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Alt.sex.column

Ball-busting jamboree

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

Some years ago I managed to stop a boy from going too far by grabbing hold of his testicles and squeezing them hard. It was totally justified, and he was disabled by the pain, allowing me to get away from him. The thing is, I squeezed that poor boy’s balls much harder, and for far longer, than was necessary purely for self-defense. I now realize that I actually enjoyed inflicting that pain on him! It gave me a fantastic feeling of empowerment, hearing a big, muscular boy begging me to stop hurting him. It has since become a sort of an obsession with me, and I take every opportunity to humiliate my boyfriends by grabbing or striking their balls. Of course, I never go far enough to cause any real damage, but I’m afraid that my obsession may be causing these boys some psychological harm and that I have to find a way to stop this habit.

Are these feelings really that unusual in girls?

Love,

Grabby

Dear Grab:

I’m glad you do realize it’s going to have to stop, because despite a pronounced bent toward the "whatever" in the judgmentalism department, I have to admit that your enthusiasm alarms me a little. I prefer my sadists a bit less avid, I guess.

These feelings are quite unusual in both girls and non-girls. But since this planet is nothing if not generously populated, that still makes for a fairly large number of people who enjoy acting out their aggressive fantasies on the testicles of any males within reach. Furthermore, ball-kicking/punching imagery and "oww, my balls"-type humor are so prevalent now that even those aggressors for whom it is not a particular turn-on cannot help but at least consider it on occasion.

I have registered my dismay over testicular-injury humor before, and pointed out that a simple gender switcheroo instantly renders any such "joke" not only not-funny but actively appalling, and have pled for an end to "kick him in the balls, har har har" as a mode of discourse. To little avail, obviously.

For you, the question of prevalence may be interesting but is ultimately irrelevant: no matter how many people do it (not that many, and many of those for money), you need to quit it for your own psychological health. I suggest holding off on any roughhousing until you get, ah, a handle on this. Pain and humiliation both have their places, for sure, but even most people who like that sort of thing prefer tops who can control themselves. The ones who can’t are not dominants; they are bullies.
Love,
Andrea

Dear Readers:

In case you don’t believe how common a kink the ball-kick is, at least as fantasy material — and especially for the ball-bearing half of the population — I offer the following examples from my archive, where they have been languishing for lack of (my) interest. Um, happy holidays!

Love,

Andrea

Q: Years back, newly divorced and tipsy, I was at a nightclub and an aggressive woman took me home for some fun. She asked me if I was averse to being tied up. I said no and consented. She led me into her basement, asked me to strip, and then secured my hands above my head. I was excited and it showed. She then asked if she could put a spreader bar on my ankles. I said yes. The ball gag in my mouth made me a bit nervous. After many kicks, knees and hard squeezes, I was delirious. I stayed hard through it all. She then gave me a fabulous BJ. I was swollen and black-and-blue for a month. It has not happened since, but I find myself masturbating to this event years later. Is this type of sex-play common?

A: Of course. What did you pay her?

Q: When I was taking karate, I was paired with a woman to practice no-contact front snap kicks to the groin. She was slow and I made a snide remark. She gave me a funny look, said "OK then," and swiftly soccer-kicked me square in the sac. The pain shot through me and I dropped to the floor in the fetal position. She bent down and said "oops, sorry" but gave me a smug look that said she wasn’t. When I got home, my testicles were quite swollen. Then I got an erection — I’m not sure why, but the entire ball-busting was a turn on after the fact. The next time I saw her, she smirked and made a snide remark, which got me semi-hard and I was tempted to egg her on again but chickened out. She dropped out of class not long after that. I still fantasize about being kicked or kneed by a woman (no sex). Am I crazy?

A: Since you neither egged her on nor went out of your way later to court injury, clearly not. She was kind of a bitch, though.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is teaching Sex After Parenthood at Day One Center (www.dayonecenter.com), Recess (info@recessurbanrecreation.com), and privately. Contact her at andrea@altsexcolumn.com for more info.

Nothing doing

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I’ve been married to my husband for close to 10 years. I admit, I didn’t marry him because we were head over heels in love. I was only 21 when we met, but I already felt that being "in love" was a lie. It was something you saw in movies or read in romance novels — something silly that doesn’t last. I did and do love my husband in my way, and he loves me. In the 10 years we’ve been together, I’ve seen many marriages fail. But we are still together and doing OK — at least, emotionally. My question is: can someone just suddenly become asexual? We’ve never had a burning-hot sexual relationship. When we first met, it was once every couple days. As time went on, it was once every two weeks or sometimes once every three months. Now it’s something like once every six months or so. It never lasts very long, but I chalk that up to it being so infrequent that he can’t last.

Then recently, he told me he didn’t like blow jobs anymore and didn’t want them. Then just about a week ago, we were watching a program on different relationships. When it got to this group of asexuals he said that sounded like him. I was baffled! He’s 40 years old. He’s been sexually active for more than 25 years (he started kind of young). Now, after 10 years of marriage, he suddenly loses all interest? Is he truly asexual? Or do you think there’s something else going on?

Love,

Baffled

Dear Baf:

I think there’s something, and I think your story, which sounds so weird to you, is just the sort-of-extreme end of a typical pattern. People do tend to have less sex (a little or a lot less, depending) as the initial honeymoon high fades, and as other responsibilities (I’m looking at you, kids) and distractions accumulate. How much it cools and how cold it gets is to some extent under our own control and some extent not — if there’s not much flame there to begin with, it doesn’t take much to quench it, and pour water on the embers, and metaphor metaphor. There are so many factors besides simple neglect that could be in play here, though, that I hesitate to give you an airy pronouncement of "you didn’t use it, you lost it." There’s got to be some element of that going on here, though. You guys didn’t use it much, did you?

I was making some notes for a revision of my "sex after parenthood" class recently and when I got to the "use it or lose it" segment, I had that haunted feeling of something familiar, hovering just out of reach. What did this situation remind me of, and what had I done about it? Finally I realized it was hiking, of all things. Way back, when I had the leisure to go hiking with a friend every week, I used to look for excuses to put it off. It sounded hard, I didn’t have the energy, I just wanted to be left alone to read my book … and then I’d heave myself up and go and it would be the greatest thing ever. So. That’s my prescription for sexual atrophy/avoidance: get up, put on your boots, and just do it. Except maybe without the boots, unless you’re into that.

Contrary to popular supposition, lack of sex does not necessarily make people horny; it often makes them yawny instead. Sex breeds sex. A really hot evening’s entertainment leads to really hot memory/reverie over coffee in the morning and lascivious thoughts come sundown. But all of this is couples’ stuff, and there is something else going on with your husband on the unilateral side.

Asexuality in the recent, current understanding is more of a lifelong thing, an inborn tendency kind of like homosexuality except for the whole "sexuality" part. Sure, there are people whose traumatic sexual histories cause a total shut-down, but I’d call that sexual aversion rather than asexuality. And I’d guess that your husband is suffering from a combination of acquired low libido caused by not having much sex or much passion at home, plus low testosterone ( "doesn’t like blow jobs" all of a sudden is cause for concern). That last one can actually be tested, and I’d be happy to be proved wrong but even happier to be proved right, since all it would take is a little supplementation and, as they say (confusingly), Bob’s your uncle.

But you know what? This is a really stupid thing to play guessing-games about. Your husband is sitting right there and he doesn’t really look all that busy, you know? What did you say when he made his startling pronouncement? Did you actually ask him if he’s always felt pretty much asexual (in which case, sucks to be you) or if it’s only recently seemed like something other people crave in a way he just doesn’t get? Maybe you need to have more sex to get more sex, or maybe you need to come to terms with a sexless marriage, but either way you’d best get busy.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is teaching Sex After Parenthood at Day One Center (www.dayonecenter.com), Recess (info@recessurbanrecreation.com), and privately. Contact her at andrea@altsexcolumn.com for more info.

Extra! Extra! Heterosexuality in peril!

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Dear Readers:

I’m kind of pretty

and pretty damned smart

I like romantic things like music and art

and as you know I have a gigantic heart

so why … don’t I have a boyfriend?

— Kate Monster, "Sucks to be me" from Avenue Q

Sucks to be Kate Monster, and it sucks just as much to be my many friends of similar description — not monsters but smart, pretty, funny, adventurous, and moderately level-headed young women of great heart, who are caught in an endless cycle of dating to no (desirable) purpose and no end in sight, at least out here on the coasts. One friend actually moved to the Midwest to get away from the evil scene and was promptly rewarded with an actual boyfriend, the type who proudly introduces you as his girlfriend and can discuss a future together without smirking. I’ve developed a kind of semi-vicarious hate-on for the coastal guys — what gives them the right to treat my friends like instantly replaceable consumer objects of dubious value? — so I’ve been reading with interest some of the recent glut of articles and books on the state of young manhood, First World Problem version.

Most of these come down to "men are just big boys/no they aren’t," the argument currently raging, or at least smoldering, pretty much anywhere you find people discussing the current social climate and where we seem to be heading, love-and-marriagewise.

On the "no wonder you can’t find a boyfriend" side, you find innumerable lifestyle articles, most notably and recently Gary Cross’s Men To Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity, in which the historian blames the immaturity he sees in modern Western males on three decade’s worth of cultural shift, starting with a rejection of the old, unquestionably masculine and often admirable but also frequently rigid and authoritarian paternalism of the "Greatest Generation," which left men wandering, lost and fatherless, for lack of a better role-model to replace the castoff, too-dadly Dad. This is nothing startling — we’ve heard it before — but he does present a decent argument and does so without too much blame, some hope for the future of heterosexuality, and none of the (admittedly rather entertaining) snottiness of our next example, the recent articles by Kay S. Hymowitz in City Journal.

City Journal is the organ of conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute, but so what? It has lively cultural commentary and even if you don’t want to be a conservative yourself, it isn’t (I think) contagious, so why shouldn’t readers of leftish news weeklies read out of their comfort zones occasionally? And its authors, apparently, aren’t afraid to say they were wrong, which is always cheering. The first of the two articles, "Child-man in the Promised Land" was another of the "men suck" pieces. The man-child (whom the writer contrasts with the man, who has or wants a wife and kids and actually seeks out responsibilities and then discharges them rather than avoiding ever acquiring any) has tastes both formed and reflected by Maxim and [adult swim]. He likes video games and junk food and sex but not women, really, and he doesn’t call when he says he will because he never intended to — why should he when there’s always another girl who, not having met him yet, expects even less from him than you do?

That was the first article. The current piece has Hymowitz exploring the (really rather startling) not-so-underground Man Web and finding that a lot of these guys are treating women like trash because the women (they feel) are trashing them right back. Nobody’s acting very mature here, so she could just as well have titled her piece (actually called "Love in the Time of Darwinism") "She Started It!"

Women, say the young men, want it all and switch the rules on you without warning. They want equality except when they don’t, and then you’re in trouble for not bringing roses. Plus, they’re attracted to jerks, they sneer at nice guys, and then they blame you for acting like a prick.

This state of affairs, the shifting rules and roles, may have brought us to this point, writes Hymowitz (and others), where the gulf between male and female mores and modes of expression is wider than it has been since before World War I, and a certain amount of aggression, contempt, and rude gamesmanship (see both The Rules and Rules of the Game ) is both expected and to some extent accepted. I leave it to Hymowitz to troll the gamier recesses of the Web for sites like AlphaSeduction and Eternal Bachelor ("Give modern women the husband they deserve. None."), but you shouldn’t be too surprised to hear that this stuff is out there.

Are these dispatches from the new war correspondents accurate? Somewhat. As much as can be expected from lifestyle journalism, anyway, which by definition requires a phenomenon, the more disturbing the better (would you read weekly articles in The New York Times titled "All Well in Pleasantville?"). Is this state of affairs universal? Certainly not. Is it inevitable? I think not. What’s that everyone’s been saying about hope and change?

