Things I've Recently Learned:

Reblogged from come correct

Foreign Films are really cool.

This one is Norweigan, about a teenage girl coming into and wanting to express her sexuality, and then actually acting on it. WE DON'T HAVE SHIT LIKE THIS IN AMERICA.

From the website:

TURN ME ON, DAMMIT! is a whimsical and refreshingly honest coming of age story about the blossoming sexuality of a teenage girl, set to open in theaters on Friday, March 30. The feature debut of Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, the film was awarded “Best Screenplay” at the Tribeca Film Festival, “Best Debut Film” at the Rome Film Festival, and “Best European First Feature” at the Mons International Love Film Festival (Belgium).
15-year-old Alma (Helene Bergsholm) is consumed by her out-of-control hormones and fantasies that range from sweetly romantic images of Artur, the boyfriend she yearns for, to down-and-dirty daydreams about practically everybody she lays eyes on. Alma and her best friend Sara live in an insufferably boring little town in the hinterlands of Norway called Skoddeheimen, a place they loathe so much that every time their school bus passes the sign that names it, they routinely flip it off. After Alma has a stimulating yet awkward encounter with Artur, she makes the mistake of telling her incredulous friends, who ostracize her at school, until Sara can’t even be seen with her. At home, Alma’s single mother is overwhelmed and embarrassed by her daughter’s extravagant phone sex bills and wears earplugs to muffle Alma’s round-the-clock acts of self-gratification.
Laced with warmth and quirky humor, TURN ME ON, DAMMIT! is a light-hearted take on a story that is told so often about boys and so rarely about teenage girls.

Trailer:
Turn Me On, Dammit! trailer  

Sadness: It's coming to DC at the beginning of June, and I won't move until the middle of June at the earliest. I need to find a way to pirate indie films. XD 

Two things I've read recently on come correct have me thinking about female sexual discovery.

I will quote them for you in full.

1. "Nobody told me I had a clitoris. Nobody told me I was capable of having orgasms. For five years I was given 'sex education.' It mostly consisted of periods and condoms. It didn't talk about consent. It didn't talk about the actual mechanics of sex, about arousal and lubrication and oscillation. It didn't tell me a single thing about relationships and it didn't tell me I had a clitoris. I only know now because of the internet. Nobody entrusted with my care and education has ever told me that the female orgasm exists, or about the parts of my anatomy necessary for it. I didn't find my clitoris until I was eighteen, after six years of active sexuality. That made me angry."

-- (Source) (via)

2. "Although most boys figure out how to bring themselves to orgasm by age thirteen, half of girls don’t have their first orgasms until their late teens, twenties, or beyond. Teenage girls widely agree that they get the message loud and clear that masturbation is something boys do, but girls don’t, can’t, or shouldn’t. The cultural focus on intercourse tells young women to expect they’ll begin to experience sexual pleasure once they have sex with a man (whether or not they’re even interested in sex with men). Nearly all teen boys, on the other hand, experience sexual pleasure long before they get their hands—or other body parts—into a partner’s pants. Despite the massive advances in women’s equality, young women’s sexuality is stuck in a surprising paradox. Young women are sold provocative clothes but aren’t taught where to find their own clitoris. Many girls give their boyfriends oral sex, but are too uncomfortable with their own bodies to allow the guys to return the favor. It’s still a radical act to say that women need and deserve access to information about their own sexual pleasure—not just about the risks and negative consequences of sex."

-- Dorian Solot, I Love Female Orgasm: An Extraordinary Orgasm Guide. (via)

Let me begin by stating that I do not, in any way, want to belittle or invalidate the experiences of the first woman, and/or women who can identify with that story, or those of the young women describe in the second passage. Secondly, I am all kinds of entirely in support of revamping the sex education system in this country to like, actually be somewhat useful in people's lives. While it was not really my experience at all, I recognize that we live in a culture that denigrates or, at best, avoids the topic of female masturbation, and if you know anything about me, you know that this pisses me off. 

