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Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Very Cuddly Day

I woke up this morning in the arms of my boyfriend. We had spent the evening before together having dinner and going to our weekly yoga class before cuddling and sleep.

I spent the day adventuring with a man I've been dating for a few months. We went wandering through the shops near Golden Gate Park, then ventured into the park itself. He carried me in his arms into the middle of a field and kissed me. Then we climbed to the top of a tree and he kissed me. Then we visited the Botanical Garden and he kissed me in the prehistoric garden, the fragrance garden, the Australian garden... Then back to his place for cuddles.

I spent the evening with my girlfriend. It was free pancake day at IHOP. Then we went back to her place for cuddles and The Tudors. She and my boyfriend are housemates and he had a date with someone else that night, so he and his date provided the appropriate sex sounds for the incredibly bizarre giant-labia-piercing-pregnancy porn that we ended up watching as I massaged her feet.

I love how I spend my days drifting from one person I care about to the next. I am different things to different people and it's interesting to see how different parts of myself become more prominent depending on who I am around.

With the boyfriend I am the calm, reliable, stable girlfriend.

With the new one I am somehow both a crazy, adventurous, sexual beast and a Zen master with an iron constitution.

With the girlfriend we are mutual listeners, giving each other emotional support and validation - assurance that neither of us is insane.

Monday, February 28, 2011

Mormon Monday - Youth Dances

Mormons like having dances. Notice I did not say they were good at dancing...

As you move into your teens, you are expected to start pairing up with boys - but only in the most innocent, non-committal, chaperoned kind of ways. Dances at the local church building are considered good ways to encourage healthy boy/girl interaction.

There is a dress code. As a girl I needed to wear a skirt or dress, never pants, and it needed to reach the knee. No sleeveless or midriff-baring outfits. No makeup. If you did dance with a boy, you had to make sure you could fit all the Mormon scriptures - the Bible, Book of Mormon, Pearl of Great Price, and Doctrine and Covenants - in between your bodies at all times.

Music was carefully chosen so that it didn't contain profanity or suggestive lyrics. YMCA was a popular song at dances, which makes me wonder how well the adults knew The Village People. My mother still tells the story of when she was 16 at a dance in Sweden and they played Lady Marmelade. She was the only one who spoke French and she rushed to the DJ to let him know just how inappropriate it was.

Dances were open to anyone 14 and up. No dating until 16 - but only with a chaperone and with no intention of "going steady" with anyone until 18. After that - hunt down the returned missionaries, snag a hubby, and start popping out those Mormon babies.

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Fisting

A year ago a male friend asked me to fulfill a strap-on fantasy for him - which is another story for another time - and during the aftercare he asked if I had any unfulfilled fantasies. I said I wanted to try fisting. It was something that I was fascinated by and terrified of at the same time. This friend had the most skilled hands I had ever encountered, so he felt like a safe person to try it with. He found a local workshop that taught the mechanics of vaginal fisting and we made plans to go.

I was married at the time. We were polyamorous, but he was disturbed by the idea. He was upset that I had never mentioned this desire to him, that I wanted to share this first with someone other than him, and that I felt a fisting workshop was an appropriate second date. He was even more upset when I told him I was considering asking to volunteer as the demo. It was a huge argument and I ended up cancelling.

Weeks later I still wanted to try it. I was worried about letting my partner being the one to do it, but figured that as long as we went slowly, weren't goal oriented, and did a lot of checking in that it would be fine. We kept a copy of "The Whole Lesbian Sex Book" next to us - open to the fisting section - the entire time.

We used big globs of lube. His hand was a perfect duck bill, palm up. We worked everything in up to that last thumb knuckle and it was such an intense, burning stretch - and then it was in. His fingers curled into a fist and he slowly began to move. It was the most beautiful sensation I had ever felt and I started to cry. They were happy tears and I felt like I was releasing something very deep and old. I felt open - emotionally and physically, exposed, overwhelmed, and unable to do anything other than to focus on keeping the pelvic floor relaxed and taking everything in. I was glad that I had chosen to do this with my partner in such a safe space.