Love,

Andrea

Got a salacious subject you want Andrea to discuss? Ask her a question!

In every dream home …

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I’ve been with my husband for 10 years, and we are still pretty young. He has become infatuated with a woman at work. It started as a ride-share and friendship, and recently developed (to their surprise) to an intense infatuation. He started staying out late nights drinking with the work crew so he could spend more time with her. They have not kissed or had sex, but the touchy-feeliness is there. After I discovered the relationship, he vowed to end it and to try to build stronger bonds with me. But ending it was a lot harder than he thought. It took me finding several communications between them for him to agree to go to therapy and finally tell her they could have no more contact outside of work. Now I’m having trouble trusting him. I break down a lot and he feels so guilty he thinks I’d be better off without him. We are starting couple’s therapy soon and he’s not in a position to leave his job. I can’t compete with this infatuation. We had a short infatuation, but things moved so fast that it dwindled more quickly than I think it should have. He told me that she makes him feel dizzy and that he’s never felt like that for anyone before. Am I going to lose him?

Love,

Tearfully Fearful

Dear Tears for Fears:

I’m a little worried, due to the finding of a few last (we hope) e-mails before he agreed to therapy, and frankly, due to your snooping (I assume you were snooping). Both are bad for both of you.

Given that he has apparently given up the stolen moments with Object of Affection (No more late nights drinking, right? And let’s assume his schedule doesn’t allow for Don Draper-style unexplained absences from the office, starting at lunch and ending when he damn well feels like ending them?), I can be cautiously optimistic, if a bit concerned about the you-not-trusting-him (understandable!) and him-feeling-like-skulking-off-because-it’s-all-ruined-now-anyway parts. Not only will he have to get over her for this to work, you will both have to get over yourselves. The latter may be harder.

Infatuations of the sort your husband had usually require some kind of fuel to keep burning, and if they have stopped seeing each other in any but the most unavoidable and quotidian "Hey, did you get that TPS report?" fashion, it has a good chance of dying down.

The truth is, 10 years in, something like this is to be expected. You could even consider patting yourselves on the back that it took 10 years, rather than the more expected seven (some researchers postulate that humans are programmed to move on after seven years, the time it takes to rear a man-cub to independence) or the alarming four, a figure that shows up in recent research on divorce in Western industrialized countries. Small consolation, I know, but 10 good years is worth a lot!

So what does he say now about the dizziness? Is he still dizzy when he thinks of her, or is it now mostly retroactive dizziness, dizzy with some distance? We’ve talked about those dizzy spells before in the column. They are a sure sign of "limerence," the crazy part of love, which I described here: "I make a distinction between loving a whole lot and limerence (which differs from infatuation in both duration and intensity), which is not so much a feeling as it is a form of madness, and like other forms of madness is turning out to have a biochemical basis. ‘When I think of you my serotonin plummets, my darling! O, how my dopamine soars! My heart pounds with norepinephrine …’"

Limerence produces sensations not only of lightheadedness but of physical pain or "heartache." It is tremendously exciting, and we tend to assume that anything so compelling must be both real and important. But if you remember that a really great book or a roller-coaster ride can create similar sensations, you realize that it needn’t be anything of the kind. The rush can be addictive, though, so let’s hope that your husband can give the rush its due and then steer clear. He will need some help, from both you and the therapist. Any sign that he is just nodding and saying whatever will get him out of there the fastest, and I’d start worrying again.

Interestingly, there are 12-step groups not just for the more obvious "sex addicts" but also for "love addicts." They are meant for those who use "love" as a drug to lend meaning to an empty life or excitement to a dull one, not to the ordinary person who, glimpsing something shiny, follows it through the faerie wood and then, realizing he’s been briefly enchanted, returns, chastened. Still, understanding that "love" (these are not quite scare quotes, but certainly sneer quotes; I don’t think what these seekers are finding deserves the name) can be so powerful a drug may help both of you to forgive him.

Love,

Andrea

Got a salacious subject you want Andrea to discuss? Ask her a question!

Also, Andrea is teaching! Contact her if you’re interested in (sex)life after baby classes. Her new blog is at www.gogetyourjacket.com, but don’t look there for the butt sex. There isn’t any.

Whiskey In The Jar

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

When my boyfriend has been drinking, sometimes he can’t ejaculate. He says he can still come and all his other physical responses back this up. But he still has an erection after this happens. Is he telling the truth, or maybe just trying to make me feel better when I sometimes don’t make him come?

Love,

Which?

Dear Which:

Lack of erection, delayed orgasm, and delayed ejaculation (not always the same thing, as your question demonstrates) and extremely delayed orgasm and ejaculation (like several days hence) are common side-effects of excessive drinking. Orgasm without ejaculation is usually something prostate-related, causing retrograde (backward) ejaculation, or some sort of nerve damage, or or or … but none of those would create occasional, post-partying lack of ejaculate.

I think there’s a good chance that he is fudging, a.k.a. faking it, but in the benign manner in which a usually-orgasmic woman might fake it, a little, when it did feel pretty good but she’s tired and knows you are too and is graciously offering an out. Is that so wrong?

Sometimes a guy doesn’t come. Very rarely is it his partner’s fault and caused by sudden-onset lack of hotness syndrome. If extra stimulation (adding in a mouth or a hand) doesn’t do it, try cheerfully offering to quit and see if he stops claiming to have come. You can’t "make" someone come (unless he’s a bull and you’re a vet wielding an electro-stimulus device). You can only help. Sometimes there’s just no helping someone.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andréa: I have a drinking problem that wouldn’t be such a problem if it wasn’t seemingly getting in the way of my sex life. On the other hand, I think it would be reasonable for someone to hear all the details and say that the drinking isn’t the only issue. I think I’m going to go look into "whiskey dick" and see if the Internet can guide me. Failing that, whom do I turn to? I had a shrink when I was little, but I really didn’t think much of it. I believe I’d like to sit across from someone in a nonjudgmental setting and see if they can sort this shit out for me. Any recommendations?

Love,

Drinking Man

Dear Man:

Judging by the somewhat convoluted quality of your opening paragraph, I think you probably already know that "drinking is causing my problem/problem is causing my drinking" is a chicken/egg problem, and not one I’m in a position to solve for you. Since it is a chicken and egg problem, though, I’d venture to say that it both cannot be solved and shouldn’t be solved. In other words, who cares? You have at least three things going on: whatever originally brought you to drinking too much; drinking too much; and the sexual (and quite likely other) sequelae from drinking too much. Go get help!

A therapist one is dragged to as a little boy, for reasons unclear to one at the time and since further fuzzy-fied by time’s crappy Xerox machine, is not to be taken as the model for what a therapist can be or can do for you. You are a grown-up, you’re beating up your body, and you can’t get a hard-on. Get help! Get some names through the local Association of Marriage and Family Therapists or a similar referral resource (I know a ton of therapists but it’s kind of uncool to plug them in the column). Call three or four and book someone for an intro session or phone consult, and don’t hire anyone you don’t think you’ll want to talk to.

That would be that, but I’m a little concerned by what you mean by "whiskey dick." Everyone who drinks will encounter alcohol’s well-known "the spirit is willing, but …" effects from time to time. But if your current difficulty is global, occurring whether or not you’ve been drinking, rather than just the result of a binge-y night, then I’m a little worried. Drinking a whole lot a whole lot can cause long-term damage — it can mess up testosterone production among other ills — so I’d be happier hearing that you can get a hard-on (and that your balls aren’t shrinking), it’s just that you often don’t because you’ve often been drinking. Dude, see a doctor. I cannot guarantee he or she won’t be judgmental (I can pretty much guarantee s/he will, actually). But buck up and find out if there’s something really going wrong.

While you’ve got the doctor’s attention, you’ve got a chance to ask for Viagra or one of its little friends. Getting a hard-on is not going to solve all your problems but at least it would be pleasant while it lasted.

I close with this helpful suggestion from the official Viagra patient information Web site: "To help avoid symptoms of ED, it’s best to avoid drinking large amounts of alcohol before having sex."
Love,
Andrea

Got a salacious subject you want Andrea to discuss? Ask her a question!

Also, Andrea is teaching! Contact her if you’re interested in (sex)life after baby classes. Her new blog is at www.gogetyourjacket.com, but don’t look there for the butt sex. There isn’t any.

Faking it

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I recently discovered that my husband of 15 years has secretly been participating in S-M activities. He has paid for the services of a dominatrix and has been meeting some dominant females on the Internet for whipping sessions. I am coping with the feelings of betrayal and have been getting counseling. I also have been reading up on the subject. The author Gloria Brame, who is into BDSM herself, gives insight into the varied range of S-M activities. I have been open to being a Mistress to my husband. Do you think there is hope for the relationship if one party is not really into it? I realize this BDSM stuff develops in the psyche early in life.

Love,

Whiplashed

Dear Whip:

Oh, it can be acquired. The real question here is, can it be faked?

On the face of it, the answer is a resounding yes, since although "real lifestyle" dominants boast their credentials and certainly garner a lot more respect within the community, any kitten with a whip can hang out a shingle and get customers. Not all customers care what their service provider is really feeling or what she does on her night off, as long as the job gets done. Of course, you are not a gun for hire, you are the wife. I’m going to guess that will feel a little different to him. Nobody wants a pity fuck (OK, that’s not true, but in general nobody over about age 18 wants a pity fuck), and I’d imagine a pity caning is, if anything, worse. Topping is a lot of work! There’s the research, the attitude, the physical exertion, the coming up with good routines, the skills-building, the outfits? Have you talked to him about all this? Is it even what he wants? If so, is it even what you want?

Wanting to save your marriage is admirable, but I’d be careful about going to heroic measures without first determining that it can be saved and that enthusiastic applications of corporal punishment are likely to work. You need to determine if you can forgive him, whether he wants to be forgiven, and whether or not he even responds to you in the dominant role (often it’s easier to grovel at the feet of a stranger than at those of the person with whom one shares a bathroom, a dentist, and a checking account). More important to me than whether he thinks you’re hot with a flogger in hand, though, is whether you even want to do this. Yes, a taste for S-M can be acquired, and failing that, can be faked. But I’m just not sure the latter is going to be good for either of you in the long run.

You are being an excellent sport about this, and I’m glad you’re getting counseling. I’m a little concerned, though. We must not gloss over the fact that he not only suddenly (to you) unveiled a whole huge new and likely dismaying (at first) side to his character, about which you had no inkling, but he has also cheated on you. I am capable of compartmentalizing visits to a pro, but "some dominant females on the Internet"? Has he owned up to the cheating and apologized? Have you forgiven him? Will he be doing it again? These seem rather more important questions, or at least questions that must be asked and answered before you consider moving on to whether you will be his Mistress, his Domme, or his Goddess, and whether you will do pain, humiliation, sensory play, or domination. I ask again, do you even want to do this? And since you’re being so game and open-minded about all of it, have you considered off-shoreing the tedious parts at all? Yours would not be the first marriage that made space for the husband (so very rarely the wife!) consulting with a specialist within certain pre-set parameters. It’s an idea, that’s all I’m saying. If you think it’s a really horrible idea, that’s OK with me too.

If you really want to do it yourself, and he really wants you to, and you are able to find some enjoyment in it for yourself, and he makes and keeps agreements about any extramural activities you can live with and agree to, then I think yeah, there’s a chance here. That’s a lot of ifs, though, and I am uncomfortable with the idea of his being paid back for betraying you with your going way way way out of your way to make sure his every urge is gratified. You’re the top now — do you feel like gratifying him? It would be nice if you could make physically punishing him feel like payback to you but I’m afraid that is the stuff of S-M fantasy. In real life, the worst case scenario might go more like: you punish him, he likes it, and you’re stuck serving him by beating him. People talk a lot about topping from the bottom; don’t get stuck bottoming from the top.

