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Dirty girl!

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

My girlfriend is into degradation during sex. It turns me on too, so I’m not worried about damaging our great relationship. I would like to explore more but am not sure where/how to start. Is there somewhere I can learn to be more degrading to my girl?

Love,

Earnest Student

Dear Earnest:

Heh. It’s not easy being mean, is it? People who enjoy abusing the comparatively powerless require no instruction on how better to be beastly. There are no books, for instance, on being rude to your waiter, or dog-kicking for fun and profit. Sadly, though, while recreational malevolence may not come easily to the naturally nice, no one has yet noted and attempted to fill the obvious market niche. There are classes and books on dominance and submission (you should attend or buy some) and quite a few on how to talk dirty, but none dedicated to lists of synonyms for bitch and whore or handy degradation scripts you can print out and tape to the wall behind the bed.

If what you’re looking for is vocab homework, you could try some of the abundant movies and stories out there in which one person degrades the other viciously but all in good fun. Why not rent some DVDs or surf the Web for ideas? It does occur to me, though, that if your girlfriend has watched or read the same stuff, she may recognize your cribbed dialogue and end up laughing at you. Nothing breaks the mood like your sub helplessly giggling at your attempts to be brutal. All you really need, anyway, is to work on your attitude. It doesn’t much matter if you call her "squealing little slut-pig" or "daddy’s little cum bucket" or whatever; it’s all in the delivery. You will gain confidence with practice, and if it’s working for her, she won’t be rating you on the originality of your epithets.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

I’ve yet to come across something in your column similar to what I recently experienced (and was grossed out by), and I’m wondering what makes certain people desire what they do.

Several months ago I went out with a good-looking guy I’d met before. I was in the mood, so we ended up at his place for sex. The foreplay was great, and I was getting into it. While I was straddling his face as he performed cunnilingus, he suddenly asked me if I would defecate (not his word) on his face. He seemed to get excited after he said it but did not take note of my reaction and tried to put his mouth over my anal area. I had to get out of there right away.

I don’t remember what I said exactly, but I was dressed and gone in less than five minutes, I think. Have you heard of this desire, and how prevalent do you think it is? What could possibly cause someone to want that? Maybe I don’t want to know.

Love,

Don’t Tell Me!

Dear Don’t:

I don’t know where you’ve been looking (I most certainly have written about it before), but if you’d entered "scat" into Google (on second thought, do not enter "scat" into Google), you would’ve been deluged with information, far more information than you could possibly have wanted.

Oddly, the answer to the question why people "want that" won’t be found in the above-mentioned deluge, because nobody actually knows. Most attempted explanations will say something about flouting taboos or being dirty (there’s nothing dirtier, really, is there?) or perhaps rebellion against the tyranny of toilet-training. These sound good, but you don’t have to be very clever to imagine that the desire to play with shit has something to do with bad toilet-training, do you? Doesn’t mean it’s true.

All we know for sure is that there are (some, few) people who fantasize about playing with shit and (some, fewer) people who actually do it. Most of those who only fantasize have no wish to follow through, but I’ll also wager that inability to find a willing partner keeps some in the fantasy-only camp. If one of them wrote me (oh, they have, they have) wondering how to broach the subject with a would-be partner, I’d probably say, "Whatever you do, don’t do what Don’t Tell Me’s date did." It’s hard to imagine a clumsier approach than blurting out "Shit on me!" in the midst of passion, without so much as a "by your leave." Well, actually shitting on a person, all spontaneous-like, would be worse, but let’s not even speak of that.

I don’t think that someone having a disgusting desire is in and of itself so terrible. One can always say, "No, thank you" and no harm done, after all. Not realizing that most young ladies won’t take kindly to such a demand, however, demonstrates such a profound emotional tone deafness that I really must wonder about your new boyfriend. Or rather, your ex–new boyfriend. Spontaneity is nice, but some subjects require a more formal introduction.

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.

Editor’s note: This column originally ran on Dec. 28, 2004.

No depression

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I’m 30 and have been married for five years. I do all the cooking, cleaning, and shopping. My wife does a few things around the house, but not many. We do not have any sex at all; she doesn’t have the drive any more. The last time we did it was two years ago. My wife has even told me to find someone else and to stop wasting time on her. I just don’t know what to do.

Love,

Big Guy

Dear Big:

As much as I don’t feel like playing Quincy (the wrinkles!), I might be willing to declare your marriage dead for you, except for one thing: I think your wife is probably depressed, which means she can probably be treated. And if she can be treated, maybe your marriage can be helped too.

I had to check twice to make sure you’d really written "30," and not the 50 or 60 your sad, resigned little note put me more in mind of. If you’re really 30 and didn’t marry your gramma’s longtime mahjongg partner, then your wife, too, is presumably young and was, presumably, not like this when you married her. So something has happened in a mere five years to transform her from whatever vibrant young thing you married to this limp, tired, and rather bitter-sounding dishrag. Would you please sit down with her and talk about seeing someone? And listen: just leave the no-sex part out of it for starters. "I’m not getting laid and that means you’re broken" is not a recommended opening move.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

I’m in my early 30s, single, and have never been with a professional sex worker. I have traveled to all kinds of poor third world countries, so I’ve had infinite opportunities, but I’ve never wanted to do it. I’m a relationships kind of guy.

However, my work has taken me to a new location where I am basically of no value in the dating market. I’m interesting, not bad looking, fit, tall, and have lots of other good qualities, but the women here are looking for a cool local guy with lots of free time on his hands. Dating is flat-out impossible for me while I’m here.

In my period of involuntary celibacy, I have learned something: men (and probably women too, but I can only speak as a man) are not designed for celibacy. It’s not just sex that I miss. It’s some indefinable part of the experience of being with a woman. The smile, the pheromones, the cuddling, the long hair …

I know that a pro’s smile is not the same thing as the smile of a woman who really likes me — which can never be bought — and I don’t like fake things. Should I suspend my disbelief for a few hours and just enjoy it? Would I feel rotten afterward? And, even more important, is this an ethical thing to do? Is there anything else I can do in my situation? I wish I could go somewhere where a woman would occasionally return my smile, but I am stuck here for now.

