moominmuppet

I mentioned in my last post that I can't abide feeling hobbled.

I like heels, because I like the height, but they have to be solid and strong, good for tromping about, roomy at the toes. Stilettos, not happening. Ballet shoes (the kink variety) give me the shivers. And my feet can't take even stompy heels for as long as I'd like anymore. I'm not ok with trading stride for height (although my relationship to height, in a family of men ranging from 6' 2" to 6' 5", is a whole other post. There's my true body dysphoria, not at my crotch. I am MUCH bigger inside my head).

Feeling my body move and work is a deep part of my sensual enjoyment of the world and my sexuality. My stride is at the core of that. It communicates and expresses me and my moods. I like to move quickly and confidently, I like the feel in my legs and hips and shoulders. I like the swing of my hips as much as I like the length of my steps.

That also breaks a lot, though. Sometimes for long periods; bouts of plantar fasciitis (I'm convinced Hans Christian Andersen experienced this; it explains so much about The Little Mermaid's "walking on knives"), or more common and variable joint pain throughout my legs. I am literally hobbled, my stride shorter, slower, more hesitant. My balance is off, I fall more easily. I can't send the same signals in the same ways, and sometimes it really shuts me down. Sometimes I'm in a weird middle state where I can still choose to move how I want, but it's gonna hurt. It gets... complicated.

One of the best things about having a intermittent illness, though, is the feeling when it goes away. When I come out of a flare and I can move the way I want to, it is one of the most glorious feelings on the planet. Walking down the hall at work is a celebration. I dance on the sidewalk (quite literally). I don't know that I could appreciately as deeply what my stride means to me if I hadn't lost it so frequently.

I do find it amusing to be a woman in comfortable shoes, though. ;P

So. Yesterday I talked at great length about the place of masculinity in my head. Today, I think I'll talk about its place in my bed. ;)

Femme performativity can be hugely hot for me, no denying. In fact, I tend to be sexually compatible with a much broader spectrum of women than men. But it's often somewhat foreign to me, too. Beautiful and hot more for its difference from me than its commonality. Worth noting that although I talked a lot about cultural structures of power around gender yesterday, especially the internal misogyny of my youth, sorting that out in my head has allowed me a lot clearer view and recognition of powerful take-no-shit femmes, appreciation for the subversiveness of intentional and unapologetic femininity (and I do love me some subversion). I love it, I react to it, but it's not my personal path most days (when it is, I tend to go "earth mother femme". High femme, even very dominant high femme, is drag for me. Sometimes fun, but I'm just being a tourist). I have a lot to thank the lesbian community for, in the ways I learned there to appreciate femininity as a conscious and radical choice, not just an awkward societal default I kept getting unwillingly shoved into. Sexually, feminine women can be hugely affirming for me. Many recognize and react to my masculine side, and our tendency to compare-and-contrast pushes me into comfortable space where I am the more masculine one.

Folks who wander the middle ground, under a variety of labels or none, are my people. Huge sense of connection there, which may or may not be sexual, depending. I struggle least inside my own head within those connections. Rather than contrast, commonality is the core of our dynamic.

Masculine-of-center -- that's the meat of what I really want to talk about today. Tomboys and butches, trans and cis men. If you want to see my neck snap around fast enough to risk whiplash while I simultaneously trip over my own feet, throw some hot queered masculinity in front of me, especially in a female body. Goddamn.

I am hesitant to pursue, though, in a way that's different from my usual nervousness about impinging on boundaries. This is old defensiveness and uncertainty. Fears that being less masculine than them in contrast will push me back into the girl box, get me read and reacted to in ways that are rarely comfortable to me. Stupid old assumptions that if they're the boy I'll have to be the girl.

In actuality, my energy with masculine people is often more masculine, not less (more on that in a minute) When it connects the other way, my feminine side is a gift of profound trust. To enjoy it with someone, especially sexually, I have to get over the fear that them seeing that side, seeing that it is _also_ true for me, will erase my hard-fought-for masculine side. It feels very similar to struggles around having my queerness erased when I'm seen dating guys. I am only truly comfortable being feminine with those people I most trust to see and honor my masculinity.

