(Heads-up: parts of this post are fairly explicit when it comes to detailing rape and abuse.)

One of the more interesting (and by interesting, I mean ridiculously ignorant) responses I have seen in a few places discussing the I Was Raped project and my input was my statement on the news that the first time I was assaulted — at the age of 11 — I did not know what had happened to me and was without any language to even express it.

This is being met with some measure of disbelief by a few folks, or the assumption I was on drugs or had been drugged or that I was simply stupid. My personal favorite was that I’m a young girl who only called my rapes rape after being brainwashed by Jennifer and feminism, a newfangled notion she apparently just clued me into. Who knew I was such a late bloomer, and that I was somehow able to grow up in the 70’s in a progressive Chicago neighborhood with a single mother, an activist father, and managed to never hear about feminism? Wowza.

I think people forget that in the early 80’s and before, we were without SO much awareness about rape and all other kinds of abuse. (And other things: I also had attraction to women before then, and a girlfriend before I knew bisexuality was a term for what I was. I was actively dating both men and women for a few years before, as detailed in one of my teenage journals, there was an entry that simply says, “Huh. It seems that I’m bisexual.”) That’s hardly to say we’re living in an acutely aware world now, but that things really have changed pretty substantially in a relatively short period of time. I was an exceptionally intelligent child, in many ways precocious, and also being a compulsive reader, I knew a whole lot about a whole lot, including having some knowledge and understanding about sex.

However, even for plenty of people who know something about sex, who are smart and relatively informed, figuring out what sex is and what rape is aren’t so easy, particularly when you’re raised female. Even if we look at classical literature - much of Greek mythology, all sorts of folktales, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the Bronte Sisters, you name it, and this was the kind of reading I did as a kid — it doesn’t take a genius to notice that usually, when rape happens, it’s often presented as sex or, at best, “sex by force.” It’s rarely, if ever, called rape. In that literature, in religion, in common parlance, in romance novels, in films, in family gossip young women have for eons been taught, more than not, that we are passive sexually, that sex for us is something a person “takes” or we “give” (rather than as something shared), and that often enough our sexual awakening is supposed to be about men deciding to indoctrinate us. Many of us were, have been and still are taught, overtly or covertly, that rape is only rape — and even then may not be — if we’re screaming no at the top of our lungs, if there is a knife at our throat, a scary-looking stranger who is scowling (not getting off and smiling or laughing), a dirty alleyway. Even then, we hear about what women in that situation did to deserve it, ask for it, incite it. As I’ve said before, with my rape that came closest to that, at the age of 12, I heard that kind of backlash from the mouths of the police.

My first assault happened with a man I trusted — my family trusted — the man who cut our hair for years. When he asked me to go back into that shampoo room with him, I earnestly thought nothing of it. When he told me how pretty I was getting, I was marginally uncomfortable, but then I always had been with compliments. When he started getting closer and closer to me as he said this, then started talking about my breasts and my legs as he backed me up against the wall, I became very quickly and acutely uncomfortable, but I was taught by one of my parents and all of her family that you trust adults, and that’s just that: that when you feel uncomfortable around them, you don’t yell out or tell them to get out of your face, or tell them how much their breath in your face makes you want to throw up. I was taught that it was more likely I would misunderstand the well-meaning actions of adults than be correct in knowing when they were doing something wrong. When his hands went everywhere he could possibly put them, I was in such a state of shock that this was happening to me. Part of that was that while I had developed a bit early, for the most part, I did still feel pretty childlike, and what was going on very much did not feel like what happened between an adult and a child. Another part of that was that from everything I knew, this was not unlike how, when sex happened, it was described. I didn’t want it, I didn’t feel aroused — I felt incredibly repulsed and before I walked home, wound up throwing up in the alley several times — and yet, it’s not like anyone had ever talked to me about how sex was supposed to feel, emotionally, or like I hadn’t seen enough representations of sex where it clearly was not about the woman’s wants, initiation or boundaries. What I was looking for, later that day and for years afterwards, was a rationale of why that happened to me, how, somehow, something I said, did or wore would have given the impression I wanted that or was available for that. For a couple years, I blamed my developing body: pulled hair out of it that had grown in, tried to make it go back to my childhood body, cut it up with a razor.

I did not tell a soul what had happened to me then. I was cut off from my dad at the time, and I was living in a household with a stepparent who was verbally and emotionally abusive, and who, since I had started puberty, had used that to humiliate and torment me. One of his favorite taunts during those years was to tell me, in lurid detail, how he might cut my breasts off. I think it’s also entirely possible — remember, these are memories which are now 27 years old and which are also made murky by a lot of trauma in a short time - I was worried that having my stepparent know this man had done this to me would give him or any other man the feeling they could do the same. Telling my mother would have meant he was told — my privacy was never respected in that home (the only place I could assure that was a closet I rigged to lock from the inside, where I spent a whole lot of time for a few years), and I was often treated as the interloper to what would have been, apparently, an otherwise idyllic existence. I had no idea what telling anyone else would mean, but I didn’t think it would be helpful. I was already a bit of a misfit at school and we had just moved, so all my friends were very new friends — and didn’t want to say anything which would cement my status as a freak further.

Again, there wasn’t any precedent for this back then, when it comes to telling. There were no talk-TV shows, no magazines, no books, not hotlines, no PSAs telling you to tell, or letting you know that telling could be a big help. There were only an onslaught of messages telling you to shut your trap and pretend nothing happened. My clear assumption at the time was that I must have done something to deserve this or make this man think I wanted this: I was often blamed for so much I did not do in my childhood that I had no reason to think otherwise. I was used to being found at fault. I wasn’t about to tel anyone about this thing which felt so wrong and get sorely punished for whatever I did.

There’s something else people seem to forget. I was more educated in many ways than a lot of girls my age, but I work in sex education right now, not in 1981. And every single day we get questions from people of a wide range of ages, from a wide range of nations, who very clearly would not — or do not - know, either. We hear from people who do not know the names of their own body parts, or do not know what the most “basic” forms of sex are. We hear from people all over the globe in their teens and twenties who do not know the basics of reproduction, or when sex has even happened. We work with a population who is frequently told that ANY sex is wrong for them, and so they tend to expect sex — wanted sex, sex of any kind — to feel wrong. We hear from people all the time who have been forced into sex or other kinds of abuse and do not know what happened to them; know that it was rape or abuse and it was not something they asked for or are responsible for. In other words, things have improved, but we still have a loooong way to go, and there are lots of things which inhibit people from knowing they have been abused which have little or nothing to do with rape at all.