Love,

Lonely (without) Abroad

Dear Lonely:

You sent this letter quite some time ago, so let’s hope you’re out of No-Love-Land by now. Since you asked, though, I have no ethical qualms about people paying for sex as long as the person doing the selling is as fully empowered to not be a prostitute as she is to be one. Whether or not you believe that this condition can ever be met, especially for women, depends on your broader sexual-political viewpoint. I am rather a middle-of-the-roadish feminist these days and neither believe that all sex with men is prostitution (or rape) nor that prostitution is an especially empowering form of goddess-worship. I do believe that many women really are in a position to freely choose the sex trades and to leave them when they wish. Those are, of course, the lucky ones, though — the college girl stripper/hooker/performance artists, not the streetwalkers — and we haven’t even looked overseas, where poor young women may have fewer choices.

Is it ever ethical to pay such a "professional"? Many would say of course not. Others, including myself in some moods, would choose the practical over the ideal and point out that while such transactions may be distasteful, if nobody pays her she will starve, or be beaten, or both. This is one of those situations that has no perfect answer, the world in which it occurs being too imperfect to yield one.

I don’t think hiring a street prostitute in a poor country is really your cup of weak yak-butter tea anyway. A better idea, in your position, would be to cultivate a few pseudo-intimate online relationships and save your money for the occasional trip abroad to visit one of those (provided you’ve netted an actual woman) or, failing that, to pay a fancy freelancer a lot of euros.

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.

No free lunch

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Readers:

Have you ever read Geek Love (Random House, 1983) by Katherine Dunn? It’s a love it/hate it kind of thing that was very popular among a certain segment (now called "hipsters," I guess) and it begins, unforgettably, "When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets … " Don’t ask me why, but I’m having an apparently irresistible urge to call you, the readers, "my dreamlets" today. So:

My Dreamlets:

This is not good news, but neither is it as dismal as it might first appear. Have you heard the latest about human papillomavirus (warts) and throat cancer? Did it disappear with unseemly haste from such headlines as it made, or am I just overly sensitive to the way news that interests us (for some value of "us") never seems to get as much play as news that interests them?

It ought to come as no surprise that HPV can cause throat cancers if you use your throat receptively for sex, same as it does with cervixes and anuses (did you know that "What is the plural of anus?" is quite a popular topic of Webular discussion?). But it’s only been in the past few years that researchers have established a clear link. What’s even newer is the epidemiology: who is getting it and how. What we now know is that there has been an upsurge in throat cancers (6,000 cases a year and an annual increase of up to 10 percent in men younger than 60), and that most of the cases in these younger patients can be ascribed to HPV. Cancers caused by HPV can hang around for decades before making themselves known, and these recent cases are thought to have been incubating since as far back as the late 1960s and ’70s. What else were people doing in the late ’60s and ’70s? What year did Deep Throat come out, again?

I have been known to roll my eyes at the idea that the boomers invented sex as we know it. "There are only so many possible combinations of body parts," I’ll say. "Do you really think nobody thought to put that in their mouths until sometime after World War II?" It’s actually true, though — as far as we can tell from what research we have — that oral sex became madly more common some time, yes, after World War II. Before that it was obviously well-known (and popularly blamed on the French), but it really wasn’t ubiquitous, as it is now. And those who did indulge probably did so with far fewer partners. Especially during that one brief shining moment between the dawn of the sexual revolution and the appearance first of herpes and then of course, AIDS, people really did put that in their mouths a whole lot more than they had previously. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

So OK, now what? Well, we have to admit that oral sex, especially on men, is not necessarily safe sex. And while this is not the first time that the blow job’s sacred status as the Safe Hot Thing has been challenged, it is probably the most serious. Not only does HIV really not pass readily through oral sex, it is itself quite rare. HPV is as common as dirt.

So — panic? I think not yet. These new cancers are nowhere near as common as you’d expect if HPV infections just automatically turned into cancers 30 years after your sluttiest year at college. It’s estimated that at least 50 percent of Americans have been infected at some point. The CDC itself uses that "at some point" to mean that many — indeed probably most — people infected at some point simply clear it from their systems at some other point. These people will not get cancer, and only a small percentage of the remaining, non-clearing cases will.

Meanwhile, you know that vaccine some people are agitating against giving to little girls — just in case the admission that one day they will be sexually active ends up making that day come sooner than they’d like? It doesn’t only work on little girls. That’s just the suggested target group right now, for a number of purely sociological reasons. It was extensively tested on young women and the maker, Merck, hopes to begin testing in males this year. If it works for men too, there’s no reason we can’t begin to eradicate the entire class: HPV-caused cancers of the throat, cervix, penis, anus, and other mucus-membraney places where people have been putting things.

Not that this is great news for people who have been infected, not cleared the infection, and could go on to develop cancer. We have no routine test yet. The pretty-good news seems to be that throat cancers caused by HPV are more curable than their non-HPV counterparts. And my advice, my dreamlets? Well, I really hate to say this, or even think it, but it may be time to start thinking about condoms, at least if we’re planning to become raging blow-job queens anytime in the near future. I know! I’m sorry!

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, and "Is There Sex After Motherhood?" at Day One Center in San Francisco and other venues.

Knock three times

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I am a happily married man (16 years). My wife and I’s lives are pretty good. But I have a recurring fantasy about swapping with a couple who are our friends. We flirt and play around (no touching) but we have skinny-dipped, flashed our parts, etc. What I can’t figure out is why I want to do more. Thinking about it turns me on a lot. I have spoken to my wife about it in a general way — but never mentioned it to our friends — and she typically just laughs. What do you think?

Love,

Hopeful

Dear Full:

I think you have to go back and change, "My wife and I’s sex lives are pretty good" to "My wife and I have a pretty good sex life." Unless you:

A) want people to think you and your wife have two completely separate sex lives and

B) want people to think you’re a moron.

If no one else is going to take a stand against pronoun abuse, then by golly, it’s going to have to be me. I. Me.