Love,

Andrea

Got a salacious subject you want Andrea to discuss? Ask her a question!

Also, Andrea is teaching! Contact her if you’re interested in (sex)life after baby classes. Her new blog is at www.gogetyourjacket.com, but don’t look there for the butt sex. There isn’t any.

Going topless

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

(Andrea’s on vacation! Check out this oldie but goodie, originally published in the Guardian 7/5/06).

Dear Andrea:

My girlfriend is really into BDSM. At first I tried and played a convincing (I think) top/dom, but it just wasn’t hot for me, so I looked some stuff up to get inspired. As I was reading/watching, I would really get off on it, but the sex with my girlfriend still wasn’t hot. Then I realized that when I was masturbating to all this, I was fantasizing about subbing. Oops. I am way in love with my girlfriend, but she is a bottom, period. She might switch it around if it meant a lot to me, but I would know that it wasn’t really making her happy. I don’t know what to do. Can I become a top? Can I teach myself to like it? I’m going to do it either way, but I really want to get into it, so please help! I want us to be good in bed together, but two bottoms don’t make a top. Help!

Love,

Topless

PS: We’re lesbians, if that matters.

Dear Tops:

It sure doesn’t, but thanks for the info!

I was just thinking about this last night when a friend was catching me up on her latest dating adventures. She was lamenting that some potential dates seem to come equipped with a set of kinks perfectly matching her own, and although that sounds good, it is, of course, no use at all.

As you have discovered to your frustration, one wants a date with a complementary set of kinks, not a matching one. It’s not an uncommon problem, and its most common manifestation is exactly the one that’s driving you nuts: there are too many bottoms in this world and nowhere near enough tops to keep them satisfied. Why this is (beyond the fact that topping is hard work), I couldn’t tell you for sure, but I bet any number of eager grad students are currently proposing theses on the subject to bored advisors who have read enough similar stuff already.

Here’s my theory. There are people for whom BDSM is a core part of their identity, running as deep as, say, homosexuality or monogamy. Some may always have recognized this element in themselves, even before they had the language to express it (these are the kids who always want to play pirates or whatever game involves somebody getting tied to something or the intentional infliction/receiving of pain, even when the other kids are long since ready to move on). Others don’t realize it until they’re exposed to S-M in some more adult context, but then it just clicks in, key into lock, and they know. Your girlfriend sounds like one of those BDSM lifers, who tend, in my experience, to be pretty set on their preferred role even if they do switch experimentally on occasion (a good idea, if only to find out how painful/exhausting it is to experience/produce any particular sensation).

Then there are the "anything goes" people who are happy to pick up a flogger or don a dog collar, what the heck, as long as it’s fun. This type of player may not identify as an S-M person per se, but may enjoy a little power exchange on the occasional Friday night, no biggie. You may fall more on this end of the spectrum, but even "what-the-heckers" usually discover some sort of preference, as you have. The perfect 50-50 switch is almost certainly as rare as the perfect 50-50 bisexual.

Plenty of people find something to like in either role, and I think you can develop an appreciation for topping and get some satisfaction out of a job well done (there are resources like The New Topping Book, by Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy, to help you). But you can enjoy and get good at it without ever really becoming a top the way both of you are currently bottoms. Be careful about taking on a role that isn’t really "you." Nobody loves a martyr, and you’re still going to want to bottom sometimes. I worry about you starting to resent your girlfriend for getting to have all the fun.

I have a suggestion that might save your relationship or might strike you as all sorts of wrong and make you hate me, but here goes: you two find a willing top, maybe somewhere in your social circle, maybe online or in a BDSM social organization, and bottom together sometimes. This kind of shared adventure can be hot, hot, hot and very bonding, sort of like getting lost in the woods together and surviving through mutual trust and inter-reliance — but a lot more fun. I think if you do that sometimes, and play top sometimes, and stick with the vanilla sometimes, you’ll probably be OK, provided you both take care of getting your itches scratched. Love conquers … much.

Love,

Andrea

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A friend in need

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Dear Andrea:

I don’t know if this is really considered a problem or just a modified version of a commitment issue. I recently have become very interested in having a G-spot orgasm. I feel the sensation and know the orgasm is literally and figuratively just outside my reach. I have found the toy that does the job (the Nubby G from Babeland) and I know I am on the verge. The only problem is that I need to be thrusting the toy in and out at a fast rate to really get me to the peak, and right before I am about the come, the sensation is so intense that I lose some strength and control in my arms. I know this could be rectified with a partner doing the heavy lifting, but is there a toy or a technique you could suggest for someone who is confined to solo play?

Sincerely,

G-spot Blue balls

Dear Blue:

Commitment issue how? Do you feel like your sex toy is somehow failing to fulfill a promise it made to you? (I can sort of see this, actually.) Have you told it that you Need To Talk?

It seems that your real problem is not that the vibrator cannot deliver, but that you literally can’t hold on long enough to give it a chance. It’s not it, it’s you. Maybe it’s just not the right toy for you at this time in your life. You need to let it down easy.

I think you need something that you can use hands-free, some kind of G-spot Bluetooth device. At first I looked on the few sex-toy guides specifically geared toward people with disabilities, figuring that even though your hands officially do work, they don’t work when it counts, so why not? There isn’t a lot out there, though. I pondered the many long-necked and flexible G-spotter devices, all of which look uncomfortably medical but most of which work pretty well — or so say the reviews — but eh, I couldn’t see how even adjusting the ergonomics was really going to do it for you. There’s still a smallish handle or base, and you’re still going to end up with the same old problem, or close enough. Same goes for the complicated in-and-out-and-round-and-round numbers (the Rabbit Pearl and its successors in faux-discretion, the oscilutf8g wombats and so on). They do some of the work for you, but you still have to hang on. No, the answer for you, I think, was available all along on the very same site where you found your well-meaning, if finally disappointing, current squeeze, Mr. G. They are dual stimulation devices with names like the Rock Chick (you insert it and you … rock) and the Snugglepuss. They stay in and leave your hands free to do whatever they need to do, whether it’s make shadow-puppets or do a Liza Minnelli impersonation or clutch your heart and go "Oh God oh God oh God." Whatever. The important part is, they do the G thing without your having to do any pumping. Of course it’s always possible that even as loyal and steadfast a companion as the Snugglofugus is, it might let you down — but there’s a good chance it won’t. Open your heart and let yourself love again.

Of course, should you have tons of money and no compunctions about tossing demi-tons of it at a matter of personal consequence but no world-shaking import, there are always ride-on sex machines like the original, the Sybian (look it up at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybian). There is something about these devices that always struck me as kind of ’70s, like something that would have had its own VIP room at Studio 54. Actually, the Sybian was invented by a very earnest guy named Dave, about whom little biographical information seems to exist, although it appears he really was just trying to help. It took considerably less earnest pioneers like Howard Stern, who seems to have regularly popped female guests onto the studio Sybian (which was hopefully sanitized between uses), to give it the unsavory aspect it has today. Well, that and the Sybian dealers currently accessible via the Web, like the one whose site makes this claim: "The female will learn how to have better and bigger orgasms. She will literally explode on it."

But I’m assuming you weren’t in that market anyway. No, what you need is either the hands-free insertable doohickeys described above, or something like what you’ve got already and a way to immobilize it so you can crouch on it, as with the Sybian, but less explodey. You could try one of those harnesses that attach a dildo to the partner’s knee or, in your case, to random household furnishings. Either way, be sure to tell any new sex toys how you really feel, and practice active listening. Communication is the key, you know. *
Love,
Andrea

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Cougar Den

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Dear Andrea,

I appreciated your response to Older and Wiser ["Sunrise, Sunset," 9/24/08], the late-20s woman who is planning marriage and kids with her late-50s boyfriend.

Fourteen years ago, when I was 26, I met my husband, who was then 58. We’ve stayed together through thick and thin, and we love each other enormously. It has pained me over the past decade to realize that, even when the woman in question has her own accomplishments and is not a "bimbo", and even when the man in question is appealing and interesting (neither a Donald Trump nor a philandering cad), still the nasty stereotypes abound. British comedian Graham Norton, for instance, refers to Catherine Zeta-Jones (39, married to Michael Douglas, 64) as "that gold-digging Welsh whore."

I find that otherwise thoughtful women I meet, acting on a mixture of feminism, anger, and what I infer to be unacknowledged personal pain or fear, seem too willing to continue such stereotypes, and I hesitate to open up to women I would otherwise think of as potential friends. I have hoped that as increasingly empowered women realize that they can date younger men if they choose, the rage over the double-standard and the fear of abandonment and dwindling romantic options will begin to fade.

Then SNL comes along with, among other bits that belittle older women, their despicable new "Cougar Den" skit, mocking sexually-active older women as ridiculous and disgusting. Fuck you, SNL!

These mean-spirited portrayals are destructive. I’ve attempted to convey this message through other venues and have been ignored. I remember a few years ago, you wrote that the only regrettable mixed union between adults is "the always unfortunate nice person/asshole combo" — so maybe you’ll see my point and print this.

Love,
Love My Older Spouse

Dear Love:
Ha, that’s a pretty good line. Thanks for remembering it.

I hadn’t even thought about SNL in years until the recent gratifying return of Tina Fey, but now that you mention it (you didn’t), I have conceived a visceral loathing for Sarah Palin so intense that I couldn’t even watch the debate for fear of feeling too sick to cook dinner. Yet I’ve still managed to be offended, feministically-speaking, by some of the endless harping on her supposed babe-itude. Can we not leave her legs (slender and therefore officially babe-ly) and Sen. Clinton’s, which have been judged unacceptably stumpy, and everyone else’s out of the equation, and judge the candidates on their merits? Gov. Palin, for instance, doesn’t have any. We win!

As for "cougars," I have puzzled over the sudden emergence of the stereotype and the unquestioned assumption that the women it is applied to deserve ridicule. After a spate of popular-media articles in the 1990s about older women and their younger men, I suppose some degree of backlash was inevitable. Still, I, like you, am nonplussed by the degree of venom spit at any woman of a certain age who not only dares to date above her age-determined station, but to do anything for fun at all beyond book club, knitting, and golf.

Don’t you think, though, that the reaction of some older women to a young one seen with a man old enough to be the first woman’s first husband is understandable? We can claim the right to date younger men all we like, but who’s to say that most younger men will be interested? And there are still legions of old coots advertising for "fit, slender" young things in the personals. There is still a media-driven double standard keeping George Clooney in the "sexy lead" seat while Glenn Close and Cybill Shepherd have to play doughty moms and, yes, cougars. Even the accolades heaped on the glorious Helen Mirren in recent years have a faint aspect of the freak show about them: "Step up and see the 60-something woman who is still sexually attractive!" These forces are still powerful enough to make your fond wish for a time when older women will inevitably gaze upon your union with one of their own with bland approval still a bit of a pipe dream. As long as older women with a sex drive, and indeed any juice at all left in them, are laughed and pointed at, some will still look at a young woman who scoops up one of the few available men in their bracket as whatever the opposite of a cougar might be. Minx. Bitch. Gold-digging (Welsh) whore. Sad, and frustrating, but human.

Incidentally, I was curious about the origin of "cougar" in this context and found an article dating it to the founding in 1999 of Cougardate, an online dating site. A book, Cougar: A Guide for Older Women Dating Younger Men, by Valerie Gibson, came along in 2001. As you can see, these were guides for women, so the term, even with its "rapacious animal" connotations, wasn’t even meant pejoratively. The nastiness accrued to it gradually, it seems, and inevitably. If it’s about women actually wanting sex, that’s gonna happen.