Back when I was running my alternative pre-kindergarten and teaching in other classrooms, the few times I had a student I discovered was being abused in some way, figuring it all out was very tough, because children normalize whatever their normal is, and they are also very easily manipulated by abusive adults into believing that when they say a given thing is okay, that it is okay, even if it hurts, even if it doesn’t feel right, even if every part of them initially — in time that intuition is often worn down to nothing — knows it isn’t okay. I had a student once with a babysitter who, as it turned out, had a husband who punished the children they cared for by burning their mouths with a lighter (you can guess, sadly, when this all played out, how little happened to this man — as I understand it, the only consequence of all of this was that the woman doing home daycare got a limit placed on how many kinds she could have, and stupid DCFS told them who made the report, so the child and his mother were harassed by phone at their home for weeks by these people). I only found this out after my young student had told me all day his mouth and throat were sore. I had given him water and juice, and finally took him in the bathroom to look back in his throat… and saw that the roof of his mouth was literally charred black. I knew well enough by then that you have to be careful how you talk to kids about this stuff — again, it’s very easy to lead or influence them — so it took everything I had to try and ask questions cool as a cucumber when I was mortified and heartbroken, knowing something awful had happened to this child. In asking where he’d been lately, what he’d done over the last few days, he finally volunteered, with a shrug, that “Maybe that happened when Mike put his lighter in my mouth. He does that sometimes.” He said it as if he were saying, “Maybe I’ll have eggs for breakfast this morning.” Mike put a lighter in his mouth, sure, and it later came out that Mike liked to physically “discipline” him in other ways, but Mike also played ball with him, told jokes, was his friend. These kinds of situations are confusing for children, confusing for teens, confusing for adults.

See, sometimes we don’t know we’ve been abused because the person who raped (or otherwise abused) us isn’t supposed to be someone who can harm you: a boyfriend, a teacher, a parent, a clergyperson, a friend. If people who are supposed to care about you, who say they care about you, who others you trust invest trust in assaults you it surely must have been something else, because people you love aren’t supposed to do you harm. Sometimes we don’t know because the person who is assaulting us tells us, quite plainly, while they are doing so that we like what they are doing, that everything feels so good, that we are so special, that they are our friend and would never hurt us. They’re smiling, the way we see them smile all the time, not looking scary or yelling or calling us bitches or sluts. Sometimes we don’t know because what we are told or shown in sex and what we are told or shown is rape so closely resemble each other: my personal feeling over the years is that one thing that makes healing so hard for a lot of survivors is that so much of the consensual sex they are having is still pretty rape-y in a lot of ways. Sometimes we don’t know rape was rape because we have heard so much more about how women are temptresses (or, for male survivors, how men and boys always want any kind of sex from anyone) who lead men into the things they do to us, who cause men to lose self-control — this kind of talk loomed large among my mother’s Irish Catholic parents, for instance — or we hear about how dirty and filthy and bad we are from birth, no mater what we do or don’t do, no matter what is or is not done to us by others.

Let’s also not forget that often, our psyches do us a profound favor with traumatic events where they can kind of turn off and tune out our minds so that our memories of a traumatic event are murky and even nonexistent. This is not some kooky idea people came up with in order to prove imaginary traumas, it’s something very well documented, and one very typical aspect of PTSD. In my case, while I remember much of my first assault very clearly, my second is one where a whole chunk starting where I was forcibly grabbed and pulled into the van and ending where I somehow had gotten myself back into the bathroom of the ice rink where I started, shivering and shaking and bruised, is just missing. I’m very well versed in this point of therapies for missing memories, things like RMT, and of the big flaws in them. Before I even knew how flawed approaches like that could be, I had no interest in trying them (and the one therapist I had who I stuck with in my teens was very down-to-earth and never suggested them): I never wanted those acute memories, nor did I, personally, need them to know what happened to me and to work through it. All the same, when you have memory loss with trauma, it can make figuring out what happened right at or around the time it did a challenge, especially when you factor in the very typical desire for denial of trauma.

One of the biggest bummers of the last couple of weeks is that I wish so many of these conversations could have been had only with rape survivors, in spaces that felt safe, where survivors could really talk and where those who were not could just freaking listen. Every time I read one of these bouts of en masse ignorance, it was usually dovetailed by comments about how we don’t need rape awareness, how everyone knows all they need to know, and how anyone who wants to talk about their rape can with no problems and full support, which is an obvious and sad irony. If we didn’t need that awareness, survivors would feel and earnestly be safe to share their stories and all the prototypical myths — like the idea that everyone knows when they have been raped and knows that’s what to call it — wouldn’t be anything we still had to counter. If people could just listen to survivors — and put aside that sometimes, what we have to say is going to make people feel uncomfortable and is going to challenge certain worldviews profoundly — we’d have come a lot farther by now both in reducing rape and in having a better environment for survivors to heal in. It’s really tough sometimes to even figure out which is more traumatic: a rape itself, or the aftermath of rape, living with rape, trying to work through it all in a culture which is so hell-bent on enabling rape and blaming or silencing survivors.

So, no: I didn’t know that two of my rapes were rapes for the first few years after them, or even when they happened. I wasn’t drugged for any of my assaults, nor was I on drugs or any other substance. I have never been stupid a day in my life. They were not wanted, consensual sex which I only decided to call rape when a bunch of feminist women brainwashed me. I was not atypical in this respect, even though my not-knowing isn’t universal, either. The biggest reason I didn’t know is that, like many, many people then and many now — including some getting the message loud and clear from some of the discussions which have happened over the last couple of weeks — I was taught in a million different ways not to know.

posted in Heather Corinna, activism, rape, surviving abuse, body/mind, rantapalooza, online life | permalink | comments (3) »

Oh, but there’s just nothing like waking up in the morning to find an image of you (from a clearly copyrighted page, no less) used without your permission and to be the unidentified rape survivor used as a poster child without even a request for your permission, let alone the permission itself. Having your work (Scarleteen) attributed to someone else is just icing on the cake. Given the subject matter, there’s a pretty grotesque and sad irony afoot, to say the least. Sure, it’s likely just editorial/journalistic carelessness, but it does strike me as sending the message that rape survivor = available to anyone for their own use without permission.

This is not to say I expect better things of Gawker or Jezebel — nor that I didn’t send their shared legal department a nastygram minutes ago — but rather, to say that I’m clearly going to require an awful lot of coffee, a very long bath, a hug and to manage my general disappointment with people today.

P.S. To friends who I told about my father coming down with pneumonia — which is obviously incredibly dangerous for him given his general health and the conditions he lives in — I just heard from him and he finally seems to be on the mend. That also means he will be able to come up and stay with me for a week and a half as planned next week.

P.P.S. If you’re local to Seattle, I just took a call from KOMO news on the I Was Raped project, who have assured me I can count on them for the sensitivity I have not otherwise encountered much today.  I’m not entirely optimistic, but we’ll see.  It is crazy to me that I have to explain (and I have, several times today to different people) that my choosing the context where an image of me identifying myself as a survivor is not minor.  A big photo of me on my local news can mean that I get to spend days, even weeks possibly running into people locally who know me only as “that girl who got raped,” by my face, it might mean opening myself up to all kinds of things with groups of people that are broader than the groups I usually encounter.

