in communities. When we are lazy, we take trans femmes for drag queens and straight white hipsters for femmes. In our laziness we reduce the entirety of femme to the singularity of an aesthetic: one type of body (with tits), one way of dressing, one way of partnering and fucking. Question your desire. Do more. See more.
I am blessed with an extreme lack of sexual shame. I’m not entirely sure how I grew up to be so shameless as a queer, kinky woman in this homophobic, misogynistic, body-shaming world, but I have some ideas. It obviously helps that I’m fairly conventionally pretty (white, blonde, thin, able-bodied), that I’ve had access to education, that I’ve had the luxury of time and resources to do the personal work I’ve done. But this week, as I was basking in the afterglow of incredibly dirty sex and heavy D/s, I realized that another major thing that helped was the internet, and I want to say thank you.
Thank you, Gorean fan fiction. Thank you, Eden’s Slave Page, for introducing me to kinky, misogynistic sex, for being the first place I saw fucking with extreme power exchange and pain. I knew I was into it and I wasn’t sure if I should be into it—but hey, even if Gor makes me want to punch shit now, that first unexpected reaction and the confusion that follows happened a good twenty years earlier for me than it did for a lot of kinksters a generation or two older than me.
Thank you, free previews of straight porn. Even with those horrible long, fake fingernails and those interminably boring blowjobs, you helped me figure out where and how to put a dick in my body so I could “lose my virginity” and experience another way to fuck, after months of not-at-all boring blowjobs and pussyeating.
Continue reading »
I’ve been waiting to read this book since the call for submissions was posted in fall 2010, and it did not disappoint. It made me me think, it made me laugh, it made me fistpump and say “oh yeah” out loud, it made me cry, and, uh, it obviously made me come.
Given Mr. Sexsmith’s taste, I knew there would be femmes, but I was particularly looking forward to hot, kinky stories written from the perspective of femme bottoms–though I wouldn’t have predicted the complete lack of stories narrated by butch/boi/boy bottoms! Sometimes it seems like tops run the porn show, which reflects and reinforces ideas that bottoms are passive, that we simply don’t do as much when we take it as tops do when they dish it out.
I asked “Why write erotica narrated by femmes? By bottoms?” when I interviewed Shawna Elizabeth, who wrote “Spoiled,” one of my femme-bottom-narrated favorites. She remarked that
…there are still a lot of people who think that being a bottom is not empowering or feminist, and that being submissive and surrendering control is weak or degrading…Just because you take the “feminine” or “submissive” role doesn’t mean you are being passive about your desire…Sometimes it is the strongest most assertive women who feel like they must be overcome and taken by force. It takes a lot of strength to be vulnerable.
A slut is someone who will do anything to get sex. A slut is committed. A slut is determined. She is dedicated. She goes after it. She prioritizes it. A slut pushes herself, wants more, seeks more, takes more. Her desire is that strong.
Show me how much you want it. Show me. C’mon, you can take more, can’t you? Show me. Push onto my fingers. I don’t see it yet; show me. Harder, you can take it harder. More.
Hit me. Show me how much you want it; hit me.
I slap her three times in the face, dig my fingernails into her shoulders. “Please, please, lick my clit, please.”
Never hit me without my permission. Okay?
“Mhm, mhm”
Good girl.
A slut is not someone who will give sex away for anything. A slut values sex so much she’ll do nearly anything to get it.
Up against the mirror. Nipples touching. Good. Spread your legs, arch your back. Show me that pussy.
Now, tongue out. Stick it out, show it to me. Kiss the mirror; make out with yourself. Come on. Now.
My neck is stiff, arching away from the mirror. This is embarrassing. He knots my hair around his hand and pushes my lips against the glass.
Tongue out. Circles, yes. Looks good.
A slut is voracious. A slut is powerful. She has sex; she possesses it, holds it in her body. Fucking increases her power as it increases her knowledge, experience, and skill.
A slut is not someone whose power is depleted by her chronic “giving it away,” because sex does not deplete, is not wasteful, is not worthless.
Sex is the reward, not the sacrifice.
January 2012
Femme Day of Action: I’m not sure yet what this will entail, but I hear there’s an organizing meeting later this month, and I’m excited to see what will unfold!
April 2012
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater: Performing Revelations, Anointed, The Hunt, In/Side, and Cry, this insanely famous and by all accounts talented African American company is one I’ve been dying to see since I was thirteen.
Vacation to Marseille: My first major trip all by myself and all paid for by myself, out of earnings from my first adult job. Tons of chilling, tons of reading, tons of writing, a little bit of blogging, a little bit of queer culture exploration, and hopefully as much femme mermaid beaching as possible.
August 2012
The Femme Conference: In Baltimore, MD from 17-19 August, The Fourth Biannual Femme Conference (misnamed; it should be “biennial”) aims to create a femme-centered space with workshops, keynotes, performances, resources, and more.
October 2012
An Unholy Harvest: Canada’s annual leatherdyke event, which I attended for my first time last fall for its fifth and the last year at Breathless. It goes without saying that I’ll be back this year!
