Man, I Feel Like a… Man?

Of all the complaints I might have about my body, there’s one thing at least that I’m unwaveringly happy about: my gender.

I’m one of the lucky majority who was born, more or less, in the right body. Growing up, I was a girly girl. Pink ribbons, pigtails, frilly socks and skirts made from tulle and satin and chiffon and sparkly things. My favourite colour was purple, my favourite super hero was Cat Woman, and my career aspiration was ballerina.

So, ‘girl’ was always right for me. And even though being a woman can be complicated, I wouldn’t want to trade. I’ll keep my emotional sensitivity and multiple orgasms, thank you.

If anything, my biggest body frustrations stem from not being quite womanly enough. I’ve always felt a bit thick, stout, heavy. I envy girls with delicate shoulders and narrow waists. I’m not happy with my breasts, because, stupid as this sounds, I’ve never felt like they qualified as ‘real’ breasts. And although I’ve never tried it, I’m pretty sure that if I truly threw my weight into a punch or a kick, there’d be a good chance I’d fuck you up. (So be nice to kinkycatlady, y’hear?)

All the same, I’ve mostly graduated from feeling like a ungainly tank-like object, to a sensuous, seductive woman. In conclusion: yay for me.

But wait, hold on. Before you release the balloons, there’s just one thing that doesn’t fit the mould. One thing that has always made me feel different from other women, not quite in the club, not quite as enraptured by scrapbooking as the other girls in the craft shop.

My sex drive.

I’ve always known I was a randy slut, but I kind of always thought all women were secretly like that. I thought the difference between me and ‘them’ was that I’m one of the shameless few who admits it.

Turns out: not so much.

Two things in the last week have altered my opinion.

The first was seeing Bettina Arndt talk about her new book The Sex Diaries at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. For this book, Arndt surveyed the sex lives of ninety-eight couples in long-term relationships. Unfortunately, the results were overwhelmingly in favour of that depressingly cliché –men want sex more than women want sex.

I haven’t read The Sex Diaries (yet), but I get the impression that it paints a fairly grim picture of the female libido. It basically suggests that women are able to live without sex, but men are not. (As in, it doesn’t seem to torment women in the way it torments men).

Arndt’s advice to the women of Australia is to “just do it”. Her reasoning is that desire does not need to be there for good sex to be had. Her argument is solid, but I still find it sad and decidedly unsexy. Just do it? Sounds about as erotic as getting a pap smear.

She did also make a point of saying that there are of course women out there in relationships whose sex drives were higher than their partner’s – but they were exceptions to the rule. (Although she did say that these women’s complaints were particularly fierce!)

Now.  In three out of the four long(ish) term relationships I’ve had, I have out-sexed my partners. In only one relationship did I find a man who could match my desire for sex. Which would have been peachy, had it not been for the emotional abuse and his just generally being a prick. But the sex, the sex…!

I used to believe that women have been socially conditioned to think sex isn’t very important. I thought that the reason I was gagging for it was because I’d given up trying to fit into any type of ‘norm’. That I was paying attention to what my body was telling me, not what my parents/peers/etc thought was appropriate behaviour for a woman.

That was, until I read a Feminist on Testosterone. (Thanks to Marauder for sending me the link!)

I highly recommend you read it in its entirety, but for those of you who are pressed for time, it is basically the account of a person who was born intersex, was raised female, and much later in life decided to become male (the process of which involved taking testosterone).

This experience has given him a remarkable insight into gender, and the social and political issues surrounding it. But what I found most astonishing was the way he described the effect of testosterone on his sex drive. Astonishing because I could identify with it. Particularly the bit about “wanting to do it all the time”, and jerking off “to relieve an itch”. Also, he describes how he started to get aroused in non-sexual situations; a concept most women have trouble understanding.

…Except me, who understood completely.

It had never actually occurred to me that there could be a physiological explanation behind my bottomless sexual appetite. Psychological, certainly. But, hormonal?

