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Cruising through people's HNT posts this morning quite a few people have mentioned how fall weather means time to say good bye to swimsuit and hello to sweaters, pajamas, and other manner of warm-weather gear.
Call me a rebel but for all the strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff in the Vickie See's catalogs an entire mall full of scratchy lace compares to the beauty, elegance, comfort, or pure erotic allure of falling-off loose knits or pajamas long-washed so soft they stay on only out of habit.
Arms slid inside to help warm a still-chilly back and cool fingertips slipped inside to awaken warm breasts, a hand sandwiched between fuzzy cotton and smooth, curved skin or between soft knit and crinkly hair there's just so much more *there* there.
Mmmm, he sighed.
Photo "Cleanup 002" by Flickr user figleaf (hey, that's me!)
While watching the "shower scenes" in that Sarah Haskins video I started thinking "maybe I should reconsider whether the masturbation euphemism 'rubbing one out' needs... well... reconsideration." I mean, usually I think it's mostly a really great phrase...
But after that video I started getting a cleaning-related connotation of rubbing out not orgasms but stains or spots, which makes it a chore, or, more ominously, non-glamorous and therefore undesirable in the Cosmopolitan/iVillage.com only-about-him universe.
On the other hand, Googling around suggests it's also a term men use (quite a few of the top hits refer to a song and/or rap lyric by a male artist with "rub one out" in the chorus.) Which harks back to Haskin's quip about soapy "hand-jobs" for bathtub spouts.
Still... while it's not as dismissive as "choking the chicken" or "flicking the bean" it's still an awfully perfunctory and utilitarian allusion to what's instead a pretty enjoyable form of personal hygiene.
Ordinarily at this point I'd lightheartedly ask what euphemisms *you* prefer but... y'know, it's a question that's been asked 10,000 times before and there *still* aren't any non-nervous and/or non-clinical and/or non-whimsical and/or non-deprecating. So try something else instead like, I don't know...
Oh wait, got it! *If* I was going to ask for comments on this then instead of asking what you called it I'd ask you to think about something like your most *opposite* of "rubbing one out" masturbation experience. Y'know, the one where you took the most time, put the most into it, really built yourself up and spent what felt like forever just riding in and out of arousal or plateau before finally avalanching into highly contented... well... *rubble!* (Hmmm... rubbling one out? :-))
Anyway, now that I think about it, and if this doesn't seem like too much information, I'd have to say *my* most extended avalanche would have to have been the incredible buildup after my vasectomy reversal, when I wasn't supposed to ejaculate for six weeks so all the nearly microscopic sutures were healed.
The first week or so was no problem. That was all about ice packs and swelling, gingerly walking, gingerly sitting, and gingerly marveling as the incidental bruising subsided. (No cringing necessary -- despite the cliché location it was no worse -- but also no better -- than recovering from any other surgery.) The next week or so wasn't so bad either, even after I'd tapered off the perfectly-adequate pain pills and began to resume normal activities.
Beginning around the fourth week, with two more to go, though, I won't say I was nothing but a walking erection, but... I was pretty preoccupied. And that's where, incidentally, I have to concur with Kink in Exile's enjoyment of Teasing and Denial. Because by the end of week five I was positively simmering and *still* had to play the total willpower game. (Made worse, incidentally, by the knowledge that most surgeon's didn't think it was necessary to wait so long... but who wants to go through that kind of surgery if you guess wrong?)
Anyway by the end of that time I remember how *intensely* relieving, although necessarily non-orgasmically so, it was just to lie back and just run my fingers up one side and down the other and then back again. It would just send shockwaves through me. I remember not daring let my partner do anything like that because by then I was just *so* hair-triggered that the tiniest misstep would have rumbled me all the way down the slope. But *wow* did it feel good!
And when the day *finally* arrived? I won't say it was exactly worth the wait but, and I definitely wouldn't hold out again for six weeks just to experience it again. But *wow* did that feel nice!
So. Not sure how I strayed so far from cleaning metaphors, but the point being we don't have to talk about it as though it was spot removal. :-)
Well, the weather's changed, I've only got two more big projects (ok, one major -- packing up the basement for an entirely non-cosmetic but much-needed seismic retrofit -- and one minor) and, thankfully, no more trips(!), and I hope no more heat-waves before my family returns to a normal school-year routine. Almost out of the woods isn't *out* of the woods but I'm finally feeling a little less frazzled and consequently *way* more communicative. Apologies for being so out of communication email-wise, comment-reply-wise, and in person as well. Again I'm not out of the woods yet but, maybe because it's finally raining properly again I'm up for a *little* non-seriousness and so, via Elisa of Fairy Flutters, a very late TMI Tuesday reply.
1. Are you truly politically correct? Be honest.
Yeah, pretty much. And by the way "politically correct" doesn't mean perfect. (If nothing else, kyriarchy makes that nearly impossible anyway.) What it *does* mean, though, is owning your shit when you find yourself busted. Or when you bust yourself. And then cleaning up any mess you made as best you can -- while recognizing "as best you can" may not be enough.
2. Will you ever streak in public during rush hour?
Hmm... Osbasso's announced an HNT Olympics theme for this week so... Eh, probably not. For one thing I'm not sure how I'd photograph myself.
On the other hand while the memories have grown unnervingly dim I certainly streaked a number of public venues during the original streaking fad, including somewhere downtown area in Chapel Hill, NC., a (Unitarian) church service, and numerous large and small parties. Oh, and I think an interstate exit ramp in broad daylight when I knew a bunch of friends traveling in a separate car were about to pass us.
But would I ever streak in public during rush hour *now?* I'd need a pretty good reason, and a really great venue (I can say it's *way* more fun with friends around) but... yeah, maybe.
3. Would you ever do something sexual in public (more than 20 people around)?
You'd have to define "sexual." I've been *covertly* sexual in public places but not in a way other people would notice.
Does waking up naked with another person in a sleeping bag and discovering that what we'd imagined was the privacy of a forest but was actually someone's back yard... with the trail of clothes we'd carelessly shed the night before scattered halfway up the hill? Fortunately the homeowners weren't looking out their picture window but we certainly noticed them. (Yikes!)
I've also been sexual in a dark room where a lot of other coupled-up people were also being pretty sexual, but since we were all sort of into each other it wasn't like anyone was putting on a show -- there just wasn't anywhere more private to retire to. So I don't think that counts either.
Oh, and I've been *very* sexual in a couple of very large crowds (for instance a late-night outdoor concert, a fireworks display) but again only very discreetly. (It's not about the fear of being caught, it's about the excitement of not being noticed.)
But, again, as for *would* I openly have sex in front of 20 or more people? Eh, I wouldn't rule it out, especially if it really spun a partner's pinwheel, but I definitely wouldn't seek it out either.
4. Do you ever not have good table manners?
Sadly no. Ok table manners yes. But definitely not great. I'm a little self-conscious about it.
5. Do you ever fantasize about a public sexual act? Describe.
Not so much. As I mentioned above I've been sexual in public settings but it's not something I fantasize about.
Bonus (as in optional): Have you ever gone through a true sexual fantasy? Describe.
Oh yes! Although maybe it's that I have pretty achievable fantasies that mostly involve highly exciting but not terribly outrageous fantasies about people I've had crushes on anyway. But to say I've gone through fantasies is sort of putting it backwards -- my best fantasies are memories of things I've already done.
And as far as that goes, as you might expect from someone raised inside the "no-sex" class paradigm but not highly enamored of it many of my best memories are of times when partners took the initiative, seduced me, surprised me, showed me something new, pushed *my* limits, or otherwise shook the scales from my eyes. Going back to item #1 I *really* need to own that I *still* believe way too much about sex that turns out to be utterly, well, incorrect. :-)
Details will have to wait for another, preferably cool, rainy Pacific-Northwest day when I can finally sit down long enough to collect my thoughts without interruption. (Sigh!)
I shall go into a hare,
With sorrow and sighing and mickle care,
And I shall go in the Divel's name,
Aye, till I come home again.
I know the truth -- give up all other truths!