Because of all that crap in my head, interacting with masculinity sexually can be very tricky for me. It draws me but threatens me. It can bring out some of my worst old defensive traits if I'm not careful.

As a note: It's rare for me to connect sexually with men or women who are entirely straight. I'm to much of a girl for straight women, to much of a guy for straight men. The men are actually generally fine with pursuing me, but we can't connect in the ways I need, and I end up feeling invisible or deceptive. And defensive internalized homophobia and machismo is a huge turn-off, both in general and because it pushes the sense that I am deceiving and violating them, that if they truly understood me they would not be ok with it. Also, those are the men most likely to insist on treating me "like a girl". No thanks.

Queered masculinity, though, especially masculine-masculine connections... There's a reason a huge percentage of my porn is gay leatherdaddies or lesbian butch-butch dynamics. *Melt* I love that energy. Carol Queen's Leatherdaddy and the Femme, Patrick Califia's Boy in the Middle... That's the home of my most potent fantasies (and their writing has reassured me many times over the years when I felt alone and incomprehensible).

The world has gotten a lot easier for me in recent years. Boundaries breaking down, increased inclusivity and space for wanderers like me. Just the recognition of our existence is a huge step, honestly. But for better or worse, my formative years happened in a much more rigid time, and old insecurities die hard. "Am I welcome here" is always a critical question for me, and one I often have to ask multiple times to truly assuage those fears. And my body still prevents me from fitting seamlessly into many of the dynamics I crave. I've said for decades that if I got a male body for a day I'd spend every minute of that day in gay leather bars and bathhouses. As is, I'm sensitive about issues of appropriation and invasion. I'm not always even comfortable talking about my attractions to gay cis men and to trans men of all orientations. I've been fetishized for my traits enough I don't want to do that to others or be perceived as someone who would.

It's not fetishization, though, I don't think. It's a desire to participate in some way (even as a voyeur) in a type of masculine energy interplay that I generally can't directly without my body throwing off the dynamic. I sure as hell have no interest in "turning" gay men. When I have played that way we ignore my girlbits almost entirely, and I'm good with that. I don't want to create heterosexuality with them, I want to revel in their masculine queerness. I want to find ways to play in that world without breaking what is special and magnificent about it. And with trans guys, it's nothing to do with their equipment and everything to do with their experience. I am not trans, as far as I can tell, but I generally feel safer with trans men than anyone else, because I trust their empathy with my reality. I trust them to believe me.

Cis guys who are most attracted to women are the trickiest territory for me. There's so much potential, but I'm easily overwhelmed by conflicting impulses. I want to be "one of the guys", except sometimes when I don't. My ten-year-old posturing competitive tomboy comes out, and she can be a pain in the ass. Queer/gay men tend to elicit my more masculine energy sexually. Guys on the straighter end of the spectrum tend to elicit my feminine side sexually, which can be very much at odds with my preferred social dynamics outside the bedroom, and can bring up a lot of old crap in my head.

Kink dynamics can make everything even trickier. At present I'd describe myself as mostly dominant, and also mostly a bottom. That confuses enough people all on its own, let alone the complicated ways gender plays into things. The most common and pervasive images of kink, both femdom and feminine submission, are poor fits for me, and fem sub to masculine dominant is perhaps the trickiest of all. Scares the shit out of me (which unsurprisingly also makes me deeply curious to poke at it; I don't exactly run at my fears, but it is my tendency to hesitantly sidle toward them and prod at them). If I were to submit, I'm pretty certain it would be easiest for me to do from queer masculine headspace, or to a queer woman, or both. It pulls far enough from the common cultural detritus of gender dynamics to alleviate some of the psychological stressors for me. As is, I generally bottom from a pretty dominant headspace, although it may be feminine.