OK, now I’m mad too.

Love,
Andrea

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Hand it to him

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Dear Andrea:

A male friend recently told me that he finds it very frustrating when women try to please him in ways other than intercourse. According to him, during hand jobs and blow jobs, men are just thinking, "Get on with it!" He claims to have spoken to lots of other guys about this who agreed with him.

Is this really true? Are there men who feel like this, or is he winding me up? (I suspect that the sample of people he asked wasn’t representative — but it’s been on my mind anyway.) Maybe the skills of his sexual partners haven’t been up to scratch? Or maybe it’s just his problem?

Love,

Whose Prob?

Dear Prob:

His problem. My onetime boyfriend (we got married, and now I don’t get to have a boyfriend anymore) used to use the phrase "That’s not an MP, that’s a YP," though he never used it on me, and that’s a good thing, because it’s really obnoxious. Nevertheless, if this guy were your boyfriend, this would be a YP, too, so let’s be glad he’s just a friend and it’s an HP all the way.

No, I don’t think it’s particularly true, although the category "men" is rather large, and there are individuals and subgroups who do feel that way. Very young men, for instance, will usually have been waiting for years to "get on with it," and they tend to think of intercourse as "the real thing" or "sex" and feel like everything else is, I guess, the fake thing. The sad part is that this conviction often leads to fairly disappointing sex, especially, but not exclusively, for the girls involved, when teenagers trade in the usually gratifying heavy petting and manual and oral for the strictly genital.

Men who know a bit more about what they really like do tend to have a slightly wider repertoire, depending on and responsive to who(m), what, when, where, and why. Sometimes a man just needs a blow job. Sometimes everything is just too wet and soft to get the job done (although men are, admittedly, generally partial to the wet and soft), and only a hand will do the job. Sometimes the visual element (from above while partner kneels, from behind in doggy style) is the important part, with friction and tempo taking the backseat, as it were. In other words, as in all things sexual, it depends. Your friend, by assuming that all men are just like him, is lacking in imagination, and again I say good for you for not having to be his girlfriend.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

I’ve been going out with a great man for a year now, and the sex is finally beginning to flourish in kinky and sensual ways. I can orgasm relatively quickly from a variety of methods. The problem is, recently he can’t come from oral or vaginal intercourse. We try different positions, but the only way he can reach orgasm is from his own hand. What is going on here? How can I get him to come with me?

Love,

Woman waiting

Dear WW:

I suggest that you don’t wait as much as file your preference under "fond hopes" and not make too big a deal out of this, since sexual response is not the sort of system that responds well to stress. I’d also caution you not to take it personally, if that’s possible, since assuming you are not doing anything differently, this appears to be an HP and nothing you can affect much one way or the other. I do wonder if perhaps he has started taking an antidepressant or a beta blocker, both common medications with nearly universal sexual side effects, at least at first. If so, give it a while, and if things don’t improve, he can go back to the doctor for a meds adjustment and a general checkup, since there are a lot of conditions, including diabetes, that could be causing this.

If not that or that or that other thing, the usual culprits are aging (possible; you didn’t say), anxiety, and, of course, boredom. Lots of people would rather hear that their partner has a dangerous, progressive disease than that he’s bored, but don’t freak out. If you’re just getting into the fun, kinky part together, it’s unlikely that he’s bored already. He may be worried about something, or fixating on something even kinkier that he’s afraid to ask for but that you might feel like offering if only you knew what it was. And he might simply be aging out of the sorts of stimulation that did it for him before and need rougher handling, which you can certainly provide. Watch what he’s doing with the successful handiwork — where is he stroking, how hard and how fast? Once you know what’s working, you can try re-creating the sensations in a way that gets and keeps you involved. Nobody said you can’t use your hand (or his) during a blow job, right? Or during what the guy in the first letter would insist all men like better anyway?

Love,

Andrea

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No choke

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Dear Andrea:

I just had a friendly breakup and we still see each other around. Sex with him was so great, I worry that I may never experience such great sex again. But I have a question about something.

There were two instances right before we broke up when we were making love and he put his hand around my neck, in a choking way, and applied pressure. We had been together for more than a year and I didn’t feel threatened, so I just pulled his hands off. I always meant to ask him about this, but then we broke up. Now, though, I’m analyzing everything. I never felt scared, but I wondered why suddenly, out of the blue, he’d start pulling this move. I’d read your column and remembered something about choking fetishes, so I got online — sure enough, I discovered it’s called breath-play. Now I’m pissed because he was trying to introduce something into our sex life (normally a great idea) that could be dangerous — and honestly, I think he should have asked me first.

Should I confront him even though we broke up? Am I making this a bigger deal than it is? Now I feel my temper rising, thinking how dare he introduce a dangerous (albeit titilutf8g for some) sexual practice without asking me first. Maybe it’s good we broke up, since who needs a guy who can’t talk about things he wants to do in bed?

Love,

Choked Up

Dear Up:

Casually introduced, non-negotiated breath-play, huh? That would be one of the few practices still capable of rousing me from my so-many-years-out-here-in-the-trenches-near-somnolent state of "whatever, dude." Of course it’s not OK not to ask! Breath-play can kill you. Well, to be fair, lots of things can kill you, but breath-play has a better chance than most.

I don’t know precisely how many deaths are caused annually by erotic asphyxiation. First aid and S-M safety instructor Jay Wiseman, this subject’s generally acknowledged go-to guy, says in his much-posted article on Breath-Play (read it at collarncuffs.com/breath%20play): "The American Psychiatric Association estimates a death rate of one person per year per million of population — thus about 250 deaths last year in the United States. Law enforcement estimates go as much as four times higher."

So it’s small, tiny really, by population — and that tiny number also includes all the cases of autoerotic asphyxiation, the only sex act that regularly puts its practitioners in the running for a well-deserved Darwin Award. Even AAE fans usually get out alive, of course, it’s just that "usually survivable" is not a great ad slogan. So why does anybody buy? Do they have a death wish, or what? There are some who do, but I don’t think that’s the big draw. Some folks are turned on by the idea of flirting with death, or of being out on the edgy edge where only the edgy people go. Others, probably most, just like the sensation, which can (reportedly! I am a big fraidy-cat myself) be intensely … intense. Boyfriend, in all likelihood, had never given the danger a thought; he was just trying to give you (and by association, himself) a big old rush.

Oh, right, but back to the part where you could die. Just to clear this up: autoerotic asphyxiation is much more dangerous than doing it with a friend, but the scarifying part about the deaths during partnered play is that they don’t seem to be either predictable or preventable — it’s not as simple as, say, noticing that your partner has passed out and taking your hands off. The primary danger is not that the person will black out from simple lack of oxygen, but that the lack of oxygen will set up a chain reaction (complicated, and well-described in Wiseman’s article) resulting very rapidly and completely unpredictably in cardiac arrest.

So. This is not the sort of thing you just spring on someone all willy-nilly and hope they like it. Doing so is unchivalrous, at best. I have a shocking suggestion though, which we may never be able to prove true or false now, but it’s worth making anyway. What are the chances that all this talk of breath-play and death-play is beside the point because he didn’t choke you out and didn’t mean to: he merely meant to do what he did — put his hands on your throat to give you both a little "what if I actually kept squeezing, not that I would" thrill? A feint, as it were?

Still a bad game, but not necessarily anything so serious that we have to go dragging Jay Wiseman and the American Psychiatric Association into this.

I can imagine why it would be bothering you, but I wouldn’t put a huge amount of energy into it. If you’re already in touch with him, I could see how a quick, light-handed, "Oh and by the way, what the fuck …?" could be just the thing, though. *

Love,
Andrea

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No satisfaction

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Dear Readers:

In a recent column, I mock-lamented the lack of a better expression than "tit for tat" to describe the writer’s situation and received not one but two gently chiding notes assuring me that there was indeed another phrase commonly used to express the concept of rote reciprocity. This one was kind of cute:

Dear Andrea:

If not a better, then at least a non-punning expression for "tit for tat" is "quid pro quo." I eagerly await a male reader’s letter complaining of erectile dysfunction and marred by a dangling participle.

Love,

Funny Reader

And now back to our previously scheduled tedious marital concern.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

I recently broke it off with my boyfriend of three years. The thing is, I was married the whole time. I never meant to fall in love with my boyfriend. I met him in a forum I found to talk about my marital problems. He was doing the same, though he got divorced more than a year ago. Before I met him, I was somewhat dissatisfied with the lack of sex and affection in my marriage, but accepted it as my lot in life. I figured my husband was a good man every other way, so I could put up with those problems. With the BF, though, I experienced intense passion, love, and attention. Now that we’ve broken up, it feels like I went from the hot tub into a cold pool.

I want affection. I want my husband to hug me, hold me … to care. I’ve asked him numerous times, but the only way he listens is if I threaten to leave. I guess what I’m asking is, how can I make my husband listen?

Love,

No Satisfaction

Dear No:

Yes. Um. It all depends on what you want him to hear. I’m willing to bet that if you murmured, "Oh, by the way, honey, I’ve been cheating on you for three years every chance I get, and I’m really sad now because I broke up with my cheating-partner, who was much better than you in bed and out, so won’t you please hold me?," he’d listen. Seriously. I’m almost positive.

Look, it may be that your husband was stingy with the demonstration of affection. That can be hurtful, even harmful. It is well within one’s rights to request more demo (more affection is probably another story), but it doesn’t work to treat another person as a sort of affection vending machine: you put in, I don’t know, time, dinners, and blow jobs, and they crank out the sweet words and spontaneous hugs and kisses?

I think more to the point here, though, is that it’s entirely possible that ship has sailed. He may have been insufficiently demonstrative (or actually insufficiently affectionate, who can tell?) due to his own innate temperament or some sort of damage. Your marriage may originally have been short on sex due to low libido (his, apparently) or bad habits or lack of spark. I can’t help guessing, though, that in the intervening three years (at least), you were emotionally (and sometimes physically) absent yourself, and this cannot have escaped his attention. There is a reason why divorce suits on the grounds of infidelity used to cite "alienation of affection." I have to assume your recent behavior has turned a bad situation worse and very likely made the marriage unsalvageable. Sorry!

No, really, I am. How committed, though, could you really have been to salvaging it? I am a big fan of Internet forums, and I don’t make the mistake that others, less familiar with the concept of chat, might make of thinking that you went there expressly to attract someone new, someone who might really "understand you." If you’d been looking for a date, you could have skipped the chitchat and gone straight to Match.com. You certainly did nothing to avoid attracting and then cleaving unto another dude, though, did you? Don’t you think, as a married woman who was concerned about the state of her marriage (or really, just a married woman, period), that was … unwise?

Gallivanting off with Boyfriend and then complaining, once it’s over, that your husband is just as apparently uninterested in you as before and wondering how do you fix him is not cricket. It isn’t fair to your husband to use him as a somewhat unsatisfactory second-stringer, and worse (at least for you), I don’t think it’s going to work. I think the next time you get mad at him for his inherent or reactive cold-fishiness, you are going to slip up and, instead of merely threatening to leave him, crow that you did, in fact, leave him for three years and he never noticed. And that will be that. I think, since you have nothing good to say for him beyond "he’s a good man and I figured I just had to put up with him," you ought to let him go. Surely being unsatisfied and miserable is not your lot in life, any more than being treated as a combination encumbrance and convenience ought to be his, poor guy.

Love,

Andrea

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Sunrise, sunset

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Dear Andrea,

My boyfriend is 30 years older than me. I am in my late 20s and he is in his late 50s. We are very much in love and the sex is pretty good. (We have both had many partners before each other.) I don’t have a father complex or anything like that. We both come from standard middle-class families. He has never been married and has no children.