I will probably have more to say after the segment is aired, depending on what they used of what I said, but I gotta say, so far, this doesn’t go down as one of my best days ever.  I feel exposed — and given, I signed up for some of that, hoping it will be a worthwhile thing for others — and like I’ve had to fight for my right not to be some sort of commodity and it’s just… I don’t know.  It’s just something, and not something very great for me at the moment.

posted in Heather Corinna, surviving abuse, body/mind, apropos of nothing, online life | permalink | comments (1) »

posted in Heather Corinna, body/mind, history, heart work | permalink | comments (2) »

It’s really a pity when you have a really nice weekend with friends (Mark and I drove down to Portland with Ben and Joriel yesterday), a great treatment from your acupuncturist (even better when she’s just a doll and treats you gratis), several phenomenal vegan meals, and then a mellow night back home and end it all with a night full of troubling dreams.

All night last night I had a series of what were clearly anxiety dreams about this job interview tomorrow. Most were based around perceptions of me as not likeable, which has got to be about the interview, because I pretty much stopped caring overmuch if people liked me in high school. There was also a lost-on-the-bus dream, which I know is also about this, as I’m having to take four busses to get to the location they want to interview me at and potentially have me work at. (I know four busses would suck, but again, I really want this gig quite specifically, and I really need a second job, so.) Then I had a revisitation dream about the very ill-fated second job I tried to have in Minneapolis in 2002, where I was doing home-care for a developmentally disabled woman who physically attacked me, including ripping a handful of my hair out in her hand, on the first (and thereafter, only) weekend I was there for an overnight. Joy.

It’s been a while since I had a bonafide job interview, and a while since I had a second out-of-the-home job. Since 2002, actually, with that disastrous homecare gig (if I don’t count co-teaching kickboxing, which I would save that it was a barter-work situation, rather than something I was paid for with the green stuff). This is something I very much want, work that I think is critically important with aspects I have been wanting to learn to do for some time, so that’s part of why this is clearly very loaded for me. Too, I think the anxiety is piling up because while my conscious mind can work out how I can do most of what I already do full-time and an additional job, out of my own office and at a considerable distance, my subconscious mind is all “SAY WHAT?!? We want a vacation, dammit, not more work!”

I’m also a bit nervous, since they decided to interview me at a different clinic than I initially applied to — the first was for a part-time spot — that at this one, the position may be full-time, and if they offer me a full-time spot, I’m not sure what I would do. While I can figure how I could work something else part-time and still run Scarleteen and keep up to some degree with my art and other writing, I don’t know how I would do two full-time jobs and everything else. Horse before the cart, chickens being hatched before eggs…I know. I’m just sorting my crap out, okay? I stopped teaching in ‘98, and even just substitute-teaching in ‘99 because it wasn’t workable to do that and everything else at the time, and that was when there was far LESS work involved, and when I was almost ten years younger than I am now, and when I needed a lot less sleep. My kingdom to have all that energy back, man: if I remember back ten or twenty years when I could work 18 hours or more in a day, grab three hours of sleep and be a bit low-energy, but otherwise fine, and bounce right back to normal in a day, I find I am stewing with jealousy towards the me I once was.

I think I’m also worried I’ll find myself having to make a hard choice again between two things I very much want to do, and it’s making me nervous for no good reason, since I don’t even know if that’s a realistic possibility at this point.

Gah. Just need to get to tomorrow, I guess. For all I know, I may be being just plain silly. Even though he’s worse at babbling for hours than I am, so a call would eat up a good amount of my day, I should probably call my Dad for some support: it’d make me feel better.

That involves doing an awful lot today, including prepping some artwork for an anthology, trying one last time to get a written piece done for the same anthology. I tried several times to write Friday and yesterday, only to find that when it comes to the topic at hand, I’m all style and little substance right now. It’s all fine, well and good to write beautiful sentences and gorgeous phrases, but one doesn’t want to go all Macbeth and be full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, especially when you’re talking about the future of feminism. One more try this morning, and if the writing just doesn’t happen, I accept that I do, indeed, have limitations and not only cannot always be brilliant, but can often enough not be anything even within the same zip code.

Also on the agenda, finishing a batch of photos I did of Robert and Carol a couple years ago, a phone meeting with the c-chair of the western region of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality about them flying me in to do a talk for their conference in April, sending out a pile of books, meeting Cheryl for our Monday early evening cocktail hour, ringing up Northwest to try and work out transferring my miles to Bri so that she and The Baby Liam (who is not really a baby anymore, but who is likely stuck with that nickname from me well into adulthood) can be here for a bit in December, doing some laundry, and evaluating my cupboards.

The one unfortunate part of seeing my acupuncturist — who moved from Minneapolis to Portland — is that she suggested that she thinks it’s a strong possibility that I have developed a gluten allergy. I’m used to making dietary changes, so it wouldn’t normally be that huge of a deal, save that at this point, I eliminate so much for health and/or ethical reasons (and out of habit and necessity: even if I was suddenly okay with eating meat, the last time I ate it was in ‘81, and I ate it pretty infreqiently even before that, so it’d likely make me sick as a dog), that if you also pull wheat, rye and barely out, I’m not left with very much. For someone who routinely forgets to eat, the less available food there is, the harder it gets when I DO remember TO eat. Not good. On the other hand, if getting rid of gluten even makes a dent in some of the health issues I’ve been having, it’d be well worth the loss.

Lately, too, I’ve been having some not-so-great reactions to soy, which is a pretty intense vegan conundrum, to the point that I’ve figured I may soon have to add back fish or eggs on a quasi-regular basis, because without any soy, I’ll find myself with a pretty huge protein problem, especially when I can’t eat at home. Regardless, for the next two weeks, we’ve agreed I’ll go gluten-free to see what happens and how I feel.

Oh, how I will miss you, sweet, beautiful cupcakes: I loved you well. Here’s hoping that either Jelena is wrong, or that you’ll be able to make some adaptations yourself and accept some other kinds of flour through which to express yourself.

posted in Heather Corinna, family, subconscious life, body/mind, workworkwork | permalink | comments (6) »

Finally, finally, finally, the cover for the book is finished.

Which is good, because I was finished with it — in terms of having to invest concern about it — months ago. Huzzah!

This weekend was a marvel: Mark and I made a pledge to both staep away from work for a whole two days. That perhaps sounds silly to anyone who isn’t a self-employed working artist and activist, but as a pair of folks who are always overworked, yet always have a giant work backlog, two solid days of “Do Not Disturb” is the golden fleece.

And we didn’t do anything special, other than simply spend the sort of time together we got to spend all the time when we were bi-coastal (or whatever the term is when one of you is on a coast and the other midwest). There was a lot of time spent in bed, time spent in the bath, time spent cooking and eating, time spent just hanging out in our beloved neighborhood of Ballard.