No need for people anywhere on earth to struggle.
Look -- it is evening, look, it is nearly night:
what do you speak of, poets, lovers, generals?
The wind is level now, the earth is wet with dew,
the storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet.
And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we
who never let each other sleep above it.
1915 by Marina Tsvetaeva
For the members of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church.
For those who share their beliefs.
For those who oppose their beliefs.
Oh dear, I may be no fun at all but this is a no-brainer to answer. I actually saw a pair of edible panties at a "bachelor" party a long time ago and can you say "fruit leather?" In other words not even boring!
No panties, on the other hand, are just bogglingly nice! Not so much in the classic/cliché sense of "nothing up my sleeve skirt" effect, although that's nice. What I'm thinking more about is more like no panties in bed when we're half asleep and spooning together. I know the middle of July isn't the best time to think about it in the Northern hemisphere, but those of you at the antipodes might appreciate that I can warm up more than my side of the bed and covers. No panties under, say, yoga pants is also a nice, especially when it's *not* a surprise because we got dressed together and we're only dressed and downstairs at all because that's where the kitchen is and we both know that as soon as coffee's ready we'll quickly drift back up stairs, a trail of clothes and maybe morning newspaper sections on the stairs behind us.
Actually the one nice thing about edible undies, I suppose, is that they're easy to tear off Last-Tango-In-Paris style. Though to be honest there's a trick to tearing off regular panties, assuming they're soft and old enough to be that kind of expendable. Although there have to be 10,000 other perfectly enjoyable ways to take real panties off.
And then there's the question of what *you'd* rather find under a nice pair of jeans. There's also the lexical quandary of describing how exactly it could be delightful rather than a disappointment to find nothing under my jeans. :-)
Still following up on the twenty questions I found at Amorous Rocker of Not Your Average Chick that I decided to answer one at a time instead of all in a rush. So...
12. Dirty Talking or Dirty Talking To:
This is probably going to be short. And maybe even sweet. I can write dirty words, and certainly *think* dirty thoughts. I can even *role-play* talking dirty if I have a little time to think about it. Although I tend to prefer innuendo to the actual seven dirty words. And of course there's all the things two or more people can say when they're flirting.
But past that? Pretty much by the time you have your hand have moved anywhere on my body but my shoulders I just have a *very* difficult time forming complete words. Let alone complete sentences.
It's not that I become clumsy any other way. Quite the opposite really. It's that the more physical I become the more my ability to express myself migrates from centers of speech into my body -- my hands especially but my arms and legs, my mouth, my torso and cock.
I still have ears, though, and so if *you* can still talk dirty I'm likely to respond *very* enthusiastically.
Update: Outside the scope of the question I'm just as enthusiastic about soft sighs or sharp intakes of breath.
Photo by Flickr user Christy Bassman. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Still following up on the twenty questions I found at Amorous Rocker of Not Your Average Chick that I decided to answer one at a time instead of all in a rush. So...
11. Role play or Reality:
Oh this one's easy when you look at it literally. *Playing* a pirate is one thing...
Being a pirate is all fun and games,
Till somebody loses a hand;
It spurts and it squirts and it jolly well hurts,
Pain only a pirate could stand.
The fash'nable look is a nice metal hook,
But now you can't play in the band;
Being a pirate is all fun and games,
Till somebody loses a hand.
I know that sounds light-hearted but I'm actually pretty serious. The difference between role playing and reality has a bit of bearing on how a heck of a lot of people seem to get off, and how that plays out in the rest of the world.
Making up a trivial or imaginary excuse for a pre-sex flogging you'll both enjoy is *extravagantly* different from an actual tied-to-a-pirate-ship-mast *flogging.* Pretending you're strangers meeting in a lounge-lizardy hotel bar and having wild, drunken, unprotected sex in the bathroom or parking lot is pretty different from, you know, actually having unprotected sex with a stranger. And while peeping in your informed partner's window as they undress, then sneaking into the room once they turn the lights out is kinky fun, peeping a random stranger's windows, let alone sneaking into their rooms, is more than a little bit criminal.
So! If I ever took your wrist in my hand in a darkened room, and tugged you towards the moonlight filtering in through old venetian blinds with a gruffly whispered "what have we here," you'd know exactly what was going to happen next... because we'd have negotiated at least the general outline together first.
Kit Roskelly has a "Kink 101" article up at the F-Word. The article is pitched at the perfect level for feminists who are concerned, but not deadset-convinced, that BDSM violates feminist principles. If you're kinky, feminist, and sick to death of having to argue about this issue, Roskelly's article is not for you. But if you're on the fence, it's worth checking out.
I'm not a kink expert by any means; I just like to whack my boyfriend with things, like to be whacked with things, and have attended a few kink events. Most of what Roskelly says strikes me as true and helpful; I especially like "feminism should not have a prescriptive stance on female sexuality" and "Consent is an absolute requirement of sexual interaction". You could nitpick about the safewords (you don't need to say 'red light' if you have some other way of communicating that things are going really really wrong, and you should probably agree on a safe tap before anybody stuffs anything in anybody else's mouth) but the basic idea of safewords is pretty sound. Both partners need a way to say, "stop" and be taken seriously.
I have one substantive criticism of Roskelly's article. (This criticism is not new. Trinityva, who writes at SM Feminist and The Strangest Alchemy, has made this point repeatedly; my favorites are here and here.) Twice in her article, Roskelly urges kinky feminists to be mindful of the social context in which their desires arise. But what does mindfulness entail, exactly? Are we supposed to seek the reasons for our kinky fantasies and desires? At this point, I don't think anybody really knows what causes people to have one set of sexual tastes rather than another. And if you did know what caused your sexual desires, what would you do with that information? Learning that your rape fantasies are the result of childhood trauma wouldn't necessarily eliminate your rape fantasies.
There are things in the neighborhood to be mindful of. Are you really satisfied by the kinky sex you're having, or are you doing it because you feel pressured? (And being in the dominant role doesn't mean that you're necessarily satisfied by the sex; submissive people can be very good at manipulating their partners into indulging fetishes they don't really get off on, in a way that's not reciprocal. Bitchy Jones' kinky sexism category has a depressingly large number of examples.) It's also a good idea to reflect on how your expression of your desires affects other people. Does the person next to you faint at the idea of needles? If so, it's not very respectful to play with needles right in front of them. Does the event you're organizing have pictures of naked women, and only women, on the walls? If so, you may be alienating some of the women who attend. In my experience, BDSM people are already more mindful about this stuff than average, but extra reminders never hurt.
I'm on board with mindfulness if it's meant to apply to actions. But what's inside your head is yours.
Photo by Flickr user tapperboy. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Still following up on the twenty questions I found at Amorous Rocker of Not Your Average Chick that I decided to answer one at a time instead of all in a rush. So...
10. Bite or Suck:
Usually when someone says "bite me" they're being... well, non-gender specific, maybe but still not exactly polite. On the other hand they also say "you suck" so I guess that's a wash. Which is sort of a nuisance since both can feel wonderful under the right circumstances.
When I was very young and learning about sex from a variety of pre-1960 and therefore not terribly helpful medical, anthropological, and psychological texts (with the occasional almost-a-stroke-book pseudo-academic works thrown in) I learned the following about the Kama Sutra: "The book contains five chapters about what we'd consider "normal" foreplay and sixteen chapters about biting, scratching, and slapping one's partners for erotic effect." And yes, I'm sure I have the exact numbers wrong but not the approximate proportions. It didn't sound very tempting** and so I generally left off all that.
My loss, as I've learned since beginning to read other anonymous and then not as anonymous bloggers of kink.
Still, given a choice between the two I'd choose suck. And lick. And kiss. And mouth. And breathe warm breath across spots tender and mild. The latter, by the way, seems to work as well on recently spanked, bitten, or scratched spots as not... but not in my case if I'd agreed to pick only one. :-)
And again that's given *my* choice of one. A choice I'd rather not make.