Before we get crazy, let’s take it back to the pink ribbons and My Little Ponies. Considering that I’m not balding, I don’t have excessive body hair, I’m not at all aggressive and I don’t have the slightest interest in war, cars, or football, I think it’s highly doubtful that I’ve got a higher than average level of testosterone in my system. (Yes, women do have small amounts of testosterone. Thank you, Yahoo Answers!)

However, there are aspects of my sexual behaviour that are decidedly man-like. I think about sex pretty much constantly, I get turned on in non sexual situations…(but that’s probably because I’m perverted), I jerk off frequently to relieve boredom/tension/restlessness, and if I had it my way, I’d have sex at least once a day. My favourite part of being in a relationship is the sex (and I will admit I’m struggling a bit with being single, for this reason). When I haven’t had sex for a while, I start to get leery. My sexual urges don’t just go away if I ignore them – they get more demanding and more intense.

I promise I’m not just making this up in an attempt to differentiate myself. This is how I’ve always been – ever since about fourteen onwards. And the slightly terrifying thing is, my sex drive doesn’t seem to be diminishing as I get older. Quite the contrary – it’s getting stronger. To the point where it actually frightens me a little.

It leaves me in an in-between place, where I’m forever trying to conceal my sexual desires because they’re unseemly, weird, unladylike. See, I can have a good old chat about the virtues of exfoliation and cuticle oil, and then I can turn around and talk dirty in a way that would make your fingernails blush. It’s a strange position to be in, and sometimes I feel like a bit of a spy – a woman who dares to brave the no-man’s-land between genders, and who gives secrets away to both sides.

I get annoyed when I’m confronted with yet another cultural artefact that reinforces the idea that women are the less sexed sex. Sometimes I feel invisible and voiceless – an anomaly. And I feel despair when I think of all the women out there who aren’t getting the most out of their sexuality – who would ‘rather eat chocolate’.

I’m quite partial to chocolate, but girls, come on. Sex is life! Joy! Abandon! Transcendence!

Compared with… a Ferrero Rocher? That’s Ferrero Fucked Up, is what that is.

I’m also fed up with this assumption that sexual desire is something that belongs to men, and which women borrow from time to time (when they’re not eating Kit Kats, of course).

It’s not. Men don’t own sex. After writing a goddamned thesis on it, I’m here to tell you that female desire is strong, boundless, beautiful, powerful, and unique. To say that sexual desire is intrinsically male is like saying that anger is instrinsically male. If you don’t believe that ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’, you clearly have not yet met my mother.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, I still believe that women have an amazing capacity for sexual desire. I think women should be encouraged to explore their sexual selves, and to be able to talk about it without being labelled a slut.

Also:

I have an idea for my next thesis. ‘She Kink’ – a book exploring and celebrating the stories of kinky women.

Watch this space.

Switching Between Worlds

In BDSM vernacular, ‘vanilla’ means ‘someone who is not kinky’.

If the black and white cookie is anything to go by, chocolate and vanilla are two flavours which can peacefully coexist, but don’t blend very well. There is not really such a thing as partially chocolate. Once that cocoa hits the icing, it will go brown. The vanilla becomes tainted. If you wanted a pure vanilla flavour, baby, you’ve gotta start again.

People in the BDSM scene adore using the word vanilla. Shortened sometimes to ‘nilla, it is often delivered with a condescending sneer, so that it also starts to carry connotations of ignorance and stupidity.

Just like any group of humans, the kink community is certainly guilty of the ‘we’ve found the light while meanwhile the rest of you poor sods are still stumbling around in the dark’ mentality. We patronise people who, for whatever reason, are outside of our world. It becomes nearly impossible to see how anyone else could have a different opinion, and how that opinion could ever be worthwhile or valid.

I know, because I’ve behaved this way myself.

Why?

Because all my life I’ve felt like a freak. I’ve always had something to hide – some part of myself I needed to obscure in order to fit in. I’ve felt like I was the crazy one, the dirty one, the one with the problem.

