Coming Home: Day 24 - all open-mouthed hunger

In my dream, I am both intensely hungry and eruptive, bursting out of my very skin. I can't remember much of it at all, just the feeling, just the sense that I am consuming everything and releasing, pushing out, emerging.

In this month, this year so far, I have met the layers and depths and nuances of my hunger -- and it scares the shit out of me. We're not supposed to admit that we're as hungry as we are: for food, yes, and for desire, for success, adventure, family, love, creative expression, sex, sensation, books, words, color, sound, texture, travel, people, bodies, skin, poetry, flame, performance, space, freedom -- it's all open-mouthed hunger here, which is not necessarily a safe/protected space from which to meet the world. Yet, here's this May-me, walking with my tongue hanging out, wanting to lick everything.

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I've missed my morning come-then-blog practice, so I'm trying it again today: flew out of bed to the computer, then am going to shower before I take Sophie out. I want to be with you in the morning.

The orgasm comes a little harder today, hard in all the ways, because my body/psyche doesn't want any fantasy between me and the sensation, just wants to come to exactly that experience, no distractions. I don't yet have words for what's scary about that -- just know that I have to stop a lot, overwhelmed, panting, reassuring the self inside that's scared of just being here. Then I start talking to myself/the maybeness that's moving against me: don't stop, that's it, god yes, just there. I practice. Then two of my favorite songs in a row come on the pandora station, and so I am not distracted even by new music. It's this line playing while I come: happiness hit her like a bullet in the back. Yes. It's like that sometimes, isn't it?

Speaking of hunger -- that song contains this line as well: And I never wanted anything from you -- except everything, and what was left after that, too.

(right?)

(speaking of dog days -- now the puppy needs to go out)
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It's not at all surprising to me that I have gotten sick just now: two days in a row, I have made powerful connections with women who are inviting me to own my hunger around profession & avocation (this in addition to the hungers I'm meeting and owning here, through this blogging, through my morning/daily masturbation practice) -- and I left each those meetings feeling like a cloud of angry bees was swarming just under my skin, having awakened the censors/editors/sef-protective armoring that wants me to leave well enough alone, to be satisfied with my life being pretty good. Pretty good is damn good when you're coming from torture and rape, right? Do you really need to go for more than that? Why invite loss, disappointment, failure, embarrassment?

Midwestern girls, don't we learn to be satiated? Be quiet? Don't we learn that we're meant to take whatever comes to us with a goddamn smile on our faces, and not ask for seconds?

In the dive deep group (the manuscript/special projects group that I run through writing ourselves whole), we talk about how hungry we are for our own goddamn words, and then we live with the shame of that -- we, women, we're not supposed to want so much. Even we evolved feminist/post-feminist/post-modern women, we women who take everything in our hands like salt, we are still so indoctrinated -- we have not escaped that training to be good girls: and good girls are not hungry.

What will happen if we are hungry? What's the message? That we'll be disappointed? That we'll be sluts, and thereby outside of polite society? That we'll deserve whatever we get? She said she was hungry, officer -- so, you know, I just thought that was an open invitation.


What if we get to be both ravenous and in control, in choice, deciding entirely what comes into our mouths?
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This is not the blog of a good girl -- but releasing that good girl is hard damn work. So I eroticize her. I let her live in bottom space, I let her climb into my fantasy life. She can to excel there; it doesn't serve my whole self if she's allowed to excel at being in charge of my life.

That good girl makes a good bottom: she likes to do what you tell her to, wants to be the very best one at following the rules, and she really likes to know that you think she's doing well. It makes her just want to serve you more.

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Use everything -- that's what all the writing books say, and that's what we are learning/reminding ourselves through this daily orgasm practice (and I don't mean the royal we there, I mean all the women I know who are engaged in an orgasm-a-day during this National Masturbation Month): even the trauma memory, even the 'bad' fantasies, even the loss, even the numbness and dissociation: it can all be a part of self-care, it can all be retrained to serve this now-self, it can all be acceptable until I decide to release, until I'm ready to let go.

Off into the world now, mouth open. Holding this hunger in the palms of my hands. I get to feed it to you; I get to be fed. How's that for radical self care, transformative healing?

Be so good to your hungry self today. Come exactly as you are. See you tomorrow.

Coming Home: Day 23 -- dissociating (to) orgasm

Today I have the sick that was percolating in me yesterday -- and somehow, in spite of the fact that I felt physically worse when I woke up today than I did yesterday, I felt like coming this morning. I dedicated my orgasm to wellness -- let's hope it takes.


