Coming Home: Day 29 -- Perhaps

On this near-last day of this month of transformative work, I'm hearing all the censor voices, the voices who don't want this writing to happen, the voices who think this work is useless/indulgent/perverted/dangerous/stupid/non-revolutionary. I am hearing the voices of shut it down. I am hearing the voices of you are doing harm. I am hearing the voices of the perpetrators, the afraid, the lost, the broken -- all those voices that still live in my skin.

Here I am writing anyway. All of that might be true: here I am writing anyway.

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I would like to tell you about the orgasms yesterday, but I made a promise to my psychic-inside self that those would be just for me alone, and so I am going to keep that promise. What I will say is that I'm grateful. And sore.

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So I'm going back to the beginning.

(From ACT UP NY) In 1994, at a United Nations World AIDS Day Conference, Dr. Joycelyn Elders (then the Surgeon General of the United Staes) was asked:"...if masturbation might be taught as a way to prevent AIDS?" Joycelyn Elders replied: "masturbation is something that is a part of human sexuality, and is a part of something that perhaps should be taught."  (later she said, "masturbation is really something you don't have to teach.")

She was fired for this: ...perhaps should be taught. Fired, I'll remind you, by our ostensibly-liberal Mr. Clinton. You'll recall what he thought should be taught.


Perhaps, she said. Dr. Elders' statements would still be controversial if uttered today by a public figure. 


This is why I'm writing. This is a why of this blog.


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How and whether you come is entirely your business. The fact is, though, that everyone has the right to deep pleasure, to self-knowledge and self-care, to knowledge and information about bodies and sexuality and sensuality. We get to resurrect the parts of ourselves shoved into a closet, or shoved under our heartbeats, or tossed in the trash, when all we were able to do was survive day to day with our breath intact. Whether or not you want to re/claim those parts of yourself is your business -- don't stand in the way of anyone else's desire do to so.


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Be so sweet to yourself today. I'm practicing the same. Come again tomorrow -- 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.

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!