And so to find out that there were other people like me, and then to have my weirdness not only accepted by these people, but celebrated as valuable and beautiful – it was like coming home.

Still, even though an entire community of twisted perves exists, we’re still very much in the minority. And thus, for most of us freaks, we find that it becomes necessary to switch between worlds.

We all need money to live, so we must fit into some kind of work environment. We all have families, and unless we’re estranged from them, we must fit into the role of daughter/son/sister/brother/uncle/niece/etc. We need somewhere to live, so we must be able to convince a landlord that we are good, trustworthy people.

Not that being kinky has any impact on your suitability as an employee, your love for your family, or your ability to pay the rent in a timely manner. Of course it doesn’t – but we hide it just the same, because it could be perceived to be ‘bad’. We might not personally have a problem with this label, but it creates inconveniences for us in our everyday lives that we’d rather live without.

So we pretend.

Do you know how exhausting it is, pretending to be ‘normal’ all the time?

And how frustrating it is, to have to disguise something that you’re proud of, something that you love, something that makes you you?

It sucks. It makes you cranky. And then you find yourself at a fetish club, during one of the few social occasions where you don’t have to lie about your personal life, and you find yourself mouthing off about the vanilla world and how closed-minded, repressed, and irretrievably dull everyone in it is.

The thing is, however, that going to a fetish club every Friday night in your latex catsuit so you can bitch and moan to the same people about the same people, is just as boring as going to the same pub every week with the same bunch of friends so you can talk about the same football team.

Non-vanillas might think they’re so superior, but ultimately, they’re just people, just like everybody else.

There’s nothing special about us, other than we’ve got distinct tastes when it comes to what gets us off. New members of Under 30s often remark about how relieved they were to discover that we’re all so friendly and normal. As if they were expecting us all to have wings, claws, tails, and be raving, delirious psychopaths who want to eat their brain for dinner.

Many of my friends are kinky. Many are not. (Which doesn’t mean that I pretend to be someone else in front of my not-so-kinky friends – they know who I am and they love me for it, even if they are not necessarily interested in it themselves).

But with new friends, there is always an awkward ‘coming out’ phase, which I’ve not yet mastered.

Many in the scene would say that this problem could be solved by not bothering with the vanilla world.

Which I think is extremely narrow minded. For these reasons:

• Being kinky does not automatically make you interesting, and by that reasoning, being ‘vanilla’ does not make people boring. What’s boring is making judgements about people you don’t even know, and thus becoming limited by your own spectrum of experience.
• On first impression, a person might appear to be vanilla, but you never know what dark desires they might be hiding. I once knew a man who seemed to be more vanilla than a crème fraiche, but that was until he got very drunk one night, and asked me to slice up his chest with a steak knife. (I said no, and I regret that now. It would have been hot.)
• If we, as a community, insist on barricading ourselves inside our own world, like a secret society, of course people are going to have misconceptions. What we need is more people talking about kink, not just among ourselves, but to anyone who is willing to listen. *Waves to my not-so-kinky readership*

Coming out is never easy. At best, you can be laughed at. At worst, you can be shunned or discriminated against. A friend of mine has blogged recently about the difficulties of telling people about her kink life, because she wants to be perceived to be “dependable, reliable, and trustworthy”. I feel exactly the same way. Even though I know that being kinky does not detract from my ability to be dependable, reliable, and trustworthy, I fear that other people will see it differently.

The solution?

It’s up to the dependable, reliable, and trustworthy members of the kink scene to educate the less informed.

I don’t think this Berlin Wall of ‘us versus them’ is doing anyone any favours. Instead of retreating into our dark corners to play out our sick and twisted perversity, perhaps we could bring a little of it out into the light?

Or would that be defeating the point?

The Clitoris: A User’s Guide

It’s not uncommon to hear women complain about how clueless men are when it comes to this part of the female genitalia. And it’s not uncommon to hear men complain about how women are notoriously difficult to get off.

