Street Harassment: Compliments vs. Catcalls

You've all seen that video, right? The one where a woman walks around New York City for 10 hours and finally the whole world gets to see what it's like to be a woman on a public street. As a woman who's lived in San Francisco and NYC, I can tell you it was completely accurate. One of the hardest things about living there was the constant feeling of being encroached upon, of being unsafe.

Many, many people have said many things about the video, so I won't reiterate all of them. I do want to acknowledge that are problems with race representation, and Slate in particular has run a couple of articles addressing this. Mainly, I want to talk about the biggest themes I've run across when people try to defend the men's behavior in the video: that they are just trying be polite and say hello or that they just wanted to pay her a compliment.

First, many of those "polite" greetings were anything but. Tone and context are very important forms of communication, and we all know the difference between a leering "Good morning" and a friendly or polite one.

Next, as a woman in public, you quickly learn that supposedly polite phrases like "Hello," "Good morning," and "Have a nice day," are often just a first gambit for your attention. As soon as you even glance over in response to a greeting, there's a very good chance the person will then say something gross or threatening. I would rather be friendly and open to meeting new folks, but instead I have to completely close myself off in public to avoid even worse harassment than I get when I'm silent and unresponsive.

Finally, and this is the main thing I want to contribute to the conversation, these men are not complimenting women when they call out to them on the street. Compliments are expressions of admiration and respect. They indicate that you think someone has done something well and you want to commend them for it. They are, essentially, social gifts, and yes, people almost universally like them. I've received actual compliments on the street and been pleased.

Catcalling, however, is not in any way a compliment. When we're being honest, we can all see the difference between someone saying, "Hey, you look really nice today!" and continuing on their way, versus someone looking you up and down, licking their lips, and saying, "Mm, sexyyyyy." The first is a compliment, and the second is an expression not of admiration but of sexual pleasure.

99 times out of 100, when a guy catcalls, what he's doing is verbalizing the pleasure he gets from looking at a woman. This is why it feels gross. It's why these comments feel like they're on a continuum with the guy who masturbates at you in the movie theater or humps your back in a crowded subway car. They are on that continuum. All of these acts involve a person (usually a man) taking pleasure from the body of another person (usually a woman) without their consent.

Gentlemen, although you might not be able to help taking pleasure in the appearance of a beautiful person, there is a difference between feeling pleasure and expressing it. It is even possible to look surreptitiously and respectfully to your heart's content. (I know this from personal experience.) You can have your pleasure and keep it to yourself.

The minute you vocalize it, though, not only are you assuming that this person has to care about (and accommodate or at least allow) your pleasure, you are suggesting to her that, just because she exists in a female body, she has no choice but to provide you with pleasure. This is where power comes in, whether it's conscious or not. It's a reminder that men can take things from a woman that she never wanted to give.

A compliment is a gift, but a catcall is a theft. You are using my body to pleasure yourself without my permission, and then you are rubbing it in my face. That is why it is harassment, and that is why it needs to stop.

Letting .com Domain Expire

Just a quick post to note that I'm letting my .com domain expire. If you still somehow care about having this blog in your feedreader, you should adjust accordingly. :-) P.S. Yeah, it's because I'm a grad student now and thus really broke.

The Urge to Declare, and Changes

Obviously, I haven't been blogging. I just wrote a post, and it's because I really wanted to. I had a thought that I just had to share.

I think that urge to write publicly comes most often when I feel like I've figured something out or when I've made a decision. When I feel relatively sure of something, I want to say it to the world.

When I go through periods when I'm feeling less sure, I have much less desire to write. One of the things I've been trying to do in the last couple of years, since I moved to NYC, is embrace a beginner's mindset. I want to be new, to have wonder, to know that I have everything to learn and to exist in that somewhat uncomfortable place of not knowing everything.

It's been much harder to write.

I'm going to graduate school in August, which is the start of a different period in my life. It's one in which I'll have a more specific goal, and in which I hope to construct an identity for myself that encompasses more of who I am. I want to still be a sexual deviant, but I suspect that will fade in importance in favor of being a student, scholar, teacher, friend, romantic, and aspiring mother.

