gender

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August 22, 2008

sex and tears

Posted by almostmagic under frustration, gender, Kitten, life, love, relationships, sex, words
[2] Comments 

Kitn and I haven’t had sex in over a month.  That’s pretty much par for the course – what’s odd about it is that I’ve been turning her down, whereas a year ago, it was the opposite.

My lack of interest has been getting more and more awkwardly obvious, as she’s been very frisky lately.

It used to break my heart that she hardly ever wanted to have sex with me.  I don’t know how many times I cried about it, frustrated and angry and hurt.

I cried Wednesday night.  We were kissing in bed, and she was wearing the decadent satin nightgown I bought her.  She wanted to have sex, and was being very adorable and sexy, kissing me lusciously and thumbing my nipples to turn me on.

But it just left me cold.  I’m still trying to figure out exactly why.  Am I just not letting myself get turned on with her because of all the disappointments in the past, all the times I wanted to have sex and she didn’t, all the times we’ve had sex and I haven’t come, how she hasn’t ever cared about my pleasure?  Like I have some kind of psychological defense operating, knowing that sex with Kitn leads to feeling shitty.

And then there’s the whole gender thing, which I really need to write about anyway.  Let me preface this by saying that I am not transexual – I don’t want to take testosterone and get hairy and live as a man.  But I don’t have what I think of as a female sexuality, a lot of the time.    This is all slippery thoughts and feelings, and hard to grasp in a concrete way…  but sometimes I feel like I got fitted with the wrong sexual anatomy.  The ways that I feel and the things that I want just do not match up with my physiology, sometimes.  (That’s at least a part of what the shittiness on Saturday was about, but that’s a blog post for another time…)  One way I’ve descibed it before is that I have an outwardly directed sexuality.  But obviously, inwardly directed bits.

It’s not about dominance or submission, or even femininity or masculinity, much as I’d like to take the easy way and use that terminology.  I want to be very clear about that – penetration is not inherently dominant or any of that crap.  What I’m talking about is more of a desire to thrust and penetratate and impale (guh, just the words alone give me a little thrill), to be inside my partner.  I don’t know though…  if you talk about it in terms of the penetrative partner being consumed by the penetratee.. that’s a bit of a different story, even though we’re talking about exactly the same act..  So maybe I’m just odd and placing too much importanance on wording.  Because I don’t necessarily want to be consumed (though sometimes I do), I want to be the one engulfing and devouring.  But that might just be my oral fixation and tendency to assimilate food and sex.  I don’t know, it’s all confusing and complicated.

But anyway, there are many times when I feel the need to put my penis inside my partner, which is obviously a problem as I do not have one, at least not one with nerve endings.  Back to the original point, I feel this very strongly with Kitn, probably largely because she has a very receptive sexuality that really brings out the complimentary feelings in me.

This probably sounds really silly, but there have been times when I’ve cried because I don’t have a penis and never will.  I really can’t describe how achingly frustrating that is, to be in a situation when everything in me seems to be screaming for the need to be inside, to thrust and come and push into.  So Kitn and I are a well-matched mismatch, I suppose.

But I think some of that was going on Wednesday night.  Knowing I can’t fuck her the way we both want, knowing I never will.

But also, she wants me to dominate her.  She wants me to be assertive and aggressive, she’s even requested that I hold her down and slap her around and be rough with her.  Which really ought to have me jumping up and down with excitement, given my usual proclivities.  But it always feels like too much effort.  Which I think comes back to the fact that I never orgasm when she and I have sex.  She doesn’t care to make the effort.  Which makes me not want to make any effort for her.  Which is classically passive-aggressive, is it not?  Which is bad, and doesn’t help things, but I feel like I already know exactly how the sex is going to transpire, which makes me not want to bother.  And so I have a lovely, sexy, adorable girlfriend who seemingly wants the same things I do, and.. I don’t want anything to do with fucking her.

But how do you tell that to someone you love?  Someone you used to be wildly attracted to, someone you can’t stop looking at and petting because she’s so lovely?  Someone looking at you with big eyes full of expectation and anticipation?  She’s my girlfriend who wants to spend the rest of her life with me, and I only want to have sex with other people.

And I end up crying, mourning the dead hopes of three years and the might-have-beens and the blindnesses that are only just coming clear.  Feeling uncomfortable and awkward, like ending up back at someone’s sleazy apartment after a first date, wondering what the fuck am I doing here?