I haven't been bitten much but if it's not oversharing once you arouse me to a certain point I adore having my nipples bitten. But then at that point I adore having them sucked as well. You hear every now and then people praising little nips during fellatio. My experience has been that it's... not so great. The side of my neck works well and so does the very top inside of my thighs. And while I've really enjoyed being bitten on the arms and shoulders it wasn't the sensation itself but the shared level of emotion, combined with a willingness to sacrifice a little comfort in the interest of not alerting parents.
Sucking though? I love, love, love fingers and toes. When I suck yours. When you suck mine. Not hard so much as warmly, wetly, and deepy... mmm, that's lovely almost any time. Earlobes? Yours or mine it's also wonderful. The inside of arms, yes, and all up and down the throat and shoulders and neck, too.
Breasts? I actually don't go in so much for sucking, or at least not the classic baby-nursing style though it's a lot of fun to slurp as much of your nipples and breasts as I can with a gentle suction and then swirling my tongue around and around. And around. But I love licking breasts even without suction at least as much. I don't know about you but I've noticed most people I've tried it with go deeper into haze when I kiss, or lick, or stroke the curves of the breast just below and to the outside rather than right over nipples. And, as I mentioned above, there's blowing gently over wet flesh first to chill it and then re-warm it again with hands or lips or tongue.
And speaking of lips and tongue, does anyone else enjoy licking and sucking their partner's lips during kissing? Gently biting there works wonders too, or would if not for that darn choice. It's always the lower lip that gets the mention for sucking but I've noticed the inside of most people's upper lip is a marvelous erogenous zone for that.
And of course there's all the different non-bite-y things one can do during cunnilingus. I used to think that eating a partner was end-of-the-world, I-could-die-happy paradise, and while I've gotten over that a *little* in the sense that I'm no longer outright fetishistic about it I still... mmm... what was I saying? Oh yeah, something I've wound up doing especially during side-by-side (as opposed to top or bottom) sixty-nine, you know, where you're each pillowing the other's head on your thigh, is gently slurping... ok I mean *sucking* an inner labia deep into my mouth and then swirling the flat of my tongue across the inner surface. Like maybe a lot of people I can get pretty distracted during sixty-nine but doing that doesn't take a lot of concentration. The only risk is that it tends to really distract the other person.
As for me? Well, fellatio tends to work in waves for me (I think this is true for a lot of people during oral, men and women) so one minute every nerve ending is on fire and a minute later I feel almost numb... although fortunately after another minute it's back to... where was I again? Anyway, when I'm cycled down it's wonderful when you pop me out of your mouth and tongue or slurp on the large, loose, soft vein along the side. You're not going exactly lose my attention no matter what but that's definitely going to keep it till my tide comes in again.
Anyway, I'm not going to say of biting that I could take it or leave it -- there are too many nice ways to do it to give it up completely. But sucking? I'll take that in a heartbeat. And give it just as quickly. Any time.
How about you?
Wonderful how your undies look stretched tight
Around your hips, yes, or
Around your thighs, or
Around your knees, and
Especially
Around your ankles
(24 words)
Still following up on the twenty questions I found at Amorous Rocker of Not Your Average Chick that I decided to answer one at a time instead of all in a rush. So...
9. Rough or Gentle:
Hey this is a fun question. I'll start out by mentioning a lesson I learned from... somewhere a long time ago about roughness and gentleness between the sexes. (Yes, even I agree that anatomy creates *some* differences between men and women.) Anyway, the advise was to keep in mind that men tend to touch women's clitorises they way they like to be touched (very firmly) while women tend to touch men's cocks the way *they* like to be touched (fairly lightly.)
Learning that worked wonders for me both ways. Oh yeah, and here's the rub... doh! sorry about the pun! Anyway, one consequence of each of us touching the other the way *we'd* like to be touched is that it really *only applies to cocks and clitorises and not our entire bodies, our brains, or our lives! Women touching men gingerly doesn't mean you're hung up, you're doing exactly what makes sense. Similarly men aren't necessarily knuckle-dragging Neanderthals, we're just doing what we think would work best. (And yes, communication can work wonders there.) But the thing is that just because we like you to hold the shafts of our cocks much more firmly doesn't mean we won't melt the same way you may if you softly nibble our necks. And just because you want us to stroke your vulvas way more gently than we stroke ourselves doesn't mean the rest of you is made out of fragile flower stems either.
So that's one part of rough vs. gentle.
Another? Sometimes I want to send the buttons of your blouse flying and pulling the tattered sleeves down to your elbows to pin your arms as I devour you where your shoulders reach your neck, other times I want to spend an hour going button by button and warmly, wetly kissing each inch of newly bared skin.
Sometimes, when you're crampy, I want to deeply knuckle the bones of your hips and tailbone, and then a minute later I want to gently rest my palm over your lower belly to let the warmth of my hand soak through your skin.
Sometimes I want to gently fingertip your nipples till they crinkle, and then gently soften them again with my warm palms. Other times, when your lips are molten hot against mine and our breathing is short and sharp I want to maul your breasts with open hands, and catch your nipples hard between my fingers.
Other times (ok, more often than not) I'd rather tip our hips towards each other so knowingly, slowly, and so gently expert in our familiarities that the distinction of inside and out, while exquisite, are almost impossible to tell.Every now and then, though, I might want to pull you up to your knees by your naked hips, lean over you with my bristled chin scratching your neck and cheek and gravel pirate-like about being unsure whether to have you like a woman or like a boy as the curved underside of my cock presses against your perineum.
Sometimes there's the rough carpet in the back of a station wagon or van when the weather outside is frightful. Other times it's nice to feel air wafting gently across us while we're underneath a single sheet while the weather outside's delightful.
All in all I'd hate having to choose just one. You?
Photo by Flickr user goosmurf. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Still following up on the twenty questions I found at Amorous Rocker of Not Your Average Chick that I decided to answer one at a time instead of all in a rush. So...
8. Fast or Slow:
Hmmm... another very open-to-interpretation question! The very short answer? Slow please. At least at first. And at middle. After too. Middle to end? That's *very* circumstantial then isn't it?
Longer? I can be very fast about "bases," cupping your ass sometimes before we even kiss, lazily contouring your breasts, shoulders, and arms soon after we begin to kiss... pulling your nearer leg towards me. But then if that's fast, well, I also tend to wait longer to kiss -- I'm not obsessive about it but I *really* like the "three date" rule. And usually by three dates you've got an idea what each other's interests and boundaries are.
Another kind of fast vs. slow? I'm getting over it but if I slip I can wind up taking forever... sometimes in a good way as in the time I'll spend kissing from your collarbones to your inner knees. Other times not so great as in your "gagging for it" as Abby Lee put it and I'm oblivious. (Hey, if I wasn't the world's biggest dupe of men's dominant no-sex class paradigm would I be so impatient to subvert it?) That's where you can just grab me by the hand, or ears, and say what under some circumstances be outright romantic: "do you really need a hint?" (That's often all the hint I need.)
Another kind of fast or slow? One of the funny things about porn is how *fast* everybody goes. It's like an aerobics class. I could just be living in subjective time but it never seems like I move anything like that? (It's off topic a bit but I also don't go in much for that "thump-thump-thump," banging away, no clitoral contact sort of sex, at least not once we've settled in for a stretch. I'm pretty likely to roll you up on top of me and... um... sort of trapping your pubic bone between my pubis and the base of my erection while my hands on your hips to feel how you're moving and then matching your hip's movements with my own.)
Another kind? Is there anything nicer than taking the time to dip, dip, dip, going an inch further each time? Wow I love how that feels!
Another kind? I really enjoy oral sex and have since before I'd done anything else... or even anything at all! If I'm *too* slow to move on you can grab my hands, which I'll usually have up stroking your belly or breasts, and pull me up.
If we do tie-up games I'm usually *very* quick to untie you after, and should you tie me instead I'd prefer the same courtesy.
It's funny but I'm not sure quickies count either way -- at least for me they're never so much spontaneous as capping off a moment where both parties have been thinking, and possibly "no-we-shouldn't-there's-no-time"ing it for a while first. And so if the quickies themselves are fast the lead up (and the implicit promise of a long follow-up some time later) can be marvelously slow.