I'm also entering a professional atmosphere where it will be important to keep my students from reading everything about my sex life.

I'm planning to start a new blog. I'm not going to link to it from here, but those of you who know me in real life will be able to find it easily. I'm going to migrate all the posts from this blog which have to do with scholarship, culture, feminism, politics, etc. Then I'll delete them here. I'll leave behind the things about my personal life.

I may still blog here, when I have the irresistible urge to declare myself to the universe. It will be separated, though, from my professional life.

I'm hoping that blogging can become an outlet for the learning I'll be doing, for a voice I might not be able to let loose in academia. I'm hoping it'll be a professional tool for networking and making friends. It may still, on this site, be an outlet for a type of expression that's often taboo. That's been less necessary for a while, and I suspect that will continue.

I appreciate everyone who's read and commented here through my sporadic episodes of writing over the years. I think that's all I have to say, for now.

On Knowing Someone First

I think I'm going to stop having sex with people I don't know well. Or, well, I'm going to stop having sex with people I don't specifically and individually desire a lot at a given moment. I finally recognize that this desire happens more often once I know someone.

There's a person I've met several times at a big kink and sex event. We had mutual friends, one of whom recommended me to him as a play partner. He's something of a big, scary dom and sadist, which appeals to me generally, so when he proposed that we set up a play date I said yes. We talked about the specifics: he suggested using a gas mask, evil stick, cattle prod, and a few other painful things I don't remember the details of. We set the time and place. Then, when that time rolled around, I just didn't feel like it. I basically chickened out, and told him I wasn't up for it.

This happened twice.

Last week, this guy messaged me to suggest that, rather than trying to set up a play date, we plan to get together during the next event to just hang out and talk and/or cuddle and get to know each other. He said he still thought we "might have some heat," but that we might need to get acquainted to really create friction.

I felt so relieved, and then I felt surprised at how strong the relief was. I hadn't realized how uncomfortable I'd been at the thought of playing, particularly as a bottom, with someone I didn't know well or feel generally comfortable with. He's reasonably attractive, yes, and he has a solid reputation. I didn't feel unsafe with him or repulsed by him. Neither, though, did I feel especially attracted to him or comfortable with him. I'd initially decided to play with him because, "why not." I didn't think to ask, "why him."

Now, I do badly want to bottom more. I miss that in my life. I've felt that way for a long time, and yet I still haven't been doing it. I know lots of people who are good tops, who have good reputations and who I think are cool people. What's been missing is that feeling of "I want you."

I've had sex with men before who clearly were more interested in having sex with someone than in having sex with me. This didn't feel good. I've known that for a long time, but I hadn't really applied it to my own behavior.

The reality is that I almost always to some degree want sex and/or BDSM play. At any moment. If I'm on a date with someone new and it's clear that I could have sex with them, the predominant part of me has so far thought, "Well, I like sex. I could have sex with them. Might as well do it." This, I think, has been a repeated mistake. I've had a lot of mediocre (and bad) sex because of it.

I've decided I'm done with that. Sure, I do like sex, but I'm also uncomfortable having it with people I don't know and want for who they are and how they make me feel. I don't need to ignore the latter in service of the former. It's just unnecessary. It's easy enough for me to have sex with my boyfriend or one of my established lovers, anyway.

I guess what this means is I'm becoming a two or three date girl, rather than the usual first date sex seeker I've been forever. It feels weird, like I'm somehow submitting to The Rules, but I think it's better. I'm honoring my feelings and what I actually want, and that's what's important.

Distractions

When I was in college, I was extremely active in extracurricular activities. Basically, I had two jobs. The main one was supposed to be getting all my school work done well and on time, but I spent a whole shitload of time leading student groups and writing a column for the school paper and performing in The Vagina Monologues and writing my blog and doing research assistantships and, you know, having a social life. I didn't sleep enough. My grades were pretty good, but they weren't stellar. I don't think I understood at the time what the opportunity costs were of these millions of activities.

Now I work at an awesome sex and BDSM shop. My boss is generous and clearly values me as an employee. My coworkers are great, and I've made lots of good friends here. I get to do buying for the store, and I spend lots of time working to make it better. I have agency and responsibility. As jobs go, it's pretty great.