(I got that idea of dedicating orgasms from our hero Annie Sprinkle, who does all number of fabulousness around orgasms and wellness and world health.) 


Anyway, right now it's later, I've got my tissues, my stuffy nose, my tea and saltines, and am still going to blog about orgasms. Let's hear it for the glamorously sexy life of a sex blogger.


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This morning, as I settled in under the water, I was thinking about dissociation and masturbation (how's that for meta?) -- the truth is, I don't always fantasize about sex when I'm masturbating; in fact, when I first get started, I think about almost anything but sex: plans for the day, how sweet it was to play w Sophie out in the park, what I new to add to the shopping list, what I'm going to write here. After learning to fully dissociate while also experiencing extreme clitoral stimulation (as with a vibrator), I know how to both feel the pound of the water against me and keep it at a distance -- it's quite possible for me to have a vibrator on my clit for an hour or more and not be any closer to actually coming than when I started, if I don't really pay attention. I have to focus, as with a kind of meditation, if I want to be in the rise to orgasm.

Did you ever hear that joke with the punch line, 'Beige. I think I'll paint the ceiling beige.' In my memory, it's a blonde getting fucked who doesn't know enough to pay attention to what's happening to her. I went and looked it up -- it's actually a three part joke: what's the difference between having sex with a prostitute, your mistress, and your wife? The prostitute asks you, "Aren't you done yet?" Your mistress asks you, "Oh, honey, can't we do it again?" and your wife says, "Beige -- I think I'll paint the ceiling beige."


Now, I think I heard that joke back in college. The only bit that persisted for me was the punchline, because it sounded exactly like something I might think during sex -- not because I wasn't interested in the person I was having sex with, not because I wasn't turned on or didn't want to be there, but because it was just so easy to float away, and it was hard work having to be so present all the time. Sex, for me, is an active clause -- even sex by myself. 


It's somewhat embarrassing to find myself thinking, "Beige..." when I have my hands on my own clit, and I'll admit that I start wondering about my own technique, but the truth is that it's just trauma aftermath, and I give myself a break. 


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I have two orgasm stories to tell you, related to this business of dissociation & focusing in:

1) This morning, I laughed at myself when I found that I was planning out a blog about dissociation while I was trying to come for that same blog. Just too many layers of recursivity there. So I took a breath, brought my awareness back in to my body, and had that thought about dedicating my orgasm to my wellness, to the wellness of us all. Then, I'll tell you, I came pretty fast, in spite of my body aches and the fact that it was a bit hard to breathe. I'm still on these exposure/exhibitionism fantasies, which are working.


2) One night at Hedgebrook, I found my head wandering when I was well into masturbating, and getting toward that place in my rise when I'm going to actually pitch over into coming. I kept the vibrator on me, moving it just slightly, while I began to imagine (totally unintentionally) my new apartment (which I hadn't moved into yet): I could see the cozy living room, darkness from the bedroom and office and hallway; there was a pot of soup simmering on the stove, and the windows were steaming -- outside it was dark, stormy, and the sounds of rain pounded all around. I saw my pup, curled up on a pillow in the living room, sleeping and comfortable and relaxed. And then I saw myself, in the bedroom, on top of the covers, masturbating -- Outside of the fantasy, in my little double bed in the cabin at Hedgebrook, I had this thought: We're going to be all right. It's going to be ok. And then I came hard, crying and laughing at the same time, to an image of myself safe and good in a new life.

That is (yes, here I go, spelling it out), sometimes we can use exactly the skills that were meant to take us away from sex to bring us in, by the back door if need be. We use it all.

Frankly, I consider that latter orgasm to be profound visioning work.

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I'm about to settle into an evening with Law and Order and some soup, hopefully an early-to-bed. Sometimes radical self care looks like an orgasm for the sick girl; sometimes masturbation looks like curling up with a blanket and Emergen-C. I'm grateful for this space, for you there with your eyes, for the space to push into these layers around self-love and longing.

See you tomorrow. Take your vitamins, ok? Come just as you are.

Coming Home: Day 22 - a poem

not in a space today for blogging -- but poems, yes, always:

At a Window

by Carl Sandburg

Give me hunger,  

O you gods that sit and give  

The world its orders.  

Give me hunger, pain and want,  

Shut me out with shame and failure 

From your doors of gold and fame,  

Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!  

  

But leave me a little love,  

A voice to speak to me in the day end,  

A hand to touch me in the dark room 

Breaking the long loneliness.  