November 2012
Outside the Boxes: Celebrating the Queer Body Erotic: I started hearing about these workshops offered by the Body Electric School through Mr. Sexsmith over at Sugarbutch a couple years ago, and this year I want in. I want my next formal development of my yoga practice to be more personal, holistic, and tied to my actual gender, sexuality, and body than my Ashtanga teacher training was. I’m still debating between this one and the intro one for women, but I think something specifically queer will likely fit better, wherever I end up on the ladybro spectrum while I’m there.
This is an exercise in integration: integration of myself as crazy, myself as femme, myself as bottom (and sometimes top), myself as sexual, myself embodied, myself whole. Today has been a rough day for my mental health; when I have a borderline breakdown, it’s very fragmenting. In general, life as someone who has borderline personality disorder can be very fragmenting. My normal modes of thinking, emoting, and reacting are not the norm in my world, so I am constantly monitoring, checking, and trying to control or change my instincts. My brain is a cage, and the constant cage fight is me-on-me. So tonight, to counter the fragmentation of round after round of MMA smackdown, KO after KO, I want to say a little bit about sex while borderline.
I’ve had a lot of amazing sex. By virtue of longevity, lots of that amazing sex has been with Nic. We’ve had two years of fucking that’s so smooth and hot it feels like mindreading almost every time. And I realize that in fact the sensation of mindreading–that thing that happens when two people are so tuned into each other, reading each other so well, doing exactly what the other’s body prompts them to do–is a core element of what I remember as amazing sex, and a core element of how I fuck every time I fuck.
Borderline personality disorder can sort of be summed up as “really thin skinned” in a lot of ways. I am emotionally porous; I find it extremely difficult to separate my emotions from those of the people around me. I am highly perceptive and receptive to other people’s feelings and nonverbal signals. The scale and intensity of my emotions is huge; where most people might experience their feelings as constant tidal fluctuations within themselves, I experience them as tidal waves I’m desperately trying to surf to keep from drowning, and it is just as physical an experience as surfing or drowning in the literal sense. My emotional experience is intrinsically embodied experience.
A lot of the time, this is not good or fun. For example, being with someone who’s really private and deliberate about which emotions or needs she articulates (ahem, Andy) can mean I’m in the position of picking up and responding to things I’m not necessarily intended to know or respond to. I can easily get preoccupied with trying to figure out what the other person feels or needs instead of figuring out what I feel or need. I lose myself in the confusion of conflicting verbal and nonverbal signals, which often contain other triggers like rejection, which can prompt crises in which my heart rate doubles to match the velocity of my thinking, my flesh heats, and I feel like I am going to fly to pieces.
But when I take that thin skin into sex…I’m just going to ignore societal norms for the thousandth time today and be arrogant. You wish you could watch. Because when I bottom, whatever tension you set, I hold it right there until you tug it tighter or slacken it. When you touch me with even a single fingertip, you get a response, and you get it fast. I know you want me to spread my legs wider so you can fuck me deeper before you’ve even consciously realized it yourself. I am fully present in my body; I bring my whole self into our fucking. And I am giving you constant information, with every cell of my body, about what feels good. This way of bottoming is tied to my femmeness; I get it when Amber Dawn asks, “Who was I, as a femme, if I couldn’t offer my body to you, my butch lovers, as a touchstone, a safe haven of hotness, a soft-skinned, sweet-mouthed reminder that who we were was right and good?” (Persistence, 100). My thin skin is how I know how to touch your shoulders, your chest, your cock, to make your gender (and mine) through our fucking.*
I am bottom-identified the way I’m dyke-identified: both identities are core to my sexual self, though not necessarily perfectly accurate. What I mean to say is, sometimes I top. And when I top, it’s because I’ve noticed your voice, the way you orient your body to mine, the way you look at me. I’ve confirmed that you want me to fuck you by changing my own voice, the way I fit your body to mine, the way I look at you. When you shift your hips a tiny bit with my fingers inside you, I change the angle by the precise number of degrees suggested by your shifting so you hiss in satisfaction. My thin skin is what gives me my top confidence; it is the why and how of me as a top.
To be completely honest, I find it frustrating when people who top me don’t seem to have this capacity for sensing. It’s a huge element of my communication style; because I’m so porous, I don’t rely on words, and strongly prefer to use them as embellishment rather than essential when I fuck. I’ve had great sex with a few people who communicate far more verbally while fucking than I’d prefer, and making the connection of my preference with my borderline makes it easier for me to adapt to them. Instead of being like “If I can do it, why the fuck can’t you?” I can see that one reason I can do it is my own borderline-induced hyper sensitivity, which isn’t something I’d wish full-time on anyone. But as I do have it full-time, I need to recognize its integrative properties alongside it’s tendency to trigger fragmentation.
*This is written in butch, because let’s be real, that’s my type. However, this thin-skin-enabled way of making gender through fucking, I’ve found, is not butch specific–and really, how could it be “butch specific” when every butch’s gender is slightly different anyway?