But it's still retail. It's not my life's passion or magnum opus. It's a high energy service job with random lulls in between activity. While there are no customers in the store I can theoretically work on, say, this blog or my PhD applications or my insurance claims. However, I'll always have to drop whatever it is on a millisecond's notice if a customer walks in. This makes it hard to concentrate on outside projects during my work day, and I'm tired after my week of 40+ hours.

I understand now what it's like to do a job that takes up all your energy, one that distracts from any other job you might want to do. I only do laundry about every 3 or 4 months. My room is often messy. I mostly only read books on the subway, and I've been (very) slow at writing on here. It's been a long time since I performed or did anything which would let me call myself an activist. Do I cook or do the dishes? Nope.

I'm excited now, though, because I'm researching schools where I can get my PhD (in Cultural Studies or American Studies). The prospect of going into a rigorous program and getting to spend the bulk of my attention on something I'm passionate about, something I want to turn into a career, is now very appealing. I'm psyched to take hard classes with lots of reading, and to do big research projects on stuff that fascinates me.

At this point, I don't even want to do any extra curricular stuff. If I get to spend my work time on the work I actually want to do, my free time will actually be free. I'll get to rest, to have fun, and to recharge to keep my main work going. In undergraduate I was really just there to do the next thing and to learn about myself and do a lot of personal growth. The outside activity was good for that, but I wasn't ready for a career or a true work focus. Now I can hardly wait to get to do all those hours of work on something that excites and interests me.

Working full time at regular-joe jobs for a few years has given me that excitement. The relative boredom and energy drain of these jobs has indeed been a distraction, but it's helped me figure out what I want instead. For that, I'm extremely grateful.

That Whole God Thing

I was raised Catholic, but not in the usual way. We went to a very alternative Catholic church in Massachusetts called Community of God’s Love when I was little. We didn’t use gendered pronouns in referring to God. (“God,” for instance, was “Creator.”) Women sometimes gave the sermons or even led the mass, we had a lot of queer congregation members, and the politics of the church were extremely liberal in general.

When we moved to California we found a slightly less radical church where I served as an altar girl and started studying for my Confirmation. When we got a new, more conservative priest who decided that girls could no longer serve at the altar, it was the last straw for my mother. She already felt that the Catholic church unfairly excluded women. If this church wasn’t going to welcome her daughters as full participants, then she wanted no more to do with it.

My whole family left the church when I was 11, and my mom now says she’s an atheist.

I know that at some point in my life I was enthusiastic about the idea of religion. I did, after all, hold up that Bible every week at Mass and carry the crucifix around the church for the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday.

Since we stopped going to church, though, and through my upbringing in secular coastal cities, I’ve grown very uncomfortable with the idea of the divine.

I don’t regret at all not being Catholic; I think it’s in many ways a screwed up political institution.* My grandfather has been giving me optimistic crucifixes for birthdays and Christmases for years, and I have no compunction in never wearing them. I do miss the presence of some spiritual community, though.

I feel very self conscious about spirituality. I’m drawn to it, particularly to the kinds that embrace women and sex, but I’m also very awkward about the idea of being too New Age or woo-woo or superstitious or whatever. Perhaps I’ve spent a lot of time around people who judged others for believing in much of anything that couldn’t be proven.

I’ve nonetheless had some very powerful experiences which make me believe in some kind of energetic connection that underlies everything and which we as beings can access. I want to write about those in more depth in future entries, but suffice it to say for now that I feel called to explore.

I’m not necessarily excited about the idea of deities, except as metaphors for particular kinds of divine energy, but there’s a lot I can learn. I’d like to consider this post a resolution to give myself permission to go there. I want to not be shy about the pull I feel towards the divine. So I’m coming out as a (novice) spiritual seeker. Here I am, and I’m going somewhere in that direction.

*The Church does a lot of good charitable things, but also a lot of messed up gender and politics things.

Friends Without Benefits

I have a bad habit.