All of that being said, I just...fundamentally don't understand how one can get to adulthood (or near-adulthood) without knowing one's own anatomy. Yeah, okay, maybe you don't know the WORDS for what each body part is called, because sex education sucks in this country, but I guess I'm just struggling with the concept of needing to be "taught" that one has a clitoris. I don't remember when I learned the word clitoris. It was probably in high school. But I've known that touching/rubbing a particular spot down there feels ah-ma-zing since I was about 8 years old. I think I discovered it accidentally when I was taking a bath or going to the bathroom or something, but I had already been exploring my body. I very distinctly remember my stepbrother, who is a few months younger than me, once making the argument when we were small children that girls pee out of their butts, and while I knew that wasn't true and explained that there was another hole. Very soon after this conversation, I decided that I wanted to know more of what it looked like, so that I could better debunk my silly brother's arguments, so at the next opportunity of a full length mirror (in my aunt's room at my grandmother's house), I dropped my pants, bent all the way over, and looked at myself upside down with my head between my legs. 

I don't remember my first orgasm, but I know that it was most likely in about the third grade. I hadn't needed anyone to tell me these body parts existed in order for me to explore them, and exploring them led directly to pleasure, so I explored rather often. The first time I was ever even exposed to the concept that some people thought this was a bad thing to do was in a book on puberty that was probably called Your Changing Body or something equivalent that my mother bought for me after I first got my period (at the age of 9). I feel like there was like, one page about masturbation, and somewhere in it it contained the line "Some girls don't like to do it," or something similar. I felt sorry for those girls then, and I still do.

I guess what I take issue with in these passages is the implied idea that one needs to be formally introduced to something to have any conception of it. It gives me the eerie sense that a woman's sexuality is something she needs to be taught or GIVEN by someone else, rather than something inherently part of herself, and that doesn't sit well with me. I never really got the "masturbation is something boys do, but girls don’t, can’t, or shouldn’t" thing--in fact, I can't really remember it ever being mentioned at all, besides by my female cousin once when we were eleven and twelve, so where does that message come from? I'm not denying its existence--I believe them--I just want to know from whence it stems so I can know what to take issue with and how to fight it. I feel like I discovered my own sexual nature and the ability to pleasure myself organically at a young age like these passages suggest boys do, and I don't understand why so many women didn't have the same experience.  

"There is no simpler or greater joy in life than touching your own naughty bits. You are always your own most reliable lover, friend and partner. No one else in the world knows just how to please you, and when you give up on masturbation then you’ve given up on pleasure."

--Jon Pressick, on Met Another Frog

The most amazing acting experience of my life.

I really don't even have words for how phenomenal an experience being in The Vagina Monologues was. Seeing it last year was...revolutionary towards my overall lifestyle and most likely played a non-trivial role in my extended deep exploring of my sexuality and sensuality. Fact: I actually went home after that performance last year, took all my clothes off, grabbed a mirror, laid down on my bed, and looked at my vagina, because I hadn't actually seen it since I was a little kid bending over in the full-length mirror in my aunt's room because I was curious. I thought it was beautiful and I understood why people have historically compared it to a flower. And a few weeks later when my ex wanted to turn on the light and look at me, really see my vagina and have a better understanding of its anatomy and the ways in which he could please me, I was a little freaked out, but I wasn't ashamed to let it happen. It wasn't the most comfortable thing ever, but I had learned to resent the idea that my body should embarrass me with people that I'm comfortable enough to be intimate with. The Vagina Monologues started that in me. I have to agree that I didn't actively think of my vagina as "something attached to me," or really think about it at all, before seeing the show last year. And as I laughed, cried, gasped, and smiled during the performance, I knew that I had to be involved this year.

So despite not being where I wanted to be thesis-wise, I auditioned. I wanted to perform "He Liked to Look at It," which is arguably my favorite of the monologues, but I got selected to perform "I Was There In The Room," which is about witnessing someone give birth. Oh, the irony. I wasn't really a fan of this monologue, because birth freaks me the fuck out beyond like, nearly anything else that involves vaginas (besides that video RC made me watch), but I recognized its power and its message. I may not have truly identified with that character the way I could see myself in some of the other monologues, but I learned her and felt her and channeled her. After every show, people came up to me, both friends and complete strangers, to tell me how powerful my voice was and how commanding a presence I held. We sold out two shows, including one for which we had to bring in extra chairs from the dining hall because we were legitimately out of seating. 

My favorite lines from my monologue:

"We forget the vagina. All of us. What else could explain our lack of awe? Our lack of reverence?"

Awe. Reverence. These are feelings I want every woman to have about her body, every person to have about hir own self. But I don't think they're things I've fully internalized about my own body and my own self, and especially not about my "down there." 

