Sex

content/sex/001.md

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+---
+date: 2019-09-24
+weight: 1
+---
+
+Cathline Schine writes in *The Evolution of Jane*:
+
+<div class="verse">I resented the state of childhood wonder.  It was insatiable, yet it seemed to me to be no more than a puerile affliction, like baby teeth.  My ignorance struck me as a bizarre anomaly, for I felt, with utter certainty, that I was --- how can I say this? --- that I was *sufficient*.  Evidence to the contrary forced itself on me every hour of every day, but that seemed to me some preposterous misunderstanding.</div>
+
+And while I don't necessarily have fond memories of childhood--
+
+> Clearly not
+
+--some part of me does rather miss the childlike curiosity with which I was able to approach sexuality early in puberty. It was all so abstract and confusing. Every time I'd try something new, there would be this thrill of danger, this rush of excitement. The lone copy of *Joy of Sex*'s assurances aside, was each burst of pleasure actually something going *horribly wrong*?
+
+> Ah, to be young and anxious.
+
+And I really was. Like many kids, I suspect, my first orgasm was terrifying. I thought I'd broken myself.
+
+> You got over it.
+
+Boy did I. I soon learned to love masturbation.
+
+But still, the bit I yearn for was the utter simplicity of my explorations. There was a lot of *does this feel good* and *let's try this* and so on, as I spent hours just trying to figure out what the hell bodies even are.
+
+> And the best part of it all is that it didn't involve anyone else. Your fantasies were about feeling good, or perhaps about some vague idea of sex as a concept, but it was all so abstract. The orgasm --- later, the delaying of such --- became the highest goal, the purest art. Other people just got in the way.
+
+It was a bit telling, wasn't it?

content/sex/002.md

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+---
+date: 2019-09-24
+---
+
+How can one be sexual when the act of engaging in sex is so confusing, so anxiety-inducing as to be not worth it no matter how barked up one is?
+
+> You're getting ahead of yourself. The solutions arrived before the problem made itself known.
+
+I suppose so.
+
+My first sexual experiences took place over the phone and over text. Late night, parked in front of my computer with the cordless pinned between my cheek and shoulder, Danny and I masturbated together 1,800 miles apart. There was only the soft sounds of breathing, the quiet monosyllables, and the rushed reassurances that, yes, we were close, and then a shaky sigh from both of us.
+
+> You can still hear his voice saying two things: "Mattie", his pet name for you, and the sleepy, giddy kind of "I love you" that comes after an orgasm when you've both stayed up far too late.
+
+I only met him once. We just smoked weed together in a hotel bathroom, hung out, cuddled. Sex would be too complicated for us, by then. We had gone our different ways. We had become different people.
+
+> And by then, you'd started encountering the aforementioned problem.
+
+Yes.
+
+Another easy solution I latched onto was erotic roleplay. TS. Typefucking. Co-authoring erotica.
+
+I latched on and wouldn't let go. Still haven't. Beyond even myself, it shows up in my writing:
+
+<div class="verse">And it was there where I found love. There where I found love and lust and romance and flings. I dated. I TSed (we were, of course, too cool to use so vulgar a word as ‘cyber’). I set up relationships for characters in our games, and I set up relationships that transcended that, two hearts touching through only those white words on a black screen.
+
+Merlin and Marusin, The_Prof and rranger386, people I would dream about and likely never meet. We were all young. We were in love with each other in our own little worlds, serially and in parallel.
+
+And while sometimes I would think about who they were beyond the screen, it was rarely for long. I was in love with Merlin the fighter who hated magic. I was in love with The_Prof the student who desperately wanted to be a professor when he grew up, and didn’t care which subject.
+
+Sometimes I would think about who they were when we TSed, would wonder what it would be like to have their paw instead of my own around my erection, but never for long. It was easier. It was safer to not bother with it.
+
+But our relationships were as real as any collocated flings. More so, we told ourselves, for the purity of essence that came with no flesh to get in the way.
+
+I’m sure we all hungered for touch.</div>
+
+> Did you? Hunger for touch, that is.
+
+In some cases, sure. I wanted nothing more than to hold, to be held. I wanted nothing more than to experience arousal and climax with these people I loved.
+
+> And that was the problem.
+
+Yes. The problem was that I wanted to experience arousal and climax, but not really the whole sex part. Or perhaps I wanted that frictionless sex that can be accomplished in typefucking. I wanted that consequence-free, painless, perfectly-lubricated and utterly messless sex.
+
+Even then, I'm not so sure.