I find it much easier to meet new people through sex and dating than through friendship. Whenever I'm in a new city, the first people I develop new relationships with are people I bang. Sometimes those relationships turn into friendships later (or are just friends with benefits going forward) and that's great. But I have a much harder time pursuing and maintaining friendships without the hang-out motivator of sex.

This means I don't have all that many friends I don't sleep with. If you narrow it to friends I've never even made out with, not to mention people with whom I feel no sexual tension or chemistry, I'm pretty sure that's a number I can count on just one hand. Maybe two.

I would really like to have some of those friendships that aren't about sex at all. I think it's gotten even harder to find since I've been spending most (read: all) off my time in the kink/polyamorous/sex positive community. Sex is a persistent background, even if it's not something I'm having or planning to have with any given person.

Now, this isn't so bad. I have lots of wonderful friends. I just miss the kind of friendship where I could be really intimate with someone, be physically affectionate with them and spend lots of time with them and talk about everything, without having to constantly enforce a boundary that the friendship won't turn sexual. I’d like that boundary to feel a little more natural.

In a lot of the platonic friendships I have now, I feel like not having sex is a line I'm drawing and not something the other person would necessarily choose if I weren't. They might be okay with not fooling around, but they’d also be happy if we did.

I can't quite explain why that's an icky feeling. It's sort of like I'm constantly having to reject people I care about, like I'm constantly being asked for something I don't want to give. Even if the asking is a subtle or sub-conscious, I'm aware of it. I also sometimes start to feel like I'm not valuable except in my sexual attractiveness and skill, which is obviously not much fun.

I would love to have even just one or two friends who are here, in New York City, who are not attracted to me at all. Not one whit. And to whom I am not attracted in the slightest, either.

Perhaps I need to think of this the same way I’d think of dating. It seems normal to me to go on dates and do things one on one when I’m considering a romantic or sexual relationship with someone. I surely can do the same thing, make a point to spend alone time with someone I think I’d like, when I want a sex-free friendship. And maybe do it with someone outside this sex-focused bubble where I spend my time. I guess that’s a plan.

Coming Out Kinky

Back in college when I was uber-involved in the queer student group, we used to have educational meetings around National Coming Out Day. One of the things we talked about what the Cass Identity Model of coming out, which described several stages in the process of coming out as gay.

The initial few stages are things like "identity confusion" and "identity tolerance," but what I'm interested in for this post is the second-to-last one, "Identity pride." Cass describes a phase when a gay person feels like they have to tell everybody about their newly realized orientation, where they divide the world into gay and straight people and mostly only feel comfortable with the other gay ones, where they might be a gay activist, where they surround themselves completely with the gay community. This is the last phase before "identity synthesis" in which one's sexual orientation is understood as just one of many aspect of self.

I think I’ve been in that uber-gay phase, except with kink. It’s really a similar process, I think, to come out as kinky as it is to come out as gay. They’re both marginalized sexualities which have potential legal and life-altering consequences. You can lose your job or your children for being kinky. You can be jailed for assault, even if it was consensual. It definitely can have social consequences. You can end up in therapy to “fix” your kinkiness. Parents don’t necessarily want to know about it.*

I’ve been practically cloistered in the kink community for the last year and a half. I work at a kinky sex shop. I live with kinky roommates. My boyfriend is kinky. My friends are kinky. I go to kinky parties and classes. My vacations are at kinky retreats. It’s been a little ridiculously consistent.

I think I’m starting to get over that stage of my coming out process. I did need it. I needed to learn about what I like and to feel okay with it. I needed to explore and I needed help in giving myself permission for that. I needed to meet people with whom I could play in this way and with whom I could talk about my kinks. I’m extremely thankful for the relationships that I’ve made in the kinky community, especially with my boyfriend and my roommates and coworkers.

But I’m ready for a little more variety. I have so many interests. I’m passionate about gender politics. I’m interested in spirituality. I’d like to do yoga, and I’m interested in health. I care about the environment. I love to write, and to read just about everything. I love to learn and study and be intellectual. I like to perform. These are all things I’ve neglected to one degree or another for the last year and a half.

Just sayin’ it’s time to branch out a little, and maybe write about it here!

