Resolution

I don't really make New Year's Resolutions, but one of those times when I take stock of my life and make some decisions about how I want to change it happened to fall at the beginning of the year this time.

I've been living in New York City for a little over five months now, and it took me a while to find any kind of comfort zone here. This is not an easy city, and it's huge and overwhelming and not always that friendly. The people are actually friendly, but they're also busy and absorbed with their own lives.

A couple of weeks into January, I had a meltdown at work. I'd been canvassing full time since September, despite my plan to use it as a New York starter while I found another job. I had recently quit the dungeon and then quit sex work altogether. I was trying to raise money for the ASPCA, which is a good cause but not one I especially give two shits about. I felt like I'd gotten away from all the things I wanted to focus on in my life.

So I left work early that day. I took the rest of the week off. I read Can I Wear My Nose Ring to the Interview?, put together a plan for a job search, and cut my work hours down to part time. I went and got myself an apprenticeship with an awesome sex educator who's going to let me take her intensive women's sexuality workshop for free and be a mentor to me. I got back to what it is I want to be doing.

I guess what that means is that my resolution is to actually do all the things I've been wanting to do, the things that are the reasons I moved to New York. I'm going to events at Babeland and kinky events and poly events and I'm getting back into that community, except in a new city this time. I'm dating again, ending the celibate period I gave myself. I'm blogging again! (In case you didn't notice.) I'm just back to my usual self and my usual pursuits.

It feels really good. Maybe I'll try this resolution thing again next year.

It's Not Easy to Get Me Off

I've been masturbating for a very long time. Since I was about six or seven, I think, although I don't remember having orgasms exactly until I hit puberty. It just felt really good, and then it would stop feeling really good all of a sudden. No peak, just a termination. I got there eventually, though, and it was great.

I've gotten more sophisticated in the ways that I masturbate over the years. I went from rubbing myself against bean bag chairs and stuffed animals to using a tiny bullet vibrator. I now have a lovely collection of toys and I like to play with them in different combinations. Sometimes I watch porn. Sometimes I invite a partner.

One thing that I don't do, however, is masturbate using just my fingers. I have done it a few times when I really felt like I shouldn't make any noise. But I think I can count on my hands the number of times I've come from my hands.

The truth of the matter is that I have an extremely sensitive clitoris. Generally speaking, fingers are too rough for it and I desensitize quickly. I just don't come from manual stimulation, and even with oral sex it takes a little practice to figure me out. It seems that many women like flicking or good amounts of friction, and that doesn't work for me.

What I didn't realize until recently was how embarrassed I was that it's not easy for me to come. I'm this big sex nerd, I try to know and learn as much as I can about sex, I have lots of sex, I'm sexually open, and yet it's not so easy to get me to orgasm. I feel awkward that it usually takes a session or two with a new lover before they've mastered the art of my orgasm.

Most often, I can communicate my way to the Big O anyway, even if it's just because I let my partner take the assist while I masturbate with a vibrator. So it really shouldn't be a big deal. But there are those times when I've given several tips about what to do, I'm turned on so it's hard to articulate about the right tongue stroke, I've been close for fifteen minutes but am starting to get desensitized, and it's just so depressing to tell them it's not going to happen.

It is superbly frustrating for me not to come, but I feel like I have to hide my frustration to avoid bruising egos. Most of the time I'll just move us on to other things without commenting on it, but if they've been going down on me for twenty minutes then that's kind of hard to do. I do actually (shame of shames) fake orgasm from time to time if they're doing the right thing and for some reason it's just not working this time. It's pretty rare, but as a sex educator who tells people never to do that, it makes a hypocrite out of me.

This is something I want to work on and overcome. I'm not exactly sure what's the source of this embarrassment, other than the fact that I'm just as influenced as anyone by our culture's emphasis on sexual performance. But I do know that orgasm isn't everything and if I don't communicate honestly about my sexual needs then I'll never have them met. I want to live up to my own advice. Confessing this all here seems like a good start.

NYC and my Fiscal Politics

About three months ago, I had an experience in the subway that really blew me away and solidified my fiscal politics. I didn't write about it at the time because I was feeling writer's blocked, but it seems important enough to reach back a little bit.

I was riding the subway home from a fancy dinner with my parents, who were in town for Thanksgiving. I was carrying a bag full of various leftovers they'd given me, which I planned to gleefully eat over the next week. I'm not exactly flush with cash, so free food was a luxury I was looking forward to.

As I was sitting there in a half-dozing, full-stomach, late-night stupor, a woman got on the subway and began one of those hat-in-hand speeches that you often hear from bedraggled people on the trains. She was missing most of her front teeth and had graying hair sticking out from the sides of her head. She said, "You're all I've got and I'm hungry and thirsty." She started to ask for whatever pocket change we could spare.

Well, I was sitting right next to her and I had all this food, so I just handed her a big thing of risotto that my parents had given me.

She stopped mid-sentence. Probably mid-word. She looked the container over, opened it, and started eating right there with her hands. She didn't really look at me, except once because I was watching her (I said, lamely, "Happy Thanksgiving,") and she got off at the next stop, still wordlessly eating.