Of course, this means I start the week already extra-behind and racing to catch up, but it was so utterly worth it.

Extra bonus? Last week Mark came home with a much-much coveted Birth-aversary gift (it was promised for last year’s birthday, but delievered on our anniversary, so): a beautiful standing heavy bag so I can friggin’ box again. My physical and mental health alike thank the boy deeply: it’ just criminal that it’s been a whole year since I’ve been able to train with what my body/mind loves the best.

The rest this weekend also gave me some awesome inspiration, to the point that my reluctant-to-assign-brilliance-to-anything sweetie called the photo idea I drummed up genius, so I’m looking forward to having some time this week to get some calls out to friends. Gotta keep this one on the down-low until I start developing it, but if you’re anywhere near me, interested in hearing what it is to be a potential subject, let me know. I feel like I can assure that this one will wind up being pretty revelatory for folks.

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, Happy!, s.e.x., body/mind | permalink | comments (9) »

I’m hoping to be able to make time tomorrow morning to be able to do some self-portrait work, so long as the old camera will be a dear and cooperate. (Can’t use the new camera for that, and besides, we seem really to not care for one another — it’s hopefully going back soon.) If I don’t get to it tomorrow, it won’t happen until after my Dad is gone.

I know it’s been a while. Primarily, that has to do with time and how much I’ve had to cram into a day, but it also has to do with interest. As longtime readers know, I tend to cycle between my arts, with one often crying out for attention over another: I have seasons of creativity that demand different media at different times.

Too, though, subjects here are few and far between, and I haven’t been all that interested in myself as subject lately, and without the real interest, there’s no real work.

But as winter is at its end, I want to capture my body in the state it’s in right now, because I know it is soon to pass. Due to both the winter months and to less activity during the winter than I’m used to, I put on a bit more winter weight than usual, to the degree that I even managed a teeny belly, which delights me. I can grow a lot of lush things on my body, but my midsection has always been the one area where weight just doesn’t tend to go: maybe I’m changing with age, who knows. But through my life, I have coveted other people’s bellies. Much to the chagrin of lovers of mine who don’t like bellies — or bellies on them — my hands always want to wander up and down a convex curve of someone who has a belly of substance. If allowed, I’d just run it back and forth like that for hours. Not sure what that’s all about, but there you go: I’m a belly admirer.

I’m also as pale as I get, which is to say pretty darn pale. While the Mediterranean genes keep me slightly olive beneath it all, during the winter months, my freckles become less and less distinguishable. So, between the paleness and the extra-cushy stuff, there’s something about my body during the season of dark and cold that I cherish in its difference. It reminds me of the passage in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek where Annie Dillard talks about the vulnerability of vertabrates: there is something both more transparaent and injurable and yet more insulated about bodies during the winter.

This is sensible, of course. We stay indoors far more often, and when we go out, we drape ourselves in layers that our own skin doesn’t provide. We are inwardly quieted and more slow. We are more sedentary, more solitary, we need to create more warmth in our own skin, and so, like any other mammal during cold times, we pad ourselves. When we’re not smart enough to do it ourselves, our own biology and the patterns of nature do some of the job for us.

It’s vexing to me how much to-do is made of winter weight and color and what is apparently a very dire need to change it as soon as is humanly possible. Of course, as the days lengthen, as light increases, as we become more active again — effectively, as we come out of hibernation — and we feel better, more energized, more vital. Again, even when we don’t pursue it intentionally, it’s the rhythm of nature and its effect on us: how intense the differences are between the seasons of the earth and our bodies and minds are clearly effected by our behaviours, but the changes would exist no matter what.

* * *

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately on some ideas I first started exploring in college, and which were going to be my primary focus of study until that crafty William Blake seduced me into a slightly different direction. Essentially, I’m coming to some conclusions regarding sexuality and body image in that the more divorced people become from nature and the most simple aspects of daily life — and I’m thinking this is particularly true for women — the more divorced we become from truly being in our bodies, and being in harmony with our bodies and our sexuality.

Working with teen and young adults, especially a generation in the western world who is the most divorced from nature in our history, these ideas have been coming to the forefront for me again. Trying to explain that a winter body exists because winter exists, and that it is only sensible and sound to honor and appreciate it for what it is, just as we do any season itself is likely to fall on deaf ears, even among many members of my own generation.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to talk about the body as something which — bearing in mind of the greatest influence of our genetics — takes the form and shape of what it is used for. If we engage in sports, what sports we choose to engage in will determine where our muscle most develops. The simplest explanation would be to talk about how easy it can be to recognize one kind of manual laborer from another just by the shape of their bodies, but to middle-class kids where many of them have never even walked to school one, where a majority of them don’t even know a single manual laborer, and may never do any themselves, this is obviously a lost cause, too.

Same goes for trying to work with some of them having real disconnects with their body and their sexuality in terms of exploring what is sensual, as in, of the senses. They rarely cook, and when they do, it’s rarely with fresh foods (much less food they’ve grown) or fire; even then it’s more about product than process — rushed, rather than savored. Many of them don’t even know what the whole of their bodies smell or look like without every product on them known to man, what it feels like to wind up totally covered in mud and dry in the sun, or to bathe in river or lake water for a week. The bleached-out world so much of middle America is woefully lacks a lot of opportunities for exploring the senses and what is natural. I can tell a teenager that the scents of their bodies are normal and just as they’re meant to be, but when the whole of their world is deoderized, sanitized, homogenized, and the only natural scent they might ever smell is their genitals, it’s going to stand out and seem foreign, rather than naturally blend in and feel natural. More than once the suggestion to some having a particularly tough time connecting with their own bodies to look into massage, dance or other bodywork, even to just start taking walks out of doors more often pretty clearly gets me dismissed as a crunchy old hippie. (Go figure: with the ones that DO get out and hike, like to camp or dance, cook because they’re vegetarian and family food won’t work, the body image and sexuality problems don’t seem so pervasive or intense.) There’s a section of the book where I work to get them to redfine “sexy” more holistically, with more emphasis on all their senses, and who knows if it’ll catch.

So much of this shift away from nature is thought to be a luxury; a privilege, and one given as a gift by the generation before to them. So many of them are expressly reared to drive, not walk; to nuke something frozen rather than cook; to take a pill rather than try and heal other ways; to spend lesuire time seated rather than in motion (and to HAVE so much leisure time in the first place); to hide or remove what is natural rather than to cultivate harmony with their nature and nature-at-large. The more time that passes, the more I observe things through this lens, I’m seeing less of a gift and more of a curse, especially the more and more extended childhood — or rather, dependency — is in our culture, and it is a curse not just upon people, but obviously, one on the planet itself.