But here’s something that you don’t hear very often:

Women only have themselves to blame for this.

Seriously, girls, there’s no point in faking an orgasm, only to turn around the next day over coffee with your ‘BFF’, and moan (in an unsexy fashion), about how crap men are.

Sisters, hear my plea! They ain’t never gonna learn if you don’t bloody tell them!

(Women, including myself at times, can be so damned shy. There’s nothing more awkward than interrupting that moment of blind passion by giving your new lover a step-by-step tutorial. Which is why most of us keep our mouths shut. And then, once we’ve established a relationship with this man, it’s even more awkward to turn around and tell them, after all that time, that they’ve been doing it wrong. So this ineptitude continues, basically, forever. If you should break up, the man will go on to his next relationship believing that he’s the bee’s knees, and that if his new woman doesn’t respond to his expert caresses, she’s clearly got some sort of malfunction. And if the happy couple ends up getting married, she turns into a bitch who never wants to shag, and the poor bloke is left scratching his head and complaining to his mates, who will tell him the same story, because their wives have done the exact same thing! Gah!)

So, let’s set the record straight. This, gentlemen, is how it’s done:

“You don’t have to go leaping straight for the clitoris like a bull at a gate. Give her a kiss, boy.”

John Cleese was absolutely right. If you’re trying to turn your woman on, leave the clit til last. Being touched in that area before you’ve warmed up, so to speak, feels terrible. So hold your goddamned horses and try “sucking the nipple” or “stroking the thighs” before you march on down to Clitoral Town.

“There’s always time for lube.”

This might come as news to some of you fellas, but girls need lube too! There is a common misconception that touching the clit is the best way to get a woman all juiced up for sex, but what many don’t realise is that the clit itself needs to be well lubricated. If your woman is not adequately wet by the time you get down there (and dudes, please don’t take it as a criticism. Not all women are naturally gushy, okay?) PLEASE use lube. If you have none, spit can be used (as a last resort). For clitoral stimulation to be pleasurable, the area must be like a lame nineties band: wet, wet, wet.

“I suggest: feather touch.”

But you have selected: POWER DRIVE.

You know how guys jerk off, right? Like they’re using their dick to jackhammer concrete? That is the WRONG way to touch a clitoris. (By the way, I’m assuming that you can all find the clitoris. If you can’t, please go and look at this film, which I’m sure you’ll find to be very informative).

Now, the clit is very small. Maximum circumference = 1 centimetre. Therefore, if your finger is moving in an area larger than 1 centimetre, you are only touching the clit some of the time. This is annoying! Imagine if some girl was touching your cock, and kept alternating between rubbing the head and then rubbing your belly button. Not painful, perhaps, but definitely not as sexy as it could be. So pay attention and make sure that your finger doesn’t stray!

The second, most important bit, is that the clit is not a button and as such should never be pushed. DO NOT APPLY PRESSURE! If you do this, at best your woman will come too quickly, and at worse she’ll punch you in the face. (But how, you ask, is it possible to touch something without pushing down? The word to remember, my friend, is glide. The tip of your finger should glide gently over the surface of the clit, in tiny, tiny, little circles. This is why lube is important.)

Less is more.

Start with the absolute bare minimum of movement and friction, and work up from there (SLOWLY!). Find out what works for your woman, and maintain whatever it is that you’re doing. Which leads us to:

If she likes it, keep doing the exact same thing.

Don’t try to be fancy by increasing speed, or changing the direction of your tiny circles, or ANYTHING. Just keep doing precisely what you were doing to get her going, and don’t change it. For boys, faster + harder usually = better, but this is not the case for girls. So if it looks like she’s gonna come, for the love of god don’t change what you were doing – unless you don’t want her to come. Which, when done deliberately, is hot, but when done by accident, is more irritating than an Adam Sandler movie.

Please, at least *try* to act interested.