*There are nuances to this argument and it’s an aside to my main point. There are of course differences between the social and legal impacts of kink and queer sexuality. But there are also lots of similarities.

A Serious Relationship

I’ve been dating my boyfriend for almost a year now. (It’ll be a year in mid-October.)

If I’m honest, he’s part of the reason I haven’t been writing here. Not because he doesn’t support my blogging or writing in general. One of the things that he did initially that I liked was read what I’d written here and talk to me about it. It means something when a person takes an interest in what you have to say.

I haven’t been writing because I’ve felt weird talking about a budding relationship, especially one that was quickly becoming intimate and seemed like it had the potential to last me for a while. If I’m going to talk about my relationship with him, it’ll be with him and not to the internet.

Of course, this blog has been a lot about my love life. I’ve at least spent a significant portion of time writing about my thoughts on relationships, if not the ones I was actually having.

I still don’t want to write about my primary relationship, except perhaps to report things we’ve decided together or discoveries we’ve made. I can tell stories about what we’re doing, etc. I just don’t want to muse about it here the way I do about other things.

Suffice it to say I’m in a solid primary relationship with a boy who I love and who loves me. We’re polyamorous in the sense that we play with and date other people but do not (so far) have actual relationships other than the primary one. He’s kinky, he’s smart, he takes care of me and I take care of him. He listens when I talk and shares himself with me. We’re in similar life stages, and maybe even have similar goals for the future. (Although part of this stage is not being totally sure of those goals.) Things are good.

Back in November, I referred to him as Roy G. Biv after our pube-dying date. It’s a code name he made up, and I think it’s what I’ll use to refer to him here (if I do refer to him here). But I probably won’t do it that much.

Basix Dildo

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Things Change

Things can change a lot in a few months.

Maybe it's just because I'm 23 and that's an age where life moves quickly and there's a lot of growth. Maybe I just personally invite that because I'm not satisfied with stagnancy or even really stillness. There will always be more to work on.

Anyway, because I haven't been writing here for all the reasons I mentioned in that last post, this blog no longer really reflects what's going on in my life. That's fine in its own way, since I've been actively deciding not to post, but it's also strange because I still link to it from social networking sites and dating sites and it's still a way I represent myself to the world at large. It's just not accurate anymore.

For instance, in one of the last posts I wrote about my love life, I was dating six people and feeling overwhelmed. The time constraints inhibited me from developing intimacy with any one of them. I was dissatisfied with this.

Now, I'm seeing primarily one man, the sixth one with whom I started going out in October. I called him Roy G. Biv in this entry and that seems as good a blog nickname for him as any. He's awesome and fun and attentive and right along with me on polyamory and I feel very close to and comfortable with him. It's a bit far from that last entry.

I'm still figuring out whether I can change my writing here to adapt to the ways my life and work have changed. There is something appealing about a more narrative structure, to try and tell the stories of what I'm up to. It's some fun, interesting, sexy stuff and might be worth sharing. I just need to check in with my lovers and with myself and figure out more how I feel about that. But there might just be a way.

In Public

I haven't been writing here. Unlike my usual dry spells, it's not because I've been especially depressed or lacking in words. I've been doing pretty well and thinking and working a lot. It's not for lack of material or desire, I just haven't felt comfortable putting everything online.

I've been pretty personal in this blog, yes, but the things I've been working on lately have felt too private to share here. In the past, a lot of my work was academic and therefore the thoughts I shared were on world problems, feminism, sex work, psychology, relationship theories, etc. I might've had a personal stake in those things, but they were ultimately universal issues. These days it's not really like that.

I've been spending a lot of time delving into deep parts of myself. I'm doing some hard work on finding and loving and healing pieces of me that aren't well-lit or comfortable. Working through family dynamics and habits, figuring out how to form trusting relationships (and why that's hard for me), finding and examining strong fears and insecurities. It's vulnerable stuff, and much harder to write about.

Another reason to hold back is that a bunch of people I know in real life are now reading this blog. I can't just say stuff into the ether; it comes back to me in the flesh. It's easier to be anonymously vulnerable to an audience of strangers than it is to bare my soul to a person who will look me in the eye and ask me about it tomorrow. It also feels passive aggressive to write about things I wouldn't say to someone's face but which I know they'll read. I much prefer direct, conscientious communication.