And with that, I’ve got to tear myself away. There are so many branching-off points from here, but I’m about to miss my own evening walk I had set aside time for and very much need today. Mark and I are meeting for dinner in an hourish, but I’d hoped to be able to catch a solitary, moist, dusk-time stroll through the neighborhood before then.

How cool is it when you must force yourself away from work to something far more pleasant in order to practice what you preach?

posted in Heather Corinna, body/mind, photography & art, sexuality, body image, nature | permalink | comments (14) »

When I was a teenager, having sex wasn’t really part of my rebellion.

Having GOOD sex was.

Now, I know that I’m kind of not supposed to even say this stuff out loud, especially within earshot of anyone under 18…or 21 or 29 or whatever this week’s proper age for sexual activity issued forth from our oh-so-moral government is per being an unrepentant tramp. Don’t suppose age matters here: it’s pretty clear there’s not any age or station at which it’s acceptable per the Bushies to be a woman who enjoys sex on her own terms and happily has plenty of it.

I know that admissions like that sometimes have the effect of diminishing my credibility in the eyes of some as a young adult sex educator. As I understand it, if you had really great sex as a teen (or a grown woman, or a lesbian or a gay man or anyone not over 50, heterosexual and married), and worse still, lots of it, you somehow lose (or never had) the ability to think critically and soundly, to have any sort of objectivity whatsoever, and thus, would obviously advise every teenager you meet to go do exactly what you did, covering them with your icky, infectious slut-bugs. You are one dangerous, contagious harlot from whom all good children who would become good adults should keep their distance.

To perhaps the surprise of exactly no one, if you were one of the ten people who held off on sex until you married at the now-average age of 27, or had really lousy teenage sex with catastrophic results, that gives you extra credibility if you’re the kind of sex educator that is telling them to stay the heck away from sex and their sexuality at all costs.

But I wasn’t ashamed of it then, and I work hard to keep any other teenager from being ashamed, so I’m certainly not going to be ashamed of it now.

Being sexually active in my teens wasn’t about pissing my parents off, or gaining social status, or meeting some sort of status quo (especially considering that while I wasn’t out for a few years, my partners were not simply male, and this was the early-mid-eighties, before anyone gave you points for macking down with other girls, to say the least). The sex I was having wasn’t merely two-minute intercourse, I wasn’t in partnerships where my body or self was dismissed or treated like a receptacle, I wasn’t feeling ashamed of how I or my genitals looked, being coerced into one-sided sex I didn’t want, or only wanted the emotional or social benefits of, and figuring that getting little to nothing physically out of sex was worth the other benefits it might have offered, or that the sex would eventually net me care from partners I wasn’t already getting.

Instead, I was almost always having sex that made me feel really good, where I had lots of good orgasms, where I could laugh with my partners at our fumbling when we fumbled, where my morning-afters left a perpetual grin on my face, rather than the look-away-I’m-hideous grimace of ashamed regret. I did a darn good job in choosing sexual partners who were kind, caring people that earnestly liked me — and vice-versa — and who had mutual pleasure and care in mind.

Mind, it was the 80’s, and I also did plenty of things that I wouldn’t encourage other teens to do, both sexually and in conjunction with sex, but in many ways, I feel I have positive sexual experiences to thank for not only getting me through the awfulness of much of my teen years, but for setting me up to continue to have great sex throughout my life, and to feel really good about my sexuality and the self it’s a part of.

Due to the negative parts of how I came of age in the house I was living in, due to the sexual abuses and harassment I dealt with, due to simply being a smart, sensitive gal who engaged in cultural analysis in her head a lot I got the message loud and clear that I was sexualized like nobody’s business, but that that sexuality wasn’t supposed to be something I owned. It was supposed to be something used against me (and I was just supposed to take it like a girl), or used to gender, commodify, devalue or objectify me. Thankfully, I also got a few opposing messages that all of that was completely screwed up, and thankfully, the context of my life as a whole equipped me with the tools to know how messed up those attitudes and cultural edicts were.

I didn’t have sex — with guys, with girls, with myself — to make anyone else mad or uncomfortable, or to follow somesome’s orders that I should. I had sex to claim and reclaim my own body and sexuality, to remind myself of all the good stuff about it, including that sex was supposed to make me feel good and be something I wanted and initiated. I had sex to find out what sex was, the ways I liked it, what part it played in my life and my identity. I had sex because I was a poor kid with a lot of pans in the fire and it’s a totally affordable vacation where you can fit in an awful lot of relaxation and de-stressing in very limited periods of time. I had sex because I wanted to have sex and I liked having sex. I had sex because it felt great, it was one hell of an adventure, and I discovered ways to be assertive in the rest of my life though the sex I was having. I had sex because in the romances and friendships in which I had it, it felt right, it increased intimacy, and it was one of many ways to get to know someone else and myself better.

In a word, I had sex for all of the reasons people have sex. Fancy that.

I know a big turning point for me in my sexual development, odd as it may sound, was the assault that happened at 12. Despite having to live in silence about it, despite it not being managed at all well, or even acknowledged as the hardcore trauma it was, despite having to work all of it out only in my own head until many years later when I found some support, I knew full well that it, and another abuse a year before, was NOT sex. I’m not even sure how I knew that, but I did.

I’m down with being a statistic: is it likely that some of why I had sex at an earlier age than many was because of abuse? Yes, I think it was. On the other hand, while there were also a whole lot of other reasons I did as well, even when we’re talking about the parts of my motivation to do so that likely came from abuse. And for those aspects that were motivated by abuse, it wasn’t primarily about my thinking my only use or was sexual, or about reenacting my abuse.

It was about rebelling against it: if I was going to be having any kind of sex with someone else, and they with me, it was going to be about pleasure, it was going to be about freedom in my body and theirs, it was going to be about joy and communion and natural curiosity, it was going to be something we liked doing on all levels; something which was emotionally, intellectually and physically satisfying for me and whomever else was involved.

And it was.

The older I get, the more aware I become that I had really good sex as a teen and young adult. In fact, now having spent many years talking with and listening to teens about their sex lives — even when their only partner is themselves — I know that by comparison, I had astonishingly good sex. Perhaps even more depressingly, I know from also doing work with adults that I had better sex as a teen than a lot of people have as full-fledged adults.

Mind, even with my burdens and my traumas, I grew up in a different time and place and environment than a lot of teens today.

I was primarily urban. My community was diverse, and no one viewpoint about anything (or looked any one way), including about sexuality, was dominant. No teacher or guest speaker in my school ever came in to tell me that I would die if I had sex, or become an unsavory, unsticky piece of tape who couldn’t properly bond to other people because I was having sex. I had a level of confidence, reslience and self-assurance that resulted in any of my peers calling me a dyke or a whore or a slut (which didn’t often happen) being told to get stuffed, and my not taking any such jibes to heart.