We have been together a while and are thinking about getting married. But I have two concerns. How much longer will he be able to get it up? And, if we get married, we would want to have children some time in the future. I have heard that the father’s age counts too when calcuutf8g the risk of birth defects. He is very healthy and youthful. What do you think?

Thanks,

Older and wiser?

Dear Older:

I am far from a hopeless romantic, but I do believe in love, of course, and I cheer on the occasional blind leap of faith as long as I’m not the one who has to do the leaping. I have to admit that I’d tend to wonder why, exactly, a man in his late 50s has never been married, and I’d wonder just how many new tricks such an old dog is going to be willing to learn. Particularly about having children. He knows about the sleep deprivation and the postponement of personal gratification and the mess and the noise, right? And that’s just the baby years. I’m hoping you’ve also discussed the hard part, that is, the possibility that he will not be around or, if around, not up to participating much when your baby is contemputf8g grad school. I’m an older parent myself, and believe me, I have all the sympathy in the world. But 60 is hella older — too old for any of this blind leap of faith business. You’ve got to talk about this stuff.

Assuming you have, and that the built-in risks are A-OK with both of you — and that you’ve worked out your contingency plans — I wouldn’t let visions of future flaccidity stop you. Most men slow down a little as they age (this is probably already in evidence), and nearly all will require more stimulation. A lot of men are going to need some fairly aggressive physical interaction where once a peek or even a thought was enough. But so what? You want to touch him, right? Anyway, he isn’t a cyborg designed for planned obsolescence — i.e., he isn’t going to shut off at 65 and force you to buy the new model. Our declines tend toward the gradual.

I know the expected thing here would be a long discussion on how much better older men are, what with the increased patience and the focus shifting from themselves to you and the fingers and the tongues. And all that is true, but I figure if you were asking specifically about the hard-ons, you had a reason (beyond hoping he can knock you up) and you don’t necessarily want a future of patient, sophisticated fingers and tongues and no penis. Some women like the penis! The penis is good! If he’s in decent health and doesn’t have to take beta-blockers or anything, though, you shouldn’t have to worry about going without for a good long time. Sixty-ish is old for a new dad, but it’s extremely young for an old guy. How’s that?

But what if the inevitable slow down does turn into a total shut down? Luckily, there is really remarkably effective medical intervention available, but you might want to make sure he’d be on board for that. You should both remember that Viagra and friends don’t always work, and there are drugs he could be on that contraindicate them. None of this is pleasant to talk about, but I somehow doubt you’re the only one in this ménage who’s wondering what will happen if (when, really) he can’t get it up. He might like to know that you won’t turn him out to pasture the first time and take up with the next young stud who jumps your fence. You won’t, right?

The worry about the birth defects: well, that’s real. You’ll see different figures, but most articles from reputable sources say that there is a definite rise in the incidence of Down syndrome and other genetic disorders with older fathers, especially when the mothers are older as well, as is frequently the case. The overall incidence of genetic disorders is still really low though, which is easy to forget when you’re reading about the percentage increase in cases of such-and-such. I wouldn’t think it’s high enough to dissuade an otherwise determined couple from having a kid, and I’m certainly not going to attempt to do so. What you do need to do, though, is decide what you will do if you determine that you are carrying a fetus with a genetic disorder. A blind leap of faith is all well and good as long as all the participants are consenting adults. But a baby, even a potential baby, needs a plan.

Love,

Andrea

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Also, Andrea is teaching! Contact her if you’re interested in (sex)life after baby classes. Her new blog is at www.gogetyourjacket.com, but don’t look there for the butt sex. There isn’t any.

Love and death

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Dear Andrea:

I’m in my mid-to-late 30s. Most of my life, my sex drive has been pretty low. Fairly quickly (within a year) after beginning a relationship, it tapers off to almost nothing. I believe this significantly negatively affects my LTRs (my last one ended due to not enough sex; we’re trying to work on it in my current one).

I suspect this is pretty common (I’ve heard of "lesbian bed death," and some of my straight friends also admit to having a very low sex drive). What are the typical causes of low libido in women? I don’t really believe in aphrodisiacs, but are there any proven treatments, meds, or herbs for this?

Love,

No Mojo

Dear Mo:

If any of those worked, they would be aphrodisiacs, and you’d be stuck not believing in them. Not at all helpful. Luckily, they don’t, so you don’t have to worry about it.

Actually that’s not precisely true. There are things that work for some women, just not all, or even most. And since female sexuality seems to delight in confounding even the most dedicated researchers, there’s no telling what might turn out to be efficacious — some combination of hormones, set and setting, history and expectation, and circulation. But in which combinations and what order, nobody knows.

I’d be interested to know what "trying to work on it" means, and whether it’s working. If you really want to delve in, you could see if you can get a referral to an endocrinologist who knows what she’s doing; maybe a little testosterone boost would give you a, uh, leg up. Second, or first if that isn’t happening, you could get yourself assessed for depression or anxiety disorders and maybe do some cognitive-behavioral therapy and/or try Wellbutrin. And last (or first), I’d take a look at the sex you are having and determine whether maybe it’s just not what you want, and try to add in or subtract the elements that would improve things or are killing your buzz, respectively.

The bummer part is that some people really do just have a low libido and that makes them normal for them. Unfortunately, a clear declaration on the order of "that’s just the way I roll" is not going to satisfy a frustrated partner, and many people suffering from low desire really are suffering — they want to have high desire. Some combination of the suggestions above may get you somewhere, and I sincerely hope they do. Otherwise, well, I just listened to a fascinating program on the placebo effect on a BBC podcast, but I’m afraid none of the researchers on there could reasonably claim that taking a pill that you know has no physioactive ingredients would work. Otherwise I’d be all, "Here, take this."

Love,

Andrea

P.S. Oh — there’s an interesting entry on the neurochemistry of lesbian bed death at "Scientific Blogging," here: www.tinyurl.com/4vaxq9. She blames it on oxytocin and pheromones and — surprise! — too much cuddling.

Dear Andrea:

My husband has ED and likes sex in the morning after I give him oral sex, which seems to help. The problem is that he won’t give me oral back! He’s gotten oral millions of times — and me? Twice at the most. Years ago, he was giving oral and I came, which kinda flooded him, and he didn’t do it again for 20 years. Now I’m menopausal and kinda dry, so rubbing gets annoying and doesn’t do much for me. And now I don’t even want to give him oral because he won’t do it for me. He touches me and I pull away because I know he won’t return what he gets. This stinks for me, and I’m totally turned off!

Love,

Rubbed Wrong Way

Dear Way:

Oh, not good. You don’t want to go without forever, nor do you want to get into this sort of (I wish there were a better phrase for this) tit-for-tat system with your beloved. You’re going to have to tell him how you feel, then he’s going to have to, well, reciprocate. If the problem really is the once-upon-a time "flooding" incident, you can do what I urge men to do: warn your partner before flooding ensues, allowing her/him the chance to pull back if wanted. Then you have to tell him that you’re dry and don’t want to be rubbed so much, but here is some helpful, handy lube. Then you have to stop being so mad at him. It’s not that you don’t have cause — of course you do! — but the grouchy, aggrieved tone that comes across in your letter is not the sort that invites compromise and the "we must all hang together or most assuredly we shall all hang separately" approach which is, frankly, your only hope. You really should not have let 20 years go by without saying anything. He really should not have let 20 years go by, period. So, OK, what now?

Love,

Andrea

Got a salacious subject you want Andrea to discuss? Ask her a question!

Also, Andrea is teaching! Contact her if you’re interested in (sex)life after baby classes. Her new blog is at www.gogetyourjacket.com, but don’t look there for the butt sex. There isn’t any.

Freaks of nature

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Dear Andrea:

I suspect there is no solution to this problem, but it cannot hurt to ask. I recently met a wonderful woman and, while we have only been together a few weeks, we can envision being together the rest of our lives. The one fly in the ointment is that she is very tight and I am pretty big, and we have not been able to have sex that is pleasurable to her. We have tried it a couple of times, but it just hurt her — and if that continues to be the case, I don’t want to go there again. We are mature and experienced and know about lubricants, etc., but this is just not working. We enjoy toys and oral too, but — damn! We want to have sex.

Love,

Bad Fit

Dear Fit:

"I suspect there is no solution to this problem"? Way to get me interested in answering your question there, dude.

There are size-discordant couples who are just never, ever going to fit, but they are necessarily kind of freaky — and unless both halves reside on the extreme opposing sides of your basic human-variation bell curve, it’s really not that likely to occur.

You’ll need to figure out what exactly is happening here (we know what’s not happening) before you can craft a solution. Is she really too tight, or too short front-to-back, or capacious enough but not managing to seize control of her own semi-voluntary muscles? If she’s too tight or too clamped down, or if you are actually that great rarity among men, the Guy Who Is Too Big (no matter how many used to call the San Francisco Sex Information line claiming membership, that is one exclusive club), she may be able to accommodate you with a little work. Using fingers — her own or yours — or geeking out and acquiring a set of dilators or graduated dildos may produce results (the process can be variously entertaining, tedious, or traumatic, depending). If she is too short, well, there’s a finite amount of space to work with but adjustment of angle can move things around in there to a surprising degree (make sure you’re sliding under her cervix, not into it). And be sure her legs are as far apart as comfortably manageable — it’s amazing how much the internal topography can be altered with some external manipulation.

And finally, I need to point out that you are already having sex! I totally get that you want to have intercourse, and I would like you to have some too, but all that stuff you’re doing already? Sex. Do some fingers, some oral, some shallow intromission and some X-treme frottage (a lot of lube, a lot of careful positioning, and a lot of wet sliding). Have orgasms. Follow with cuddling. Do you really not feel (and look, and smell) like people who just had sex?

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

I’ve tried three different vibrators and, without exception, they left my labia and clitoral hood numb and swollen for a day afterward. In fact, if I rub my clit with my fingers (my preferred method for orgasm) too vigorously or too imprecisely — just a few millimeters off — or if my fingers aren’t wet enough, the same thing happens. And partners can’t suck on or even lick my clitoral hood for too long, to say nothing of rubbing me with their fingers. Is this a serious medical issue or just another prank of human physiology? Also, I hated coming with the vibrators: it felt like my body was just going ahead without me, and left me irritable and unsatisfied. Am I the only woman in the world who doesn’t like vibrators? Have I just not found the right one yet? (Experimentation in that regard has proven depressingly expensive.)

Love,

Ouchy Girl

Dear Girl:

You’re just a sensitive girl and, yes, the victim of a physiological prank. (Nicely put!) I suggest using barriers between yourself and any stimulation-producing member, human or otherwise. Since these are not safe-sex barriers as such, they can be sexier than your standard latex — silk underwear, for instance. You already know the other measures you have to take — if it hurts when done too this or too that, don’t do it that way, and don’t be shy about instructing others to take similar precautions. Also, have you tried a cool compress afterward?

As for the vibrators, there’s one that might work — this thing that’s supposed to simulate oral sex and has a whole bunch of intensity settings (not the fake-tongue thingies, which are kind of creepy, but the high-end British "smart" vibe called a SaSi) — but it’s crazy expensive and nobody will send me one to review. You could try one of the ones you’ve already got, with a towel (or many pairs of silk underwear) between you and it and see how that goes, or you could accept, with relief, the fact that you really don’t like vibrators anyway. And no, you’re not alone.

Love,

Andrea

Got a salacious subject you want Andrea to discuss? Ask her a question!

Also, Andrea is teaching! Contact her if you’re interested in (sex)life after baby classes. Her new blog is at www.gogetyourjacket.com, but don’t look there for the butt sex. There isn’t any.

Here Today

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Dear Andrea:

What the heck is going on with the Today contraceptive sponge? My wife and I have always used condoms, but when we saw the sponges a few months back, we figured, "Let’s try ’em."