In the dusk of day-shapes  

Blurring the sunset,  

One little wandering, western star  

Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.

Let me go to the window,  

Watch there the day-shapes of dusk  

And wait and know the coming  

Of a little love. 

xo to you today. xo to this body. be easy, and come again tomorrow, ok? 

Coming Home: Day 21 - 'a passionate and precise interrogation'

Again again, late in the night, here I am at the computer, at the keyboard, candle flickering, wanting to give you what moved through me hours ago when I came in the middle of the day.

This blog was not at all what I imagined it would be -- it's a record of orgasms, sure, but also a record of an imploded routine, of a body relearning its way through each every day. It's a record of emotions and longings, of fantasies, of erotic rhythms, of questions and new curiosities. 

It's also a place of silences, unspokens, a record of what isn't being said.

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Some questions I have, just now, about my body and my desire:

What would it look like to have sex not be centered around even some small panic about whether or not I might be able to come?

What does it mean to claim and share exactly how I like to come?

How many different ways can I allow another to accompany me into the place of orgasm?

What happens if I give permission to my body, and a precise and exacting forgiveness, for all the ways we've learned to come, all the ways we've accepted orgasm, all the fantasies that have served us?

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From Hélène Cixous' "The Laugh of the Medusa":

I have been amazed more than once by a description a woman gave me of a world all her own which she had been secretly haunting since early childhood. A world of searching, the elaboration of a knowledge on the basis of a systematic experimentation with the bodily functions, a passionate and precise interrogation of her erotogeneity. This practice, extraordinarily rich and inventive, in particular as concerns masturbation, is prolonged or accompanied by a production of forms, a veritable aesthetic activity, each stage of rapture inscribing a resonant vision, a composition, something beautiful. Beauty will no longer be forbidden. 

I wished that woman would write and proclaim this unique empire so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim: I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of torrents that I could burst -- burst with forms more beautify than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune. And I, too, said nothing, showed nothing; I didn't open my mouth, I didn't repaint my half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed my shame and my fear. I sad to myself: You are mad! What's the meaning of these waves, these floods, these outbursts? Where is the ebullient, infinite woman who, immersed as she was in her naiveté, kept in the dark about herself, led into self-distain by the great arm of parental-conjugal phallocentrism, hasn't been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a ... divine composure), hasn't accused herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn't thought she was sick? Well, her shameful sickness is that she resists death, that she makes trouble. 

And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you, your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written. (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great -- that is for 'great men'; and it's 'silly.' Besides, you've written a little, but in secret. And it wasn't good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn't go all the way, or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just to take the edge off. And then soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty -- so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time... 

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More questions:

How can we push all the way into what we really long for, give ourselves fully over to it, allow our world to shift in order to accommodate that truth, desire, avocation?

What if these bodies don't need forgiving at all?

What if we keeping secret all the things we were taught were shameful about ourselves? What if we take space for the telling, the revelation, the sharing -- what if we allow for more "me, too!" moments of profound connection and de-isolation?

How can I more passionately interrogate this body? More lovingly? How can I more precisely listen to (and record, and respond to) my body's requests, longings, silences, stillnesses, hungers, satiations, fires, quenchings, liquidities, resiliences, metabolizings, strengths, breakings, vulnerabilities -- alongside, right stroking up against, the trauma aftermaths, the triggers, the numbnesses, the absencings, the dissociations, the losses?

How hungry do I get to be? For how much? And how well can I record it?

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Today's was a fantasy that shifted like a dream, from me on my knees before you to you on your knees before me, from us in the classroom to us in the wings of a theater, from you about to come to me, yes, coming, there under the water -- I fell into the fantasy, let the images unfold, let myself exactly narrate, tell myself the story the way I might write it, the way I might tell you if we were on the phone. I made myself wait for the good part, made myself listen for zippers and instructions, smelled chalk dust and sweat. I got overly excited, had to pull the water away several times, panting, eyes closed, oh god I'm so close. Then I put the water back on against my lips, my clit, and shove one more bit further up over that plateau. You know that feeling; do you?

Is this awful?: what nudged me just that last inch over the edge was the image of my own cunt, exposed, public, imagining myself exposed to you just when you can't react, when no one else could see but you -- and in my own mind's eye, that omniscient narrator of fantasies, I could see, too. Here I was, internally, in the experience of both voyeur and exhibitionist, and I came hard, imagining your reaction, you taking what had been so brazenly offered to you. Of course, in your taking me, in my own fantasy, I am taking myself. I am getting off to the image of my own body, your arousal, my desirability, my own audacity.