(noun): A date scheduled with one polyamorous partner for the primary purpose of another partner’s convenience.
Though there are probably other circumstances that are Accommodates, the most common type in our polygon is a feature of our configuration, in which some partners live together and others don’t. One partner requests that her roommate-partner make a date with her non-roommate-partner out of the house in order to accommodate (ha) the first partner’s date at home with a partner who doesn’t live there:
“Hey Andy, could you schedule an Accommodate for Saturday? Helena and I want to sleep here that night after the ballet.”
(Okay, Nic has probably never said that sentence because our polygon is not particularly punny on a daily basis. But you get the idea.)
Play Party, Day 2
I’m naked except for the boots, thigh-high brown leather. She’s fully dressed in all-black leathers, smooth on my skin when she comes in close. My palms are flat against the wall, my feet spread wide so her canes have plenty of room to slip up and down my inner thighs. She keeps a hand or a cane on me at all times, watches my breath and my body, makes me count and politely ask “Please, may I have another” (until she’s heard enough and starts striking when she wants), forces me to decide how many total I’m going to take, adds one more. When she’s done she pulls my hands away from the wall and folds our arms together, pushes me against a vertically propped mattress with her whole body weight, tips my head back against her chest and smothers me for an instant with the crook of her elbow. She leaves deep welts that bruise pretty for a week on my asscheeks and upper thighs. I’m content falling asleep in my prison cell at the hostel that night.
Workshop, Day 3
The grey-haired Master sitting next to me, about to start facilitating her workshop on control, asks her slave, “Where you at babygirl?” and I hear her voice asking that question for a month afterwards. I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone so publicly and unabashedly and offhandedly announce their butchness and their domness and their kinkiness, in such a concise but complete way. In theory, all she did was ask if her slave had somewhere to sit. In practice, what she did was be what she is confidently, without a second thought, fully grown into it and comfortable holding all the care, strength, sweetness, responsibility, power, and, yes, control that go into creating butchness, domness, kinkiness. No wonder when someone asks who came because the facilitator was hot, half the room raises their hands, from the Harvest virgins to the five-year vets. Seeing her command of this room as she gives and takes contributions to the discussion, seeing respect in the room for that command, I see the particular wisdom and strength of lineage, the lineage of leatherdykes I came here to join.
Dinner, Day 3
We’re at least two, maybe three, maybe four femmes at three tiny round tables. The definite two are me and a grad student who gave a lunchtime talk the day before; the maybes are the girl in the sweaterdress one table over from me who’s not saying much and the older dyke who started the conversation: “This is the second time I’ve heard someone talk about gender and go straight to butch and femme this weekend. Why?” It’s the four of us, femmeish, plus someone I’d ballpark as genderqueerish, talking about the evolution of concepts of gender and the resulting changes to gender identities and who can claim them. We two for-sure femmes are explaining what femme means for us, elaborating each other’s definitions, refining exclusions. We agree that queerness and invisibility are inherent elements of femme. The other two youngish queers at the table protest our delineation of borders; I feel a hint of my usual frustration at the idea that everyone can and should be able to be everything (identities mean nothing if everyone can be them). The other for-sure femme says her gender is femme–she’s not a woman; I say mine isn’t (or isn’t only) femme–I am a woman. Amusingly, our reasoning is just about the same: it has to do with not fitting conventional standards of womanhood. I’ve found the geeks, which means I’m at home.
Add Cuntext To Google Reader
There Is No Blanket Consent in Poly
I’m kind of embarrassed to admit that this is a recent realization.
Consent is a constant process, not only while having sex, but also while having relationships. Just as one’s consent during sex adapts to accommodate our current realities, so must our poly. I am not a big believer in “rules poly”; reading some examples of poly contracts has been a source of genuine horror and hilarity. Instead, I believe in shared values and expectations about what your poly looks like and how it works–that is, you don’t have the “blanket consent” of rules to fall back on; you figure out situations as they arise. This has been my perspective for years now, but it got pretty twisted and lost in the last few months of my relationship with Nic.
Nic and I broke up in February. One catalyst–though not cause–of the break-up was her interest in dating a third person. The situation showcased pretty much all the ways that Nic and I are simply not compatible, particularly when it comes to communication. By the time we broke up, I felt bullied, ignored, disrespected, unheard, insane, and like a total failure at polyamory. As a vee, our understanding since we dropped the primary/secondary structure in August 2010 had been that we do not tell our partners who they can date and we do not tell our partners what others can be to them. I felt like a failure for not truly being able to get behind what Nic wanted with the new girl, despite very much wanting to get behind it. Apparently, I’m not alone–I recently re-read Dean Spade’s fantastic piece on polyamory as the new “radical” norm, and how the resulting harsh self-judgement over emotions such as jealousy doesn’t end up making anyone feel too radical or too good. The concept of polyamory as a norm of radical culture is also legible through the lens of consent: a norm that is a “basis for judgement and coercion” sounds a hell of a lot more like rape culture than radical culture.
Continue reading »