Grammar aside, I don’t see what’s so terribly confusing about this situation. I assume all of you are semi-youngish, still cuteish and hornyish, and often quite drunkish, or at least that’s the picture I’m getting. There’s nothing wrong with being any of those things, of course. I do not judge! It turns you on because other naked cuteish drunkish bodies are meant to turn you on, and because while many men in particular (although this is not in any way limited to either the young or the male) may find themselves satisfied day-to-day with who and what they’ve got at home, they would jump at the chance for some free (that is, wife-approved) alternative nookie. Nobody will be shocked to hear this, I assume? Some fidelity, granted, is fueled by honest-to-God "I only have eyes for you"-ness. But another substantial chunk is inspired by the "I’d like to, but she’d kill me" sentiment. Swapping, presumably, removes imminent murder from the equation, hence its appeal — at least in theory.

Since you used the word "swap," I’m assuming that the lure here is the other wife. Of course it is possible that you, Mr. "My wife and I’s," do not so much value precision in language and really meant "all get together in a great heaving heap of miscellaneous body parts," in which case it’s even less surprising. Nothing like a nice old-fashioned orgy to get those unnamed, unconfessed itches scratched before pretending they never itched in the first place. But whatev. It doesn’t matter why you want to do this: you want to, that’s all. Too bad you’re not going to get to.

What? How do I know? Because, silly rabbit, you have asked your wife (and more than thrice, I suspect), and she just laughed. If she was interested and had been waiting for you to bring it up, she would have laughed, yes! and then gone on to say: "We should ask them (giggle)! I mean, just for a joke! And see what they say, you know, just for laughs (giggle)." She would have said that, and she didn’t. And now you have to drop it. You get three tries with most things like this. After that, it turns into pestering or, depending on the dynamic in a given household (no aspersions cast), bullying. There are always exceptions. It is acceptable, for instance, to mention more than three times that you think your partner ought to be getting more of the oral sex. Even that would wear thin pretty quickly, though, if not actually accompanied by more of the aforementioned oral sex.

When it comes to more controversial acts, though, like wife-swapping or bondage or anal play, I think most people say no when they seriously mean no. By the second offer, most people who might be a little — or even a lot — interested but don’t feel comfortable copping to that yet will whisper, "Let me think about it, OK?" And you have to back off and let them. By the third time, they should be ready to say yes or no. What’s to be gained by a fourth try, or a fifth?

There are, of course, subjects that can only be brought up once and then they must be banished forever. If you want to raise one of those, you have to bring it up the right way, which goes like this:

"Honey, come watch this video with me."

"What’s it about?"

"Um, pooping on people."

If you receive a resounding "EEEEEEEEEW! NO!", you will know to drop it. If you don’t drop it, there is no help for you. Compared with pooping on people, your fantasy is pretty tame. But you still only get three tries and then it’s back to the "flirting and flashing" for you. Be glad you’ve got that.

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, and "Is There Sex After Motherhood?" at Day One Center in San Francisco and other venues.

Fork This

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Readers:

This is probably the only time the Alt Sex column will cover the same territory as my new venture, a nice, moderately wholesome blog about kiddie consumer culture (www.gogetyourjacket.com). I was prepared to let the "expectation of blow jobs on Mother’s Day" thing go, especially since US Mother’s Day itself is a few weeks gone, but now the Father’s Day press releases are trickling in — they’re not gushing manfully yet, but I suppose that’s to follow — and the picture that’s emerging of the state of sex in the modern Western (hemisphere, not yippee-yi-yo-ki-yay) bedroom is so weird I can’t let it alone.

First there was the Mother’s Day gift basket meant to get horny, aggrieved husbands with feelings of entitlement to bug their wives for sex instead of going out and getting them a pain au chocolat (the baskets contained paint au chocolat, but that is not at all the same thing). To me, this implies a target audience of couples who aren’t having sex, the female halves of which have to be jollied into it with cheesy "romantic" gifts and who, even more weirdly, can be jollied into it with cheesy "romantic" gifts.

And now I have a "New! For Father’s Day!" ad from the last place I’d expect to produce a sleazy and ultimately sad commentary on the perceived state of modern child-having marriage: a mom ‘n’ pop, organic, non-sweatshop-made "family fashion" (novelty T-shirt) company. I mean, women, would you get your husband a shirt that says "Daddy needs some love’n?" How about one that reads, "My wife likes to spoon but I prefer to fork?" Bear in mind that these are supposed to be gifts. What are we saying here? Why not just go to CafePress and make him a shirt that says, "You’re not getting any and I think that’s pretty funny, har har har!"?

Oh, and men, would you wear it? Would you write to me and tell me why? And if you’d order it yourself and wear it out to lunch (real men don’t brunch, right?) on Father’s Day to mortify your wife, explain that too. By e-mail, please, you don’t sound like the sort of people I would like to meet in real life. I’m embarrassed for those women and I don’t even know any of them.

I truly don’t. I swear I know a goodly number of heterosexuals — one does run into them now and then — and the cartoony vision these products are promoting is just not something I see a lot of. I’m happy to report that I don’t hear from or even hear about a lot of marriages in which the wives refuse sex out of contempt, complete loss of interest, or utter lack of concern over whether their mates are happy or not. Recently I’ve been meeting a lot of women who are hoping to regain lost sex drives and lives after having babies, and even they (of course these particular women are the ones who are motivated enough to talk about it) never show a hint of contempt for the men they aren’t doing it with. They’d like to do it. They want to want to do it. They’ve just lost touch with it. Desire disorder is the dysfunction of the day — just wait till the drug that fixes that hits the market. People will be all, "Viagra who?"

And while cheesy dad gifts are on the table, I would like to register one more complaint. I don’t know what the gift-promoters are trying to pull here, but it struck me as quite completely unfair that after the stupid Mother’s Day come-ons, which were both sexed-up and creepily infantilizing, the first thing I got that was aimed at dads said simply that you should get him a bottle of really nice single-malt scotch. What, no boxer shorts on a stick?