Oh … my … god. Going bareback after years of condom use was absotively amazing for both of us. We also discovered that what my wife calls her "special trick" — which involves sliding the condomless head of my cock over her clit — worked OK for her with a condom on, but she describes it as "exquisite" without one.

So now, Synova, the company that was making the sponge, has declared bankruptcy, and sponges are going for $8 a pop on eBay. Do you know if Synova is going to come out of its reorganization and start making the sponge again?

Love,

Spongelover

Dear Lover:

I hate to be the one to break your heart, or rather to rebreak it after Synova — cads that they are — already treated you and yours so callously, but you will survive. Your heart will go on.

There’s something about the sponge (beyond the spermicide itself) that just makes people go all gooey. This is the second time sponge fans have loved and lost, and I’m afraid I do not know when, if ever, your beloved will return. Back in the ’90s, Seinfeld‘s Elaine coined the term "sponge-worthy" when she discovered the first shortage and had to start gauging whether or not a boyfriend rated a precious, hoarded sponge. That model was pulled from the market for safety and manufacturing problems, and didn’t come back until last year, along with a media blitz that attracted hordes of new fans. And yes, Synova, the new owner, has declared bankruptcy. The manufacturing rights have passed to yet another company, but I don’t think it’s saying when — or if — it will begin exercising them.

So what’s the big deal? The sponge is nothing but a … sponge, filled to the brim with Nonoxynol-9, the soapy, controversial spermicide that has been around forever. The big advantages are ease of application (pop it in) and forgetability (you don’t have to pop in another one for a day or so). Nonoxynol-9, though, can be some nasty stuff. A number of studies have demonstrated that it causes enough irritation to let in pathogens, including HIV, and it tastes horrible. Plus, I will forever bear a grudge against it since it caused a boyfriend to develop a huge bright red clown-mouth — a scarlet letter "O" — around his lips, just in time for Passover at my mother’s house, and people kept asking him about it all night until he was ready to die. So, um, none for me. But I do understand your dismay at the loss of a dear contraceptive.

There are other forms of spermicide — film or pellets or whatever — but they don’t work well without a diaphragm-y thing to hold them in place. In fact, even with such a device, they work just as poorly as the beloved sponge, which is very poorly indeed in women who have had children and only sort of OK in women who haven’t. The sponge was never a great form of birth control; it just allowed for great sex. Is your wife absolutely sure she wouldn’t like a nice NuvaRing or an IUD? I know, it’s not fair — I’d like to be able to recommend some sort of device to insert — but they’ve got to be better than condoms and eternal sorrow.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

I’m on the pill and monogamous, so I’m not limited to water-based lubricants. Recently my partner and I got the idea to try vitamin E oil — it smells and tastes pretty good, it lasts longer than Astroglide, and if it’s edible, we figured, it must be safe. Well … a short while after we happily started lubing with E, I got a urinary tract infection and have since read numerous lists of suggestions for avoiding UTIs that all seemed to mention specifically using a water-based lubricant. I feel somewhat weird about asking my doctor this question, so I’m turning to you: are "natural" but non-water-based lubes such as vitamin E oil bad for one’s inner girly parts, or have I wrongly linked a few coincidental events?

Love,

Gimme an E?

Dear E:

You’re right that it could be a coincidence, but I’m betting it’s not. I don’t know what kind of carrier oil was used for the vitamin E, but whatever it is, your vagina probably doesn’t know how to get rid of it. I completely agree that water-based lubes are essentially unsatisfactory, but luckily one does not have to reach for weird, random substances off the supplement shelf. What you want is a nice silicone lube, of which there are many. You can get them flavored if that’s your scene, but most are taste- and scent-free, non-irritating, non-drying, and so slippery they are actually kind of dangerous — and you really want to watch where you prop the bottle between applications. You will love them and you will thank me.

Love,

Andrea

Got a salacious subject you want Andrea to discuss? Ask her a question!

Also, Andrea is teaching! Contact her if you’re interested in (sex)life after baby classes. Her new blog is at www.gogetyourjacket.com, but don’t look there for the butt sex. There isn’t any.

A yikely story

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Dear Andrea:

I am a 26-year-old good-looking male living in New Jersey. I am very fond of scat play with females. I used to play with my own scat, but I always wish some female would play with me. Can you help me with that, please?

Love,

Scatman Wannabe

Dear Man:

Yeah, probably not.

I was changing the baby this morning when she started to whimper and fuss. "What’s the matter," I asked her, "Don’t like poop?"

"No," she said firmly. "Don’ yike it."

Let’s be honest; I don’t yike it either. The truth is, hardly anybody does yike it, and of those who do, most appear to be men. So every six months I get some variant of your question and every year or so I answer it. Like this: "Chances are you’re S.O.L. Sorry!"

There are a few women who will actively seek out scat play. They are, in both the Rick James sense and the strictly demographic one, superfreaks. If you moved to a major metro area and became involved with the S-M community, behaved well, and got invited to parties you might hear of one such woman, or perhaps — if you approach very carefully and are vewwy vewwy quiet — glimpse one in the wild. I can’t even promise that you’d meet her, and I certainly cannot guarantee that anyone you did meet would want to do her thing with you. This is not the sort of thing people just indiscriminately do with anyone who comes along. It’s kind of — and it pains me to say this, or to think about it in too much detail — intimate.

As with many other very rare, widely despised subspecialties, this is the sort of thing you’re probably going to have to pay for. You could find yourself a Strict German Goddess or some such who might consent to shit on you. On her terms. That just might have to be good enough for you, and it is surely going to cost you. Like I said: sorry!

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

My boyfriend says his old girlfriend used to let him pee on her. I’m wondering why, and also if it’s safe. He says it’s sterile. Is it really? And what’s the deal with this? I can look it up, but I’m not sure I want to see what happens if I Google "pee on me."

Love,

Not Sure About This

Dear Sure:

Good thinking! Especially if it’s your work computer. Either way, Googling "piss play" or similar is probably a bad idea unless you’re quite sure you want to see what you’d see. Of course, it’s safer than "goatse" or "tub girl" or that guy who … never mind. Those sites kind of scarred me for life, and I wouldn’t wish similar on the unwary reader, so let’s just drop it.

I can’t answer "why" without knowing more about what the boyfriend and the ex were up to. You can piss on somebody with much sneering and attitude and be all dominant about it, but two people can also just play with pee because it’s there, with no greater meaning. You can splash it around, or aim it, or drink it, or make somebody else drink it — but there’s no way to tell which they were doing without more info. On the subject of drinking it, though, it really is pretty clean, although I hesitate to use the word "sterile" since I’m a stickler and anything that’s touched the outside of somebody’s body is going to pick up some "body ash" (is there a skeevier phrase?) or dust or something. Plus there are many reasons that a spare blood cell or so might be floating around in there. But basically, yes, pee is remarkably clean.

Poo, of course, is remarkably dirty — it defines "dirty," really — and right there is your difference. It’s extremely unlikely you’re going to catch anything from pee. It doesn’t stain. If you’re healthy and hydrated and have avoided certain obvious food groups, it barely even smells. Social taboos aside, it’s pretty innocuous. The taboos are there, though, so in a way pee is a cheap thrill: it feels really dirty without being any dirtier, really, than a glass of drinking water, and in many cases it’s cleaner. The big thrill/low actual disgustingness quotient explains its relative popularity among "weird sex" types. It’s weird but not that weird.

None of this means, of course, that you have to let him pee on you. I’m not at all comfortable with a system where if Andrea says it’s not going to hurt you, you have to do it! You’re going to want to ask exactly what he and the ex were up to, what he got out of it, and, if possible, what she got out of it. As long as he’s willing to drop it if you’re not into it, though, what the heck? Maybe you’ll yike it, maybe you won’t.

Love,

Andrea

Got a salacious subject you want Andrea to discuss? Ask her a question!

Also, Andrea is teaching! Contact her if you’re interested in (sex)life after baby classes. Her new blog is at www.gogetyourjacket.com, but don’t look there for the butt sex. There isn’t any.

Burning woman

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Dear Readers:

It’s late summer again, when the hipper urban enclaves empty out and suddenly there’s parking because all the cool people have gone to Burning Man or some other anarcho-artsy fire-dancing/fairy-wings festival. Burning Man in particular, plunked down as it is on a lake bed as hot as Venus and as barren as the moon, can take a toll on participants’ health and well-being. According to my friends at the Women’s Community Clinic (www.womenscommunityclinic.org) nothing takes more of a beating out there than the private parts (less private than usual due to rampant nudity and a fair amount of random partnering) of female festival-goers.

So what do women need to know to avoid having to rush their rashes straight to the clinic as soon as they’ve unloaded the truck and showered off the playa dust? Staffers there asked me to write a list of common sense self-protection maneuvers for a situation in which sense is less valued than sensation and spontaneity.

(1) This goes for everyone: drink an insane amount of water. I actually recommend bringing double the usual ration of a gallon a day — it’s not like you can easily run out for more in a commerce-free zone like Black Rock City. You want to "piss clear" (an infelicitous phrase that I have nevertheless often found useful since first encountering it at Burning Man). Your health depends on it. Your urinary tract, in particular, will thank you.

(2) Keep clean. This is, of course, one of the many uses to which any extra water can be put, but you’ll also need unscented baby wipes with no greasy or sticky additives. You don’t want to attract every mote of dust (and oh my, is there a lot of dust) and convince it to cling to your damp spots. Out in the desert, I wash my face with witch hazel pads and my other parts with massive numbers of store-brand unscented "natural" baby wipes. Don’t get these mixed up.

(3) Bring a safer sex kit. Consider all casual pickup sex unsafe unless somehow proven otherwise — you don’t want to be having long, intense negotiations with strangers while you’re out of your head on whatever you’re doing out there to get out of your head. Use condoms and, while you’re doubling your recommended water ration, do the same with the lube. The fierce desert wind wicks moisture like you would not believe, and even nice known-quantity sex with your steady partner can chafe. Lube up. You might want to consider using gloves for anything really intimate, too, and just generally being more careful than usual about introducing anybody’s (blank) into your (blank). After a few days on the playa, you’re likely to be abraded, chapped, windburned, sunburned, scraped, scratched, and undefended in a way that’s unfamiliar to the city dweller. It’s much easier to pick up somebody else’s creepy-crawlies when your skin isn’t in top shape, and trust me, it won’t be. Use the condoms and other barriers when reasonable. Piss clear when you’re done and don’t forget the wipes. Bring alcohol gel and clean your hands regularly, even if you haven’t been up to anything. Don’t get crazy and clean things that oughtn’t to be cleaned with alcohol, though.

Most of all, don’t be an idiot. I can’t stress this enough, and the Community Clinic, while staffed by women too nice to call you an idiot, doesn’t want you to be one either. If you’re going to take substances specifically designed to bring out the idiot in you, do so under the safest circumstances you can manage. Party with your friends, make a meeting place, follow a buddy system, and make some rules for yourself. If you’re going to take E or anything else likely to act as an empathogen (or "entactogen") — that is, a drug that makes you think you like people who may not, in truth, be worthy of your affection — try to do it in the presence of people who’ve got your back, and not because they want to climb up on it and hump you like a dog.

There are organizations dedicated to disseminating information on safer drug-taking. I do the sex part, and I habitually worry about young people having sex with people they don’t like, or, especially, with people who don’t like them. If you’re going to do it anyway, use a condom. Not only do you not have these people’s e-mail addresses, you may not even like them, remember? You’re not going to want to track them down later to ask about that funny-looking pimple.