content/sex/003.md

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+---
+date: 2019-09-25
+weight: 3
+---
+
+The problem was that I didn't really want sex. I loved the idea of it, loved reading and writing about it, loved ERP, loved consuming art, loved thinking about it, loved masturbating. I just didn't really love sex itself.
+
+Not for lack of trying, mind. I played around with my partners, tamping down my anxiety and squeamishness in order to try and just enjoy myself, enjoy our times together. Often, I was at least reasonably successful, too. I still have fond memories of some fun romps
+
+> What rankled?
+
+It was a few things, I think. The most obvious being the increasing dissonance between my body and my identity as 'male' started to fit less and less. When having a penis seems odd and dischordant, engaging with it feels unsatisfactory at best, nauseating at worst.
+
+Another was simply the mess of it all. Water-based lube gets sticky. Condoms are finicky. Fluid-bonding is great, but then the mess is magnified. Foreskin is complicated --- a rough weekend left me scarred, the resulting phimosis making sex something of an adventure.
+
+I think, most often, it was just that it was a lot of work. You had to set aside time. You had to negotiate. You had to have the condoms handy. You had to have the lube handy. You had to both be willing and on the same page. All perfectly doable, but whether or not it was worth it was something that seemed to vary from day to day.
+
+> And the shame.
+
+Yes, there was plenty of that. The unswerving sense that I had messed up. That I was doing something wrong. That this was all so disgusting. That this baffling act of smashing meat together was somehow a positive thing, but I just couldn't see how.
+
+> You tried to cleanse yourself of that. You went to the Underground parties. You gathered around you a core group of people you trusted and played with them. You worked to extract that shame from yourself so that you could live without it.
+
+Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it was a matter of the stars aligning.
+
+Of those fond memories I mentioned, most of them surround lazy, comfortable sex, where everything was just aligned. Giving a cozy blowjob on a couch with no time pressure. Putting my hair up with a chopstick. That Underground party with lube and condoms readily available, and us two incidentally parked near enough that getting started was no stress. Sneaky fingers slipping past elastic waistbands. Tentative touches.
+
+> Sex that you had for fun. Sex with people you were close to. Sex with no expectations.
+
+Which I suppose is how it should be, but that rarely seems to be the case. Even when JD and I had moved in together and were sexually active, it was often more stress than it was worth.
+
+> And then you gave up trying to conquer shame.
+
+Yes. And since, by that point, every sexual act I engaged with left me feeling awful, I effectively gave up on sex.

content/sex/004.md

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+date: 2019-09-25
+weight: 4
+---
+
+> Where did the shame come from?
+
+I'm not sure. I've got a few ideas, though.
+
+The first is likely that, as a queer person, societal shame is just part of our lives. We're not normal, after all. The sex we have doesn't line up with the sex we *should* have.
+
+I certainly bought into that, despite all of my efforts. Homosexual stuff was fine online, of course, because it was all so idyllic and perfect. No muss, no fuss. To be confronted with just how much of a mess sex can be offline, especially between two bepenised individuals, left me feeling like somehow I was falling short of that ideal.
+
+> Perhaps that is the crux of the shame: sex should be easy, and you should be good at it, if your online sex life was anything to go by. That it isn't and that you aren't felt like an indictment.
+
+Yes. The second idea that I have is that there was that misalignment between body and mind that started in 2005 and just grew wider over time. This put that indictment in very stark terms: sex should be easy, I should be good at it, and I should be a girl, if my online sex life was anything to go by, and I was none of those things.
+
+> Has the shame lessened since transition? Since surgery?
+
+Oh, quite a bit. I still feel like I'm not very good at it, that it's not easy, but I no longer have that overwhelming sense that I'm lying to everyone I lay with.
+
+> Your other ideas?
+
+Two. The first is subtler, and more of a subset of stuff already mentioned. To be raised a boy in America in the 90s is to be raised with the competing ideas that women are people and that women are sexual objects. Having sex is a balancing act between claiming what is rightfully yours as a man and treating a woman right.
+
+To then be gay, and especially then to bottom, is to turn every bit of that on its head. You become the sexual object. You become the person who should be treated right. You fulfill all these obligations placed on sex, but somehow manage to do so completely wrong. You fuck it all up.
+
+> The other?
+
+Getting raped just kind of messes you up.
+
+> Ah.
+
+So, <a class="pulse" href="/sex/kink">let's talk about kink</a>.

content/sex/_index.md

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 type: serial
+back: /poly/6
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 <!--
 Things to talk about:
 
-* Rape
-* Masturbation
-* Phone sex
-* Typefucking
-* Asexuality
-* After surgery
+* Rape (started)
+* Masturbation (done)
+* Phone sex (done)
+* Typefucking (started; talk about the rhythm, etc)
+* Asexuality (done?)
+* After surgery (to do; include masturbation)
 -->