Also, on the subject of knowing a few heterosexuals here and there, I was asked if I would comment on the California Supreme Court’s ruling on gay marriage (um, they were for it). Sure. I have to admit I have nothing particularly pithy to say about legal gay marriage. I’m for it. I’m a lot more for it than some of my gayest friends are, as a matter of fact: they’re in the "Why should we beg you to let us pretend to be just like you?" camp, while I’m over here in the "It’s not fair that I should get to claim a certain kind of legitimacy for my relationship that you don’t get for yours" camp. They pat me on the head. Me, I’m just dorky enough to be all rejoice-y about this, and hope that my Midwestern friend’s "spousal unit" gets to make an honest woman of her after, oh, 15 years and two kids. And how can any event that occasions this headline — "Star Trek’s George Takei to Marry Longtime Partner" — fail to produce a "Woo!" and a "Hoo!"?

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, and "Is There Sex After Motherhood?" at Day One Center in San Francisco and other venues.

TWSS

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I’m confused. Are there any guys out there who aren’t at the extremes as far as sex goes? My ex-boyfriend was completely obsessed. Not only did he want it four or more times a day, he’d want to have phone sex at least twice a day when we were apart. I think of myself as a pretty sexual person, but even I have my limits. (Plus, I think phone sex is boring. Though I like to masturbate, it’s hard for me to orgasm when the person on the other end of the line is waiting for it.) My ex was so obsessed with sex that he saw everything as sexual. If I said it was raining, he’d say, "Oooh, sounds … wet." If I said something was hard (difficult), he’d say "Ooh, hard!" And he wasn’t some 20-year-old kid. He was 48! I’m 31, and since I felt more mature than him, we broke up. Then I fell in love with his polar opposite. I’ve been with the new guy for a couple of years and our sex life has gone downhill rapidly, from two or three times a week to maybe once every three months. I’ve tried to initiate, but I get nowhere. It only happens when he wants to. I really love this guy and I want to marry him. I just need to figure out how to find a happy medium between my sex-obsessed ex and my uninterested current beau.

Love,

Opposite Day

Dear Day:

A happy medium in your case would require something like the matter transporter machine from The Fly — you’d put Mr. "Ooh, Sounds … wet" in one pod and Mr. Every Three Months in the other and zap them back and forth in space until their DNA was well and truly mixed. Ideally, you’d end up with a guy who wanted to do it about as often as you do, with room for negotiation. Un-ideally, you’d make a boyfriend who never wants to have sex but does like to make a whole lot of immature, sniggery jokes about it. On second thought, maybe this isn’t the best plan.

The first guy sounds unbearable. I’m surprised you stuck it out with him as long (ooh, long) as you did. It must have been hard to … I mean, you had to have been open to … I mean on top of — oh, never mind. It must have been like living with Michael Scott with a few drinks in him: "That’s what she said!" Awful. You have my sympathy.

The new guy is a harder nut (oh, shut up) to crack. Are you really as mystified as you sound about where the sex has gone and why, or is there a chance that you do know what’s up (shut up) but don’t want to admit it? I don’t think it’s abnormal to experience a drop-off after a few years, but four times a year is slim pickings. As a mere stripling of 31, I would be very cautious, in your place, about signing any long-term contracts under those conditions. At the very least, you ought to know what’s going on with him (and with your relationship) before you marry someone who, frankly, isn’t going to satisfy you. It would be a different story if you were saying, "We only do it every three months and we’re both happy with that." Then I’d dance at your wedding. The way you’re talking, though, I’d feel more like I was dancing on your marriage’s grave. And while I’ve always liked Nick Cave, I’m just not that goth. Sorry. It ain’t going to work.

You’re going to have to have one of those sit-downs nobody wants but nearly everybody needs at some point. This is no time to ask him what’s wrong with him or to suggest that maybe he’s just not man enough for you — not if you actually like him. It is time to find out what’s going on in his head all those times you initiate and "get nowhere." Is it possible he’s missing your cues? Is there a better time or a better approach? A different act? If the answers are all "no" and this is just who he is — a guy who’s interested in sex four times a year and anything more seems unnecessary or unappealing — then you’re going to have to figure out if there’s a way you can get your itches scratched. Maybe he’d be happy just holding you while you take care of things for yourself. Maybe he’d be OK if you had a "friend." Maybe he needs a checkup and a meds adjustment and all will be well after that. In any case, you’re going to have to find out. I don’t care if it’s hard. And that’s not what she said, or so I hear.

Love,

Andrea


It’s not all about the sex! Andrea’s new blog, "Go Get Your Jacket: a blog about begetting and spending," debuts May 19 at gogetyourjacket.typepad.com. Pink or blue? Made in China or made in Vermont at three times the price? What are we buying for our kids, and why?

Andrea is also teaching two classes: "You’ve Really Got Your Hands Full" — a realistic look at having twins — at Birthways in Berkeley, and "Is There Sex After Motherhood?" at Day One Center in San Francisco and other venues.

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.

Mother’s Day don’t

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Readers:

I recently received a press release saying,

Although moms appreciate flowers and breakfast-in-bed on their special day, this year Dad should try to spice things up and not be so predictable! Booty Parlor offers items to add some fun to Mother’s Day that Mom and Dad can enjoy, together …

It went on, predictably, to hawk a number of chocolatelike items intended to be smeared on bodies (in bed, mind you) and removed in some fashion other than rigorous showering, heavily scented oils and bath bombs, and something which may or may not have been a vibrator but both image and text were too busy being coy to tell me. How do I loathe the idea of a "sexy" Mother’s Day? Let me count the ways.

It isn’t just the seXAY-fication of a faux-holiday properly celebrated by the delivery of adorably botched breakfasts made by pride-puffed seven-year-olds to mothers enjoying a morning off from domestic drudgery; it’s also that "should" sticking out there like a sore thumb that deserved everything it got: "Dad should …." Sez who? And who, we may ask, is "Dad," and what is he doing in that sentence? Either he’s your dad, who has no place in this scenario, or he’s your children’s dad, a role that only exists in relation to the people he is "Dad" to. This is not confusing. Imagine a bath that a male parent takes with his children; now think about a bath that a male partner takes with you. Who is your daddy?

While we’re counting, whose idea of sexy is this anyway? It’s not that it’s meant to appeal to a clumsily imagined male sense of what a clumsy male thinks women think is sexy (that really did make sense, I promise, go back and reread if you don’t believe me) — it’s that it’s nobody in particular’s idea of sexy. It is, as a friend put it, "the sex-related equivalent of the ‘festive hot chocolate assortment’ you give your coworkers at Christmas."