The thing is, I really want to write. I suppose it doesn't have to be here, but this is the best forum I've got and I want to keep it alive. Writing is good to me, it's therapeutic, it stimulates my mind and emotions. I love to write. I love to be creative. I need that outlet.

I'm not sure exactly what to do about this. Maybe I could take the blog in a different direction. Maybe I just need to write more for myself, audience be damned. Maybe I should screw my courage to the sticking point and do a little soul baring. I've always believed in and talked about the subversive and transformational power of being genuine and sharing vulnerability, but it's different to act on it when I feel genuinely vulnerable. It's scarier.

We'll see. Either there will be a change in the wind here and a lot more writing, or there won't. We'll just see.

D/s

I've been feeling dissatisfied lately with my play as a bottom. I thought for a while that it was because I keep having these short scenes at play parties that only tease me, getting me into a nice head space only to be over as soon as I arrive there. I still think that's part of it, but I've realized it's not the whole story.

When I was in San Francisco, I visited with the lover I met and spent lots of time with at Dark Odyssey Summer Camp. We spent most of the day just hanging out, and we fooled around for maybe twenty minutes. This was just as brief as the scenes that have been frustrating me so much, but for some reason I found it more satisfying.

The difference, I realized, is that rather than just straight up beatings without frills, the dynamic I have with this lover is much more D/s. The physical things we do together aren't even all that "kinky." It's mostly just sex stuff, with a little hitting here and there or he'll put his hand over my mouth or move me by the hair sometimes. What makes the difference, though, is that he'll talk the whole time and tell me what to do in a calm and expectant way, call me baby girl and get me to call him Sir, and tell me I'm a good girl when I do what he says.

I crave this. Playing with him, however briefly, made me realize that the power exchange is what's really been missing in my recent life. The dynamic I have with this particular guy is nice, but it doesn't have to be exactly that. I'd just like to be submissive in some capacity, rather than just bottoming for pain.

I want that feeling of giving over control. Beatings are good, but the real reason I like them is that they help bring my mind to a submissive place. I'd rather the pain be in a context of D/s than D/s kinda sorta be a part of things because there are beatings happening.

This desire is a little harder to realize than just wanting to be hit with things. So long as I know somebody has the skills and isn't a total creep, there aren't a lot of prerequisites to beat me. I feel pretty casual about it. D/s, on the other hand, requires that I trust someone enough to hand them not just physical but also emotional control. There's a more delicate balance of what excites me and what could trigger me. It requires more specific compatibility, since I like certain kinds of submission and not others. It's more complicated.

I'm going to see what I can do about this by both talking to the people I've been spending more time with, and trying to schedule some time with the play partners who I know can take me there. I'm quite happy with just about everything else going on in my relationships, so if I can get this one desire met then my life will be overall awesome sauce. It just takes some doing.

The Whole Happy New Year Thing

So, I like holidays. I love winter holidays. I think it is more crucial than can probably be expressed for us all to feel some sense of camaraderie and celebration when it gets cold and the sun is gone. As someone who feels the affects of the season (literally, as in Seasonal Affective Disorder), I very, very much appreciate the winter holidays.

I don't really like that the new year starts in January, though.

Obviously I'm just one human and my opinion on these things isn't going to stop people from calling this the new year. But I can't be the only one who thinks that they had a better idea in the days of yore in some random parts of the globe when they celebrated a new year in April instead of January. You know, when the snow has melted and the sun has come back and animals are being born and plants are starting to spring out of the earth and grow new buds and everyone is cheerful to be outside again? Seems a lot more like a renewal to me.

I don't feel very renewed this week. There's nothing about the procession of days through the winter that makes me want to examine my life and make resolutions about things I'd like to change. It feels to me more like something to get through, a season for storing stuff to deal with once the sun comes out and I've got more energy.

This year, I had a really significant birthday. I even wrote about it here. As holidays go, none are more personal than birthdays, and mine this year was an opportunity to do just what I don't feel like right now: take a look at my life and spur some action towards the things I really wanted and needed.

