Jumbled blurt-tations

…because there’s some chicken gravy + chicken + bread to put both on in the other room and I’m going to need to go to them soon, but this stuff has popped into my head and/or view and/or it’s SO not a complete list of any kind of catching up or commenting or being thorough or even conscientious.  Just saying:

I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings who has said this just out of “hey everybody else says it so I’ll use this phrase too,” but the whole “bonus points for…” phrasing in personal ads is basically an immediate disqualifier for this reader.  It just rubs me the wrong way that people – okay, men, because that’s largely whose sex-personals ads I read – take it from a starting point of “I’m grading you, and but hey, good news ladies, I will give you bonus points for [completely arbitrary features or obscure knowledge because the whole world revolves around molding itself to you and finding your interests to be contagious!]” and then I’m off on my judging extravaganza.  Please, fellas, I’m not the only woman who feels this way.  Do you not realize that we talk amongst ourselves all the damn time?  I’m not even talking about feminist consciousness-raising feel-ins, I’m talking about how *we fucking talk to each other* and *we find your pomposity off-putting.*  Make note of it if you’d like to get laid, is all I’m saying.

Sydette, you mentioned a while back something about how we have our sexuality for ourselves and in a satisfying and self-loving way.  Or else I misunderstood/projected what you had asked about, but that’s where this chunk of this post is headed.  What I wanted to say to anyone and everyone who has ever dealt with sexual frustration as I have, and I feel like there are a couple of us around here who know exactly what I’m talking about when I say that being a pervert who is turned off by misogyny makes for very few bedfellows…  my experience to share is that the more I threw caution to the wind and wrote specifics in online perv/sex-partner-hunting ads, the better my results.  My twin sister and I adopted the phrase “Fuck it, I’m 40″ when we turned it this past February, and I can’t tell you how much it’s set me free in how many areas.  But especially sex.  All the things I thought were either asking too much, or too blunt, or too self-interested, or too irreverent, or too open – I said fuck it, I’m 40, and I just put it out there.  Ah, and also, I have had to stick with the whole tell-people-when-something’s-not-quite-working-for-me thing, which always initially throws me, but which, once I go ahead and say “hey I like you but this one sex thing, it’s not what I need, and/or this other thing is,” then I either get what I want or at the very least I stop getting what I don’t want.

And that’s really all I got around sex and dudes and proclivities like mine and self-care and what a person may or may not do with all of it… but I can tell you this, I’m thinking of two of you right now, and your deliciousness is so profound, and just because we live in a world where people will crazily either not acknowledge it or outright deny it sometimes, does not make it untrue.  And you should hold out for sure for the feeling of someone who knows you are delicious.  It’s the LEAST you should hold out for.  That’s my opinion.

ETA: ugh.  that last part sounds potentially patronizing to me now.  I’m quite familiar with the fact that the world at large most assuredly notices your deliciousness on all fronts – I meant stupid, mean boys who have ever hurt your feelings, but I said it in a veiled way and it came out sloppy.

Speaking of Sydette and her questions, it’s a weird thing to be able to write about things that are bullshit but to have the net result of making me feel happier afterwards, because of how you turn a phrase.  And by weird I mean I can’t put words to it but I love it.

As much as I am not okay with any rights being denied to some while granted to others, and as such I am NOT on the side of no-gay-marriage per se, I really couldn’t get it up for yay-more-rights-and-privileges-for-some-based-on-arbitrary-things-like-coupling-up-and-bringing-johnny-law-into-it movement even before the outburst of “black people killed the gay rights movement, thanks a lot Obama.”  And one of many things that gives me pause with what is the mainstream gay rights movement is that my concern is with people living or dying more than it is with things like weddings and legal benefits thereof.  A) I think I should be able to visit someone I love in the hospital and leave my cats and/or money to someone even if we never fucked, never exchanged rings, or were in a ring of people who all fucked each other, or whatever the hell.  And so B) I am not willing to make my focus be about fighting for anything less than that, and fighting for still only SOME people to have rights of those kinds is fighting for anything less than that.  That doesn’t mean I want you to feel crappy about wanting to be gay married and then feeling punched in the stomach by California and other states saying eff-you to that, or already being gay married and feeling confused AND slapped in the face by Proposition H8te.  It does mean that I would be more inclined to feel like “hey let’s all do our own thing, and it’s okay if our things are different,” if people, in doing their thing, could be bothered to acknowledge that it’s not the only thing, and it’s certainly not up to anyone else to hold your thing dear when you don’t know or don’t care if they have their own thing at all.

I’m close to needing that gravy now.

I like that Heart posted this because I got the email and like so many emails, it got read and had appreciative feelings put forth in its direction and then I went back to thinking about me or sex or some other fucking thing and did not post about it here like I could have.  If you think Adele is heart-throb-y for her writing and online self – and of course you do – try meeting her in person and not fainting dead away from swoon.  Maybe wear head gear or try to meet her in a forrest of pillows, is my advice.  And thanks again, Heart, for posting that link.