 

August 21, 2008

co-opting a comment

Posted by almostmagic under bdsm, dominance, femdom, gender, sex, strap-ons
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A comment by “Aileen” on Bitchy’s blog, which just says things so well:

One of my pet peeves (or should I say, rage-inducing vexations) is the frequent marriage of the PVC/leather/vinyl fetish, and kink in general. The outside world often sees us merely as vaguely inhuman freaks dressed in ludicrous plastic clothing. “Leather” is often used as a synonym for “kink”. Clubs run by us, intended for us, often have dress codes which segregate against those of us who simply don’t want to dress up like human-sized novelty dildos or shiny purple piratic prostitutes with masks covered in enough zippers and snaps and bells and dangles to amuse a small toddler in a crib for hours. Dress codes like this aren’t just restrictive, biased, and unfair, they are indirectly insulting.

I don’t, I really don’t, much mind what other people do to arouse themselves, no matter how strange, silly, or even hypocritical I may find it, because sex is a strange thing…but I’m royally pissed off when it’s insinuated that I’m not a real sadist because I don’t wear “fetish gear”. I don’t like “fetish gear”; I like making pretty things bleed and cry. I like to wear attractive, flattering, tailored, comfortable clothing in which I can feel confident, sexy, and powerful. Isn’t that the entire point? I think I would feel very undignified and weakly, whipping a man while wearing wobbly skyscraper heels with rat-stabber toes and a latex corset that made my skinny, muscular, broad-shouldered bosom heave like a dying consumptive’s.

I have a huge issue with the notion that sadism is an extension of innately masculine urges (as is mentioned in my antique copy of Psychopathia Sexualis and as seems to be the generally accepted assumption). I am alarmed that dominant women and sadistic women are expected to love strap-on sex and forego vaginal sex, and the belief that an attached rubber penis is better and more natural an extension of myself than my own personal cunt to which I am quite attached. I’m not saying that penetration cannot be dominating or sadistic, or even that I don’t, occasionally, like using strap-ons. But one does not negate the other; sometimes a phallus is just a phallus, they’re fun and I like them because they’re phalli, not because they’re mean and scary. I am mean and scary without one.

I plan on writing an manifesto on this. My sadism is pansexual, but aspects of it are innately female. What about vagina dentata? The Dark Mother? The goddess Kali? Hell, the dark aspect of a vagina is DEVOURING. In fact, I first realised I was a sadist when, as a child, I was forced to reconcile myself to my intense, almost painful desire to absorb and symbolically consume what I loved, to tear it down to its barest, most vulnerable truths and swallow it whole or in quivering parts. It’s symbolic and subconscious, and I’m not aroused by vore per se, but there is a very distinct aspect of hunger and consumption in my sexual desires.

And it fits. Women are hungry. Women are more likely to use food for comfort, or to use it to torment themselves. Women are more likely to feel actual guilt for experiencing hunger, or lust, both of which involve PUTTING THINGS INTO OUR BODIES, and the guilt, I really feel, is entirely on account of cultural, sexist pressures.

And, odd though it may seem, when I eat, I never feel that the food is dominating me. When a man has sex with me, I never feel that his penetration is dominating me. Why the Hell should I? He’s giving me something that I want and I enjoy and I desire, and there’s absolutely nothing dominant about that unless I WANT there to be something dominant about that.

The entire concept sexist and insulting, and worst of all, it’s stupid and its patently wrong and I really must write said manifesto before I rile myself thoroughly.

 

April 26, 2008

Meatstick, please, with a side of masculine submission. Or.. let’s see what’s behind curtain #3.

Posted by almostmagic under feminism, gender, other people's words, sex
1 Comment 

In a somewhat recent post  that I’ve mentioned before Dev said, “In my ideal world (which may or may not be possible at all), set gender roles would not exist.  People would not view women and men differently on the basis of sex.  Things like femininity and masculinity would be for play, for hotness, and many people would have no need of them.  It would be the same way with power dynamics – nobody would be presumed to be stronger or better than anyone else, and people would only use power dynamics for play, like we do in bdsm.”

I heartily concur, and she said it much better than I would have had I tried.  Which made me realize that I really haven’t written much here about my views on gender.  Maybe because it’s so fucking complicated.  Most people like to think that’s not true, but it is.  When you start talking about gender and trying to define and neatly box things, you get into a mire pretty quick.  Because most of it is bullshit.

If someone were to ask, I’d like to say that gender is just a construct, just an idea, just a made-up way of categorizing people, because people seem to need to put things in tidy little pigeonholes.  But I don’t necessarily think that’s completely true.  It’s the whole nature vs. nurture debate, which can never be satisfactorily summed up. 

I hate thinking of gender as binary.  I know it isn’t for me.  And it isn’t for a lot of people.  But it is so incredibly hard to get out of that mode of thinking, it is so deeply ingrained into society, and into language.  And it is rather comforting, or at least easy, to have those tidy little categories.  Labels make things easier for the mind to grasp.  Or something.