Honestly, I always expected that if I got over my fears enough, I'd be more likely to explore submission than dominance sexually. I got surprised on that one, in ways that seem glaringly obvious in retrospect. So far, in the one relationship where it's been a serious element, I found a profound resonance that I'm still both processing and grieving. I don't know if I can do dominance casually. The experience shifted my life (I found a whole new way of falling in love), but right now my feelings about it are too deeply tied to an aching hole in my heart to go anywhere near those dynamics with someone else, even casually, if that's even possible for me (I'm a slut, so I expect someday it will be).

The experience, though, in opening me up to D/s dynamics (I was all S/M previously), created another avenue of possible exploration. I don't like being limited by my fears. I don't think that deep down I'm primarily submissive (the opposite, actually), but I don't want to fear whatever tendencies I have in that regard, and I have gotten progressively more curious recently, largely as a result of trying to wrap my brain around my sub partner's headspace. I don't think I'll end up living there, but I want to know and understand the territory to the extent I'm able. I suspect that's pretty directly related to how I'm reacting to some of the people around, especially in the community, in ways that are rather surprising and atypical for me. No idea when/if I'll actually be ready to explore that, but I'm certainly finding the inside of my head an odd place these days. We'll see.

The recent split was prompted entirely by my need to be who I am, not by lack of love on either side. I'm grateful for the gentleness of it, but reeling from the loss. So now seems to be a good time to focus on being my full self again, figuring out who that is at this point in my life, with everything new I've learned about myself, good and bad. To restate what it is I want and need to be.

A while back I had a half-finished post about that, couldn't get it out because of the dissonance in my head. I think I'll try again, see how much hard choices have brought me back to myself.

A silly online questionnaire on archetypes recently informed me I was:
46% intellectual
29% caregiver
25% advocate
The percentages are meaningless, but in their particular breakdown (http://www.archetypes.com/category/archetypes/), these were certainly far and away the best matches for me, I won't argue that. (I will argue the validity of asking my gender for the first question grrrr)

Before I jump into the navel-gazing portion of tonight's program, a quick PSA. I do not think I am any more special a snowflake than anyone else. When I say "I am like this", it's not because I necessarily think I am uniquely or shockingly so, or that I am engaging in life-shattering revelations. Just testing how the ideas fit together in my head, because I think our aspirations and beliefs about ourselves create us to a great extent, and I try to create myself as intentionally and with as much self-awareness as I can. Ideally, I want to be able to recognize what is _true_ about me, and from that, make choices about the directions I go with the particular resources I have. I believe being honest about my strengths makes it easier for me to be humble about my many weaknesses, and also helps me be more clearly affirming of the complementary strengths others bring to the table without getting defensive or self-loathing. And overall, I want to be continually better at finding a life that capitalizes on the former and minimizes the latter.

As an example of this, I think I'll talk some about body image. It's comfortable territory for me, something I think and write about a lot, and have my entire adult life. I'm passionate about body acceptance, and loving my body is something I see as one of my great triumphs in the face of a fucked up culture. It's also something I see as a form of activism, in a very "the personal is political" kind of way. It matters to me not to feed into body hatred, and you'll find I will never partake in the "what part of your body do you hate?" casual water cooler conversation. I will not feed that beast. I will do my damndest to set an example, because there are still too few models for what it even looks like to not casually hate your body, especially if you're fat and female.

I said earlier about being clear about what is true, and making choices from that. My body is fat. It is pale, and has freckles, and has bobbles here and quirks there, and it is strong, and yet it breaks down entirely too frequently for my liking. These are all true. Facts. Even setting aside all the self-loathing paths I could choose, I'm still left with many ways I could conceptualize my body and shape my life. I could be cute, curvy, bouncy femme with it, appear soft and luscious. I could go old-school butch dyke with it, and use that mass to create a sense of masculine unapologetic taking-up-of-space. I could celebrate softness, or strength, or sheer size. So when I talk about the archetypes that resonate for me, certainly my physical body makes some paths an easier fit than others, but it is no such easy equation as "I identify with earth mothers because I'm a fat lady and that's all there is". Fuck that noise.