Do mothers even want sex or "sexiness" for Mother’s Day? Some would, sure. Many would welcome a reminder that Beloved Spouse still thinks she’s attractive. Fewer would welcome an additional duty ("being sexy") thrust upon them on what promised to be a day off. And yes, I do know how that sounds. As much as I may hate the popular idea of a mom doing pretty much anything to get out of having sex with her hubby, that’s exactly the sitcom-ish image this thing gives me. I picture an exhausted, vaguely shrewish, newish mom and a horny, sulky husband who’s resorting to ham-handed hinting. "Oh, God," she thinks, "chocolate sex paint and satin undies on a stick. Christ, maybe if I blow him he’ll go away and let me sleep late."

Although this ugly picture contains the usual stereotype’s tiny ring of truth, we don’t need to promulgate it. Parents in this culture hardly need any encouragement to see their roles thus, and I certainly don’t intend to promote this vision of connubial unbliss as either inevitable or permanent. I am all for sexy marriage. I had sympathy for author Ayelet Waldman when she got into that ridiculous brouhaha a few years ago when she meant to say that grown-up love and lust, not children, are the heart of a marriage, but she ended up sticking her foot down her throat and gacking up something about how she loves her husband so much she’d throw one of her children in front of a bullet for him. I didn’t say I agreed with her, mind, but I did think it was about time somebody spoke up for the hot bond that preexisted the children and, one hopes, will burn on long after the children are on their own. Just not on Mother’s Day. I think Mother’s Day is a bit silly, but if you’re going to celebrate it, it ought to have more to do with the family unit and less to do with dad’s. After the family stuff — a lovely evening out and copious oral sex, why not? — but no springing "sexy" surprises and no sticky body paint. Ever, really.

I asked a number of female friends how they’d like a bunch of sex toys (assuming nicer sex stuff than this) for Mother’s Day and only one thought she might. She retracted it, though, when I wrote, "It’s really just a come-on for a blow job by someone who feels he hasn’t been getting enough of those." "I pictured the body paint on the woman!" gasped my correspondent.

Was she right? Was I too cynical? Is it too much to ask that a man who wishes for more blow jobs say something or do something rather than buy something? Nobody loves a gift basket or a tap on the shoulder, and this is both at once.

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.

Take another letter

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Readers:

I’ve had a seemingly endless stream of these beginner S–M questions lately. So while I’m on break, I thought I’d run this one (originally printed 6/13/07), which could have been written in response to several of them. Carry on!

Love, Andrea

Dear Andrea:

I just saw Secretary yesterday, then read your column that mentions the same movie and similar sentiment ["Thwang," 5/30/07]. My situation is a bit different because I’ve known how I feel for a while but have never seen or experienced it. Also, I’m a stripper and rarely have sex, although I am extremely sexual. I’ve got a serious lust affair with the eroscillator, but I think I may have given up on a love that will be feminist but dominating and aggressive. In the movie, Maggie Gyllenhaal is looking through classifieds for a partner, and that is way too dangerous for me. How do I quiet the arguments between feminism and being truly submissive? Also, having to be seriously up-front about wanting some serious kink might kill the whole deal for me. Do these relationships actually happen in real life? How?

Love, Sub Grrrl

Dear Grrrl:

Right.

There was a moment when every other conversation, magazine article, and academic conference was devoted to exploring the conflicts and connections between radical feminism and radical sexuality. It was called "the ’80s." You probably missed it since you probably weren’t born yet, but that stuff is still in print, so whatever is or isn’t gathering dust in the sorts of used bookstores heavily populated by overweight cats should be easy to find. Most of the best-known pro-kink feminists of the time were very, very lesbian (see Gayle Rubin on the academic side and Pat Califia for "literotica"). But that doesn’t mean they didn’t have anything to say to straight women.

Of all the possible permutations, male dominant–female submissive is likely the most discomfiting to you. Happily, the flip side of the "this weird sex thing goes against every political, ethical, or religious principle I consider right and true" coin is frequently the Big Hot. Go to any upscale S-M party (yes, these really do exist) in San Francisco or Seattle, and at least half the women crawling around their master’s boots begging to be punished ’cause they’ve been very bad are in real life junior partners at onetime all-male law firms, or teach gender theory at small but prestigious liberal arts schools. In other words, they are quite fully "empowered," thank you very much, which doesn’t keep them from voluntarily surrendering said power come Saturday night. And that may in fact add to the appeal. The classic, even clichéd, old-style S-M enthusiast, after all, is a member of Parliament who reports like clockwork to the bawdy house every Thursday afternoon for a brisk caning …

Um, yes. Where were we? I’m not sure where you, who perform naked for sexually aroused strangers for a living, got the idea that playing the personals is particularly dangerous. Perhaps from the same episodes of Law and Order in which a few pieces of S-M gear stashed under a suspect’s bed signal that a severed head in a shoe box cannot be far off? I would never suggest that you meet someone for coffee and immediately go home with him to check out his cool dungeon. Far from it. But the meeting-for-coffee part is perfectly safe. After that you proceed as normal, which includes sharing your interests and aspirations … which is the next place we’re going to have some trouble, I see.

If being up-front about your weirditude is a potential deal-breaker for you, then I suspect you are a spontaneity freak. They are common, but many or most can have the need to proceed by whim or fancy beaten out of them by a stern application of reality. Spontaneity is fun and sexy, but it’s also responsible for most of your unwanted pregnancies, a vast number of STD transmissions, and who-all knows what other havoc.

It’s also inconsistent with S-M at any level more technically advanced than the (admittedly often completely satisfactory) bend-over-and-spank variety. If you do go ahead with this, and you do find someone worthy of your submission, you are going to have to talk about it, whether you want to or not. Not only is it unsafe to do S-M with people you know nothing about, it isn’t even fun. What if you want to wear a neat little skirt and heels while bending prettily over nearby furniture, while he wants you to be a bad puppy and sleep in a kennel in the kitchen? What if your idea of submission is saying, "Yes, sir" a lot, while his idea of domination includes branding irons and cattle prods? Can you see how this could get ugly?