Ren, I’m not sure if I’m totally going the wrong direction with this comment – if it’s not on-topic at all – but your post did make me think, among other things, about how when I worked at the dungeon, when I first started there, I did not know what to make of the way some of my co-workers were uptight about how “we are not whores.”  Or how sometimes in “interviews” in the media with professional dominatrixes here and there, the thing that would be claimed as “what she most wants you to understand” is that “it’s not sex, it’s not prostitution, it’s an art.”  If pressed, sometimes a not-that-there’s-anything-wrong-with-that could follow, re: “actual” whores, but mostly, you know, super important to differentiate.

And I have to say, I have such real-world mixed feelings.  Okay for starters, my defaul setting really is to like and then pretty soon thereafter love any and all girls and women I meet.  Can we set aside how pollyanna any given reader thinks that is to get to the point I want to make about whore/not-whore stuff?  So I start out being like, mmm, about women period, and so of course I fucking loved almost all my co-workers.  The only one I didn’t love – and this is even after battling ugly competition-and-jealousy-feelings that I had early on with other women who were doing the types of sessions I was doing (never had those feelings towards the ones who were doing stuff I didn’t do anyway, in other words) – was this lady who was flat out ugly towards me.

Anyway, so I loved all those girls.  Women.  And what do you do with that fact, when you add into it this other fact of them saying things that seem dehumanizing to you, about other women?  Which happenend more than once.  If a dominatrix on staff was assumed or known to go topless, for instance, in a session, it pissed the other dommes off.  Or god forbid if she ever actually DID anything that legally gets called sex, involving his penis.

I did find that I could talk to them about it to a certain degree – I could bring up the fact that I basically did what I felt like doing, sexually, in session, versus what the party line was of what we were supposed to do.  “But you have a good head on your shoulders about it,” was what one woman said, on the heels of bashing this other lady for being a supposed whore.  Which translated to sort of the mirror of my feelings for her – “I like you, so I will overlook or look-at-differently things that you do that would piss me off/that I would judge in others.”

That said – I am not unsympathetic to the complications of boundaries in the sex industry, and the pressure on all of us to

- not have them if someone else doesn’t have our particular ones

- have ones we don’t care about, or pretend we have them, lest our peers resent us

- take responsibility for men’s actions just like we are pressured to do/expected to do/ go ahead and do a lot of the time anyway just like outside of the sex industry.

I feel for my friend, P, who never got naked or half naked or gave hand jobs or even foot jobs or allowed body worship or any of the things that some other pro dommes were comfortable doing, and who really was fucking AMAZING in her talents for making everything that most people would identify as possibly painful feel only like pleasure and excitement.  “Feel for her?” – I was head over heels for her.  And it didn’t seem fair that the era of her being appreciated for that kind of magic was passing into “pro domination is what strippers do because they heard it can pay more and is easier.”  [NOT saying it is any of those things, or that strippers shouldn't get to do it if they fucking feel like it, or that anybody isn't entitled to want to do something fucking easier! - saying only that there is the feeling in pro kink, or was anyway when I was most involved in it, that it was changing into all you really needed was fake boobs and a few lessons in how to not-kill someone accidentally, and then you could just be mean to dudes and collect their cash.  Some young women I met entering pro kink did believe those things, whether they were successful or not, but I am simply noting that it was a source of tension for people who had spent years devoted to a whole other ball game.]

So yeah, I feel both – I don’t want P to feel like a dinosaur, and I didn’t want anyone being mean to baby faced 19 year old strippers who came to work at the dungeon.  And some people were.  Um, P was one of them.

And there’s the rub!  I don’t think it has a practical application in a pro domme’s life to tell her that it’s not babyface, it’s the dudes who are making things difficult and unpleasant.  It’s the DUDE who says you should do such and such because someone else did, or who says you are less valuable for who you are and what you can do versus how you look and what you’re willing to tolerate out of either inexperience or the same desperation everybody eventually may feel if they’re in the sex industry.  And it has no practical application in babyface’s life to tell her “those women don’t really hate *you*, they just hate how having you around *feels*, but hey I like you so don’t worry about it.”

Hm, that kind of got off – topic even from my original off topic about pro dommes not wanting to be thought of as prostitutes.  Ah, here’s why it was related for me – I don’t want for P or anyone to have to say “oh okay I am a prostitute or whore” when that’s not what feels true for them or when it feels like they’re being told the solution is not for the whole of the world to stop sneering at those labeled whore and hence we all are raised up, the solution is for you to say “well then give me the same stigma” in solidarity.