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And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you, your body is yours, take it. 


Say it over and over again.
"Writing is for you, you are for you, your body is yours, take it."

Take it, as hard or as easy as you like. Come again tomorrow. See you then.

Coming Home: Day 20 - what gets to be orgasmic?

I am tired tonight, after a full full day, in which there has been, as yet, no orgasm. No traditional orgasm, that is. I mean, no climax of an explicitly, physiologically sexual nature. No -- wait, what was the definition I found so early on in this month?-- no "physical and emotional sensation experienced at the peak of sexual excitation, usually resulting from stimulation of the sexual organ and usually accompanied in the male by ejaculation."(Gotta love those male-centric dictionaries.)

Here, though, is the rest of that definition for orgasm:

2. an instance of experiencing this.

3. intense or unrestrained excitement.

4. an instance or occurrence of such excitement.

Now, there has been intense and unrestrained excitement, several instances of such, in fact:

 1. excellent physical exercise, complete with a lot of sweat and panting (got to run around the lake for the first time in a few weeks)

2. there were jellyfish in the lake when we went out there this morning. Jellyfish. In a lake. (Yes, I know it's tidal. Still exciting. Unrestrainedly such.)

3. We got to play out at the shore this evening, while there was an eclipse going on. I kept pausing in the ball-thowing to glance up sharp at the sun, catching peripheral glimpses of the bite that the moon was taking out of our star. Still more excitement.

Do those get to be orgasmic? What gets to be claimed as the peak of sexual excitation? If I am in my body, full of joy, erupting with the surprise of laughter and delight -- does that get to have a layering of orgasmic pleasure?

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Many people just kept walking around the lake this morning, while Sophie and I were knelt down next to the edge, bent over, looking in at the bobbles of white fringed fabric moving through the water. They had on their headphones, they were on a mission, they had a schedule to keep, they know better than to get close to the edge, they did not pay attention to people doing something unusual in the vicinity of their exercise -- this is Oakland: everyone's doing something unusual.

It was a pleasure, though, when a father and son stopped near us after glancing over into the horror that can be the Lake Merritt water (filled with murk and garbage, birdstain and tadpoles, small fish, human leftovers) to see what we were looking at. They spoke in Mandarin, I think, or another Chinese dialect, they were still there several minutes later when Sophie and I finally picked up to head home for breakfast. We passed other folks who had slowed to study the water, to wonder over these invaders. We -- neighbors who otherwise might not even acknowledge one another -- got to make eye contact with each other, say, Did you see the jellyfish? I know, aren't they gorgeous? We got to grin delightedly, like small ones, with such pleasure at this simple thing: what are jellyfish doing in our lake? I laughed out loud each time my eyes fell on another of those sheer undulant forms, their multiplicitous cilia filigreeing around the outermost lip of themselves --

Doesn't that get to be an orgasmic kind of pleasure? Can we keep on expanding what orgasm gets to hold?

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I'll admit that I thought about the body, as the puppy and I jog-walked back up from the lake toward our apartment. I thought about Lake Merritt as both beloved and reviled -- how we admire its nighttime light-ringed reflective surface, and then cast aspersions in the morning at the smells that rise up in the new sunlight, at the trash drifting into its crevices through which the ducks and geese push to find interesting new tastes. I'll admit I was hunting for a parallel, maybe for a metaphor.

What stunning resilience is so close to our every day that we take, consistently, for granted? What do we adore in only the right light? What do we diminish with our language of garbage and disgusting and horror?

And what gives us the singularity of ordinary miracle when we just show up with our eyes and breath and attention, look around at what we might otherwise consider distraction or a waste of time?

It's true, I can work too hard for a metaphor, a bearing over or into, sometimes. But this one is worth it, I think.

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I'm off to bed now, where I'll lay my hands on myself and give thanks for this day, for these pleasures, for all the layers of orgasm I already got to welcome.

See you tomorrow. Come again, ok? In all the ways you can.



And I thought, on the way hoe

Coming Home: Day 19 - using all of it

[burst into fire]

Once again it's the end of the day before I can blog -- it's a workshop Saturday, and so after a morning orgasm (big and upending -- more about that in a minute), it's rush to eat, get Sophie to her playdate and get back to set up for the writing. After an workshop filled with excellent words and gorgeous community, I went with a friend to another friend's and we made incredible food and played music and with kids and were generally California and fabulous and laughed and maybe cried a little inside and out and got to just be in these lives of ours. Who gets this?