All of which boils down to: I don't have New Year's resolutions. Maybe you'll see some from me in April, but most likely I'll be making them for myself, on a day that makes sense to me and has very little to do with huge snow storms, heavy clothing, and darkness at 5:00pm.

A Call to Men

This pretty much speaks for itself. One observation: the audience is almost entirely women because this talk was at the TEDWomen conference. I think this is a vitally, vitally important message, but I do wonder how it's going to get to actual men when gender is so consistently considered only a women's issue.

I don't have a solution for this. I don't know how to get men to pay attention to this stuff because their privilege does allow them to ignore it. It just seems so important to involve them, not just to end violence against women but to free men, as he says, from their own versions of the Man Box.

Tony Porter's website, A Call to Men is very much worth checking out.

Better

My mother calls me to tell me about the three-inch-wide, deep-to-the-bone gash she got falling down the stairs yesterday and the five staples now holding her arm together.

As the conversations ends she says on the phone “Well, your father…” and then trails off.

She pauses, then says “Well, he’s home, so I have to stop talking now” in the tone of voice that means she needs to go do something so she should get off the phone but what she really means is that she wants to say something about him that’s negative, that might hurt his feelings, that might let him know we all talk about it and it’s actually a problem, that it actually has consequences for the rest of us. She couldn’t do that, though, because he could hear her and he’d be upset. Which is a code word, because everyone gets upset and what he does is more than that.

“Has he been grumpy?” I ask, which is another code word. It’s also a yes or no question. That way she can give me information without tipping him off, clue me in so I know what’s happening, so I’m warned when I come home this week after months away, so I can call my little sister and hear if she’s okay. So I’ll know whether or not to tiptoe when I enter the house.

“Well, he’s got this surgery coming up on Monday, and that’s a nervous thing. And he’s been worrying about that, and then I had to go and have something,” by which she means the gash and the staples, “and it’s a lot of pressure. We have the Christmas tree, and that’s done—thankfully that got done beforehand.”

By all of which she means, “Yes.”

I hear this and I remember being young, maybe seven years old and my sister was four, and we were sitting in the living room of the house in Massachusetts and my parents were putting up a very big Christmas tree. We couldn’t go out of the room because we shouldn’t be unsupervised and more because we didn’t want to miss anything, we wanted to know what was going on, we didn’t want to overhear it from upstairs.

My mother said we could stay there as long as we were quiet as church mice. Every time I had to help Daddy with a Project, I remembered that phrase, and I knew that I should be a church mouse and that Sis was better at it, which was why he always chose her to hand him the screwdriver or hold the flashlight.

And we were very young and we were sitting in little chairs I think, although we could have been on the floor, but we were wedged right next to each other on the right side of the wide doorframe, and I remember being afraid, and I remember Daddy yelling at us if we made any noise at all or if we asked any questions.

He was using a wire to attach the tree to the wall near the ceiling because it was a crooked tree and it wouldn’t stand up otherwise, and this was difficult and it was a Project, and if we interrupted he wouldn’t be able to concentrate and we weren’t going to help only make things worse, so we had to be quiet.

I remember being quiet, that day. And I remember the fear of what would happen if I made a noise and the equal fear of what would happen if I left and couldn’t keep track of what was going on in that room. And I didn’t like the quiet because I wanted to help, to make the Project over, to make it all okay, to contribute what I had to offer, to make it better. But I was quiet, I did it, I stayed quiet.

“So he’s just been worried about this surgery, but he’s being better now. He is doing better now.”

“Okay,” I say, because better is better. I’m thinking about how this all feeds into it, how we don’t name what it is. How instead we say why it is. How we talk about it only in terms of the causes, of him being stressed or angry or anxious, never in terms of what he’s doing, never in details or actions, never in terms of what it all means to us. We never talk about the fear or the sadness or the anger, not directly. We only all know it’s there because we share it. It’s always implied.

“He scared the dog the other day, scared her all the way down into my office,” she says. The office that is four floors down from the dog bowl in their San Francisco hillside town house. “Supposedly he was just trying to give her dinner.”