That last thing is actually personally part of how I feel about it for myself.  I mean, refusing to let anyone I deal with be comfortable in looking down on whores by letting them believe they’re not talking to one at the time.  (Although technically I am a whore if you consider just about everything people mean when they use that word in all its contexts, with or without money attached, so it’s not like I’m magnanimously taking on the mantle.  But you would be surprised how many people don’t want to think I am *that* because of how tightly they cling to the idea that women who are *that* are less human than how they experience me to be.  Or maybe you wouldn’t be surprised…) But, I am comfortable with a lot of things that many, even most, people are not.  I don’t want anyone to have stigma, is I guess what I’m saying, but I especially don’t think it’s logical that some people who are technically not whores should be forced to claim stigma when others who are not whores are not guilted into the same thing.

Like, in other words, why should my friend P be guilted into solidarity-whore-labeling while my friend Damara who is an attorney is not?  Neither do what I do, or what prostitutes do, so why is one more responsible for diffusing stigma than the other, by taking it on herself?

My view, and again I don’t have the urge to force it on people but it is what feels right to my heart – my view is that it’s not that “well why her and not her?”, it’s that *if* all women said “I am in fact her and she is me so don’t look down your fucking nose at either of us with that shit,” then the stink eye would be pointing in the right direction.  Same as like, “I’m not one of those [fill in the blank] for any folks who get loosely grouped together comes across as rejecting of whoever “those” are rather than rejecting of the dehumanization of “those” in the first place.  Okay I’m rambling and being redundant and now I’m seriously fucking hungry.

But look what PetitPoussin put up!  I keep waiting for that Chris Brown song to get old like all popular songs eventually at least partially do – okay, I’ve finally heard it enough so that I’m not yearning to hear it when it’s not on, I feel a little satiated – but this song of his never has reached that point for me.  I feel like half of why I fell so hard for the Hott Offs was because PP so often has the same taste in pop music as me.  I feel like she would have been as fun to go to that *NSYNC concert with as my sister.  *sigh*

This made me – what are the kids calling it these days? – squeeeeee more than anything else in for fucking ever.  And is now, minus the lolcat caption, my desktop image on the work computer.

Boy are all these different topics not flowing into one another.  Feels inappropriate right after a lolcat link to post this link to my so-far favorite post about post-election feelings.  And I don’t mean that in an anyone-else’s-posts-have-failed-to-be-as-good! way, I mean that I related most to what Elle says about, or this is how I read it, what’s with people wanting to extinguish hope anyway?  Why are we not allowed to be hopeful?  Is it true or is it just me – isn’t there always actually plenty of time to feel shitty when situations inspire/call for: disappointment, fear, anger, sadness, loss of hope?  Why get a head start?  It’s one of the few things you really don’t need to take an early crack at.  And I puzzle over that in life, what it is that makes people not only not-feel-the-same-hope-about-the-same-things, which is frequently understandable to me what with different experiences and whatnot, but what is it that makes people outright hostile to other people’s hope?  That’s not the same thing as not sharing it.

So thank you, Elle, as always, for writing in the first place, and Nez thank you for posting all these amazing posts!  It’s like you run into two people you love on the same corner.

I am aware that I need to update my blogroll, sorry for the lag in updating links yet.

I love Noemi’s writing.  I love that she takes time to do it, and I love when I get to read a bunch of it at a pop.  I feel like…there’s something quiet in the energy at Hermana Resist - not silent quiet, or meek quiet, something steady and rooted in itself is maybe more what I mean than quiet.  The vibe is a comfort, is also maybe what I mean.  Which is saying something, because Noemi, as she mentions in the linked post near the beginning, does make a point of blogging about violence against women and children by people they know and/or love/d.  Anyway, never get tired of her writing.

This is really just to say I love Ilyka, I don’t have anything to add re: the post itself.  Sadly, analogies that involve animals always send me off on a mental tangent about the actual animals.  Like, oh god it must have been so nice for that guy from the Grizzly Man documentary that he got to love a fox up close.  Or, I love that a rooster came around my friend Isa’s house super early in the morning to wake all of us up after a late night of partying.  Well, I loved it cuz I was not partying, so I got to view it as – how fucking funny is intrusive behavior by little animals?  Always gets me.

I wanted to have a clear thought on Sylvia’s questions but it hasn’t come yet.  I read over them and I think, ah okay well because – and then, no, wait, that last part threw me.  Help.

Crap.  The good news is, I’ve blurted out much of the random thought that had been nagging at me, and the bad news is I haven’t yet linked/talked about loving half the people I love who blog, in this long scattershot post of mine.  So can we temporarily leave it at – I need the gravy now, and if you weren’t mentioned it wasn’t because I’m not as obsessed with you as I am with everyone else I linked.  Seriously.  You’re special to me.  More later as later permits, and hope you all have a good weekend.