These are my questions today (just two of very many more, actually): what does it mean to get to have orgasm be a routine part of my day? (Today's was not routine, but still.) And: what does it mean to have writing and workshops just be a regular part of how I spend my time? (That is, not set apart, not special, not anxety-provoking -- just... my real life.)

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 I want to give you this paragraph from The Chronology of Water, a memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch. I want, actually, to give you the whole book. Please go find this book and read it. This is a book about trauma and recovery, which is the most horrifyingly reductive thing I could say about it. It's a true story about the ways we get damaged, how we damage others in our attempts to heal and just fucking survive, it's a story about loss and wanting, the thick desire to keep living even amid the coping mechanisms that just lead us around by death, it's about a true and messy kind of resurrection. I was going to loan my copy to everyone I know, but now I can't let it out of my hands, so I just want you to go buy it, please, so that we can talk about it.

I'm just going to give you this paragraph about the narrator masturbating after she has just stood all the way up to a father who has been mean, controlling, abusive, and devastating for much of her childhood -- but I can't give you the whole paragraph, and so you won't get everything it means for her to take her hands to herself in this moment. In this chapter, she is taking down the suitcase that used to be her father's; she's going to use it to pack the things she's taking with her to college, a school he didn't want her to go to. He catches her in the garage, where she is pulling down the suitcase, and begins to scream at her about how selfish and shitty it is that she's leaving. Yuknavitch writes this, about that:

My sister and I, we were selfish. We wanted selves. There was no rage or love that could stop us. That's what opened my mouth.
Fuck
You.
Motherfucker.
(pp. 50-51)

Then there's a bit more confrontation -- I don't want to give it all to you now, because I want you to find and read this book. But here's what happens, after she gets through it:

I carried the suitcase to my bedroom. I went in. I closed the door behind me. I took off my clothes. My skin smelled like chlorine and sweat. Summer heat snuck through the screen of my window. I put my head down on my pillow. I waited. I heard a car go by. I heard a dog bark. I could hear a shiver of wind in the shrubs outside my window. And Cicadas. And frogs. I waited and waited. And then I didn't I put my hand between my legs. I parted my lips. The wet slid my fingers around and around and fast and hard. I closed my eyes. I thought about Sienna Torres shoving her fingers up my wide open cunt, as open as a mouth screaming motherfucker. I came so hard it shot out of me. I didn't know until that night a girl body could do that. Shoot cum. (pp. 51)

Do I have to tell you how hard I fell into this book after reading this paragraph? There, this character, this young woman, this girl claiming all of her prowess and fear right under her fingers right there in the threat that was the aftermath of that argument.

Go get this book from the library, from the bookstore, from your friend who has a copy. Read it read it read it. Keep your hands on your body while you do. Keep your hands on your pen.
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Here part of what was not routine about today's orgasm -- I came hard and strong under the water, in the tub, fully immersed in the fantasy of being watched, being observed; I let myself fully into that desire, did not concern myself with the well-being of this watcher, did not even perform much as I thought about her/them/you catching a glimpse / listening / looking in on me. Shar Rednour writes, in the Femme's Guide to the Universe, about allowing oneself to be an OoD (Object of Desire), to be objectified in all the right ways (she writes about letting ourselves have OoDs, too, and getting to consensually objectify our lovers sometimes as well!), and this morning, this is what I was imagining: I'm in here, making all this noise, taking care of myself so well, and the object of my affection is out there, on the other side of the curtain just listening, or able to see me but not able to touch -- and the fact that she's getting so turned on watching/listening to me turned me on further, which, you see, just becomes the best feedback loop ever.

It was a little scary to give myself over all the way into this fantasy, feels selfish, almost mean. And what happened, then, was that I used those feelings, too. Look at how fucking selfish she is, how mean she's being. Doesn't that make you hotter? Use it all. Implosion. I'm telling you.

This evening I'm tired, want quiet, don't want to write about orgasms; more, I want to be having them, and then drifting off to sleep. I'm going to take some tea and read instead, maybe go back into my re-reading of The Chronology of Water.  More tomorrow. There are still thirteen more days of this marathon.



Did you like how you were good to you today? Come tomorrow, as you want. See you then.

Coming Home: Day 18 - can orgasms be romantic?

Today, I'll tell you, I was in a movie.