I left one home early on (and spent the last year barely there no matter what it took to avoid it), and had a measure of autonomy and responsibility to manage a lot of teens even then didn’t, and now still often don’t. I had jobs from an early age, I made many of my own clothes, I fed myself, I got myself around the city on my own on public transportation, I paid for much of my own basic care, including some of my schooling, and in general, the frivolities of my teenage life were balanced out by an awful lot of responsbility, so sex wasn’t the first place I needed to be accountable and in the driver’s seat.

I knew where the sexual health clinics were, and I used them vigilantly, and with community support in using them. I very rarely took risks in terms of protecting myself from pregnancy and infection, and no one was trying to scare me away from those protections. Because I spent much of my youth in the hospital my mother worked in, very comfortable around doctors and nurses, I was always fine with asking my sexual healthcare providers questions, and I had the benefit of knowing the right language to ask them in — and a comfort with that language — so I could net real answers. There was sound sexuality information on bookshelves at both my mother and father’s apartments, in my school libraries, in my public libraries.

I had one parent who was 100% fine with the fact that I wasn’t heterosexual, who was wonderful to any girlfriends I brought home, and who never gave me any idea there was anything wrong (or even unusual), at all, with being queer. That same parent also sent really strong messages about my claiming ownership and responsibility for my sexual choices autonomously. I was never the girl who’d have to ask a partner if they had a condom or birth control, and be at anyone else’s mercy as to what they’d try and get me to go without using. I was the girl who simply pulled whatever it was out of my purse, handed it over, gave no indication to the recipient whatsoever that sex without was optional, and in meeting any resistance to being safe, tended to merely shrug and voice that no sex was going to happen then, and that was cool with me.

I also had no illusions about the fact that sexual violence and abuse was widespread, and that bad things absolutely could happen to me, and — having a more cynical view in many respects than many my age — with my luck, probably would, especially if I didn’t walk in every door already standing up for myself. I had a defiance and an anger about a lot of my life that was a very real gift in this regard, as it was — and still is — in many others.

I also had some measure of comprehensive sex education growing up.

Given, it wasn’t exactly queer-inclusive, but it sure wasn’t queer-negative, either. It didn’t quite tell me how to enjoy myself during sex and didn’t address any of my abuse, but it also didn’t tell me sex would kill me on first contact, even if I protected myself, that I needed to get married to have it, that birth control (safer sex wasn’t an issue yet: thank heaven for having a parent working in AIDS care before most of the world even knew AIDS existed so I knew about that) being effective was just a myth or that if I did become or was sexually active, I was the human equivalent of an overused kleenex. The cultural sentiment was such that I could even ask a teacher I respected for help or advice, and that adult could give me support and information without fear of losing their job.

* * *
Imagine, if you will, how things might have been for me in different circumstances. In say, the circumstances of many teens today.

It would have been very easy for me, and far more typical, for instance, to have developed a profound sexual shame and low self-esteem that would have been easy for others to exploit given some of the abuses I lived through, had I only heard opinions and information which enabled or encouraged those results. It would have been very typical for a girl like me, survivor at an early age, who grew up with one strong set of very negative messages about my terrible, awful growing-into-womanhood body, to not be so resilient and defiant, especially with the pervasive messages of the media, the Girls Gone Wild commercials, the capitalizing upon teenage sexuality while at the same time denying it outright, the en masse weight loss mania, the commodification of girl-girl relationships, the endless hard-sell of heterosexism and that one right man as the answer to everything. Even if I hadn’t have been a survivor, all this crap would have had a profoundly negative impact on me.

With the continued suppression of, and resistance to, a lot of feminist politics and the cultural revisitations of the ideal woman-as-eunuch, or woman-as-property, imagine how much more difficult it would have been for me to assert myself when it came to my sexuality: both in simply honoring its totally healthy, normal desires and in negotiating sex with partners. Imagine how doggone ashamed I might have been with myself, even for the sex I was only having WITH myself. Imagine what I might have thought of the men and the women I had sex with. Imagine how I might have felt as a sexual abuse survivor. Imagine how on earth I could have managed to be that girl holding out the condom and holding her own.

Being a low-income teen, had I not had — as a majority of teens right now do not — access to affordable, accessible and nonjudgmental sexual health services, I’d have had a lot of questions that went unanswered that very much needed answering. I may well have gone without the birth control and safer sex I needed, the annual screens and exams, and I may not have had access to medically accurate sex information at all. No sense in pussyfooting around: if I had been even half as sexually active as I was then just without that one thing, chances are quite excellent I’d have been long dead by now.

Once I switched over to my arts high school, I was in a completely GLB-friendly environment, to the degree that I’d call it GLB-celebratory: had I stayed in public high school, had all my immediate community been wary of queerness at best, and homophobic at worse, things would not have gone so well for me. Had I not had some good role models around me, some awesomely strong, outspoken women and some fantastic old queens, that made clear that my sex, gender, orientation or desires didn’t make me inferior, sullied or shameful, I would not only have been a very different person then, I would be a very different person now, someone who loved and accepted herself and everyone around her a whole lot less.

In a less diverse environment, without a wide spectrum of beliefs and attitudes available to me, try and figure out how I could have really found out what I really thought and felt about my sexuality and my sexual life, explored freely enough to find out what identity was authentic to me, and what it was I really wanted for myself, to fulfill my needs, not just the needs and wants of others. Had I not had at least one family member where I could be completely honest about my sexuality and sexual life, who supported my choices and helped me learn to make them responsibly AND had I been reared in an environment where other support wasn’t anywhere to be found, where would I have turned to to find it? (P.S. This is also a good wonder to have if you’re wondering how it is so many younger teen girls get hooked into iffy relationships with older men, because guess who has NO problem endorsing and supporting their sexual maturation?) When I did just plain screw up, how might I have dealt with it and learned from my errors if there wasn’t at least one person who I knew loved me who could also tell me that it was okay to screw up sometimes?

What if I had not been reared with my inquisitive spirit nurtured? Without it being a given that I was not only allowed to, but encouraged to, ask questions about anything and everything, including my own body, any aspect of sex, sexual politics and mores? Had I instead been raised with much of that purposefully stifled, unless what I thought fit someone’s agenda, who might I have become?

Hell, how might I have been able to have the focus, confidence, energy and time to devote to all my awesome achievements of my teen and young adult years that had nothing to do with sex if I’d been a teenager today, just trying to navigate my way through the jungle of sexuality?

* * *
See, all of the things I had going for me are things that many teens right now do not now have. Plenty of them have exactly none of these things.

My challenges aside, let’s take a real look at all of those benefits I had, and bear in mind that even with them, I was still left wanting when it came to sex education and to sexuality support. If I still felt I needed more, if I could have benefitted from better, then you’ve got to ask yourself how on earth we or anyone else expects a lot of teens and young adults right now to come out healthy and whole with how little support so many of them have to be healthy and whole, sexually and otherwise.