This is the post I'd started a few weeks ago:

I don't believe in Gods but I do believe in stories

I make the "gods" point to clarify that while issues of archetype and totems are spiritual for many people, that is not true for me, but it also doesn't make those ideas invalid to me. I'm an atheist and skeptic to the core, but I don't find that incompatible with recognizing that humans are storytellers, that we imagine ourselves into existence in many ways, that we create our own self-fulfilling prophecies.

I believe in the magic of neurochemistry and human imagination.
I believe the stories we tell ourselves and each other shape us, in real and meaningful ways. That knowing the stories a person resonates to, and the archetypes to which they aspire tells me something deeply important. Not "right" or "factual", but true. And equally, that it matters that I understand my own resonances in that regard.

And it can be hard to talk about these things, to not feel presumptuous or foolish for daring to compare ourselves to the larger-than-life and romantic. Especially if we fear others will look at us and see not a shred of it, or will believe that we confuse aspiration with actuality and are getting lost in our own deluded egos.

So I'm going to talk about what resonates for me, and hope you will be gentle and generous in your interpretation of my words.

First and foremost, I should clarify that I'm genderqueer; I identify with both masculine and feminine imagery of various sorts, and where my head is at in that regard shifts from day-to-day and moment-to-moment.

I'm also a reader, and that's probably equally important. For some reason I don't seem to have the skills at creating fiction, and have not been interested enough to put in the amount of work to find out whether I could, but characters live in my head, always have. I'm mostly an SF/F geek, so there's a lot of archetypal material out there for me to connect with. The characters I identify with or aspire to have most definitely shaped me. So have my political/philosophical traditions, especially feminist and activist history and heroes.

That archetype quiz for way back at the beginning of this post? Intellectual/Caregiver/Advocate -- yeah, this is where that's relevant. What traits matter most of to me to bring into the world, which do I most aspire to? Courage, wisdom, passion, strength, knowledge, reason, love, ethics, calm, protection, refuge. That's what I want to be in the world. I think of myself as a defensive warrior: a shield, not a sword. I aspire to cronehood, and seek to be balanced and wise in how I share knowledge. I also want to be a refuge for my loved ones and community, a place of calm and acceptance and love. I identify with the bear's physicality and strength but generally playful and placid nature. The more my life is in line with these goals, the more I live them minute-by-minute, the more whole and fulfilled and affirmed I feel. When I lose track of my aspirations, or disconnect from the ways in which I fulfill them (retreat socially, cease being involved in activism, etc), it crumples me up inside, breaks me in deep and scary ways. Getting back to how I need to be becomes a matter of psychological survival. I'm feeling more on-track in that regard than I have in a number of years now (since mid-2012).

There's a bunch of stuff still rattling in my brain that didn't make it in. I may add more in comments as I sort it out.

My current "commute and break" audiobook is Speaking Sex to Power: The Politics of Queer Sex, by Patrick Califia. It's a collection of his late-nineties/early-2000s essays, just as he was really starting to transition, with some wonderful additionally contextualizing notes and introductions. His writings about both kink and parenthood are connecting more for me these days.

It's making me feel a bit old, I have to admit, seeing the work of the 90s become the historical foundation for the current generation, seeing the "big new ideas" that shaped me in the context of developments since that time. Susie Bright, Pat Califia, Carol Queen, Tristan Taormino (hey, wait, wasn't she the new kid on the block just yesterday?), Betty Dodson... I was reading another FLer's post about Betty Dodson and Sex for One just the other day. It warms my heart that people are still discovering her.