Sometimes having the radio on can do that, make me feel like I'm right in the climax-- and not the orgasm-y kind, necessarily, though those played a part in today's imaginings. No, it's more like pushing into that part where the heroine is finally experiencing her big change, is swelling all the way into the kiss or getting the big phone call from a publisher or agent that will change her life or she gets in the car, finally finally, and you can see that she's really going to go this time-- she's going. She's going.

What if the movie gets to be your real life?

The song that got me today was Azure Ray's Sleep-- Some songs just sound like they're meant to be around the heartbeat of a movie and this is one of those (and then I go look for the video, and check it out! The song was used in the film The Devil Wears Prada. Natch). In the movie that played in my head as this song poured into the bathroom, this is what I could see: a woman, let's say, who's gone through quite a bit of shit around her sex, she's spent a lifetime feeling broken, and the movie, this movie, is about how she begins to really find comfort and joy and a place of agency and power and also release and vulnerability, particularly around her orgasm. Let's say she just wants to come easier-- let's say she wants to be able to come with a lover the way she comes with herself. Let's say she wants to come all the way home into herself.

And so this song is playing, and I'm in the shower, and I've got the montage scene in my head. Don't these movies always have a montage? This is the montage from my movie: the woman's joyous face, big smile over and over, enraptured, head flung back, all thick with passion and screams -- in her bed, in a bath, in someone else's bed, in a park, maybe on a rooftop terrace, in the nighttime, in the day. We get to see her body's yes, the result of so many years of work (work? ok, yes, work.) We get to see the aftermath of her never giving up on the idea that she could have all the joy with her sex, that sex and coming could be a place much less fraught, less triggery, more open-bodied.

It was gorgeous, I'm telling you. Let's find the funding for that movie.

The movie-making did, however, distract me from The Actual Business I was meant to be down to there on my back in the shower, so I was glad when the song was over and I could focus again.

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I've been thinking a lot these days about what a romantic I am, and how I like a LOT of romance with my sex -- I got this concept from the Sex/Romance/Intimacy rap that we get at the SFSI sex educator training: this is a way to think about your ideal relationship style: do you like a lot of intimacy with your sex? or Romance with your sex? Or do you prefer your romance with intimacy but no sex? Here's a good breakdown of this rap, complete with Venn diagram, from asexy beast's blog. Check it out -- I have wanted a lot of romance with my sex, but have had a hard time letting the intimacy in -- that is, letting my erotic self fall all the way into the center of those three circles. That's some of my work now.

(You know SFSI, right? San Francisco Sex Information -- they have lovely things to say about sex in general, and women's orgasm and masturbation in particular)

So, here's what I've been thinking about, though: orgasm has mostly not been a place of romance for this body or psyche; keeping the romance out was another way to keep orgasm split away from the rest of my sex, I think. So orgasm, as a result of the fantasies that could carry me into it, was relatively brutal -- emotionally disconnected (the folks in the fantasy  were disconnected from one another, and also --because those fantasy-characters were always strangers to me, like I was watching a porn movie -- they were all disconnected from me), unromantic, power-over, hard, shameful. Now, some or any of those attributes could make for a pretty damn hot scene, I know, but mostly I just felt shitty about them.

In the stories I write, I could bring that hard/power-over/fucked-up alongside romantic/longing/vulnerable, and end up with characters getting what they want and ending up feeling pretty good about it, even if it was damn hard to get there. But that process took longer inside my own head.

Orgasm is a really fucking vulnerable place to be. Can I really welcome intimacy and romance there?

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Here's another thing I noticed this morning: the closer I get to coming, the more my head starts to reach for fantasy -- please, could we get out of being so damn close to the body, to this eruption, to this pooling explosion? Couldn't we just get a little distance? Sometimes the distance of a fantasy can give me some psychic friction -- how to explain this. But more, I think it's about safety.

So this morning, as all my muscles started to tighten, I let myself give in to a couple of fantasies (first that you were Out There, listening to me; next, that I got to watch you touching yourself -- you, then you. Yes. You, too, if that's all right, riding those hands hard and sharp and now), but over and over, I was back exactly in my body, feeling the panic that I might not get over the edge, that I'd have to ride this tension all day, that I wouldn't be able to Get There. Then the frantic waterspout eruption gathered hard and sharp in me and I felt everything sucked hard into my center, through my cunt and up out around -- what are the words for the sensation of a black hole in the body that brings only light and a terrifying joy?

Then panting, laughter, get up girl, get you to work.

So much more to say here, but I'll stop for now. Keep being good and tender to your body during this Do Something Lovely For Your Body Everyday Month (the long renaming of National Masturbation Month). Come again tomorrow, as it feels best for you. See you then.