Let's see... oh yeah, and for readers who've said they enjoy tapotment... ok, percussive foreplay... ok, spanking, I'm inclined to begin with slow massage and then fast and very light, loose-fingered slaps to get your circulation going, then assuming we hadn't negotiated something different first I'd go pretty slowly, each swat followed by slow rubbing to ease the sting (in my hand too, remember.)
Oh, a final fast or slow: even though I've sort of since learned better, after sex I'm *very* fast to jump up and bring back a soft, warm washcloth. Gently sink your teeth in my lip or keep your legs around me if you'd rather I slowed down. On the other hand I'm usually exhilarated afterwards and therefore I'd probably be very slow to fall asleep even if wriggling, snuggling, and talking after sex *wasn't* fun.
Still following up on the twenty questions I found at Amorous Rocker of Not Your Average Chick that I decided to answer one at a time instead of all in a rush. So...
7. Thigh highs or Bodystocking:
Ok, this sort of harks back to the <<
That said I've never been a big fan of fan of body stockings. It's not that I'm *overly* obsessed with skin-on-skin contact, in fact I really enjoy the sort of bondage-y pleasures of laying a silky, satiny, or (yuppie-style) high thread-count sheet over a partner and hand-smoothing it over all the contours of her body, tucking it under her arms, then torso, then under one side and then the other of each leg, and then stroking her through the slippery-soft fabric that only slowly shifts the fabric away, uncovering her only an inch at a time till the last whip sheet falls away leaving nothing between her and the warm skin of my hands, and arms, and chest, and legs, and belly and cock.
But given a choice (and it's not always my choice since some people feel slippery playful in them) I still take a pass on body stockings, even fishnet-y ones. I've always been very impatient to get them off when someone wears them. Thigh highs, on the other hand, play into my serious preference for making out for hours. The few inches of bare skin between stockings and undies under a skirt or dress... the transition, I mean, from fingertips on that sort of zizzly-smooth texture of hose to the soft, soft skin to gathered gathered elastic legbands to the soft, humid texture of body heat captured behind cotton or satin... and when you're both grownups and have all the time in the world there on the couch or in the car? Oh my that's lovely. So yeah, definitely thigh-highs just for that.
Bonus: I know they're appallingly 80s but when I was in college hanging around socially with a bunch of dancers I thought their leg warmers and leotards were the total bee's (warm) knees! Around the same time that movie Flash Dance, or Dirty Dancing came out and then suddenly everybody was wearing them, including over jeans (!?!?) and then everyone stopped. Except for actual, you know, dancers. On whom they look great because they're sexy and *functional.*
Still following up on the twenty questions I found at Amorous Rocker of Not Your Average Chick that I decided to answer one at a time instead of all in a rush. So...
6. Dominate or Be Dominated:
Sorry, dominate. Or top. Or whatever you want to call it. In social situations I'm a bit wordy (duh, you think?) but otherwise I can evidently be frustratingly deferential. During sex the deference translates to something more like cue-reading or attentiveness but otherwise if I'm sure you're not just consenting but enthusiastic then I'm highly liable to lift you, hold you, turn you, undress you, kiss you, lick you, and just generally do whatever I can think of to melt you till there's nothing left but a smile.
*If* I know you're into it (it's been a *very* long time since I'd feel comfortable just having sex with someone without first exchanging enough ideas, fantasies, interests, and concerns) I'm purringly content to be even more dominant.
I really enjoy taking turns though, not so much submitting for a whole session but switching back and forth is great, matching and riffing off each other's fancies. And wow have I learned a lot of cool stuff, and enjoyed some genuinely transporting sensations that way! But if you're inclined to relax my inclination is still to retake the initiative.
In other words, if you don't mind I'd rather dominate. :-)
Still following up on the twenty questions I found at Amorous Rocker of Not Your Average Chick that I decided to answer one at a time instead of all in a rush. So...
5. Bad Sex or No Sex:
No sex. No question. Between hard feelings, disappointed expectations, and the fact that good sex is too often good only for one party, bad sex just has a terrible habit of spawning more bad sex. So going into it knowing it would be one way or the other? No sex please.
Of course there's always "promise for next time" sex, almost like a quickie, where maybe even neither of you get very far but it's just sort of like sealing a deal "for later..." and if you're both serious that can be pretty nice. But then by definition I guess that's closer to no sex than bad sex so... still no sex.
I dunno. Don't you think good sex is sort of by-definition worth the wait?
Following up on the twenty questions I found at Amorous Rocker of Not Your Average Chick that I decided to answer one at a time instead of all in a rush. So...
4. In the Jacuzzi or In Bed:
Mmm, I might have to reconsider the indoor/outdoor question. One of the most, um, vivid times I've had sex was... ok, *half* in a jacuzzi. And... let's just say I happen to know that if, after a great deal of increasingly wet and almost-swallowing-each-other kissing, you happened to turn around and put your knees on the bench with your belly on the edge of the tub with your crossed arms supporting yourself on the deck, and if stood behind you and leaned over, my hands next to yours and my cheek resting between your shoulderblades or, if I could just reach, my lips were on your neck and shoulders... then if you just happened to rock your hips so one of the medium-strength jets was directed down and over your mons, then I also happen to know that between the thrumming of the jets, and the champagne-y bubbles rising up over our joined bodies, neither one of us would have to move very much to have, I happen to know, an amazingly memorable experience.
That said? For all that there are more memorable things you can do in a bed than in a tub so, for the long haul anyway, bed. (Also if it was our first time then I'd almost always say bed.)
Following up on the twenty questions I found at Amorous Rocker of Not Your Average Chick that I decided to answer one at a time instead of all in a rush. We'll see how that works. And so...
3. Outdoor Sex or Indoor Sex:
Ooh, good question! Too bad it's either/or because while I've enjoyed sex outdoors every time I've done it... but in my area at least there just aren't that many days, or nights, when it's at all warm enough to do it. Also, hmm... does in a car count as "outside?" No, I think while given a chance I'd always go for outdoors if the opportunity permitted, I'm going to pick indoors.
And it's not like "indoors" is all that limiting. There's the bedroom, sure, and the bed's always a lovely "comfort-food" choice... and actually a nice spot for something new. And of course there's a less-than-subtle difference between *on* the bed and *over* it isn't there? And speaking for myself, anyway, there's that... almost kinky association I have with kneeling *next* to the bed, a partner's feet thrumming on my shoulders and my cock so hard from the thrill of it all that it bumps or nearly scrapes the cold underside of the bed rail with each beat of my heart. Luckly that degree of vicarious excitement also signals the moment to rise... but not too far as I wetly kiss my way higher.
And that's just the bedroom. "Inside" also means the bath, the shower, the hall with maybe a mirrored closet opposite, the living room, a TV room with every pillow in the house tossed on the floor between the couch and the set. Goodness knows there's the kitchen with everything from to chocolate syrup to ice cubes to spatulas (for the so-inclined.) And of course there's the laundry with the possibility of subtle (the drier) and less subtle (spin cycles.) Even the basement and garage present their various opportunities.
And *that's* just "inside" in one's home or apartment! What do *you* think about when you hear "inside?"
Following up on the twenty questions I found at Amorous Rocker of Not Your Average Chick that I decided to answer one at a time instead of all in a rush. We'll see how that works. And so...
2. Leather or PVC:
Leather for sure. I totally get that some people enjoy the scents of vinyl and rubber, and get off on the slippery humidity that accumulates underneath it's impermeable barriers. I'm not a big fan of hot weather or humidity though so I think leather, which is breathable and slightly absorbent, is a more comfortable material.
Plus there are other nice things you can do with leather... more particularly there are some other nice things *I* can do with leather. (In my youth I went through a formal leatherworker apprenticeship, and besides hand-tooling and upholstering, belt-fitting, and bag making, stitching and dying and finishing, our shop made the occasional specially fitted items, and while my employer and her husband always did the *really* special fittings, she taught me that there are rougher and gentler ways to measure a person intimately and that it's important to assess what the customer is looking for. But I digress...)
