Coming Home: Day 3 - Notorious

The alarm goes off at 4:45, and I hit snooze for the first of about ten times. I'm exhausted, totally unable to move my sleepy body out of the nest I made for myself; instead, I get to wake up and fall back asleep, wake up and fall back asleep. It's one of my favorite experiences, that pleasure of, I'm not ready yet, just a little more.

Sometimes masturbation looks like letting yourself sleep until you're actually ready to wake up. Then sometimes it looks like pulling the little vibrator that you won in a raffle from the Center for Sex and Culture out of your bag of playthings and pushing your hands down beneath the covers, wanting just to be warm and cuddled and not quite awake while you start your morning sex-with-self.

Then, other times, it looks like realizing that that small buzz isn't going to be nearly enough, you're awake enough as it is, and heading for the shower. This morning it was me, the good shower head, a tall candle, and the Frou Frou station on Pandora. (Don't you sometimes need just the right music to have sex to? Today I was all about, "let go / let go / just jump in / oh well -- what you waiting for / it's all right / 'cause there's beauty in the breakdown."

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1.27.12 (journal excerpt)

What would the poetry be this morning? This dancer skimming across my heart, this tapping feet, this fluttering candle flame, this thump that wakes me and holds me hostage. this isn't about love, it's about relinquishing, it's about wanting to climb into a new body, no, it's climbing into this body. It's wanting more from my own skin, eyes, fingers, tongue, more from my own time, tanglements, turbulence. I'm not wearing anyone else's clothes anymore. This is my own body.

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I look up quotes about masturbation to include in the blog, to spur thought, conversation, writing -- but most of them are the opposite of what I was hoping for: rather than hopeful, celebratory or encouraging (did I really expect to find these?), our popular culture messages about masturbation are self-depreciating, hostile, subtly or overtly shaming:

“Procrastination is like masturbation; In the end you're just screwing yourself.” - anonymous
“I never did like working out - it bears the same relationship to real sport as masturbation does to real sex” - David Lodge

Even Woody Allen's “Don't knock masturbation - it's sex with someone I love” is meant to make us laugh at him, embarrassedly, maybe a little at ourselves; do we give the idea a second thought, or do we smirk amongst ourselves: right, justification.

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This morning, though, it was sex with someone I loved. What about that, now? What about being able to love all the way (into) this body, this self, these hands that know just how to touch and stroke, the parts I admire, the parts I have learned to appreciate?

There's breakdown happening all around and inside me right now. Coming every day is just opening me further into what's actually in me, wanting to get out, wanting some energy, wanting to move.

Good morning, I whispered into the candlelight, then closed my eyes. Good morning, body. This is our wake-up call today.

My orgasm was lit with a candle, and I adored watching myself. I looked down, at the muscles of my forearms, at how my body both opens and holds tight into itself when I am prone like that. I watched left hand holding my body open to the spray of the shower head, and then watched myself move the shower head up and down, then in a slight crescent caress to one side of my clit. I watched myself the way I would watch you, if it'd been you down there, your fingers, your mouth, I watched the way I watch my lovers -- and got more turned on. 

Was it narcissistic, this desire I felt for my own body, for exactly what I was doing to myself? Was my stepfather right about me? Does it matter? I closed my eyes and moaned, just a little, surprised, pleased, into the space around the music. It took awhile today, and I gave myself the space (sometimes radical self care is not rushing or forcing an orgasm, is breathing when you thought you had to go fast, is listening to the parts that want a little more time). 

Today I had the feeling of, maybe it won't happen at all. I have that feeling most times I masturbate, most times I try to come. And then there's the physical thrill that unleashes itself up through me like a breath, like a wisp of smoke, a shudder of electricity -- it's a thin wire, like a giggle that moves somewhere from my pelvis up through the center of me, between spine and heart. This small, lit filament says, It's happening. Promise. 

And then I grin, delighted, grateful. Always grateful. 

And then, after the slip of awareness entered me, after the cusp of my orgasm cupped itself around my insides, I came fast -- still caressing that place next to my clit, asking you to help me find it, please find it. (and you did. oh, did you.)

Today was hardly any fantasizing, an orgasm that was big and surprising, like being engulfed from the inside out, one of those implosions: after, I feel consumed, the bathroom still echoing with my Oh My Gods. And then, again, small laughter, and the longing to cry. The tears are just to the other side of some bedrock in me, and won't come out yet, haven't broken through. I just lay there a moment, switched the shower head to a more regular flow, warmed all of my skin, soothed the throbs that still swelled in my labia. The tears rested in my cheekbones, in the tendons of my neck, in my jawbone. They'll come. Right? Like we do.

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This could be my favorite of all the quotes about masturbation I came across: From the Watchtower (9/15/73) pp.564-5 "Breaking Free of Self-Abuse-Why? How?": "That masturbation is abnormal and unnatural is also indicated by the fact that abnormal, mentally deranged people are notorious masturbators."

Notorious masturbator. That should be on a t-shirt, don't you think? Let's make them.

Abnormal and mentally deranged people masturbate. As do normal and mentally healthy people. And all the rest of us, too. Have sex with someone you love today -- consider loving yourself the way you want someone else to love you. That's my practice, too. 

Be easy with you and your body. Thanks for reading -- come again tomorrow!