These are some of the people whose ideas and perspectives helped shape me, my role models and idols. They're all human, and flawed, and sometimes just as confused as I am, but that's part of what I love, why they give me confidence. They gave me visions of the life I wanted, blazed paths for me to follow. When I live loudly so other people can see what that looks like, it's my attempt to pass on the gift they gave me by opening themselves in essays and smut, speech and vid, so I could feel less alone. It's gratitude for all the transgressive cultural outlaws who have helped shift the boundaries, expand the space for all of us, those who've taken the punishment in order to find their freedom, and mine. It's recognition that the risks I take pale in comparison to those of many others, both historical and modern. (and now I'm trying really hard to keep this from going off on a general activism and social justice tangent; I'll never end up hitting "post" if I try to tackle all of that)

Sometimes the generational shift is the kind of shock to my system that epigenetics was to my science geek side (holy shit, did that blow my mind). Mostly the evolutions are pretty clear in retrospect, though. Listening to Patrick talk this morning about class and queerness, and about the complexities of community for a behaviorally bisexual leather dyke gone trans man, I just kept thinking how grateful I am that intersectionality has come to fore. At times I feel out of the loop in modern conversations, wonder where I fit anymore, think that maybe I'm stuck in my 90s feminist theory and haven't kept up with the debates well enough, but I'm also so, so proud of the new generation, joyful at the explosion of excellent sex educators and speakers and writers, the ease with which I can find awesome queer/trans-inclusive feminist porn, the plethora of amazing resources. 20 years ago I had to hunt down these writers' books, dog-ear my copies of On Our Backs and Anything That Moves, hear rumors of fascinating happenings far across the country, treasure the few friends who didn't stare blankly at most of what I wanted to talk about. For all the struggles and dust-ups of online community, I wouldn't go back for a minute.

And I'm taking "break time" to mean "time to post" time, or I never will. Always more to say.
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Related second post:

Who was transformative for you, sexually?

Related to my most recent post, who was transformative in your life, sexually?

I've been talking about writers, primarily, but I mean this broadly; there are lovers and relationships I identify as watersheds in the development of my sexuality, moments of connection with community, essays that reflected parts of my soul back at me and made me think and discover new things about myself; all of that counts. I may add some of these in the comments as they come to mind, but there's one I always think of:

I still remember exactly where I was sitting (outside the Drexel in Columbus, at a little cafe table on a bright summer day) when I started Carol Queen's Real Live Nude Girls, when I read the line in her "Letter to My Mother" essay:

"I could never explain to her how important sex was to me, what a journey I was making of it."

It didn't just resonate, it rang through me like a bell. It still does.

(cross-posting here so it's accessible to folks who aren't on Fetlife, where I'm doing most of my writing about sexuality these days. Original post is here: https://fetlife.com/users/10935/posts/2913859)

After-school classes, academic summer camps, science fairs -- these were my bread and butter as a kid. As an adult I love a good conference, although haven't been to one in much too long, and I still take classes of various sorts occasionally just for fun. I also read voraciously, but I think best when I get the chance to bounce ideas around with other people. I'm extraverted enough for the social interplay to be mostly energizing, not draining, and formulating my thoughts to express to other people always helps me sort them in my head. And there's the benefit of other people's knowledge, experience, and perspective, of course!

I often explain to vanilla people in my life, half-jokingly, that kink is a natural extension of sexuality for me, because it's the sex that involves homework. Thinking about sex (in the broadest sense of the term), talking about it, engaging my curiosity and intellect, learning new skills and ways of thinking, finding new bits of my own sexual map; that's a big part of what gets me hot, engaged, and excited. It's not that you can't be thinky about vanilla sex, or that all kinksters are into kink for that side of things, but I've said for a long time that I think the overlap between the kink communities and the geek communities is less than coincidental, and I stand by that. It seems I find a lot of my people here; the ones for whom the analysis and planning and learning is a big part of their joy.

I've also been thinking about the pull of the community, about why I choose community over playing solo, even setting aside the access to fun equipment and technical specialists. A lot of it has to do with the ways that being a community around sexuality shifts the boundaries on appropriate conversation. I'm a sexuality geek, not just about kink but overall. I want to bounce about the newest reseach on the g-spot, or the excellent new indie porn producer, like some people want to replay the winning field goal from Sunday's game. I am, overall, pretty TMI and NSFW, although I have elaborate thoughts on consensuality and boundaries regarding discussing sexuality and handling other peoples' comfort levels, and there are plenty of environments where I just bite my tongue and talk about things that actually interest me much less. Incidentally, for a long time I used Livejournal as my primary outlet for rambling about these topics; I'm trying to get started doing much the same here these days; it lets me shake the words out of my fingers so I don't explode.