And finally, if you’re female and have sex with men or might have sex with men after enough empathogens, bring Plan B emergency contraception with you. This may seem extreme, but it’s not like you have to use it. Condoms can break or be forgotten. Midnight’s "oh, what the hell" can easily turn to "What the hell did I do?" in the harsh (in Burning Man’s case, extremely harsh) light of day.

Love,

Andrea

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Upsie

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Dear Andrea:

Now that I’m postmenopausal, I’m worried about how I can get some orthopedic support in our bedroom to make "amore" easier. My arms and back are injured from overuse and wear and tear. I really think about the garage door-opener rig in the movie 9 to 5. Is there something like that hoist that is available for home use? I think this would work great. A friend suggests a sky-chair. What can we do? Grab bars are out since there isn’t a door nearby. Thanks for any help you can offer. I’m not dead yet.

Love,

Ouchy

Dear Ouchy:

Oh, dear. I hear you about the overuse and wear and tear — at some level I simply don’t believe we were meant to last this long, any more than my pampered, heavily medicated house cat was "meant" to still be alive and scratching at 21. Still, merely making it past menopause ought not to doom you to a life of pain and infirmity. Promise me you have seen some doctors and physical therapists and a teacher of some school of gentle and not-too-ridiculous yoga, and I will tell you what I know about assistive devices, which is plenty. Do we have a deal?

Starting on the lower-cost, lower-tech, and lower-to-the-ground options, I have often mentioned "sex pillows" and I will mention them again. You can buy fancy ramps and humpty-things from a company such as Liberator Adventure Gear, whose unintentionally hilarious Web site features apparent Chippendales rejects and their female counterparts posing awkwardly on big foam hummocks that would not look out of place in an ’80s loft-space complete with black leather coffee tables and Nagel prints on the wall. If you can’t deal with that level of retro, you can get foam ramps and donuts and the like from a medical supply company. They won’t come in colors (especially not "premium" colors), but you’re just going to throw a towel over them anyway.

Next we have stand-alone swings and slings. These do not operate on garage-door frequencies, but I’m not sure how good an idea mechanization is anyway. I keep imagining bits and parts getting snagged and hoisted against their will. Plus, while your neighbor may not hit the garage door opener and cause your … something … to go up, I did find a story about an English guy with a Turkish-made erectile implant that responded enthusiastically to a neighbor’s remote, and I’m not Snopesing it. Call me Fox Mulder: I Want to Believe.

There are dozens of swinglike devices made specifically for your purpose (well, not for the creaky and painful of joint, but for suspending a receptive partner in the air, hopefully above the insertive one). You could check out the jauntily-titled justaswinging.com; it carries a full range of swings. These devices are ugly (and the site itself, in sharp contrast to Liberator Adventure Whatsit, looks like the photographer set up shop in the bathroom of a San Fernando Valley furnished apartment and covered whatever he didn’t want in the shot with used bedsheets), but what do you want for $425? That will get you the Effortless model, which not only has a packable, hideable frame for vacations and visits from relatives, it even has a remote for raising, lowering, and possibly swiveling. That oughta solve your garage-door itch right there.

For considerably more money and even less aesthetic appeal, but with a degree of sturdiness and whoops!-lessness I cannot guarantee for a purpose-made sex swing, there are those devices made for lifting a disabled or infirm person in and out of bed. You don’t need any sort of special license to order one of these — or most medical equipment, really (didn’t Tom Cruise buy Katie her own ultrasound machine?). All you need is a charge card. A good charge card, though, because they’re not cheap. You’d need to order something like a "Sani-sling," too, if you think the problem through, and that will set you back another $400 or $500.

Forget that. You’re going to do better in the sex world than in the medical world. The sites may be sleazy and the devices may not be something you’d want either your parents or your kids to see, but the medical versions would require just as much explanation (since you’re not actually disabled, just a little rickety), be twice as ugly, and cost twice as much. I am all for getting the best-designed, toughest gear you can afford (our kids are outfitted as much or more by REI than they are by Babies "R" Us), but there’s such a thing as overkill. And anyway, buying medical supplies is kind of depressing unless you’re, you know, into that. Stick with the swings and slings. They’re the right tools for the job, although anything’s better than hooking yourself up to the garage door. Aren’t you glad you asked?

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Don’t be a hatah

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Dear Andrea:

I hate my contraceptive! Hate hate hate hatedy hate! I’m on the mini-pill because the other ones made me sick, and this one is giving me headaches, zits, bloating, crying jags … you name it. Planned Parenthood says the Mirena IUD has fewer side effects, but isn’t that just the same hormone? So I’ll be just as sick, but out more money? I think I’d just as soon get my tubes tied. Do you have any better suggestions or is it all the same bullshit?

Love,

I Hate Everything

Dear Thing:

I get it! You’re miserable. It’s bound to happen sometimes when the system you’re messing with is inextricably bound up with metabolism, mood, libido, and even whether you’re going to have zits or not. Perhaps hormonal birth control is not for you?

Usual caveats (I’m not a doctor, etc.), but I have two suggestions for you — beyond the Mirena, which is greatly beloved by most of its many users and really does have fewer side effects, mostly just break-through bleeding. The subject of permanent birth control, especially for women, always raises these interesting issues of self-determination and even self-knowledge. At the risk of sounding either paternalistic in the old-time doctory mode or, I guess, maternalistic (as a smugly parental parent addressing the childless), people change their minds. People change their lives, or their lives are changed for them, and there you go. If you are absolutely sure this could not possibly ever apply to you, I think this new thing, Essure, is a great option. It’s a pair of tiny coils inserted in a quickie outpatient procedure. The company claims that it’s covered by most insurance plans, and I believe it’s covered by Medicaid in 46 states. If you can find a way to get it, I’d say it has you written all over it (albeit in very small writing).

My second suggestion is hormonal, but bear with me. Although the arsenal of useful hormones is limited, making it appear at first glance as though there’s no real difference between this method and that, delivery style matters. Pills must survive a trip through your inhospitable digestive system before getting filtered and altered, often in unfortunate ways, by your liver, while topical methods follow a less torturous path and can be administered in much lower doses. Many women who can’t tolerate pills love the NuvaRing so much they’d marry it if they weren’t already seeing somebody. It’s very low dose, easy to use, and easy to quit if you don’t like it (remove offending ring, throw away). You should be able to get it for cheap at a clinic. If you hate it, feel free to write back and bitch me out, but seriously, you may be feeling so much better you won’t want to.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

At a recent routine checkup, my doctor asked what methods of contraception I’m currently using, and she strongly advised me to use something to fortify my old mainstay of a condom. Her suggestion, spermicide, sounded plenty reasonable. She’s been my doctor for most of my life and always trustworthy, so I felt good about going the extra mile to protect myself when I used spermicidal film the next time I had sex.

Next thing I know, I’m in the throes of a particularly grim yeast infection, which I’m not prone to, so I suspected the spermicide. Sure enough, a bit of Web-poking turned up a long-established link between nonoxynol-9 and yeast and bladder infections. Maybe it wouldn’t happen every time I used the stuff, but the connection is there, and this infection has been miserable enough that I assure you I’ll be avoiding nonoxynol-9 like the plague.

So what’s a girl to do? I know you’ve rolled your eyes in the past at overzealous combinations of birth control, but it does seem like with the potential for error in condom usage and the possibility of mishaps or undetected flaws, a not-so-invasive backup is a great idea — as long as it doesn’t come with the side effect of excruciating discomfort.

Love,

Back Me Up Here

Dear Here:

Oh dear. I hope she’s your primary care doc. I’d expect a gyno to know better. Nonoxynol-9 can indeed upset your delicate lady-balance but, even worse, can make you more vulnerable to STDs. I’d avoid it like — well, if not the plague, at least a bad yeast infection. And yes, I’ve rolled my eyes at some overcautious method-doublers, but usually for imagining that their brand-new sex lives with their equally recently devirginated childhood sweethearts require multiple methods of STD protection. For you, I’ll forswear the eye-rolling and suggest sticking with the condoms, following the directions, changing them mid-act if you’re going to be more vigorous or persistent than usual, and pre-locating a source for emergency contraception so you’ll have it in the somewhat unlikely but not impossible event of condom breakage. I feel about spermicide the way the first writer felt about the pill: hate hate hate hatedy hate.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Aftermeth

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By Andrea Nemerson


› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

My husband had been a secret methamphetamine user since the mid-1980s. He had issues with depression and repressed anger, but I had no idea that drugs had so much to do with everything that’s happened in our lives. We’ve always allowed each other a lot of space, so it was easy for him to hide his use and the spending that went with it.

Six months ago he finally got tired of the lies and the fear (random drug testing at work) and started rehab, and I feel I’m starting to get the man I married back. However, his confidence, libido, erections, and our sex life are all gone. He recently confessed that he was high every time we had sex for the past 10 years or so, and now that juice is gone. Blood pressure medication is compounding the problem.

Considering the number of people who never had sex without drugs and are now sober, there is precious little information about sex after sobriety. Most of what I found was along the lines of "You just need to get over the fear." It was all pretty much about having to figure it out for yourself, and nothing mentioned prescription meds. Maybe everyone really does have to find his or her own way back?

Despite some of the drug- and depression-related behaviors my husband has exhibited over the years, he is a wonderful man with many wonderful qualities, and I love him very much. I could live without the sex — my libido isn’t what it used to be either — but it does make me sad to think of leaving this world without ever making love with him again. The fact that it was drug enhanced didn’t make it any less great.

Is there any good information out there about sex after sobriety, especially after uppers? My husband is afraid he burned out his circuits with the drugs. I don’t know what to think. Maybe six months isn’t enough time to expect a transition to "normal" functioning. Going back to drugs is certainly no solution. Is there anything that can help in this situation? Trying to have a sex life without meth and with high BP meds … maybe it’s too much to ask.

Love,

Aftermeth

Dear After:

I could answer this myself — but why bother when My Friend the Therapist, whose practice consists largely of men whose sex lives were first fueled and then derailed by meth and subsequent sobriety, is willing to take it on? I warn you that My Friend is not given to sugar-coating things, but he does know what he’s talking about.

There’s a huge public health effort to convince people that sex without meth is great: "It’s so much more (intense, intimate, meaningful, etc.) without drugs." The truth is that, for many folks, post-meth sex will be less compelling than sex on meth, and that’s just the way it is. Brain chemistry versus ad campaigns: brain chemistry wins. If you start with that, you’ll have better chances of having a satisfying (though possibly never again as mind-blowing) sex life. Modest expectations = better odds of success.

For some people, this improves after the first year or so. It takes about that long for your brain to get back on track making the appropriate endogenous chemicals, and once they’re back on their own internal meds, a lot of folks experience a return of libido. If your partner is only six months sober, don’t expect much yet.

I usually recommend starting really, really slowly. He can try jacking off a little, work up to jacking off together, and eventually do some oral. Go slow, and leave the intercourse until he really, really wants it.

Viagra can be helpful in a reverse kind of way. Viagra itself won’t help with low sexual desire, but absence of libido plus Viagra plus calm environment plus stimulation = hard-on, which often leads to some kind of sexual activity, which then often leads to a return of some level of desire. If a heart condition is a factor, no Viagra without doctor’s permission. Try some alprostadil (a prescription erection aid that doesn’t affect blood pressure) if needed.

Short version: start with gentle, no-expectations stimulation, don’t expect much for the first year, and see how it goes. — Adam Zimbardo, MFT

I would also suggest that your husband talk to his doctor about the meds; it’s possible an adjustment might make a difference. And I do think it’s worth asking for Viagra or something similar. The worst that can happen is the doc says no. I promise the doctor will not recoil with horror, gasping, "Sex with your wife? Why ever would you want me to help you have that?"