Nothing impedes an orgasm more than knowing that your partner is bored. I’ve literally had boyfriends fall asleep while attempting to get me off. Just so you know, all girls are psychic and can tell what you’re thinking. Twenty minutes of watching while a beautiful woman moans in ecstasy is not a boring thing, so pay attention, goddammit!

Multi-tasking.

Once you feel fairly confident that you’re on the right track with the clit, you can try doing other things at the same time. Having your nipple nibbled while your clit is being stroked is one of the most beautiful feelings imaginable. Also, fingers in the vagina are also fantastic, and if your woman is a certified kinky bitch, a delicately placed finger in or on the ass is also pretty freakin’ good. (Or so I’ve heard…)

The longer it takes, the stronger the orgasm.

If you’ve got a lot of time on your hands, see how long you can draw it out before you let her come. It will drive her wild, it will put you firmly in control, and it will deliver an outrageously powerful orgasm. These are all good things.

For The Win:

• If she squirts, consider this to be the ultimate compliment. Do not go: “ew, gross, girl germs.”
• During cunnilingus, all the same principles apply. It’s actually a little easier, as it’s impossible to exert too much pressure with a tongue, and it’s already wet. For best results, experiment with sucking the clit very gently into your mouth.
• Learn to read body language. Generally, moaning = good, heavy breathing = good, and writhing = good. However, staring blankly at the ceiling, or saying “ow, that hurts” = bad. Perhaps you can ask your woman if she’s enjoying herself on the first couple of occasions, but after that, you should be able to tell.

If this becomes my grand contribution to the internet, and indeed, humanity, I’ll be happy enough. Go forth and pleasure!

Empowerment Fail

Lately I’ve been pondering – is it possible to find a middle ground between being a complete pushover and being a complete bitch?

The obvious answer to this is: ‘yes, of course’.

But it’s not that easy. Since way back, women have been divided into two categories: angels and whores. It’s a simplistic concept, but unfortunately, it’s just as relevant as it was a hundred years ago. Case in point: Christina Aguilera.

Good ol’ Christina. Back when I was an impressionable teen, she was on my TV screen every week, fluttering her eyelashes about being a ‘genie in a bottle’ and needing to be ‘rubbed the right way’ before she’d, er, put out. Record company marketing execs know how lucrative the sweet-and-innocent-girl-next-door routine is, and my what a killing they must have made with innocuous little Christina. (Bitter? Me? It’s just that when I was a teen, these were the type of role models my generation was presented with. Vapid air-headed prick-teasing goody two shoes butter wouldn’t melt in their perfectly pink lip-gloss covered mouths. Utter. Bullshit. Erghhh).

So I was amused to see, on Video Hits one day in my late teens, the image of none other than Christian Aguilera, writhing around in assless chaps, smearing herself in brown-coloured water that appeared to be coming from a flooded toilet, dry-humping big black men, and singing about how she wanted to get ‘dirrty’.

Angel to whore – MTV style.

(A word of caution to all you nubile young pop stars out there; the transition from angel to whore is much easier than the other way round. So think carefully before becoming a whore, because once you’ve shaved off all your hair and flashed your vagina to the paparazzi, there’s kind of no going back. Not mentioning any names.)

The journey from angel to whore is closely linked to age. The older you get, the more tainted you become. It’s inevitable.

Having mentioned this – I had a birthday last week.

Now that I’m ten years on from sixteen, I’ve decided that the cutesy schoolgirl shtick on which I’d relied so heavily as a means of getting attention and being desired, is getting old. So I’ve dyed my hair a normal colour, and I’ve tossed out some items from my wardrobe that were wearing thin, conceptually and literally. The aim was to eliminate all the gimmicks I used to use to lure people into being interested in ugly little me, and see if I could survive on the strength of my, er, charming personality.

I had an inkling that it would work, but nothing could have prepared me for how well it’s been working.

Which places me in a difficult position – one that I had anticipated and knew I’d need to face. As predicted, I’m in an enviable place where I’m going to have to say no to people.