Fisting is now a very regular part of my sex life. I am fucked with a fist far more often than a penis or dildo. It is the most reliable way to bring me to orgasm and I am grateful for it. But as often I am fisted I have never been able to duplicate the emotional high of that first experience.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Attraction is a Moving Target

I was at a large pagan convention on Saturday. Boyfriend and I sat down with a group of people we knew to have dinner. I was next to a very gender-queer individual. This person was dressed in a corseted green velvet Renaissance-style gown with high heeled boots and had a full, bushy beard and mustache. The multiple, conflicting gender cues and the fact that this person was clearly interested in me was appealing. I had a lot of fun ordering the person to kneel on the ground to give deep, hard neck bites in the lobby as non-pagans who just happened to be at the hotel on an odd weekend looked on in confusion.

So, gender-queer person (GQP) and I wandered outside with a beautiful trans woman that I had been in play space with before, but had never really interacted with. She seemed interested in me too. The idea of a threesome with me, hot trans woman (HTW), and large-breasted/bearded/corseted GQP suddenly seemed very appealing. Just the intersection of so many types of queer sexual orientation/gender identification - in addition to being the most "masculine" one involved while still being the only cis-gendered female in the threesome - made it seem like an experience that I needed to make happen.

We found a cuddly proto-orgy happening in one of the hotel rooms. I got naked and started giving people massage to join in. Soon GQP was down to bra and fake breasts, I was hair-pulling and biting, HTC started to get involved - but then lost interest. I told GQP to leave bra on, but it eventually came off. Suddenly, I realized that the hairy legs I had caught a glimpse of under the dress peeking over the tops of the boots that had been SUCH a turn-on were no longer appealing now that GQP looked like any other naked hairy man. Kissing became uncomfortable. I had no interest in anything other than giving pain and sensation play. Luckily GQP was very subby and seemed completely okay with it. Even interest in that was fading after a while and I was glad when the other couple left in the room asked us to give them some private space and I had an excuse to get dressed and leave. I felt incredibly shallow as I realized that if the dress had stayed on I would have willingly - HAPPILY - done so much more. Attraction can be so arbitrary. Or maybe that's just me!

Later that same night I was part of another cuddly threesome with the same HTW and a gorgeous cis-gendered woman (CGW) that, up until that very moment, I thought I had not been attracted to. As she invited me to cuddle with her and told me how much she appreciated my presence I realized that what I thought was lack of attraction had actually been fear of rejection. She is very stereotypically beautiful in that head-cheerleader kind of way, incredibly intelligent, and I didn't expect her to invite me into her circle. CGW, HTW and I spent most of the next two days together sharing, bonding, and I think it ended up being a very healing experience for all of us. Sex and sensuality blended into just holding and loving.

Such a contrast. To have the first experience end within hours of the second one beginning has made the lesson even clearer to me: I need to slow down and listen more to what is right in the moment instead of trying to create what I think I want. I need to reserve judgement of others and stop assuming that I know how they feel about me.

Monday, February 21, 2011

Mormon Monday - Inside a Mormon Temple!

I'm thinking that if this blog is something I'm going to try to maintain over a long period of time, it would help to have some kind of schedule structure to give me cues on what to write about. I'm an ex-Mormon. People always seem curious about that part of my past and I have a lot of stories. Hence - Mormon Mondays!

I was 12. In Mormon culture, this meant I was old enough to do what they consider a very valuable temple service: Baptisms for the Dead. We'll get to what that means later...

My youth group was scheduled to go to the Oakland temple later that month. In order to get in you need to be a baptized member and pass an interview with the local bishop to receive a "recommend." To save time, the bishop decided to come to the church building during one of our weekly youth activities and pull us out one by one for the requisite questioning.

I had a 5 foot pet iguana named Sam that I was obsessed with. I don't remember why, but I had brought him to the youth group that night on a leash. Wearing a sweater and bow-tie. When It was my turn to be interviewed, Sam came into the bishop's office with me and settled in under his desk. Everything was good until the 4th question: "Do you live the law of chastity?" I was a painfully honest kid, and I suddenly felt deeply uncomfortable. I had never had sex, but I knew he was asking more than that. I started tearing up and shamefully confessed that I sometimes touched myself. Awkward silence. Sam decided this was the perfect time to crap on the rug. I was really crying now.

After a while the bishop asked if I had prayed for forgiveness - I sensed a ray of hope. I stammered out that I had! I was incredibly sorry! Looking back, I think we were both just as desperate to avoid the humiliation of my not passing the interview and everyone wondering why I wasn't allowed in the temple. He let me slide.

