Fuck My Sexual Orientation and Identity

I was reading a post on Figleaf's Real Adult Sex today where he answered several questions designed to provide enlightenment about his gender identity. He apparently got all these questions from Bond at Dear Diaspora.

One question in particular gave me a big jolt as I was reading, one that suddenly clarified a huge issue with my sexual orientation that I've been half-subconsciously grappling with for years. It was this:

What would your gender identity be if you’d been born as the other sex? How masculine or feminine would you be? (This comes from an old one for when one is questioning her sexual orientation: What would your sexual orientation be if you were the other sex?)

Now, my response had more to do with the parenthetical aside than the question itself. I answered without a millisecond of hesitation in my head: I would be a femme gay man.

And I was suddenly struck with the absolute truth of that. If I were male-bodied and could have queer sex with other men, I'd be gay. Not bisexual, really. Maybe a little. But no, I'd be gay. Almost entirely.

So sure, I'd still be femme. My gender identity is actually pretty solid and apparently has little to do with my body. The thought of being a femme man sounded just as comfortable as the thought of being a femme woman. But the question of orientation? That blew my mind.

I have historically had many more male sexual and romantic partners than I have had female ones. I've been annoyed with that fact. It feels like a barrier to my identification as queer, as a true bisexual. I know for a fact that I've been more attracted to some of my female partners and enjoyed the sex much more than that with many of my male partners. It's exciting in a different way that I like. A lot.

But.

I think that might have less to do with liking female bodies and femme gender presentations than it has to do with liking queer sex. When I so easily answered that gender/orientation question for if I had a male body, something clicked in my head. The thought of being a gay man felt like a relief. If I were a gay man, I'd be able to have the kind of sex that I like best with the people whose bodies I like best. And I think, weirdly, that those bodies for me are male.

This has been so confusing for so long. Because, yes, I definitely like women and their bodies. Just not as much! But I like like lesbians soooooooo much more than I like most straight men. Maybe all "straight" men, if we define that as hetero- and gender-normative. In fact, I’m not particularly attracted to straight people. (Male or female.) I do like the ones who will say “I tried gay sex“ or “I would try gay sex” and it didn’t do that much for them, or the ones who approach sex queerly. That’s different. That’s not “straight,” that’s just heterosexual.

The problem here is that I'm QUEER. I like queer sex. I like queer relationships. I want to sleep with guys, but I want to sleep with gay guys. Or queer guys. I want to sleep with them queerly, without the total emphasis on PIV intercourse or the lack of respect for female pleasure. I want the sense of play and transgression I've had with other queers. Queer sex!

Which is frankly kind of sad. I'm female-bodied. I love being female-bodied. I really wouldn't want to change that. I just wish that more queer guys wanted to sleep with/date me. And yes, there are queer guys who like women, but they're so much harder to find. It takes "bisexual," which expanded my dating pool and turns it into “female bodied queer person who likes queer men," which drastically shrinks it.

As if there weren't already enough reasons it's hard for me to find a partner. Pfft.

Kink and Me

When it comes to my personal interest in BDSM, in both my fantasies and real life, I don't think it's really the image or illusion of non-consent that appeals to me. I know that these kinds of consensual non-consent scenes are what draw a lot of people to BDSM. Rape fantasies abound, and I'm not knocking them. I've had my fair share.

One of my favorite erotic stories when I was younger was about being kidnapped by pirates and tied to the mast naked for all to play with. When I was very young, I'd fantasize about a male soldier tied up and seductively teased by a female captor to get him to talk. I clearly do like SOME non-consent.

But most of the time I find that my fantasies turn more towards being told what to do and then doing it. It's not so much about a lack of consent (or a pre-negotiated pretense of a lack of consent) as it is about simple dominance and submission.

I want to give over control to someone who I trust and who I want to please. I want to take pride in my ability to please them. I want to be a good girl. I think maybe that's always what it's been like when I go into sub space. I become very obedient and I get very turned on over following orders.

I like it best when my dom orders me to do things that are hard for me to do. I especially like it when they are sexual things or things that require physical endurance. Like attempting to deep throat a very big cock or holding myself in a difficult bound position or just breathing through some pain. (Yum, spankings.) My dom would of course have to take care not to violate my physical or emotional boundaries, but I like to be pushed.

For me, all that is not so much about a lack of consent as it is about a gift I'm giving to my dom. As I said, I take pride in it. It's a special thing that only I can give. It's not a vehicle for humiliation or disempowerment.

If I'm giving over my power, then that means I possessed it in the first place. We start from a place of equality and enter, consensually, into a power exchange. This makes the feminist in me comfortable even as it turns me on. The equal negotiations are very important, and that means I don't want a 24-7 Dom/sub relationship. And I pretty much need to play with other people who believe in equality.

All this is also why I don't like casual or public BDSM. It's a very serious and intimate gift I'm giving someone - trust with my feelings and needs and body. I can't do that with a stranger, and I don't really want to do it in front of strangers. It puts me in a very vulnerable place, and I need to feel safe to be there. I can't really feel that way with random folks around.

To recap: I like to be told what to do. I like to be brought into intense physical sensations. I like to give my obedience as a gift. I like to be asked to do difficult things, praised when I do them, and punished (lovingly) when I don't. I'm completely uninterested in casual, public, or 24-7 BDSM. I require equal and respectful negotiations in order to play.

That all took me a long, long time to figure out, but maybe now I can start acting on it.

New Domain!

Hey everyone! I finally registered the domain www.papercutsandplastic.com for this blog! I've been meaning to do it for ages and ages and ages, and now it's finally done. From now on, papercutsandplastic.blogspot.com will redirect to the new domain. In fact, you should be able to see it in your browser now!