Being in the show has made me realize that I really don't have a word I feel comfortable referring to my vagina as...which translates into me actually never referring to it at all, which I think makes it easier to not think about it often (or as something that is a part of me, because what other parts of my body do I not give names to? Perhaps my nipples. I'm unsure that I ever directly refer to them either. I should work on that. Or that space behind my knee that doesn't actually have a name because who ever needs to refer to it? I don't want my vagina and my nipples to be in the same category as the useless space behind my knee.) There is a power in naming things. I don't want to sacrifice that power. But "vagina" is so...clinical and just un-sexy. I don't really like "pussy" or "cunt". Things like
"va-jay-jay" are just...no. There are other words, I'm sure, but I am positive that this disinclination towards referencing my vagina is intricately linked to my general disinclination towards talking during sex, which I know I'm not comfortable with. So maybe I need to spend more time figuring out why I don't like particular words for the vagina and discovering one I do like, because I want to be able to employ the ownership enabled by having terms for things. 

We have a student-written monologue about...basically when sex doesn't feel good. She talks about not enjoying sex with her ex-boyfriend, and she describes it as "mechanical". That word floored me the first time she used it, because I think it would be inaccurate to say that I've never been bored during sex. I have a distinct memory of being with someone, being on top and just going up and down, up and down and not being particularly into it...but it was just for a little while and then I got out of my head and more into the moment. I didn't regret the experience overall. But her monologue has made me wonder a) whether I should have, and b) if I've been having bad sex, or worse sex than I'd previously thought I've been having. I've turned down sex recently and I doubt that my experiences listening to this monologue and that fact are unrelated. She and her vagina deserve better than mechanical sex, and so do me and mine. 


We were supposed to have a transgender woman perform a monologue about what it means to be a vagina-less woman, and though she didn't actually perform with us due to unfortunate circumstances (the details of which I do not know), her story is making me think more about what it means to be a woman. (I'm also interested in whether transgendered individuals do more to fight or support gender normativity, but that's another thought train for another time.)


But even apart from the specifics of various monologues, there was something profound about being in this show, and especially about staging the show the way we did it, with the cast members "hiding" in the audience. The cast members got the audience to participate very heavily, from reading intros for various pieces to grabbing hold of a performer's breasts during an orgasm scene. The energy in that room was palpable, and it was all revolving not only around sex and sexuality, which is not terribly uncommon, but around VAGINAS. We were celebrating them, and helping to create a space in which they could be openly and comfortably celebrated was...transformative. 


Moral of this story: If you've never seen The Vagina Monologues, go buy the book. And/or find a local performance to go to next February.


To commemorate this experience, I purchased this necklace on from LipsLikeCherry's etsy store. (You can find ANYTHING on etsy.) 

Yes, that is a vulva.

The front reminds me of the rose from Beauty and the Beast.

 

I'm still thinking about sex/sexuality

or I guess, like, myself as a sexual entity. 

Snippet from a post I just read over at Met Another Frog that got me thinking more about this: 

When you get naked with someone and sleep with them, you not only let them see your body. You’re also letting them see you at your most basic level. The part of you that you spend a lot of time trying to pretend isn’t there. We’ve been taught to separate our hedonistic sexual selves from our demure, proper, tax-paying selves, and to keep the sexy part under wraps. To borrow from the ineffable Lil John, we are all supposed to be “a lady in the street and a freak in the bed.”

So when you get intimate with someone, you’re letting that part of yourself off the leash. You’re introducing another person to a side of you that even you don’t even always see. And that’s a scary prospect. It becomes much easier if we embellish our sexual selves and mask those drives we have with a more theatrical approach. If we distance ourselves from our sex lives, then maybe we won’t be held responsible if we do something wrong...

We become the embodiment of who we think our partner wants to be with because it’s safer than being ourselves. We act out a script in our head that’s been successful in the past, or we embellish our moans and cries of pleasure because we think it’s what our partner wants to hear. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad strategy. Sex can be stressful and each new partner presents unique challenges, preferences, and learning experiences. Retreating behind a sexual persona can make it a bit easier to have confidence in yourself.

This only becomes negative, in my opinion, when our obsession with being “perfect” prohibits us from enjoying ourselves. Even though having sex with another person is a shared experience, it is still a way for us to express ourselves. Becoming a caricature can alienate us too much from what we want and need. I think this tends to fade naturally when we develop a long-term sexual relationship with a partner, and this facilitates the development of those lovely little layers of intimacy.