I've tailored my life to this in many ways; my household, my friends, and some of my other communities (especially sex education, reproductive health, queer studies, and sex-positive feminism) are similarly open to these topics overall, and I love that. My academic studies have often revolved around topics of sexuality. It's one of my great passions, and my approach to it is deeply informed by my politics and philosophies about the benefits of open communication and shared information.

The kink community is one of the places I can breathe a sigh of relief, stop biting my tongue, and have the conversations that are always trying to bubble out of me anyway And it's especially fun because the boundaries are different in some ways. The nature of a community where we share space sexually, and where direct personal sexual expression is generally appropriate, allows for different conversations, different shared experiences to reference and discuss. That's intensely valuable to me. It's an intersection of my academic and political interests with my personal sexual experiential fun. Powerful stuff.

I feel less compartmentalized within the kink community than in most other environments, and those other environments where I feel as or more complete and at home are those that are also sex-positive and kink-positive. The feminist sex-positive movement, especially where it intersects with the queer kink community, is probably most "home" to me of anywhere -- feeds all the parts of my soul in very special ways. And I've been finding that within the larger kink community more easily these days, more of "my people" floating through the crowd.

Although I like to play, and I particularly like to play publicly, it's not the primary reason I'm investing time and energy in building my connection with the community. It's a bonus if it happens, but there are plenty of nights I come home from parties feeling sated and fulfilled in the ways that matter to me most even if I didn't play at all; the mental stimulation and connection is primary for me. Certainly, I have lonely nights here and there, but when I do it's less about the frustrations of not having a partner with me (or finding one to play with), and much more about those off-days when I feel awkward and self-conscious and can't connect socially as easily, can't seem to have the conversations I want.

So, I can't say it's "in a nutshell", but there's a good bit of why the community matters to me, fwiw.

Whose head I'm in (imagining myself in the scene vs imagining what it's like to be one of the characters), and how that relates both to maintaining some sexual functionality even when very deeply depressed, and to fun stuff like gender play and exploration of various experiences that wouldn't work for me, in my own body and psyche. I like both general forms (my head/their head), but they work pretty differently, in ways I find fascinating and sometimes very telling.

So, in general I see a number of different ways of interacting with sexual energy.
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I'm about to do a bunch of toy reviews, so now seems like a good time to reshare this; I wrote it back in 2001 or so, I think? It doesn't include some of my earliest explorations, but it certainly explains a great deal about how central curiosity and exploration are in how I think about my sexuality.

Apologies for any formatting weirdness. Also, I'm posting it basically unread, since I'm all muzzy-headed at the moment. May go back and add some clarifications, corrections, and updates at some point, may not. Also, I suspect some of my age guesses about how old I was are over-estimates.

TINKERING
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So, I talk about sex and sexuality-related issues very differently than most folks, and much more openly. And now seems like a good time to explain how boundaries around that work in my life. Or hopefully it is; I did just wake up and may not be entirely coherent yet.

I talk about sex, including my own sex life, in graphic detail. And I also sometimes flirt and have online sex of various sorts (great way to burn off extra sexual energy without worry about navigating extra safer sex stuff in my life, given that my relationships explicitly permit such play). What's the difference?
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So, let's see how much more of the megapost I can finish up before the end of shift.

From the end of the previous post:

Also, I actively ask my partners for feedback. How to have those conversations honestly without hurt feelings is a whole big topic of its own, too, and one I definitely want to write about as part of this (note to self: also find old post about erotic conversations and how to avoid making them problematically prescriptive when it comes to the actual reality of interaction).

Well, until I get motivated and go hunting for that post in its entirety, here's basically what I meant by that:
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And really, it probably will be very random rambling. I'm in the mood to write/talk about sex, but don't have a lot specific on my mind.

( text only behind the cut, but not particularly worksafe descriptions )