In romantic fantasy, the heroine meets the rough but passionate and shirtless master of the manor when she fetches up at his door as a penniless et cetera. In real life, I’m sorry to tell you, she meets him online or at an S-M "munch" or through kinky friends or at a party. Then they talk. I’m sure you’d rather toss your hair tempestuously while a dark and stormy stranger bends you over his knee and yanks down your pantaloons — but you’ll get over it.

Love,

Andrea

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Taking the lead

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I am a 21-year-old college student and am looking for boys about my age to have sex with. But whenever I approach one, I end the conversation with absolutely no idea if he is interested. The signals are so mixed, they cancel each other out. A lot of the time, a boy will avoid eye contact, keeping his arms folded and swallowing a lot, then ask if I’d like to get coffee sometime. If I do something extremely forward, like touch his arm and leer, it’s like I pulled out a gun. I’ve had boys run away from me before.

I tend to be attracted to guys who are shy, ectomorphic, and slightly younger than I am. I’m not a huge S-M fan, although I am aggressive. I hesitate to call myself sexually dominant, though, because my last boyfriend was so submissive he wouldn’t exert any kind of effort. I got really bored and frustrated with always having to do the work.

I tried the whole alcohol thing, but hated feeling drunk. It made me even more depressed, and talking to guys is not a problem for me, sober or not. I’ve tried going places where other people were drinking, but the problems persist. I take a lot of film classes (which is where I meet most of these kids) and have no problem approaching them, but the dynamic remains the same. Should I find some other type of boy? Go out with someone I find unsexy? Be more assertive? Be less assertive? What?

Love,

No Action

Dear No-A:

Be less Vulcan, perhaps? There is something a little chilling in your approach ("I am looking for boys about my age to have sex with"), something that falls somewhere between the robotic and the predatory that your targets may be picking up on. Is sex really all you’re interested in? I ask because despite their reputation for happily sticking it into anything with a concavity capable of receiving it, even very young men often prefer some human interaction with their nookie. Shocking, but true.

To be fair, one needn’t have pointed ears and a dispassionate air to have a hard time judging whether a would-be partner is interested. In general, the best judges of others’ interest are straight women and gay men, with lesbians and straight guys often professing an utter inability to read signals, no matter how loudly broadcast or animatedly mimed. To some extent it may correlate inversely with willingness to make the first move. Straight women, who are used to being approached, develop the necessary radar. Straight men, who must usually do the heavy lifting, don’t. You, as a habitual first-approacher, wouldn’t have developed yours much either.

If you often get a delayed but gratifying "Um, coffee?" in response to your no-grabbing, no-leering approach (my preference for you, in case you missed that part), then I fail to see the problem. You may not be able to predict whether you will get a bite during the bait-dangling phase, but what of it? Anything is preferable, surely, to kissing the boys and making them cry.

If you want to learn something, though, try paying attention to any emerging patterns: how do the guys who eventually mumble something about coffee act compared to those who run away? The kind of guys you like are never going to thrust out a beefy arm, give you a hearty handshake, and ask you back to their place for some truly epic boinking — but guys like that can be tools. So if you like the shy, mumbly dudes, you must learn to appreciate them in all their mumbly glory. Cultivate a little Zen. Be the mumbly guy.

I do have one more question for you though, if you don’t mind: do any of the coffee-offerers ever come back for seconds? (And I don’t mean refills.) Do you want them to? If not, OK, you’re a little too efficient for me, but I don’t have a problem with single-minded female sex-seekers, provided everybody’s happy. If you’d like to see them again, though, you might consider spending more of your time pondering that question and less on trying to second-guess the college boys, who likely don’t even have a reason for their behavior and are just doing whatever they can manage with their immature social skills and fully-formed, if underinformed, sex drives.

I also feel the need to point out, in defense of submissives everywhere, that being passive should not be equated with being submissive. Passivity is annoying; submission is hot. Since you are not into S-M, you probably want to avoid such terms lest you find yourself in situations that are not at all what you had in mind.

Love,

Andrea

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Let it go

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I broke up with my boyfriend when he moved to another city after a short but intense relationship. Since then, we’ve visited each other regularly and continued having a sexual relationship. I’ve been fancying/dating/shagging other people for basically the whole time. But now he’s started expressing interest in another girl and I’m jealous, though I’m trying not to let him know.

I don’t want to get back together. Apart from the long-distance factor, every time I see him I’m reminded of all the ways in which we are incompatible. The sex is good, but not the best ever. Still, I spend a lot of time missing him, thinking about him, and feeling resentful of this new woman! Why can’t I let go of this?

Love,

Pouting

Dear Pout:

Oh, who knows. I think we’re just mammals and once we’ve marked something or someone with our (insert yucky metaphor here), that something must forever remain at least partly ours. Yesterday my daughter claimed an empty kefir bottle and carried it around with her for hours, reclaiming it this morning the minute she saw it in the recycling. OK, she’s a toddler, but I don’t know how much we ever mature past the "Mine! You can’t have it!" stage.

It’s hard to let go, even when what you’re hanging on to is entirely unsuitable. You don’t really want that empty yogurt jug; you just don’t want anyone else to claim it. But someone will, and you’ll be fine. In other words, it’s not that you can’t let go, it’s just that you haven’t yet.

It should be obvious that the best way to get you past this in a hurry is to stop seeing the guy. You don’t really want to be this dude’s booty call, do you? And he doesn’t seem like such a great pick to be your booty call, since he’s only pretty good at the only thing you’re likely to be doing together. It would be different if you were, say, an aspiring singer and he were the only accompanist who understands … oh, never mind. This story is going nowhere, just like what’s left of your relationship with Visit Guy. You miss him because you see him. And you resent the new girl because she’s taking some of what you’ve got left. Give her the whole thing. You don’t need it.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

I am confused by my thoughts. I fantasize constantly about my wife having sex with other men. She’s refused, so I quit asking her about it. But now I can’t sleep. I am 36 with three children, and am having three or four wet dreams a week about my wife having sex with other men. Most of the time the men don’t even have faces — it’s just me watching my wife have sex. I love my wife very much and wonder why I have this fantasy.