I'll tell you my little secret though, about maybe mildest but most fulfilling fetish: my choice between leather or pvc, just like my choice between cotton or lace, is nothing at all so that I can fingernail stroke someone from the soles of her feet to the backs of her knees, to the curves of her bum, to the small of her back (with a pause for a meticulous and exquisite back scratching), to the nape of her neck.
I don't much care for my own semen although I don't *not* care for it either. And so I don't mind kissing after coming at all. I'm pretty sure I've said so but since it's been too long do you know what I really *really* like instead?
Unless we'd agreed I was to come that way I'd always, always rather wait till you were just instants from toppling me before (sometimes rather desperately, always very passionately) pulling you up so we could kiss. Because... I don't know... it might be from the heat, or excitement, or activity, or I don't know what but there's something about fellatio that makes people's mouths wonderfully soft and full and *very* nice to kiss.
Trading back and forth that way, first eating and then being eaten, with date-night-heavy kissing in between is just so deluxe. And yeah, sooner or later it has to end, but why not later? And if when later came you coaxed my fall into your mouth the way I felled you with mine? Kissing after that's great too.
Photo by Flickr user {axom}. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Amorous Rocker of Not Your Average Chick found a meme that looked like fun from Another Suburban Mom so I thought I'd give it a whirl. But rather than answer them all in the usual twenty-five words or less way (though hmm, maybe a few answers will be 25 words or less) I thought I'd do each as a separate post. We'll see how that works. And so...
1. Chocolate or Whipped Cream:
That's always a fun question. First of all given a choice if I was going to lick anything off of you my *first* choice would always be, well, *you!* Next, if I could cheat just a little, would be not chocolate exactly but pure cocoa butter -- it feels wonderful going on, it melts right at body temperature, as long as you're not allergic it won't irritate your skin or any other parts, it smells wonderful in a more subtle-than-chocolate way that I think goes well with your natural scents, it feels wonderful, creates just the perfect combination of friction and slide for pressure in... places where that can feel *very* nice.
If I had to pick from just the two, though, my second choice would still be a nice, not-too-hard chocolate that at least if it was me I'd want to use on you, or me for that matter, the same way as cocoa butter. Warmed to almost skin temperature and then slowly, sensuously crayoning impossibly thin, fragrant, sweet layers on each other and then stroking or kissing or licking it off.
And either way I don't see using it chocolate-syrup-like in the usual places do you? I'm thinking tracing... almost massaging muscles of the shoulders and, especially, neck. Of the soles of your feet, the muscles of the calf and the large tendons over the soft flesh of the inner thighs. And always, always, followed almost instantly by soft fingers, firm palms, wet kisses, or warm breath.
And if all this talk of this gentle chocolate play sounds a little, err, vanilla? Well of course, the alternative is *whipped* cream. Which, when not too, um, sweet, has an allure of its own.
Photo by Flickr user Daniels View. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Z of The Naked Truth begins her post with what to me was always one of the most wonderfully erotic events in the summertime south...
This morning when I woke I thought it was too early. The room was darker than it usually is even at pre-dawn: I checked the reflection in the picture opposite my bed, and I could see that I had left the shutter up and the window open, as I always do, even in the depths of winter, which this is so patently not. During the night the rain that we longed for in the sticky heat of yesterday afternoon must have come.
The daytime temperature here in the Northwest is well above the unusual-even-for-her 40 degrees Fahrenheit it's been stuck at lately but I know much of the rest of the country's been laid low by heat. (Even in Alaska it's been in the 70s.)
Z goes on to talk about the pleasure of stroking tenderly soft skin (very nicely, definitely read it) and I remembered how when humidity and heat combine there's no such thing as soft or smooth skin because it's all trumped by stickiness such that even tender caresses tend to chaff and rub. I know other people feel otherwise but for me heat and humidity and libido don't play well together in sentences without, perhaps, the addition of the word "not" somewhere between them.
Anyway, remembering the relief of wind and pressure drop and lower temperatures that summer rain brings, and how even if for just until the sun comes back out our skin responds to a lover's touch, I read "During the night the rain that we longed for..." and
Wow, funny how such ordinary phrases can be so welcome.
In his book, Coming to our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World through Mindfulness, John Kabat-Zinn describes this revealing scene of a group of very busy adults.
I once led a mindfulness workshop at a business conference in Chicago. About fifty people in suits showed up. I opened our time together by suggesting that we simply sit together for a few minutes with no instructions and no agenda. I suggested that we let go of whatever expectations and stories we were bringing into the room about the workshop and why we were there (after all, something brought them there, no one was in the room by accident), put down our coffee cups and newspapers, and just take a few minutes to allow ourselves to feel how things were for us in that moment, however they were. A few people started crying.
In the conversation afterward, I asked what the tears were about. One executive said, "I never ever do anything without an agenda." Heads nodded in agreement. Just the words, "let's sit without an agenda," were liberating, releasing dammed-up feelings of grief they didn't know they had.
The people in that conference room may have been masters of hiding those damned-up feelings of grief from themselves, but I wonder how successful they were in hiding them from their children. When the topic of teen suicide is discussed, the causes typically cited are drugs, the influence of fatalistic song lyrics, bullying and the never-ending pressure for grades. One cause that is often ignored is the despair that young people experience when they look at the lives that their parents lead. A teenager will hear his father angrily rehash the office politics, see the weariness in her mother's face from the long hours at the job, mark the hours his parents spend staring vacantly at the television, and ask, "Is this what my life will be like?""
That sense of despair is what I recalled when reading a post written by Her of Desire X entitled, Generation-Y. Coming of age in the late 1980's, Her is, by her own account ...a woman without a generation. Or maybe just without a cause. The radicalism of the 1960's came to Her in a watered-down version from teachers, erstwhile hippies, who
...waxed poetic about Abbie Hoffman. Our response, isn't Abbie a girl's name? The Black Panthers, The White Panthers. Was it the Chicago Seven or Eight? Had to remember that for the test.
In this post, Her gives us a snapshot of her mother who, in her own rebellious youth, was anything but watered-down.
My mother drove across country in a VW bus packed full of hippies, Grace Slick's White Rabbit blaring out of the window, scaring all-fuck out of the Provincials, swearing that the only way to truly change the world was to get naked and perform an impromptu, ad lib, acid induced version of Major Barbara on the courthouse lawn, and then get arrested for public indecency and inciting a riot. When her father drove cross country to post her bail he found that she had changed the name of the father in Major Barbara to his name. He looked at his daughter, standing in a holding cell with her hippie friends, wearing only a jacket that someone had given her and, staring straight into her eyes, said unflinchingly, 'I do not know this woman. This is not my daughter.' She swore she had seen the world with New eyes through a glistening ball of liquid on the end of a medicine dropper. She marched on Washington. She went to Woodstock. She was turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.
It is that firebrand quality that Her treasures in a friend destined for Berkeley and a major in Women's Studies:
I loved her because she loved my mind. I adored her because she called me brilliant. She was a radical, a rebel, a warrior: a simulacrum of my mother in her youth.
When Her announces that she wants to attend Berkeley, her firebrand of a mother objects, calling the university ...Berserkly from the drugs and craziness she had experienced there during her past.. But Her is determined. She begins writing a paper that will not only cure her generation of complacency, but her mother as well.
There were also some old photos of her tucked haphazardly into shoe boxes and pushed to the back of her closet. One in particular had always been my favorite, she was smiling, dressed in hippie beads, a brown mini-skirt and moccasin boots, her long blond hair a tangled mess. A too-big Army camouflage jacket was draped over her small shoulders. She had a joint in one hand and was making a peace sign with the other. She was beautiful, angelic, but her eyes were fierce, intense. She was happy. When I see this photo I'm always reminded of Raymond Carver's Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year. I've wanted my whole life to meet this girl. To know her. To be her friend and companion in chaos.
But when Her's mother reads the paper, Her does not catch a glimpse of that beautiful girl in the photograph. She is face to face with a woman who is ..pleased. Not excited, not enflamed. Her does not go to Berkeley:
Life took some turns for me that sent me in other directions.