I was so struck by her facial expression and the way she took that food. This woman was clearly starving. She had not eaten in days. It was obvious, and my heart just broke.

It's so impossible to understand living in this city. You can walk up Park Ave and see all the fancy shops and the women with obvious plastic surgery and fur coats and fancy cars with drivers. I collect hundreds of dollars sometimes in single donations on the street. And yet, there are people here who are starving.

Starving.

So, it became immensely clear to me that there's no reason that the kind of extreme wealth that's on display in this city should even exist. There's just no sense in it when we could tax those people into a semblance of reasonable life and be able to feed and house the people who need it.

I'm not saying people shouldn't be able to build up money and that there shouldn't be fiscal rewards for work. I do think it's important to have a bell curve of socio-economic status. I just think we need to cut off the ends, eliminate the outliers. So yeah, still pay doctors more and let people at the top have higher salaries, but there's just no reason for anyone to have gold dinner plates or private jets or whatever. It's just gratuitous.

So I guess that makes me something of a socialist, although not an extreme one by any means. That's something I'd shied away from for a long time because I felt like our fiscal politics were very, very complicated and trying to take a stance when I don't fully understand them would be silly. But really now, I can at least grasp a general concept and think it's close to the right thing to do.

Meghan McCain is Kinda Cool

Okay, so I got sucked into the internet vortex of Jezebel and their fortunately often feminist commentary on the gross celebrity stuff that's a constant subtext to life in American. And I somehow ended up at Meghan McCain's column at Daily Beast.

She's a Republican and very clearly supports fiscal policies that favor individualism and capitalism. She's also pro-life (I would say anti-choice). Those aren't things I agree with. I've decided I'm more or less a socialist, which I'll write about soon, and I'm passionately pro-choice. In case you never guessed. But that's fine. What struck me, despite some important opinion differences, was how much easier it would be to feel safe with Republicans and not kinda hate them if more of them were like her.

She talks honestly about some of the things I think are important. She notices issues with body image for women and writes about her own struggles with double standards in a way that's accessible and makes sense. She admires Hillary Clinton. She wants the Republican party to be more inclusive, and she's clearly at least socially moderate (if not liberal, although the pro-life thing is a wrench in that). She supports gay marriage. She thinks young people are important.

It's a departure from the rampantly privileged older white male syndrome. Yes, her economic policies still favor privilege. But at least she's got some awareness that life is unfair sometimes and actually cares. And she's respectful of people who disagree with her.

I don't know if she'll have any success with her message that Republicans need to join the 21st century. If anything, it seems like they're only getting more conservative and poisonous since they lost the White House. I'd love it, though, if she did. It's so much more fun to have an opponent when it's a respectful, ethical one than when it's a mean, exclusive, scary one. Maybe then we'd actually be able to have a few reasonable compromises and actually get some shit done in politics.

The History of Removing Women's Body Hair

In case you couldn't have guessed, the practice of removing female body hair in Western culture and especially North America started with advertising.



When sleeveless dresses became popular shortly after the invention of the razor with disposable blades (planned obsolescence anyone?), it was an obvious step for advertisers to try to sell the razors to women. What better way than making them think their armpit hair was unsanitary and needed to be removed?

The above image from 1915 was the first in a widespread campaign which increasingly suggested to women that their hair was dirty and distasteful. Now, this particular advertising trend had to do specifically with underarm hair. The disgust for leg hair and need for razors to shave it off was encouraged later, after hemlines began to rise. Women had to be self-conscious about their newly visible body parts in order to convince them to pay to alter them.

It's a little harder to pinpoint exactly when women started shaving their legs. There seems to be a consensus that it happened in the 1940s when skirts got shorter and sheer pantyhose became available. Some speculate that it had something to do with pinup model Betty Grable showing off her hairless legs and inspiring others to do the same.

Complete removal of pubic hair is a different story, actually. This was less driven by the advertising industry than by the porn industry. If you're a pornie, you've probably seen some of those old 1970s pornos where the women still sported the full bush. Pubic hair got shorter and shorter as porn became more and more accessible via VHS, DVD, and then finally the internet. As it became viable for more people to get into porn, it also became useful to remove their hair, the only visual obstacle to intense closeups of pink vulvas.

So, ladies, the fact that you're socially pressured in a huge way to remove all the hair on your body (except the long locks on your head) comes almost exclusively from industry and advertising. It has nothing really to do with hygiene or femininity, it's just about profits and products. I mean, that's no different than other staples of beauty standards like makeup and anti-aging products, etc. It's just equally depressing.

Quitting (Longish post)

Well, I quit sex work.

It's a little more complicated than that. I took myself off the schedule at the dungeon a few weeks ago. As an (apparently very) submissive woman I was having trouble effectively meeting the needs of my clients, and I didn't like the work that much. It was a fun learning experience and it gave me a lot of time and some experiences through which to mull over BDSM and my feelings towards it, but I was done with it.