  

As I've mentioned before, I have streaked my eating club. Twice. I also regularly go around shirtless for varying lengths of time, usually on Thursday evenings but sometimes other days of the week too. No one is really sure how shirtlessness became a rule of Middle School Drinking Game night, but it is one we hold people steadfastly to (unless they're realllllly uncomfortable with it, because violating people isn't cool). Occasionally I will lose my bra too, for various lengths of time. This Thursday night my pants eventually came off too and I watched (really really terrible) porn with a bunch of my friends from my eating club while caressing and being caressed by a female friend (which was turning me on way more than the porn, which was legitimately horrible for reasons we don't need to get into). And I was entirely comfortable in this situation. I like these situations because they help me get comfortable with my sexual self, in the context of hanging out with a group of my closest friends whom I feel will accept all of my selves. 

The problem is, I don't think I'm that same sexual self when I'm actually in hooking up with someone. At least, not necessarily or not always. I'm always wondering what that person is thinking, or what they'll think about me if I do Thing X or don't do Thing Y. If my partner suggests a different position or that we do something else, I comply; at least, when this has happened, I have always complied. And that's not to say that I've never initiated anything or taken control, because that's entirely untrue, but...how much of my compliance is me wanting to be exposed to other things, and how much of it is wanting to please my partner, and how much of it is for my own pleasure, and how much of it is me letting myself be bent (pun very much intended) into a sexual mold that is not my sexual self? How much of it (a large part, I fear) is me being terrified of doing something wrong or not being able to do something and being judged for it? 

How do I determine who gets to see which parts of my sexual nature? Is that an intimacy I should give to people I'm only physically intimate with? What do I lose by letting people see that side of me?

How do I learn more about who that side of me IS without letting people see/participate? But how do I know that I like what I like in the act BECAUSE I like it, rather than because the person I'm with wants me to like it and I want to make that person happy? I suppose that I know that the things I recreate when I'm having private sexytime are things I know that I like. But then I also suppose that I don't necessarily have to like the same things with Person B that I like with Person A. Different personal relationships can (and maybe even should) engender different sexual relationships, right?  And I also suppose that the first time or even first couple times you get intimate with someone, you're doing more figuring out what they like and the ways in which you're compatible than you're actively expressing yourself. And I've never really been past those first few times.

It's becoming clear to me that many of my sex-related questions/concerns/thought experiments can't really be addressed until I have a longstanding sexual relationship with someone. Boo my sex life.

NSFW: Sex is on my Mind (AND on my reading list)

My dad and my older sister kept bugging me about what I want for my birthday and I finally just told them to get me hair products so I don't have to buy them myself, but fact: I want to get laid for my birthday. No, like seriously. It's been a month and a half = too damn long.
^Statements like that are a testament to how much I've developed as a sexual creature this year. Fact: 9 months ago I was a virgin, through a combination of choice and circumstance (I didn't really care about/trust the guy I dated between high school and college enough and then there was a big giant dearth of opportunity that wasn't entirely self-imposed until last Spring). After that relationship was over in June, it came to my attention that I had already had and greatly enjoyed sex with a man who didn't love me, and as such saw no reason not to do it again, provided that we didn't try to make it into anything more than that. This lead to various sexploits already discussed in earlier posts, as well as to streaking my eating club a few times and increasing the number of people (note the gender ambiguity of that word) by 200%. I have said it before and I'll say it again: I'm on a quest for liberation. I feel like people had this image of me as this innocent good girl which maybe I technically was, but I didn't want to be. So, I am taking control of the situation and actively working to lose that image. 

R and I were talking with our friend A about the streaking society our eating club has, and I was explaining to A that I'd streaked as a part of this quest for liberation that I'm on. R asked me if I think I've found it yet. Parts of me instantly said, "Duh." But other parts that even I don't talk about very often reminded me of their existence, prompting me to say "I'm working on it." And maybe I'll be working on it for the rest of my life. 

Documented proof of the fact that I'm still working on it is the fact that I recently bought a new book:

Lidia-Anain of SexLoveJoy posted about this maybe two and a half weeks ago, and as soon as I started reading her post, I broke away to Amazon to buy the book. One of the book's first exercises is to "send your future self a message about why you're committing to this process, what you want to get out of it, and what you want your future self to remember when things start to feel hard." I'm supposed to be writing these exercises in a notebook or a Word document or something that isn't going to be shared with other people, but fuck rules I do what I want. And when I want to share with you guys, I will, because I think the things this book is going to make me think about are REALLY. FUCKING. IMPORTANT. That's why I bought it. And I mean, hey, I'm just no longer a private person, evidently. haha

And so, okay, I had some thoughts that are pretty similar to the quiet parts of me that made me acknowledge their existence and not say yes I am liberated.