I won't rehash it. What followed has already been written.
The Church of Coke Whores 1
The Church of Coke Whores 2
Be warned. The Church of Coke Whores offers only one sacrament: Extreme Unction.
I referred to Her's mother as a firebrand, which is defined as someone who deliberately foments trouble. But it is the word's second meaning that I had in mind: a piece of wood that has been burned or is burning. How long can one woman remain on fire if she does not have the support of others? For many of the women who came of age in the sixties, who were responsible for raising children in the seventies and eighties, there was little support for that rebel flame in the home or the corporate workplace or the university. Little support but a ready supply of misogyny, as the poet Sharon Olds found when, in the ninth month of pregnancy, she arrives for the review of her dissertation. The men who will review Olds' dissertation may have been so courteous as to offer a pregnant woman a seat on a crowded subway train. But they show no such compunction for the jabs they deliver to Olds' other child, the one she fleshed from experience and learning.
When I walked into the seminar room
with my dissertation, our son floated in out
before me, treaded water in,
almost nine months old, upside-
down, sucking his thumb. My advisor
had called my thesis original,
richly metaphorical, and so
free of footnotes--I secretly thought
I might win something. But he didn't show up,
and the Chair of the Department had a pillar of mail
and a wastebasket by his leg -- for two hours,
he disemboweled. Two other men were
muttering to each other out the sides of their mouths
and doing their hard har, har,
har. I cited my advisor for his
encouragement, I described the yards
of file cards, the research, but after five minutes of their
jokes and smirks, I saw they meant
to flunk me. I drew my powers together,
120 pounds of me,
40 of the pregnancy
and 7 of my baby. Two hours later,
they asked me to leave the room for an interval
and they voted: Fail, Fail, Fail,
Fail, and You Can't Do That--
the one woman. When I lumbered back in,
our son's sweet palate may have wrinkled up
at the taste of fear's sour effluent--
who was polluting his waters? (Rip)
They wanted (Rip) a dissertation
absolutely new, without one
word (Rip) of this one--except
"the" was all right, and "and." How much
time shall we give her, gentlemen? How about
--nine months? Har, har
har. My cervix bent, for a moment,
with intimate, private hurt. I said,
Thank you. I thought, if you have hurt my child,
if you have curdled my milk with that, I will find you, and I will kill you.
And at that, my son's hair stood
on end, in the saline.
"The Defense" from Blood, Tin, Straw by Sharon Olds
I do not know if this scene is what Her's mother imagined when she read that fledging dissertation. But she had learned that an impromptu performance of Major Barbara could not change the fact that the world has little use for firebrands or brilliant girls. Perhaps being pleased rather than enflamed was the way that Her's mother tried to protect her child. Unfortunately, there is no way to protect a child, except to show her how to recognize danger, when to pick her battles, and that being a good little girl is the worst danger of all.
References:
Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World through Mindfulness, by John Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., Hyperion, New York, 2005. ISBN: 0-7868-6756-6 (Quoted text: page 447)
"The Defense" from Blood, Tin, Straw by Sharon Olds, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2001. ISBN: 0-375-40742-2 (Quoted text: pages 8-9)
Reawaken me
Grow me, garden me, raise me
Tease me, provoke me
Test my pulses
Raise them,
in my neck,
at my wrist,
in the great veins of my groin,
in my cock
Quicken my breath
Shorten it
Reawaken me with vision
With your eyes in motion
Your hips
In motion
Your breasts and legs
Your fingers circling without touching
Guiding my eyes to...
Your destinations
Making my fingers jealous of yours
My lips hungry for you
My cock rise first towards
And then up and away from
My belly
Awaken me with your mouth
On my mouth
Your breasts against
My chest
Your hands
Pinning my shoulders
With the weight of yours
Your hips and thighs flexing
Rolling
Petting
Me first softly
Then firmly
Then hard as I
Grow first softly
Then firmer
Then hard
As you please
And then, reawakened
To your liking
My anatomy hand-raised
To, finally, match my
Ever/always interest
You can pounce me
Envelop me
Quench me,
Us
Both... or
Roll away with a told-you-so smirk
Knowing that
Reawakened
I'll as gladly pounce you instead
And letter your envelop
And drench us,
Quench us
Reduce your new-fanned fires
To steam and sighs...
Again
Art for art's sake alone
Of course
You ask me to disrobe, not strip
Of course
Art for art's sake alone
Of course
You ask me stop, my shirt unbuttoned
To turn a bit
To look up
To look away
To inhale deeply
And hold it... hold it...
Good, that's it.
Art for art's sake
Of course
You ask me to continue
Slowly
And then to stop, my pants loosened
And low, low on my hips
To move my foot outward
To let the waistband drop a bit more
To let it catch at the top of my stretched, strained thigh
To look down
To lift my chest
To hold it... hold it...
Good, that's it
Art for art's sake
Of course
When my pants are at my ankles
And I bend down to free one foot
You ask me to stop
To straighten my legs
To bend at the hips
To keep my back straight
To turn again
For the light on the lines of my cheeks
And the shadows on my figgy hanging balls betwen them
Of course
To hold it... hold it... longer this time...
Good, that's it
Art for art's sake
Of course
And you
Fully dressed
Of course
And me moving only at your direction
And you
Moving me
Directing me
Because the photographer literally calls the shots
Of course
In response to his post, Libertie, Equalitie, and ...More Equalitie?, Figleaf and his readers engaged in a fascinating discussion on the concept of grammatical gender. Several commenters expressed the view that that there is no sociopolitical implication to the fact that native speakers often ignore the genders of words in their languages, because grammatical gender and biological gender are two different concepts. But Figleaf expressed his doubts:
And then there's the *philosophical* effort of trying to suppress incredulity that the etymology for each word really, truely has no gendered signficance.
I have to say that I agree with Figleaf on this point, and here is why.
My experience with the study of foreign languages is limited to three years of Latin during my high school years. That may seem too quaint to allow me to add anything of value to this discussion, but looking at the gender assignment in the Latin language is valuable for two reasons. First, since Latin is technically a dead language, in that it is not currently used and therefore not subject to random change, it provides a frozen specimen to test the assertion that there is some underlying rationale to the assignment of genders to animals, objects or abstract ideas. Second, until the 1960's the study of Latin was a requisite in the secondary educational curriculum in North American and, I would guess, Western Europe. For centuries the associations of certain objects or abstract ideas with nouns whose gender had to be memorized was part of the formal education for men and eventually for women. Therefore, the nuances hidden within these gender assignments would have been absorbed, although unconsciously, by students and scholars for hundreds of years. To assert that the associations and judgments embedded in the gender assignments did not exert an influence on literature and philosophy would be disingenuous, IMO.
Let us begin with the body, for it is my belief that the way we think of our own flesh will reveal the way we think about sex and the sexes.
Consider that in Latin, blood (cruor), sweat (sudor) and breath (spiritus) are masculine nouns. Masculine is the gender of the Latin words uterus and fetus, which have become part of the English lexicon.
Nouns that represent the less noble effluvia such as urine are designated as feminine (urina). The Latin word for sewer is the feminine noun cloaca, which also has been used to describe the stomach of a drunken woman. Is it insignificant that the sewer system of Rome was named Cloaca Maxima, and was believed to be under the protection of the goddess of filth, Cloacina, who also presided over sexual intercourse in marriage? The feminine noun latrina is the Latin word used to denote both a toilet and a brothel. After reading this should one be moved to shed a tear, please note that its Latin equivalent would be the feminine lacrima.
The concept of Nature is designated as the feminine Natura, and the feminine sylva is the Latin name for forest or woodland. But the feminine gender is also assigned to the less wholesome elements of the natural world: shade or shadow (umbra), fen or bog (lama) or a wild animal (fera). The less wholesome elements of the supernatural world are also designated as feminine: the lamia are the witches, vampires and ghosts.
As for the virtues, I am happy to report that courage or daring (audacia) and piety (pietas) come in on the distaff side. Unfortunately, they must share the stage with ira, their Latin cousin so given to anger.