Kitten teases me because I have a “type.”  A type of guy I tend to be attracted to.  A pretty specific type. *sigh*  Ok, very specific.  Tall, slender, adorably geeky, submissive guys.  Throw a pair of glasses on him, and a button-down shirt with rolled-up sleeves, and I’m salivating like one of Pavlov’s dogs.  But why?  And how can I even begin to justify that when I’m so rabidly anti-binary-gender in general?  Because tall, slender, adorably geeky, submissive girls just don’t give me the same reaction.  Which is sort of funny to say because that’s a spot-on description of my girlfriend.  Is is genitalia?  Assumptions of personality based on gendered expectations?  I don’t know. 

Vaginas and labia and that sort of miscellany don’t really do much for me.  Just not exciting, generally.  If I had protruding bits that could fit into vaginas, I might feel differently about it.  I dunno, I do find female and feminine people attractive, and would happily have sex with any number of women.  It’s just that the usually-associated genitalia aren’t part of the excitement.  

But I do get excited about cock. 

*sigh* Maybe I shouldn’t spend so much time dissecting differences, maybe that’s my problem.  I tend to think in extremes.  What about intersexed people?  Women with big clits, men with small penises, transgendered folk of all flavors?  Makes it harder to talk about things when you throw away the categories, labels, little boxes.. 

I do know that for me, good sex usually doesn’t involve a single thought about gender.  It’s just me and my partner enjoying each other.  I don’t find myself feeling particularly feminine, or masculine, generally.  I do lust after a partner’s sensitive body part to fit into my sensitive body parts, but that’s biology and has nothing to do with “male” or “female.” 

I don’t know, I’ve been in a lot of discussions about gender, where some people want to break down all barriers, remove all binary vocabulary, get rid of the whole idea of gender.  And there’s always someone who says, hey, what the hell is wrong with having preferences?  So what if I like a big fat meatstick and don’t care to look at a wet flesh-hole?  And of course everyone is attracted to different things and sometimes those things end up being gender-specific, and of course when your husband transitions to living as a woman you shouldn’t be expected to still be as attracted to her.

Kitten and I have had a lot of conversations about gender and one subject that keeps cropping up is types of people we’re attracted to.  For me it boils down to a strong attraction to the aforementioned specific type of guy, and a milder but infinitely more diverse attraction to genderqueer and female people.  I like slender guys – a lot.  And some cute chubby ones.  All submissive, pleasethanks.  And that’s pretty much it for the traditional male.  When it comes to women and genderqueer people, my attractions run the gamut from thick to thin, from innocent to tough, from dominant to submissive, from feminine to masculine and everything in between.

Meh, it’s easy to analyze things in the abstract.  Everything changes once interaction is out of the theoretical and into the flesh.  There’s just a click with some people that has nothing to do with what you’d see in a photograph.  And sometimes there’s no click at all once a photogenic person is there face to face.

Ah fuck, it’s late and I lost whatever point I may have started out with.  Just read that first bolded paragraph that Dev wrote.

 

April 11, 2008

Dev’s post on female submission

Posted by almostmagic under bdsm, feminism, gender, other people's words
1 Comment 

As Kitten is downstairs playing Rock Band and being very distracting right now, I can’t really write a decent post, but there are some excellent things being said here about female submission and how people’s ideas of it are influenced by feminism and their views on the patriarchy.

 

November 23, 2007

femininity = submission? fuck that. and fuck me, while you’re at it.

Posted by almostmagic under Bitchy Jones, femdom and fucking, feminism, frustration, gender, kinky sex, other people's words, sex, submissiveness
[3] Comments 

A well-phrased excerpt from BJ (emphases mine):

“One crucial thing was over looked in this race to elevate women to bossiness. To escape the oppressive tyranny of PIV sex and let women be in charge. They failed to notice that it wasn’t being penetrated itself that was submissive. It was just that all femininity was equated with submission – that everything a woman did in sex had been made to look as if it was a priori submissive.

But there is no way that such simple basics – being the hole or the plug – are on their own submissive or dominant. It only has further meaning in context.

Sometimes it feels like femdom is a big mirror. You hold it up to the world and you see all kinds of yukky beliefs reflected by and clear. Like that bit in the Snow Queen or something.
But that’s the fact. Way back in the past when they invented misogyny they decided that women were lower status and thus had the low status role in sex. He had the mighty phallus – she had the dirty needy hole. You can see how femdom later thought, hey, lets flip this shit. Let’s make the guy be called slut for wanting and be filled. But those things aren’t really submissive. Having something pushed into your body that feels amazing is only submissive because someone decided that the female role in sex was a submissive one.

You don’t need to put the guy on the bottom because he is the bottom. It misses the fucking point. Fucking. Which is the point. Which feels good. Which doesn’t have an innate power exchange embedded in it.

Really. It just doesn’t.”

 

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