Such a little word to bring about so much consternation.

I’m not the only person in the world to have ever had a problem with the word ‘no’, but hells bells, it’s still really bloody hard.

Case in point: last Saturday night.

A while back, I bought myself a ticket to see Dylan Moran at the State Theatre. The opportunity to see your favourite comedian on your birthday does not present itself often, so when my friends were busy or poor or otherwise, I took the initiative and decided to go by myself. I will admit that seeing a comedian on your own is a little weird, but no matter, I’ve been to concerts on my own before and had a good time, so I figured ‘fuck it, I’m going’.

It was great. Dylan Moran was reliably hilarious, and I didn’t feel overly weird or conspicuous.

At interval, a man walked past my aisle and looked at me. Since I’ve been trialling this whole ‘confidence’ thing, lately I’ve been trying to hold people’s gazes, as opposed to blushing and looking away. So I stared back at him, and there was an slightly too-long moment where our eyes stayed connected.

I didn’t think anything of it.

Then, after the show, as everyone was walking out, that same man sidled up to me. At first I thought he was someone I was supposed to know (like, someone from school or uni that I had forgotten), but after he introduced himself and told me “I couldn’t help noticing that you were here alone” I realised that I was being picked up.

Picked up? Me??

I’m just not used to it. And on all of the occasions in my life when a man has gone out of his way to approach me, I’ve behaved like a nervous, giggling idiot.

Saturday was not much of an exception.

He offered to buy me a drink, which I tentatively accepted. By this stage, I was already feeling indebted to this man – feeling as if I couldn’t possibly hurt his feelings by saying ‘no, I’ve already got plans for tonight’ (which was true).

So we went to a strangely empty bar, where a strange bartender poured us glasses of cheap shiraz for free (because he couldn’t accept my suitor’s credit card), and the whole thing was surreal in a not particularly good way.

I was feeling anxious, apprehensive, uncool.

I always automatically place myself below anyone I meet for the first time. I don’t know why, but I always assume that everyone else is cooler and more interesting than me. So it was jarring when my suitor turned out to be boring, egotistical and narcissistic, and spent the entire time talking at me about his unoriginal idea for a TV series. I could barely get a word in, and when I finally did manage to say something (to mention that I too was a writer, which I would have thought would interest him) he said “oh!” and then proceeded to launch back into his incessant diatribe about how all TV comedies were crap, except, of course, for his.

As I sat there blinking rapidly, thinking about how I didn’t find him at all attractive and was not at all interested in him or his TV show, I was also thinking:

Damn, I really wanted to go to Oxford Street, to meet Whipslave as previously arranged, and now it looks like I’m going to have to sit here all night listening to this tool.

And:

I guess I’m going to have to sleep with him, because he was nice enough to approach me and offer to buy me a drink, even though the drink was free.

And:

I suppose I should give him my phone number, because he seems nice and kind of lonely, and maybe I should just marry him and have three of his children and nurse him into old age, because I feel kind of sorry for him, poor guy.

What the fuck!!!

I mean, I go to all these lengths to announce to the universe that I’m not going to let anyone take advantage of me, and that I was going to be empowered and forthright and unapologetic – only to indebt myself to a man I’d know for all of twenty minutes, just because he was kind enough to pick me up?

It was only sheer luck that after he gave me his phone number, he didn’t ask for mine. And it was only sheer luck that I really did have somewhere else to be, because otherwise I would have had to tell him no, which means that I’d probably still be there now.

GAH!!!

And what’s worse is that even as I write this, five days later, I’m still feeling BAD about not calling him!

Yes, bad! Awful, in fact! I can feel his phone number burning a hole in my sim card, begging to be dialled.

It’s so tempting to think that I’m just no good at this dating game, and I should either just get married or sign myself into a convent and be done with it.

But that’s bullshit and I refuse to be beaten so easily.

I’m sick of being an angel. But I don’t quite feel comfortable with being a whore.

Which leaves me with…?