The Wikipedia article on grammatical gender states:
Since all nouns must belong to some noun class, many end up with genders which are purely conventional. For instance, the Romance languages inherited sol "sun" (which is masculine) and luna "moon" (which is feminine) from Latin but in German and other Germanic languages Sonne "sun" is feminine and Mond "moon" is masculine. Two nouns denoting the same concept can also differ in gender in closely related languages, or within a single language. For instance, in Polish the word ksie;z.yc "moon" is masculine, but its Russian counterpart is feminine. The Russian word for "sun" is neuter...here is nothing inherent about the Moon or a potato which makes them objectively "male" or "female". In these cases, gender is quite independent of meaning, and a property of the nouns themselves, rather than of their referents.
I disagree that gender is quite independent of meaning. The meaning may be obscure, forgotten, or hidden in the oral traditions of the culture -- but it exists. Consider the fact that the moon is a feminine noun in the Romance languages and a masculine noun in Polish. If you examine the mythologies of these two cultures, you will find that in the Roman mythology Luna is the goddess associated with the moon. In the Polish pantheon of gods, Miesiac, the moon deity, is seen as both male and female. Before a culture would have recorded the names of objects, places and gods in written form, these words would have been part of an oral tradition, the stories of creation by which people tried to make sense of the outer physical world and the inner world of perception and emotion.
While there are valid criticisms of the the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, I think its value is the assertion that the instrument by which we name the external and internal world is not objective or neutral. While the connotations hidden within language may not have determined (in the strict sense of the word) our views about sex, the fact that we have to struggle to change our thinking about the qualities "naturally" attributed to each sex is an indication of the influence of these hidden meanings and the power of language.
So do you like to undress or be undressed? Undress your partner or let them do it. Slip things off slowly, thoughtfully, piece by piece, or quickly, maybe even impatiently shuck everything off at the last moment.
Sure, at any given moment we might feel completely different about it. I'm just curious about *this* moment, when you read the question and before you begin to read my answer, what popped into your head?
Me? I woke up thinking "mmm, how would you like me to undress you..." And a moment later, as my eyes opened enough to register if there was yet light in the room, as I rolled over to stretch and my still-awake morning erection, momentarily pressed between me and the bed, added its own wakeup messages that moved the question from idle curiosity to very warm curiosity... without subtracting momentum from that moment at all, I remembered how nice it feels to be undressed instead.
And at that moment my answer was "I like to be undressed; I like to undress my partner; When I undress I like to shuck out of everything as a transition from one moment to the next, relishing how every inch of my skin can suddenly experience new sensation -- newly, warmly naked skin against mine, fingernails, lips, hair, cool sheets, warm air, warm shower spray, sunlight and hands... and hands... and warmly naked skin, again.
[Caveat: Accompanying photo is fractionally less work-safe than usual. --fl]
So I'm going to say something I usually don't. I usually don't say it because I'm not, at the moment, that which I'm about to say. Other times... quite often really... I don't say it because I'm shy. And so without further ado, and before I chicken out, I'm feeling a little horny at the moment. (Whew!) It's a totally inappropriate moment for it as far as practicality is concerned. I'm sitting in the living room where almost anyone in the neighborhood could stroll by and see me.
There's nobody here to be horny with, and yet for reasons I just explained I can't really unbutton my button-fly jeans and stroke myself. (If nothing else I just heard hammering and, looking out the window it occurs to me that if I can see roofers pounding away at the neighbors they they could probably see me.) It's also doubly impractical because my partner will return from picking up everyone from school and, on Fridays especially, playdates are ... make that triply impractical then. And finally, while I might ordinarily just slip off somewhere more private for a personal "moment" I'm on the couch in the living room with a head cold, surrounded by tissues and cough drops and zinc lozenges (no, I know they don't do anything) and stacks of teacups with lemon in them. If I felt like moving since I got back from my last band performance (playing bass for a school play) I might have long since done so.
So anyway, here I am, sitting on the couch, nose streaming, tissues everywhere, and just a little bit horny -- not horny enough to have an erection or anything, just a bit of a stirring in the deep muscles signaling "ready when you are" -- and staring mournfully at my ancient 70's era mother of pearl belt buckle that for all its heft unhooks easily, and at the buttons in the long fly of my black Levi, the ones where the first button is a bit tricky to undo but thereafter you just take a little twist of the wrist and each succeeding button pops, pops, pops open all the way, way, way down low enough that my cock could be sprung free without sliding off my pants... and yet no matter how much fun that might be it *won't* be. Cold. Children. Roofers. Bustle. All conspires to render such possibilities moot.
But! I hope going pretty much against type and admitting that *I'm* modestly horny, if unable to do anything except talk about it, will make you mildly horny too. Because misery loves company. :-) Because whereas nobody wants to catch someone else's cold I'm not sure if they mind catching someone else's horniness.
[Note: Accompanying photo less work-safe than usual. Also, I wrote this yesterday afternoon and... promptly feel asleep without posting it. Not exactly consistent with either horniness or savoir faire, but it *is* consistent with this wretched cold. :-) --fl]
In the final paragraph of his post, Missing Discourse For Intercourse, Figleaf makes the following request:
I know I can't possibly be the first person to bring this up (this isn't the first time I've brought it up either.) But I'm realizing it's a big deal. And that finding and using some nice, earthy, evocative, preferably Anglo-Saxon (or even just Anglo-Saxon *sounding*) words for it would be an even bigger deal.
Yes, it is a big deal, and the truth is that if you want to be a good lover or a good poet you have to learn to talk dirty. And the best dirty are the single syllable Anglo-Saxon words for all the messy business of being alive and being human.
Forget those weak Latinate cousins: fellate will not get you going like lick or suck. If you want to vary the length of your strokes, stay on the Middle English side of the fence so you can easily dip or daub.
If you want more help to flesh this out, here you go:
gush
gulp
grab
grasp
grip
hold
slip
slide
suck
Note: Talking dirty is not as easy as it sounds. Tess Danesi is teaching a course on talking sexy (dirty included). Perhaps if Figleaf will ask nicely (or not-so-nicely), Tess could be persuaded to help him with his homework. ;-)
Yesterday I mentioned that breaking out of conventional gendered roles created *more* possibilities. As luck would have it, Z of The Naked Truth has a hot, hot example, relating what might be memories and might be a dream.
I drag my body over his, wet pussy hardening his cock beneath me, labia spread open by the pressure of my hips, clit just tantalizingly stroked. Maybe I could get off with just this, I think, but I know I need a cock inside me.
And when I have it, I don't fuck him, I fuck myself, barely moving, until I come. And then again, and then I roll off, spent, and I'm done.
"...my pussy hardening his cock beneath me..."
Wow that's just so cool. I grouse a lot that even the English language conspires to make it difficult to talk about women being the active party during any kind of sex, let alone intercourse.
Which makes Z's way with words -- making "hardening" *her* verb and him the object to be hardened -- all the sweeter. And, um, uplifting!
In comments on her post there's some discussion about whether her actions included consideration of her partner or whether she was acting unilaterally. Well... it seems to me that whether or how often we could do that, could just literally jump our partner's sleepy bones, would have an awful lot to do with whether it was easy, and ok, and maybe common for both of us to be able to do so.
Now just one funny thing about *my* social conditioning. I feel totally self-conscious whenever I try to recognize, acknowledge, and advance the notion that women don't just have the tepid agency of consent but the active agency of initiative. All my preconceived devils on one shoulder *and* the angels on the other are all whispering "but figleaf, you're making everyone think you're just covering up a streak of passivity!"
Like that would be a bad thing, first of all, but like that would be even true! I'm *very* content with taking the lead, almost caricaturing the role of lady's man from taking someone's hands and ballroom-dance-style twirling her tight against me to kissing and purposefully stroking her till she says she tells me she's dizzy to sweeping her off her feet and on to the bed before kissing my way from her instep to her mouth and having my way with her. Totally love that. But then I also love drowsy/pragmatic cuddly itch-scratching sex. And when a partner backs *me* up to the bed, and trips me backwards and grabs my jeans by the cuffs and schwoops them off me like a magician whisking a tablecloth out from under a table setting before throwing her leg across me, supporting her weight with hands on my chest before curling her head down to kiss me.