If you want to update your bookmarks, please go for it. I'm excited because now I feel like a real boy! I can haz real website? Yay!

Celibacy

So, I haven't had any kind of sex since Halloween. Now, this is sex as I define it, which is about as broad as it gets, so that means nothing more than kissing. (I just realized I haven't written here about my definition of sex, so I'll get on that. Expect a post on it soon.)

Anyway, I obviously could have had sex if I'd wanted to. I've done the craigslist thing before, I had a couple of people I already knew who I could have called, and it's honestly never that hard to find a casual sex partner. Alls I have to do is turn on my radar for chemistry and go with that flow. It usually happens just fine.

However, I haven't wanted to turn on my radar. I've been somewhat uncomfortable in my new surroundings. New York City is a hard place to adjust to, and what with a demanding job and some drama in my friendship with my roommate, I just wasn't feeling up to it. I've been giving myself permission not to be the super-awesome sex fiend I usually see myself as.

This has actually been kind of super-awesome anyway.

I've had a lot of really useful time to reflect on what it is that I get out of my romantic and sexual relationships. It's been easier to do when it's not so pressing, when there isn't drama or stimulus right outside my door or thirty minutes away. I've still been thinking about sex, and especially about BDSM and poly and my sexual orientation, but I've been able to turn that inward rather than outward.

I've learned a lot. It's done a lot to help me clarify what, exactly, is my interest in BDSM anyway and why it's been so hard for me to act on it. It's helped me to clarify what the deal is anyway with my not-so-obvious orientation percentage levels or whatever with bisexuality and queerness. I've even gotten to examine my gender identity a little more, and parse out what parts I like and dislike and how I want to perform.

Now, this is obviously a teaser post, and I promise I'll write about all of the above soon. My main point, though, is that it's been really nice to let go of my self image as a sex goddess who has more sex than you and is therefore cool. I tried not to be like that anyway, but NOT having sex has allowed me to truly let go of my insecurities around sexual performance and what makes me an interesting person. I seem to be doing okay even without it, and that's pretty cool.

On Satire

http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2009/12/04/rape-the-method-by-josh-brorby/

This post on Feministe (I think I'm a bit late responding to this one, but my thoughts stand nonetheless) made me think hard and very clearly about the difficulty of satire being such a thoroughly appreciated and oft-attempted medium in this day and age.

Since I stopped writing my college sex column, a variety of other collegiate types have taken it over. They almost uniformly attempt to write "satire" that is as poorly written as Mr. Brorby's and frequently deals with the same topics. It's sexist, sex negative, and supposedly "all a joke." It just tends to be so very, very poorly done that it comes off as a bashing of sexuality as a whole, and most often specifically of women.

This is immensely frustrating. It's actually the reason I applied to start writing the article, and I made a very serious effort to be funny in my writing but also respectful and inclusive. I think I did a fairly good job, but I have no control over what happens now. It's just back to the way it was before.

I see this a lot with amateurish writing, be it blogs or college newspapers or even real-world but poorly-written-and-edited publications. People think they are quite clever, but they manage to just make a muck of out what they're trying to say and perpetuate the awful cultural trends that they're trying to critique. I think any newspaper writer should have to go through a mandatory "Art of Satire" class before they're allowed to have any creative control over what they publish. Or just, whatever, the world should stop being so sexist and sex-negative and rasist and classist and miserable. Yeah.

Sex Work is Complicated (Uh, Duh)

I do not think sex work is empowering.

Now, I'm not saying that sometimes people don't experience it that way. I've written myself about how stripping took objectification, which I can't control, and put it in an arena where it's a consensual exchange. That one thing did help empower me, but that's just one part of a larger experience. I don't think it's what the industry does as a whole.

Sex work is often exploitative, sometimes dehumanizing, frequently fun, occassionally uplifting, very lucrative, hard work. It's a job. One that is complicated, most especially in its labor/management relations.

You wouldn't ask if working in a car factory is empowering. You wouldn't ask if being an accountant is empowering. A farm laborer. A Walmart cashier. Whatever. Maybe it's a valuable question, especially since the answer is usually "no," but it's not one lobbed at most labor.

So why should this be the standard for whether stripping or ho'ing or domming or modeling or whatever proves that it's acceptable? Why do we insist that sex work must either be unequivocally empowering or enequivocally degrading and sexist? I think it's awfully silly.

Until we begin to recognize that women's bodies are simply a site for regular old emotions and work and day to day life and not just a battle ground for those who want to exploit or empower them, we're not going to be able to deal fairly with sex work.

(The empowerment thing applies to male sex workers too, but the debate usually plays out most over women. Yet another way male sex workers get ignored and marginalized.)

Sex work is work. It's important, yes, but it's neither the answer to nor the only question of misogyny.

Winter

I have been suffering from the lack of motivation that I usually feel throughout the winter. I've got the whole cranky-mood, not-having-sex-because-it-doesn't-seem-like-a-good-idea-when-I'm-emotionally-needy, fighting-with-my-roommate thing going on.

I was hoping that being outside for four hours every day, as I am when canvassing, would help with the the seasonal affective thing. They say, after all, that it's partly caused by a lack of exposure to the sun because people stay inside during the winter. That clearly doesn't apply to me, but I'm still feeling the winter blues.

I'm praying that I'll start to feel more comfortable in this city and work out my shit with my roomie and eventually feel comfortable getting some. Maybe soon. Either that, or I'll just move back to the Bay Area. But all things considered I'm just applying to grad school and waiting 'til the sun comes out to make my decision. And there you go.