My intention was to go back to stripping, and I found a small-ish club in Queens where I felt reasonably comfortable and the house fees weren't too high. I even auditioned there and worked for a night. (They have 8-hour shifts, 8pm-4am. Ouch!) I bought a gown to fit the dress code there, and packed all my g-strings into my rolling stripper bag.

But when I went in for my second shift, I just didn't want to do it anymore. I knew what I had to be doing to make money. I needed to go around the room and find the men who glanced at my ass, look deeply into their eyes, flirt mercilessly, all the usual. I needed to play the game. And I just had no interest in it.

I normally have an overabundance of sexual energy. I think about sex all the time and talk about it and have it and I've got this great store of positive juice in my batteries when it comes to physical love. As a stripper, I was able to use and play with that energy to keep things interesting and engage with men and even have fun.

These days, I'm a little low on that energy. I think a big part of that is having a full time canvassing job that's not in line with what I want to be doing. We're not even canvassing for Planned Parenthood anymore; now I spend all day having conversations with people who don't give a shit about human rights but will cry and throw thousands of dollars at "homeless" (ie feral ie wild) household animals. It's draining, on a soul level.

I also think I've probably learned everything I'm going to learn from stripping. I understand the dynamics of it and I have a feel for the industry. Sure, I could always learn to be a better stripper, but that's not really who I want to be. I was never a lifer.

Most importantly, though, I always promised myself that the second I really didn't want to be a sex worker anymore, the second it started to hurt me, I would stop. I've seen the consequences of staying in it past that point, and they're not pretty. I don't want to damage myself that way. I want to have more respect for myself and my feelings than that. I'm lucky enough to have a day job so I can, kind of, afford to leave.

Things are admittedly going to be financially difficult for me for a while until I figure out what to do instead. I'm going to try to go back to babysitting. Instead of another physically and emotionally draining job on top of my first one, I'll get to be around kids. That's like a battery charger; I love them.

I'm also looking for a different full time job. I came here meaning to canvass for only a little while as I looked for something else, but I was overwhelmed with moving and being on my own so I didn't have the extra initiative that took. Now I'm settled, and I'm going to dedicate myself to that for real.

I'm not really sure where I'll end up with all of this or how it'll go, but I've got some money saved and I've got a new determination to find work that's fulfilling, at least on a basic level. Wish me luck everyone, and I'll keep you posted on how it goes.

Rapists are Nearly Always Predators

I've had two blog posts by Thomas over at Yes Means Yes up in my Firefox browser for a while, meaning to write about them here. They are both fairly lengthy but very, very worth reading.

In the first, he talks about who the people are who rape repeatedly without getting caught. He discusses a couple of surveys where researchers managed to identify and question un-incarcerated rapists. A few key points from the post:

Of the 865 total attempted or completed rapes these men admitted to, a staggering 95% were committed by 96 men, or just 8.4% of the sample...Just 4% of the men surveyed committed over 400 attempted or completed rapes...

The sometimes-floated notion that acquaintance rape is simply a mistake about consent, is wrong. The vast majority of the offenses are being committed by a relatively small group of men, somewhere between 4% and 8% of the population, who do it again … and again … and again...

We need to spot the rapists, and we need to shut down the social structures that give them a license to operate. They are in the population, among us. They have an average of six victims, women that they know, and therefore likely some women you know. They use force sometimes, but mostly they use intoxicants. They don’t accidentally end up in a room with a woman too drunk or high to consent or resist; they plan on getting there and that’s where they end up.

The second post is sort of an expansion on the first. In it, Thomas explains how it is that serial rapists manage to commit their crimes without detection. Namely, by raping people they know and by using intoxicants much more than force to make the rape possible.

In the course of 20 years of interviewing these undetected rapists, in both research and forensic settings, it has been possible for [the researcher] to distill some of the common characteristics of the modus operandi of these sex offenders. These undetected rapists:
• are extremely adept at identifying “likely” victims, and testing prospective victims’ boundaries;
• plan and premeditate their attacks, using sophisticated strategies to groom their victims for attack, and to isolate them physically;
• use “instrumental” not gratuitous violence; they exhibit strong impulse
control and use only as much violence as is needed to terrify and coerce their victims into submission;
• use psychological weapons – power, control, manipulation, and threats – backed up by physical force, and almost never resort to weapons such as knives or guns;
• use alcohol deliberately to render victims more vulnerable to attack, or completely unconscious.

Now, I am not able to do these posts justice with brief blockquotes. I really do suggest that everyone go and read the full posts, as long as they are. They're both very informative and I finished reading them with the sense that, yes, dear God, rape is awful and these are horrible men, but also with the sense that maybe there's something we can actually do about it that would work.

That's what blew my mind. I've heard the rhetoric about acquaintance rape, that it's committed by guys who did it by accident, who were just confused and fucked up about consent because of our weird sexual culture. I bought into that.

The studies in these posts explain that this is clearly not true, that rapes are committed by predators, plain and simple. This actually made me feel better. Yes, I still will never know upon meeting a man whether or not he's a rapist, but at least the ones that are rapists aren't accident-prone nice guys who I should feel bad for. I need no conflict in my feelings. They're evil. And we can identify them, if we watch for the signs he points out.

That's pretty damn cool.