In other words there's not one thing I want us all to be able to appreciate. Instead there's just no one thing I'd want to rule out.
One of the downsides of giving up on the daft "no-sex" class paradigm is having to give up... oh... say... 99.999% of all romantic songs, poems, and literature as... um... incomplete.
One of the upsides of giving it up, of admitting that not only are women not passive recipients but perfectly able to want sex because they want sex and not something else, of admitting that all men aren't always enthusiastically and automatically ready for it... is...
...is not just recognizing how often you seduce us,
...but admitting how hot it is when you do
[Hmm. I haven't gotten much work done, or all my homework, let alone my correspondence, let alone replies to comments. But for whatever reason (maybe that two-page paper I started writing around two in the morning) posts are flying out. Including a very rare second HNT post. Oh well, sometimes it's sunshine, other times you need an umbrella. --fl]
Quick question: I'm not sure if you've thought about it much, but have you ever considered how most activities that require a lot of body strength don't usually involve standing or working in the poses and postures we most often associate with bodybuilding?
Well, it being Half-nekkid Thursday and all I was struck this morning about the difference in some of the poses we associate with manly or womanly sexiness and... it occurred to me... that an *awful* lot of the cliché poses we associate with sex would actually be *terrible* positions to be in *during actual* sex.
At this point I ought to make clear that I probably wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't noticed that most HNT participants -- the ones who are clearly feeling sexual in their photos -- are in positions that *do* make sexual sense. So while I'm pointing fingers I'm generally pointing them at the light/cheesecake/advertising and heavy industrial porn industry and at the subset of "amateurs" who emulate them. In other words, if you're an HNT participant, not you. :-)
You probably know what positions I'm talking about, right? The classic porn pose, one that drives a lot of people crazy, moralists and immoralists alike, is the woman naked in high heels who's squatting so low her knees are around her ears and she has to lean back to support herself with her hands behind her back. Cliché as the dickens, and certainly sexualized beyond mere gynecology (gynecologists are almost never need *that* much space to work) but... not at all practical for any kind of sex at all.
Not even for a nice, unreconstructed patriarchal man! She's too low and leaned back for a blowjob, to well-braced to push over and violate, way, way too low to easily caress, and more strenuously acrobatic than classically vulnerable. Yet over and over we see that and countless other poses in men and women that again are unquestionably sexualized but not sexy in any practical sense of "hey, let's have sex like this!"
Now I happen to think this is probably another one of those things like "O-face" where, mostly through unfamiliarity and insufficient time to develop affection for it, people decide *real* orgasmic faces are just too goofy and so they make all those weird-assed romanto/porno grimaces of agony and ecstasy and outrage that, in turn, make us feel even more self-conscious about our authentically orgasmic faces. Well, same with real sexual poses and positions.
Well, for the most part I think we probably look a little awkward, bracing our legs, pressing our pelvises up or out or down or in effectively but not very gracefully, to give ourselves and our partners the best contact with our (hidden from view if we're doing it right) genitals, and often-asymmetrically leaning here or there in ways that feel *wonderful* but look (if we weren't too self-conscious to let others look) awkward as pre-teen cousins forced to dance together at a relative's wedding. But (rather pointedly *unlike* being forced to dance at someone else's wedding) oh my does what we really actually do feel nice. Even if it doesn't *look* as nice as the made-up stuff people do for photographs.
Anyway, without dismissing or decrying porn (or advertising, or Hollywood, or romance-novel covers) I suddenly feel very comfortable pointing out that the create a *very* unfortunate impression of what we generally *experience* as very fortunate experiences, and likewise our attempts to create fortunate *impressions* we, like porn stars, Hollywood talent, and cover models, may end up with unfortunate experiences. Just something to notice next time you're thumbing, or browsing through photos.
Anyway....
Let's just say that were we ever to do more together than drink coffee and shake hands you might find me taking you by the hand, or shoulders, or by the hips, or thighs, or even hair and moving you to our mutual best advantage I can guarantee that *even if* for some reason there was a camera or audience in attendance we'd still be arranging ourselves for feeling, rather than necessarily looking, our best.
Once again, Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
Photo by Flickr user Queen Roly. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Because it's so much fun to lick, and kiss, and slurp, and nuzzle outside the designated areas.
Because I always want to use more than my lips and tongue
Because I enjoying blurring the line between when it begins
Because I like to blur the lines between when it ends
Because one word, even such a large, fancy Latin one, isn't enough for all it can be
There are whole worlds of cunnilingus
And only one word?
One word for when you kneel over me
Fists in my hair
Holding me still as
You rock and
Surge and
Grind into my mouth?
One word for when I catch you off balance
Catch your ankles in my large, strong hands
Turn you and press you in mid-tumble
So your knees nearly span your breasts
So you helplessly blossom open under my tongue?
One word for when you pull me towards you
And, resisting you
But not one last temptation
I slip instead down for a quick taste
Before answering your playful pull
With a lid-fluttered push?
One word for maddened howls
As I circle all that is not conventional,
The cups where tendons of your thighs join
The ought-to-be-ticklish hollows beside your mons
The rude flirtations with your perineum and ass
The broad, flat-tongued laps of enlarged halves of you
But never, no never closer
To your ridge-swollen inner lips
To your straining clit under it's sensation-starved and angry hood?
One word for inarticulate hisses and sighs
As, play concluded,
I find my way to the spot you love best
I find the stroke you love best
I find the pressure you love best
I find the rhythm you love best
And spot you
And stroke you
And press you
And rhyme you
With nothing to distract you
But my lips and tongue
One word, for all the mischief
In the smile you get when,
My head pillowed on your open thigh, and
Your head pillowed on mine,
You mouth me deep
And I forget
And then, remembering,
And wetly swirling,
I smile that you forget?
One word for all that?
One word for *any* of that?
Well, let's pretend
Cunnilingus is enough
Have I mentioned how good it feels
When you trap my thigh between yours
My knee bent just so
Your ankles trapping my ankle
To keep it just so
Your hand on my chest
Your lips near my ear
Your hips in motion against me
Your hands, done exploring
Confidently mapping my cock and ass
Your breath growing first longer and deeper
And then growing shorter and faster
Mmm
Good morning!
Image by Stephanie Sinclair, USA, from UNICEF Photo of the Year 2007
“We needed the money”, said the parents of eleven-year old Ghulam, shown in the photo above. She is seated next to her fiance, a forty year old Afghan man, Mohammed Faiz. The photo, taken by Stephanie Sinclair, has won first place as UNICEF's 2007 Photo of the Year. While in Afghanistan, Sinclair noted how many young girls were married to older men, even though the legal age for marriage is sixteen. Villagers in the couple's province of Ghor predict that Ghulam will be married with a few weeks of her engagement and will begin to bear children for Faiz.
In a comment to Figleaf's post The Ultimate 'No-Sex' Class, A in France of A Changing Life said:
Off-topic in a way, but let's not forget that child marriage is widespread in the developing world *and receives little or no attention*. In some countries 25% of girls are married and give birth by the age of 15.
Not off topic at all, A in France, and thank you for bringing to mind this photo and story.
According to the accompanying story at the UNICEF site:
Early marriages are not only a problem in Afghanistan: worldwide there are about 51 million girls aged between 15 and 19 years who are forced into marriage. The youngest brides live in the Indian state of Rajasthan, where 15% of all wives are not even 10 years old when they are married. Child marriages are a reaction to extreme poverty and mainly take place in Asian and African regions where poor families see their daughters as a burden and as second-class citizens. Already in their younger years, girls are given into the “care” of a husband, a tradition that often leads to exploitation. Many girls become victims of domestic violence. In an Egyptian survey, about one-third of the interviewed child brides stated that they were beaten by their husbands. The young brides are under pressure to prove their fertility as