Tenga Egg Review

I got a Tenga Egg from Good Vibrations!

You might be asking yourself why I would choose a male masturbator as my first toy to review. You might be thinking that I do not have a bio cock (although I do have a few less-sensate ones in my drawer at home) and therefore might not be able to write a detailed review of this kind of product. You might then conclude that I've used it with one of my male partners, but you'd actually be wrong!

You see, there is an off-label use for this adorable, single-use masturbation sleeve. One that benefits me, and my clitoris, more directly.

I like to use a Hitachi Magic Wand as my go-to toy for masturbation. It stays plugged in and tucked down to the side of my bed at all times. I pull it out pretty much nightly for a little release before I go to sleep. It's good shit.

However, I've got a very (very) sensitive clit and while I like the penetrating vibes of the Hitachi, it's a little too strong to touch directly to my fine skin. I usually use it through a comforter or a folded piece of quilt so as to dull the sensation just a little bit.

This method, however, is a little cumbersome and not particularly sexy to look at. If I'm going to be Skype-sexing with someone, I want to look hot while I'm masturbating and still be able to get off.

Thus, the Egg! While I could take advantage of its super-stretchiness on whoever's whatever-sized dick, I instead tried flipping it inside out and putting it over the head of my Hitachi.

This had a few perks. The Egg was just thick enough that I could indeed use the Hitachi on my clit without any other intervening layers. I also got the "Stepper" version of the Egg, which has triangle-shaped nubbins all over the inside. With the included lube, these added a nice texture to my masturbation session.

Because the Eggs are single use, or at least single-person use without involving a condom, I'm not going to end up trying it with a dude. Maybe I'll get another one someday and give that a go. It did, however, work very well as a Hitachi cover and I'd therefore recommend it as a good accessory for those whose clitorises (clitori?) are sensitive like mine.

I Wanna Do Porn

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What Antidepressants Have Been Doing for Me

I wrote a lot about my decision to start taking Wellbutrin in June, about my fears and hopes surrounding the drug and about the experiences that prompted me to finally seek chemical assistance. I haven't, though, followed up to tell you what it's been like for me to take that pill ever day, what kinds of effects it's had on my emotions and my life.

The easy answer is that it's been awesome and very helpful.

In more detail: taking the medication does in fact make it easier not to sink into the moods I used to fall into so quickly. I can still react to things, I'll still get upset if something is upsetting, but it passes much more quickly. I react, I feel, and then I get over it. Before the meds, a relatively small thing could send me into a funk for days. When a few bad things happened in a row, that was a depressive episode waiting to happen. That feeling of looming despair is almost gone.

I've also only had one migraine since starting these pills. That is remarkable. For a while there, I was getting one every month.

My migraines are incredibly debilitating; I get blind spots, flashing lights, numbness in one or more of my limbs and sometimes my face, complete disorientation, inability to come up with words, splitting headache, dizziness, exhaustion, sensitivity to light and sound, and nausea. I can't work or do much of anything for the first four hours of a migraine, and am sometimes slowed down for days afterwards. So yeah, I'm happy to be having fewer of those.

The pills have also definitely been helping my ADHD. I didn't notice this as much through direct ability to focus better, which is sort of hard to track, but I noticed its lack when I missed a few pills the other week. I forgot, like, four things I was supposed to do for my boss and couldn't concentrate for shit. That's been better now that I'm on top of my meds again.

I've also had no side effects, so altogether I'm a happy camper. It's hard to believe it's taken me so long to take the step, but I know I did it at the right time, in my own time. I can't really ask for more than that.

Fun Pubes

Do I really need to comment much?

I had a really fun evening with a newish boy who happened to have some "Fun Betty" dye and a delightful sense of humor. He also dyed his own hair blue, pink, and green. Our new code names are Roy G. Biv and Cranberry Muffin.

I'm very pleased with my newly matching carpet and drapes. Very.

P. S. The dye includes bleach, and you don't put it anywhere near your labia, just on the upper triangle of hair that shows when your legs are closed. I wouldn't be endorsing a sad-vulva product. Just don't put bleach on your girly bits, okay?