1. Despite being a pretty forceful person in my everyday life, I find it difficult to be direct about what I want and what is/is not working for me in the bedroom. In fact, I rarely speak at all unless spoken to first, and this uncharacteristic quietness concerns me deeply.
2. I have no regrets about my recent sexcapades, but I am not unsurprised by this lack of regret/guilt/shame. I am equally not unsurprised by my ability to detach emotions from sex, and want to make sure that I'm okay with that on a fundamental non-reactionary level.
3. I find it difficult to get out of my head and lose myself in the actual act of sex. I highly doubt this is unrelated to either of the first two points, and lets throw some body image insecurity into that mix too. 
4. (Very strongly related to 1) I have faked an orgasm rather than actually help a partner to satisfy me fully, because it seemed easier/less demanding and I am disgusted by this every time I think about it. 
5. I've never really enjoyed cum from receiving oral sex and I'm unsure whether this is due to the partner from whom I've received it or due to some potentially deep set socialization I have to not actually want people spending that much time exploring down there. As a matter of principle I don't stop it if it's going to happen, because I don't actively dislike it (sometimes I even enjoy it fleetingly before getting bored) and intellectually I appreciate that my partner is doing it, but I can't never quite shake the feeling that I'd rather be being penetrated, and I would like to be sure that's not for bad reasons.
6. A post I discovered in a friend's blog archive has made me question the overall quality of the sex that I have had. Before you think I'm throwing shade (Twitter is keeping me up on the popular lingo, lol) on anybody, let me say that I'm positive I've never had shitty sex. I've never just been laying there wanting it to be over. I've never felt used. I've never felt like my partner wasn't interested in pleasing me. All the sex I've had, I've found pleasant and satisfying (this is not contradictory to number four: I believe sex can be satisfying even if I don't cum). But even in relationship sex, I've never felt anything like the connection I feel like she's describing. And maybe this is just because I've never had a particularly lengthy sexual relationship with anyone (if you're counting oral I don't know the exact numbers, but straight up sex, my record is four distinct occasions with the same person...not much to write home about), but reading that post makes me want more from the sex in my life.
7. I'm still working on getting comfortable just being naked around an individual outside of moments of intimacy. (A few months ago that would have been on the list, but I think I've since accomplished it. I would like to recognize it as at least a recent concern, though.) 
8. I want to make sure that the means, methods, and manifestations of my quest for liberation are actually what I want. I know that I don't currently see any problems with the way I've been living, but I still think I could benefit from sitting down and really analyzing my sex life and my sexual desires to make sure that what I'm doing is what I want to be doing and is leading me on a path towards satisfaction, not just gratification. 
9. I suppose that generally, I find it easier to talk/joke about and reference my sexuality than to actually act on it in a lot of situations. I want to learn how to be sexually courageous in ways that are more important than proving to myself that I can do certain things, like fuck someone I legitimately couldn't give two shits about. I want to develop the courage to actually hook up with a girl, rather than just tentatively and exploratorily kiss a female friend of mine during the course of Spin the Bottle when we play middle school drinking games. I want to not blush--well, do that shy smile and tilt my head down in a way that people who know me well or who are familiar with the blushing tactics of people who can't physically blush will recognize as a blush--when someone calls me pretty or beautiful or sexy or whatever. I've embraced my sexuality in forums like this blog, and when talking to my friends, but I don't know if I own it yet inside of me all the time. That needs to change. 

So I guess I want to know that the sex I'm having is good (or at least decent) sex, and I want to be satisfied by the sex that I'm having. I want to develop the voice to not be mute in the bedroom, in terms of expressing pleasure that I'm being given, dictating what I want to be done differently or what I like, and generally to be able to talk about sex WHILE I'm having it. I want to feel like I've ACCOMPLISHED things with regard to my sexuality, rather than just done things that are supposed to represent sexual growth. I want to never ever fake it again. I want to get into my body and out of my head during sex. I want to understand exactly what I am and am not comfortable with sexually, and I would like to have some sense of why. I want to act on my sexual desires more often and more fully. And I want to be physically, mentally, and emotionally safe during all of that. [And the book demands that I include this part:] I, Maya Reid, am making a promise to myself: I won't quit this process. I'm starting it for a reason, and I'll see it through to the end. Because I matter to myself. My desires matter, my pleasure matters, and my safety matters. What I really really want matters. This process is a gift to myself, and I promise to accept it.