Love,

Sleepless

Dear Sleepy:
Nobody knows why, so don’t look at me. I mean it — nobody knows why anybody fantasizes about or fixates on anything. It’s not just that nobody knows why you, the guy who wrote Andrea a letter, fixates on seeing his wife have sex with another guy. It may help to know that you have a great deal of company; indeed, accessing a little porn on the theme may help take some pressure off. Your search terms are probably "cuckold" (now that‘s a word with some years under its belt) and "hot wife" (although there’s also "troilism" and "candaulism" if you want to get technical). If you do not want to see or read some porn, I suggest you never, under any circumstances, Google any of those terms. Even "wife" alone will get you some things you’d probably never want to tell your spouse that you’ve seen — especially since you’ve asked her, been turned down, and she’d probably prefer not to have that particular discussion again.

While I was waiting for the coffee to kick in this morning and trying to force my brain to cough up the term "troilism" for you, I did a little search myself and found this quite nice article on Nerve that goes into great detail about the culture that has grown up around cuckolding-the-fetish — which is not the sort of thing that could have flourished in the pre-Internet age but has certainly come into its own. And aren’t we proud?

Actually, I have no problem with it, provided it isn’t one of those situations where the man (usually) begs and whines and cajoles and bothers the woman (usually) past the point where it makes sense to do so. Either she won’t change her mind or she’ll agree to it, meet someone else, and leave the first guy. Either way is OK with me. But neither of these things applies in your case. You’re OK. If you can’t sleep, try exercise, melatonin, or masturbation.
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.

Fleshpotstickers

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Dear Andrea:

Greetings. At the tender age of 12, I discovered my father’s porn collection and the joys of masturbation. At 14, I can remember inserting my parents’ dildos up my anal cavity. Now I often will look at transsexual or bisexual pornography and enjoy it thoroughly until the point of ejaculation, but afterward I’m somewhat disgusted with myself. I only date women and find myself attracted to men only in the way of a circumstantial sexual kink.

The experiences I’ve had with a man and a transsexual were both unfulfilling, starting as a hot, steamy romp and ending with me saying, "I’ll never do that again," or "This isn’t for me." Yet I find myself scanning Craigslist personals looking for hot TS women, well-endowed daddy types, and couples looking for that young bi-curious male, sometimes sending aimless e-mail I don’t expect anyone to answer.

Is a trip to the shrink in order? I’m only 21; maybe I’m just defining my sexual identity. Still, it seems a bit selfless to be a student, friend, and employee all day yet have this undeciphered sexual attitude present at all times.

Love,

Undefined

Dear Undie:

You didn’t mean "selfless," you know; you meant "without self" — undefined, maybe hollow. "Selfless" means, like, spending all your holidays down at the soup kitchen: unselfish, as opposed to self-free. You aren’t worried that you’re too nice: you’re wondering if maybe you don’t even exist. Relax. You do. You’re just experiencing the juxtaposition, both exhilarating and potentially alarming, of being very young, hence somewhat unformed, and open to experience. Empty mind + open mind = blown mind, but not permanently. Don’t worry.

Also, don’t start your letters with "greetings." Seriously, it makes you sound about 16, hopelessly adenoidal and socially maladjusted, like you’d better make those assignations via Craigslist because nobody but a really determined predator would approach you once they got a look at you. Don’t want to sound like that? Never ever say "greetings." Say "hi." And while we’re at it, stand up straight.

I don’t see any reason to waste a therapist’s time or your own trying to figure out why you, a young, highly libidinous man living in a fairly old, highly libidinous city, would be interested in sexual exploration. The phrase "fleshpots" was — or at least could have been — coined for this place. Not only was topless go-go dancing (more or less) invented in San Francisco, so was Craigslist. So there you go.

I think one of the most important sexual experiences one can have here, or anywhere else regularly described as having "fleshpots," is getting to come out as what you were. You sound pretty much like a straight guy with kinky fantasies to me, and as such you have plenty of company. Hardly anybody ever gets around to doing all that weird stuff you see in porn. And although there are obviously real-life tranny chasers and such, there are far more married, monogamous guys with large collections of shemale porn. I think you’re on a journey of self-discovery that will end with you standing just about where you started, but with a little more insight. But try not to end up there with a case of hep C or anything while you’re at it, OK? I don’t get the sense that you know all that much yet about what kinds of dangerous agents, human or viral, might lurk out there in the, you know, fleshpots.

I also didn’t get the sense that anyone was actually answering any of your aimless e-mails (perhaps you’re starting them with "greetings"?). But I do urge you to think through what you would or will do if you happen to catch a live one. Perhaps it would be wise just to read the personals for a while and have a nice, safe, contemplative wank when you find something that strikes your fancy. You’ve already discovered that at least two of your experiments were, for you, better left to the imagination. I can’t help but think that there are many more out there just waiting to disappoint you.

Go slow, son. There’s no time limit in operation here. As to your last question, there’s no contradiction between being a student, a friend, an Eagle Scout, and whatever else was on your list, and having a great, honking, perverted imagination. What do you think your friends are thinking about when they peruse Craigslist? It ain’t secondhand furniture or a really great cheap babysitter — not yet it isn’t.

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.

A-gain

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Dear Andrea:

I have a friend who claims to be asexual. Although women (and occasionally men) have expressed romantic interest in him, he never seems to want to pursue a physical relationship — or any kind of intimate relationship at all. He says he’s quite happy, but I’m confused. Doesn’t everyone have some level of sexual desire? Or is there really an asexual community out there which is happy to be untouched? What do you know about this?

Love,

A OK?

Dear A OK?:

Oh, lots. I wrote about asexuality a few years ago following a big cover story about it in New Scientist [11/03/04], in the course of which I discovered that the movement’s Web master and spokesperson, David Jay, is not only local but went to my alma mater with a close friend of mine and therefore is practically family. So I know everything about it!

OK, I don’t know everything — but I can answer questions. Most people, barring those rarities like the This American Life interviewee I call "The Man with No Testosterone," may have "some level" of sexual desire flickering away in there somewhere. But if that flame is sufficiently dim or sufficiently unappealing to the flickeree, he or she may chose to ignore it altogether. Some, though, have searched their psyches and failed to detect even the faintest flicker of interest, and they may feel fine about that. It seems to me that the most reasonable reaction to people who feel fine is to feel fine back at them. Still, asexuality remains somewhat of a hard sell.