I seriously don’t want Scarleteen and my work to be the only thing out there for them, and thankfully, it isn’t, even though sex education like this remains in serious danger of extinction. There are parents out there who rock it with sexuality support, information, and providing great environments for their kids when it comes to sex. There are other organizations which support and distribute sound, comprehensive sex ed. There are schools bucking the system, and there are communities stepping up to the plate. Not enough of them, if you ask me, but they are out there.

But I like to think that over the years, myself, the volunteers and the users have figured out a way to provide something that is quite unique and very sorely needed: something bigger, even, than just a good sex ed class or one supportive person. Basic, accurate sexuality, sex and sexual health information is critical. But so is a positive, wide, diverse and shameless context for it.

I think it’s vital to have an environment for sex education which feels comfortable, personable and also respectful; which answers questions but also asks them, making clear that sexuality isn’t simple and that its influence on us as individuals, in our relationships and in our communities and culture is vast. I think it’s essential to have sex education which dares youth to take very real ownership of their sexuality, as individuals and as a collective — perhaps in a way we don’t even know to exist yet in our world — and busts its ass to give them the tools and support to do so.

When I did the acknowledgments for the book — which, suffice it to say, went on for an age, like everything out of my mouth tends to — the very last sentence is this: “To that girl I once was, here’s that book you wanted. Sorry it took me so long.”

In many ways, this can also be said for Scarleteen.

I didn’t really mean to make something for who I was: in many ways, there is plenty at Scarleteen I did have, and which would have been superfluous for me. On the other hand, there’s plenty there I really could have used, such as opportunities to process my sexual abuse and what it meant to me to be a survivor, or having other peers around in different places to talk to who were queer, without worry of my conversations about those issues quickly finding their way through the gossip mill of my immediate queer community. Gender was also a real issue for me: it wasn’t until college, and many years of trying to fit a very femme mold that just wasn’t me, that it was ever strongly suggested to me that gender was about choice, not biology or what ideals were pushed on me. That’s one I’m still working my way through, and feel I have wasted an awful lot of time struggling with, that I could have used to a much better end. Had someone let me know earlier on that I had more choices than ingenue or femme fatale, it would have been pretty life-altering.

During the times when I had trouble rectifying my enjoyment of sex with the occasional feeling that that’s all I would be seen as sometimes, having someone to talk to about changing some of my choices or the way I made them, and about how to analyze the real root of those feelings would have been a real gift. As one of the only teens I knew as sexually active as I, having others around who were more expert, who could talk me through a pregnancy scare, scenarios when I wasn’t sure what I wanted my boundaries to be, some of my conflicting feelings about my female body or my queerness? This would have been seriously nice. Having someone with some distance from me, who I didn’t have to worry about disappointing, to call me on my shit when I did do things sexually that were just plain stupid, or put too much stock in my sexual life or identity also would have been a real bonus. And I’ll tell you right now, that as the primary sexual advisor to most of my friends, they sure would have benefitted if I had had a source like Scarleteen to send them to, especially on those days when I was so damn sure I knew all there was to know, and on the days when they believed me.

If a teenager like I was could have found these benefits in this and more, it should be painfully obvious that a majority of teenagers today need it more than ever: especially if they’re going to be having any sort of sex (and most are), and all the more if we have any care about the sex they’re having actually being any good, in every way it can — and should — be for everyone, at any age.

(Super-duper thanks to everyone who has blogged today for Scarleteen, to those donating, and in advance for those whose entries are forthcoming: not only is it a great big help to us, but now that things have started winding down for me this week, I’ve really been enjoying reading some of what’s out there.)

posted in Heather Corinna, Scarleteen, activism, soapbox, body/mind, sex/life | permalink | comments (1) »

I have just recently discovered that if I make a big fire, cover the foyer door with a blanket, and flop my yoga mat right in front of the woodstove, I can essentially have a very heated Bikram space to do Kundalini in. Since I start my day with a fire when I can, and often do morning meditations there anyway, I’m not actually sure why it took me so long to put two and two together this way.

Still no boxing here in Ballard, I’m sad to say, no heavy bag for me to work with at home, nor have I found anything doable in outlying areas I can get to by bike or bus per being close enough to get to without losing half a day in travel for a one-hour workout, or being something I can afford. Sure missing that sweet free studio time I got for teaching and co-teaching in Minneapolis, let me tell you.

I did try the local gym for a month, which is a nice place, and totally affordable. However (did I talk about this before?), I cannot for the life of me get a good body/mind workout with fifty gazllion television screens around me. It is the most distracting, mind-jangling thing I know of, and while I can tune out the sounds with my ipod, my eyes have got to go somewhere. I see people reading while they work out, but I don’t get that one: my mind has got to be on my workout, plus, moving around while reading makes me dizzy as hell. The only other places for my eyes are on all the mechanics of the machines or the wall-to-wall carpeting, and that’s not much better. Plus, I bloody hate machines. Ideally, all my workouts would be out of doors, but if I can’t have that, I at least need real things, natural things around me, or, in lieu of that, an austere space with nothing in it at all. having to work on the computer all day is machine enough for me, thanks.

So, it’s been biking for me, or jumping rope, or shadowboxing, or — best of all, really, per being able to do it anytime, no matter the weather — back to my yoga practices. And for now, I’ve decided that’s fine. Earnestly, both my body and my headspace are likely in more need of dynamic yoga and more meditation than punching and kicking things anyway, no matter how much I miss the punching and kicking.

My discovery this week with the woodstove was a very happy one and exceptionally well-timed, to boot. It’s been a weird few weeks for me, very packed, and very up and down. It was beyond awesome to have Mya here for a week, but it also meant I had to try and do my work at double-time (well, I already do that normally, so I guess I meant quadruple-time). I also realize that the older and older I get, the more of a loner I become. We had a great big party here last Friday, which was awesome, but I’m one of those people where big social groups sap my energy entirely. mark is one of those lucky folks who somehow innately knows how to draw energy from big groups, and I envy him that. Me? I’m mentally exhausted for days afterwards.

Sunday night, I had one of the most heartbreaking queries I’ve ever had at Scarleteen. A teenage boy was first posting with big STI paranoia, even though he’d never been sexually active, and was even limited in masturbating. He kept insisting he had real reason to be concerned, and after prodding a bit to try and find out what that was, he confessed that he had AIDS.

But he doesn’t.

Rather, his mother has told him for years he has AIDS (because, as we all know, people with full-blown AIDS and no treatment can be sitting around doing just fine: jesus), that he got it from an immunization shot at his doctor’s office, and that he shouldn’t ever get tested or seek treatment because no one would ever tell him if he was positive.