A few weeks later I got to join my friends for our first temple ordinance: Baptisms for the Dead. Mormons are crazy about genealogy, and for a reason: they believe that baptism is necessary to get to the VIP section of heaven - as opposed to the normal part that anyone can get to. If you die without being baptized, don't worry! You can have someone baptized in your name. Mormons research their family history to collect as many names as possible to submit to the temples for proxy baptisms by volunteers. It used to be that any name could be submitted by anyone to the temple, as long as they were dead, but after the public found out that Mormons were baptizing Holocaust victims (and the PR nightmare it caused!) they stipulated that you actually needed to be related to the people you were submitting.

Our group was let in a small side door after our recommends were checked and led to a waiting room with a big TV in the corner playing an endless loop of LDS commercials between showings of Johnny Lingo and the Eight Cow Woman. The temple workers separated us into groups of 5 and, when it was my group's turn, we were issued plain white zippered polyester jumpsuits. The baptismal font was huge! It was a giant bowl balanced on top of a full-sized sculpture of 12 oxen, representing the 12 tribes of Israel. I had to climb a flight of stairs to get in. My dad was performing the baptisms that night. He dunked me 20 times for 20 different dead women after reciting a short prayer from the teleprompter next to the font, protected from the highly chlorinated water with a sheet of Plexiglas.

Once everyone had cycled through we celebrated our good service with a trip to Fenton's for ice cream.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Valentine's Day - FOR REAL!

So... The last post was titled "Valentine's Day" and I mentioned it briefly in the beginning, but ended up spending most of the entry rambling about Halloween. So sorry. Here's the rest of Valentine's Day:

Valentine's Date invited me to Pillow Fight Club in San Francisco. It's an annual flash mob and it is brutal. As the clock tower strikes 6 the feathers start to fly in Herman Plaza. I wore goggles, but they seemed to make me an even more inviting target. As I was searching for Date I was stopped by a reporter who asked why I had come. "Simple," I said. "Nothing puts me in the mood for romance like beating the crap out of people."

One of Date's exes had come too. She and I teamed up, made our way through the crowd a few times, and sprinkled feathers in each other's hair before she had to leave.

Date and I decided to move on and wandered up to Coit Tower. Stopped anywhere there was a view to make out. He has figured out how much I like being bitten and having my hair pulled. I was working hard not to moan and make all the tourists uncomfortable.

Then we walked to Chinatown for dinner at Utopia, stopping for gelato in North Beach on the way. Skimming the menu, the perfect Valentine's selection jumped out at me: fish balls with bitter melon. We took pictures of the feather debris still attached to my shoes and the giant bruise forming on the bridge of his nose from the fight.

Took BART back to his place and listened to a mash-up of La Isla Bonita and Alejandro as he tied me securely to his bed, then spanked and fisted me.

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Valentine's Day


My Valentine's Day date told me, as we climbed the stairs to Coit Tower, that he didn't understand why I wasn't an Internet celebrity already. I told him it was because I am far too boring.

I've been dating this one for a couple months. We met last Halloween at a party hosted by a polyamorous co-housing community in the South Bay. I was dressed in a German barmaid's outfit wearing my strap-on (with a pretty purple dildo I had borrowed from an erotic clown because it matched my skirt) under the fluffy black petticoat. I was there with my boyfriend, one of his other girlfriends, and her "partner-with-benefits" who looks exactly like Abraham Lincoln.

Boyfriend, his girlfriend and I were all on very friendly cuddling terms and made a happy puppy pile in front of the fireplace. He-who-was-to-become-my-Valentine's-date was lounging in a giant armchair and caught sight of the dildo under the skirt. He had many questions - most of them technical in nature - about use, sensation for giver and receiver, technique...

Boyfriend, his girlfriend, and I moved on to the hot tub. It was a small 4-6 seater. We soon had 12 people squeezed in. I ended up in the lap of a cute young boy while someone attacked my neck and shoulders with deep, hard bites. Another man asked if there was anything he could do for me, so I directed him to massage my back as I was getting bitten and put my feet in the lap of the woman across from me - which she was kind enough to massage. He-who-was-to-become-my-Valentine's-date joined the tub. It came out that I was a certified massage therapist and he started asking technical questions about musculoskeletal anatomy and massage technique. I made a valiant effort to answer coherently through the delicious haze created by teeth, deep effluerage, and warm water. The back massager offered me a tour of the SF Bay in his sailboat, which I ultimately turned down. The biter and I scheduled an impact play session together. He-who-was-to-become-my-Valentine's-date and I made an appointment to trade massage a couple weeks later.