I think it’s kind of criminal that people are expected to get and stay sober with so little warning that their entire sex, love, and intimacy pyramid might collapse, crash, and burn in the aftermath, and with so little information on how to rebuild it. Hope this helps.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Adventures in eroscillation

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I’m in my 20s, I’ve had a few partners, I masturbate fairly frequently (since childhood), and I have no hang-ups that I can identify. In fact, I enjoy having sex as often as possible (usually more often than my partners can keep up with). However, I don’t think I can orgasm. I have no problems enjoying sex, and I can feel myself building up to an orgasm, but just at the point where it feels like I may reach the peak and crest over, suddenly everything just ebbs away and fizzles out. What gives?

Love,

Going Nowhere

Dear Going:

You too? I had a bunch of these questions this year, but I don’t think there’s any sort of trendy "no orgasms are the new orgasms" thing going on here. I think the orgasmless female sexual experience is with us always. And due to the cosmic joke part wherein our most sensitive bits ended up outside while most of our partners are driven to lodge themselves inside, I don’t expect this phenomenon to go away anytime soon.

You, though — are you saying you don’t come from masturbation either, even though you diligently practice like a good girl? That is frustrating! And it tells me that despite a professed lack of hang-ups, you are likely just not comfortable — sorry for the dismal cliché but there is no better way to say this — "letting go." It’s truly unlikely that you lack the capacity — that just doesn’t happen much with young, healthy women. What does happen is fear, inhibition, and "spectatoring," or allowing oneself to be distracted from the moment by wondering what one looks like or what one’s partner (even imaginary ones) is thinking of one’s performance, and so on. As I mentioned the last time (see "Going solo," 02/20/2008), one of the best sources for exercises aimed at getting one’s inner critic to STFU is Julia Heiman and Joseph LoPiccolo’s Becoming Orgasmic (Prentice Hall, 2003), although there are tons of similar resources out there.

There are also tools available that simply didn’t exist when pioneering works like Becoming Orgasmic‘s original 1980s version were being written — and by "tools" I don’t mean coping skills and so on, as referenced by therapists and therapy geeks. I mean tools that use batteries or alternating current. Some of the stuff out there now is just mind-blowingly efficient, so much the right tools for the job that they practically dare you not to come. Try something in the way of the Rabbit Pearl or one of its many descendants, any of these things that rotate, undulate, buzz, flicker, dice, puree, and frappé. Then see if you’re still having a problem.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

My ex-boyfriend was able to give me multiple orgasms, usually using his hands. I mean real, one-after-the-other, sometimes three or four in 60 seconds. I haven’t been able to replicate this myself and I haven’t found anyone else who has quite the same effect on me. I miss it. Do you have any advice? I’m sure there’s no foolproof way to recreate this experience — step one, step two, presto! — but any tips from you or your readers would be welcome.

Love,

Miss the Multiple

Dear Miss:

Foolproof, no, but quite reliable, certainly. Just because you have not shared the above writer’s frustrations does not mean you can’t share her prescription: high-tech sex toys, the kind with something that goes in and something that stays out and various things that go ’round and ’round.

My favorite sex toy vendor, for no real reason other than that it is local to me and staffed with friendly nerdy chicks who can write a decent sentence and test everything before considering carrying it on the site, is Blowfish.com. And while you don’t have to shop there, you should certainly give its Web site a look. The "luxury toys" section is especially fun — even if you don’t want to spend $119, isn’t "The Cone" fascinating? It’s just a pink silicone, well, cone with a 16-function motor, and I suspect it may exude "come to me" pheromones like the similar-looking pink jelly monsters in erotic science fiction are wont to do. (They then enslave you and breed in you and you die, but that’s another story.) It even has an "orgasm button" (isn’t the whole thing an orgasm button?) for the impatient.

Then there’s the Eroscillator, which I love because it sounds and looks like something a bearded, dispassionate 19th-century physician might have used to solicit nervous paroxysm from hysterical housewives.

It also carries less rarified and less expensive options, of course, all of which are rather remarkable examples of modern and mostly Japanese engineering. And I can pretty well promise there was nothing your boyfriend could do with his hands that these can’t do with their … parts. Admittedly, however, they don’t love you. Is that part of the equation necessary, do you think?

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Belay that

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

Ever since I was nine or so, I’ve had unexplored dominant-role power exchange fantasies. Now they are at odds with my marriage of 20-plus years (my wife isn’t into it) and my worldview/faith. I feel pretty strongly that I’m fooling myself when I think that finding a similarly-situated woman to clandestinely and mutually scratch this itch would somehow be cathartic and result in resolution once and for all, but the fantasy persists. Are these type of fantasies typically lifelong? Do they wane with age?

Love,

Hoping

Dear Hope:

Is it national S-M month or something? Shouldn’t I have been flooded with gay, lesbian, bisexual, transexual, and questioning questions all June instead? I do like a good S-M question, of course. I was just wondering.

I doubt you experienced those childhood urges as "dominant-role power exchange fantasies." I guess, rather, that you really enjoyed playing pirates, but only if you got to tie the prisoners to the mast and do weird stuff to them, and you never wanted to be the prisoner yourself. And eventually your friends got bored or irritated, but you wanted to keep playing. Likewise, I assume that more recently you’ve been doing some reading and now you recognize your youthful leanings for what they may have been: early indicators of later inclinations.

These types of fantasies are fairly likely to be lifelong, but like any other enthusiasm they are apt to wax and wane with the seasons, the hormones, and the circumstances. One of those circumstances may be deprivation, but I have to say that it’s just as likely to be immersion — if sex breeds sex (and it does), then kink no doubt breeds kink as well. Therefore, indulging in online simulacra or other noncorporeal outlets is not necessarily a cure for inappropriate fantasizing. (Hold that thought.)

"Wait," you say. "What’s so inappropriate about S-M fantasies? I thought Andrea was kinda in favor of those?" Maybe I am and maybe I amn’t, but that’s beside the point. It is obvious, given your commitment to your marriage and your wife’s lack of interest, your power-play longings are not doing you any favors, so dwelling on them may not turn out to be very helpful. Individual real-life appropriateness aside, I actually think S-M is morally neutral: great for some people, a bad choice for others, and, as my Hispanophone friend Melissa would say, bla bla y bla.

Now, is it really a bad idea to immerse oneself in S-M fantasies if one will not be indulging them in real life? No, of course it isn’t. If there is one tenet by which all sex educators swear, it is that fantasy is fantasy and reality is reality, and there is no obligation that ever the twain should meet. If, however, the fantasy ignites and will not quiet, and you find yourself spending ever more of your precious waking hours obsessing on it, then cultivating a very rich fantasy life is probably not for you.

Ah, but you didn’t really ask about fantasy. You asked about finding a real person, similarly unfulfilled at home, and embarking on a S-M-only clandestine nonromance. And I say, in the immortal words of Rocky the Flying Squirrel, "That trick never works!"

Is it possible to have a partner with whom one only does S-M, no sex, and with whom one does not fall in love? Emphatically yes. Is it a good idea to do this without one’s spouse’s agreement? Of course not. Add in the special intimacy, false or not, that you and such a partner would likely forge, based largely on the seductive call of "my partner doesn’t understand me," and really, just no. I didn’t miss the part about your worldview and faith being incompatible with acting on any of this, either. Happily you do see that putting yourself through that many uncomfortable and potentially unethical contortions at once can only lead to injury — psychic and possibly otherwise. I think.

I do not believe that acting out a power differential with a fully informed and consenting partner is incompatible with an egalitarian or nonviolent worldview, but if you do, that’s going to be a bad fit. As for not fitting in with your faith, well, I’m unaware of any organized religions except perhaps what a friend once referred to as "Episcopaganism" that expressly embrace kinky sex, but many insist only that you respect your body and your partner’s, an idea that is open to hairsplitting interpretation. You would know best, of course. If what I’m hearing from you is what you meant to present, though, I’d have to say that a moderate amount of (porn-assisted, if you like) fantasy and no real-life contacts will be the healthier choice for you. Finding a girl on the Internet and flogging her? Not gonna help.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

All or nothing

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

When my husband and I first married, he was into S-M. I was very inexperienced, while he … well … wasn’t. Things were interesting for a while until he repeatedly breached our full-disclosure agreement and saw other people behind my back, but came clean about it later. There was also an issue with anal sex (he’s hurt me too many times). We’ve been completely out of the scene for several years and are enjoying a much closer connection. However, three kids later sex is very boring, planned, and short.

I’d love to have fun with him again, but he’s so sex-crazy I’m afraid of re-opening the door to trouble. He still uses a lot of nasty porn and Web sites where he exchanges e-mails with subs. I don’t like this, but I understand that he’s got to have an outlet. He’s a pretty all-or-nothing kind of guy. Also, I think that he isn’t sure how to approach me anymore after having three children. Who feels sexy with baby puke on their sleeve and no shower? Is there any hope for us? Also, he refuses to go into therapy or ask for help because he doesn’t want to be judged.

Love,

Want Something

Dear Want:

You may be surprised to hear this, but for a couple who not only have such disparate experience levels and requirements but also three small children, you seem to be doing pretty well. Any number of issues casually glanced on in your letter could easily have doomed you — yet you persevere and even feel closer than when you were doing all that kinky stuff? You’re OK.

The S-M obscures things a bit, but the core issues here are no different from ones we discuss in classes (rather imprecisely titled "Is There Sex After Motherhood?") I’ve been teaching at a local nice-moms-and-their-babies education center. The baby puke, for instance. One of the most disheartening things I heard while awaiting my own babies was, "Oh, I didn’t change my clothes for six months. I just wore this ratty old T-shirt full of holes and spit-up." (This from a lovely friend who was only telling me the truth as she’d lived it.) "Forget it, then," I thought. "If it’s going to be like that, I’m not doing it."

And it wasn’t like that, of course, not for me — and it shouldn’t be for you. One needs to do whatever it takes not to sink to that barely human state where you figure, what the hell, why bother showering when you’re just going to get dirty again? Get enough T-shirts so there’s always a clean one! Drag everybody into the shower with you, get up at 5 a.m., pay a neighbor to watch the kids for half an hour, whatever works. Get enough time to look and feel decent. We’re not talking about a hot-stone massage, Yummy Mummy makeover here. Grooming enough to bear the sight and smell of oneself shouldn’t be too high a bar.

I would like to launch into some ways you two could get back to breaking out the whips and chains and stuff, but I worry. Does he really need to have it all? Is he really insisting on nothing if he can’t? I’m hoping a guy starved of all but virtual kink for a couple of years may be more amenable than he used to be to a scaled-down version of "hell-bent for leather." Maybe "leaning toward Naugahyde"?

I do believe he doesn’t know how to approach you anymore, so here’s the obvious suggestion: you approach him, but only after ensuring that you won’t end up with him holding the power, reins, flogger, modem, and lube again, which he didn’t use enough of anyway. Take this opportunity to decide which games you liked, which might do, and which are untenable. Given the scarcity conditions that follow the introduction of many small children into the marital equation, I would also suggest that the whole "other partners" thing is right out. In order to get beyond the dreary status quo (although I do have to put a good word in for the parents-of-small-children quickie while I’m here), you’ll need to plan. You’ll also need to throw some childcare money at the problem (what my husband and I refer to, just to annoy people, as "paying young women for sex"). This is all stressful and expensive enough already, so no way will you want to pay for babysitters for his nights out without you. Save your cash for kinky-sex dates.

Obviously, all this depends on him not being so crazy, sex- or otherwise, and that "some but not all" actually is an option. I’m hoping that after a few years of deprivation and with the added motivation of keeping a beloved family intact, he can embrace moderation. Tell him it’s like the French model of eating, you know? A little + a little + a little = plenty.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Andrea is also teaching two classes: "You’ve Really Got Your Hands Full" — a realistic look at having twins — at Birthways in Berkeley.

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