In short, it’s pretty clear that for whatever utterly fucked-up reason, his mother has sought to scare the crap out of her kid by making him believe he had AIDS. He’s been suicidal, paranoid, socially isolated, on the verge of an eating disorder, dealing with insomnia, terrified to even kiss anyone, the works. Obviously, I went ahead and debunked things for him, got him a list of places he could get free or low-cost testing, and made it clear that that test would be negative, but he clearly needs to see that result. I also gave him the number for DCFS in his area, because I can’t begin to imagine what his emotional process is going to be when he gets that negative result (flatly, I’d be unsurprised if this kid went home and gunned down his whole family), or whatever other forms of abuse are going on in that house. Really, this is one of the cruelest, most insidious forms of child abuse I’ve ever heard, and all Sunday night — date night for Mark and I, no less, as he was going out of town for his day job the next monring — I could NOT stop thinking about it, and anytime my mouth opened, all that came out were the chaotic sounds of sheer overwhelm.

(Much of the time, I’m glad that over the years, Scarleteen has established an ongoing trust that means teens in deep sexual or interpersonal crisis feel safe coming to us. As someone who grew up in crisis with nowhere to really turn, that’s obviously important to me. Every now and then, though, I confess that I look at other sex advice sites wistfully, wishing that we, too, could just hand out pat advice, say something salacious and witty, or tell people what vibrator to use.)

I’ve also been doing some freelance consulting/counseling for the stepparent of a sexually abused daughter: fantastic family from all I can tell, but per usual, it’s challenging work that’s not exactly emotionally easy.

Then the next day, Anne sent the foreword she’d written for the book. It was lovely: more than lovely, really. Totally perfect for the readers, but from a more selfish perspective, it made me feel ungodly good. Everyone gets a rush from hearing someone they admire and respect clearly have the same respect, especially when it’s someone who paved the way for you to do what you do with the work they did. It’s an honor.

But it’s also at times like that, I find myself sitting there floored that someone I respect has good things to say about me and what I do, that creates an uncomfortable reminder. A reminder of how much I’m still stuck in that childhood and adolescent mode of never thinking I’m good enough, never fully believing that no matter how hard I work, I can do as good a job as I feel I could or should, that I’ll never quite measure up, and that it’s this giant gift for someone to recognize my achievement or support what I do without an agenda or ulterior motive. And you know, that’s seriously depressing. Now and then, when I’m counseling abuse survivors and they’re impatient six months, a year, two years after the abuse, asking how long it’s going to take to get 100% over it, it sucks to have to say that that will probably never happen 100%, and it sucks when they observe that [i]I[/i] seem totally over my stuff and I have to tell them that I’m so not. Especially when they know how many years it’s been since I got out of and away from my abusive situations.

Like them (with a good 15-20 years added on), it sucks to know how many years you work at it and how much you do to work through it and to still have shit like this crop up where it’s clear how much baggage you’re carrying around. Obviously, this is hardly something — the pace of personal development, and the ridding ourselves of negative patterns and mindsets — that’s only a given with abuse survivors, and in my case, I don’t think it’s just about abuses, but also about the various coping techniques for a myriad of things I developed early on and kept with, as well as the simple flaws of my own nature.

Eh, well. Like anything else, awareness is the biggest step, anyway. I did used to be far less aware of these patterns and when I fell into them than I have been over the last few years, so hey: that’s something.

Back to the fire with me, per usual.

posted in Heather Corinna, Scarleteen, home, body/mind | permalink | comments (2) »

Holy mother of god.

Now THAT (though we were at the one in Lynwood, not the Tacoma one) was one amazing afternoon. Actually, an amazing afternoon which led into a doubly amazing evening.

If there has ever been a time when I need a stretched out afternoon where I soaked in several tubs, steamed in several rooms, had every square inch of me vigorously scrubbed to a baby-soft sheen, had my hands massaged and hot wax soaked, had a lovely facial, and got to spend the day with my friend AND got to spend all of it in those sort of happy, comfortably naked, all-shapes/all-sizes body-positive women-only environment I love, it is this week.

I was trying to explain to Mr. Price the other day that the whooooooooosssssh I felt come off of me Wednesday night wasn’t just mental or physical exhuastion (certainly part of it), nor simply finishing something that long wanted finishing. It’s also about the fact that, especially over the past couple of months, the level of personal responsibility I have been carrying has been MONSTROUS. It’s not like I don’t weild enough of the stuff with everything I do already, but with the ACLU/COPA case on top of it and the book and all it is supposed to do, who it all needs to aim to serve, all the heavy issues weighing it (and me) down?

It was an awful lot of responsibility for one short person to carry, even for someone like me, who doesn’t have a problem dealing with responsibility. I can do it, for sure, but I’d prefer not to do it at that level very often.

In any event, by the time Ariel and I got back here from the bath house and had some chow, hung out and imbibed a bit with the aforementioned boyfriend (who was, when we got home, a bit in his cups), this girl was feeling pretty darn lusty. Mind, only the night before Mark and I had a very spontaneous roll in the proverbial hay, a good thing, since it had been around a week during deadline hell of no sex, which for me, is a tremendously long time.

(Yes, I’m the asshole everyone hates who, when single, if I’ve gone without a date for a month or two, will prattle on relentlessly about my terrible dry spell while my otjer single friends who haven’t had a partner to play with in a year shoot daggers at me from behind their eyes. Absolutely, a year is nightmare, no argument there. But two months IS a long time, okay? It is.)

By the time I was home I could NOT stop touching myself post-scrubby goodness and would bark out every two minutes “Feel my arm! Just touch it!” and “You will not BELIEVE how totally soft my butt is. I have baby butt. Baby butt!” All of which, of course, meant that within mere minutes of Ariel going home, it was, “Bloody hell, can we just go upstairs and have sex already?”

Before we lived together, when we shuttled across the country to see each other, we’d (obviously) often have the super-extended sex sessions. Now, when you do the math, we still have them just as often, it just seems like less often because we’re seeing one another every day, not every month, and there’s more of the shorter trysts in between the biggies.

We got to have a nice, long one.

It was seriously delicious, even for multi-orgasmic me (which is why I will ever stick to my guns when I tell people having trouble with orgasm to go get some bodywork done, on top of some other things, because not only do common sense and the basics of physiology support that approach, if it makes a testosterone-fueled chickadee like myself even that more high-key and that more blissed-out…well, come on, people).

One of those fabulous romps where all the stuff that’s only occasionally on your sexual menu, you bring in: all of it, all in one sitting (or standing, or squatting, or bending over, or….). One of those where if either of you has any tiny hangups at all, they’re just on vacation for the night. One of those where you only remember that you live in a 100-year-old wood frame house that is in very close proximity to the ears of others after you’ve wailed like a bean sidhe and yelled out things with your ex-opera-trained lungs that probably other people don’t find as enticing as you and yours.

I feel intensely bad for our neighbors. If I was a meat-eater, I’d deliver a pot roast, but delivery of a lentil loaf just seems like adding insult to injury.

What a fine, fine way to usher in my now-begun month-long sabbatical of sorts.

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