For whatever reason, many people — sexual people — find it hard to accept the idea that nobody is under any obligation either to feel desire or to act on it. Most of us are accustomed both to wanting sex and to wanting to want sex. (Desire disorders are the new erectile dysfunction — expect to see, say, Michelle Obama starring in a commercial for a breakthrough treatment in a few years.) How can people have no desire to feel desire? Aren’t they broken? Don’t they want to be fixed? Shouldn’t they want to be fixed? If you take these sane, rational adults at their word, that word is no.

As I was procrastinating answering your question a friend mentioned she knew an asexual woman who’d been interviewed about it on TV, which led me to this YouTube clip where you can see many of the asexuality movement’s big names (well, it’s a small pond, but these are the people who are most frequently interviewed and featured on Web sites and the like) telling their stories and proudly proclaiming their lack of interest in getting in your pants. (I can’t remember the chant I made up for them the last time I wrote about this: "We’re A / We’re OK / Now just go away," maybe?) I can’t promise that this clip or any of the others available online is any better than any other 4.5 minutes given a serious but potentially salacious subject on a typical TV magazine show. After the interviews the reporter turns to the camera and dutifully chirps, "Of course, some experts doubt even the existence of asexuality!" Of course they do! There are experts who will appear on these shows to doubt the existence of air if it gets them on TV. And then there’s the odious sexologist Joy Davidson, who offers this take while wearing an awful lot of lipstick:

Presenter: Can labeling oneself asexual become a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Davidson: You might as well label yourself not curious, unadventurous, narrow-minded, blind to possibilities…. That’s what happens when you label yourself as … sexually neutered.

Well, they didn’t label themselves that way, lady. You did. Davidson’s insistence that people who don’t want to have sex must be in some way damaged reminds me, irritatingly, of another well-known sex therapist I heard claiming that Viagra and friends cause as much damage to a relationship as they repair, and that if you really want to overcome erectile dysfunction you have to see a therapist. But Davidson is meaner.

So, yes, your friend is probably telling the truth, and yes, there is such a community of "out" asexuals, albeit largely online (but there’s no shame in that — all hail the Internet’s awesome community-building powers!). The one thing you’re wrong about is the supposition that such people eschew intimacy of any sort. There are folks like that, of course, but we’d do better to call them "hermits." Asexuals have intense friendships and even romantic relationships. They identify, in many cases, as straight or gay, although it’s hard not to imagine an asexual lesbian, for instance, as someone who’s particularly interested in not having sex with women. You could get a little woozy thinking that way.

I do have to admit wondering whether asexuals like David Jay could be having as much "fun" as they routinely claim to have. "We’re having too much fun to have sex!" How much fun does anyone have, really, who isn’t, say, a professional skateboarder or a four-year-old? Who has the time?

Love,

Andrea

For an older column on this subject, see www.altsexcolumn.com/index.php?article=373

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.

T-Ball

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Readers:

I’ve written aplenty about testosterone: for instance, the then-new research demonstrating that high testosterone does not make a male a winner as much as winning makes a male’s testosterone high; and the current vogue for prescribing T for everything formerly ascribed, with a shrug and a sigh, to "getting older." I’ve taught a bunch about hormones, describing estrogen — with its touch-and smell-sensitivity enhancing, "receptive" sexuality-producing qualities — as the "fuck me hormone," leaving chin-jutting, bad-boy testosterone to be described, inevitably, as the "fuck you" hormone. I’ve also been quick to explain that that’s a joke, son, and to debunk that characterization, emphasizing that women have and need T as much as men do (if in lower quantities), and that aggressive men do not turn out to have higher levels than their meeker brethren. Without testosterone, nobody gets laid — not even lesbians.

And then recently we took the kids to the children’s museum and I insisted that, naps and lunch be damned, we had to be in the car for the broadcast (actually a rerun) of This American Life’s testosterone episode. (Hear it for yourself at www.thislife.org, Episode 220.) You could skip producer Alex Blumberg’s introduction about coming of age while feeling guilty for even having testosterone, due to an early (and entirely uncalled-for) reading of Marilyn French’s "seminal" feminist potboiler The Women’s Room (Ballantine, 1988). Just don’t miss the segment on the man with no T (Act One: "Life at Zero") which will, in a mere seven minutes, turn everything you think you know about testosterone on its head. The interviewee, who had written an anonymous piece for GQ, developed an unspecified, rapid onset condition that shut down his T production entirely. But before he got a diagnosis, he simply … ceased wanting. Anything.

We know that T supplies the drive for sex and possibly for success, but with absolutely none in this guy’s system, he had no drive for anything. He stared at the wall, un-driven to get up. He could live on Wonder Bread spread with Miracle Whip and want nothing else, although he didn’t particularly want that, either. Everything looked beautiful because he lacked the will to judge it as anything else. He didn’t bother trying to see his girlfriend. He became, in short, a sort of bodhisattva, but without any sense of spiritual enlightenment — evolved, but in a meaningless way. An enlitened being, if you will. He sounded relieved, yet a bit let down to be reconnected, via supplementation, to the world of drives and wants and needs and giving a shit, rather the way people who have near-death experiences often describe resisting the pull to return to their heavy, duty-bound corporeal selves. An amazing story, implying as it does that without T life is, if not precisely not worth living, not worth caring about whether one lives it or not.

More familiar but in some ways equally startling was the interview with transman Griffin Hansbury, who, at the time, had entirely enough or possibly too much T in his system — enough to fuel a few bar fights and an inappropriate remark or two to a female coworker. Hansbury started out, like pretty much every F2M I’ve known, as a women’s college–attending, women’s studies–studying, "Take Back the Night"–type womyn’s wummin, and ended up … a pig. He is honest and extremely funny, describing how under the influence of massive amounts of T, he started dogging women around and getting turned on — literally — by the piston action of passing machinery. He said stupid stuff. He offended people; and moreover, felt entitled to do so. Most alarming, he became suddenly, uncharacteristically interested in and even good at math and science, like a sort of instant anti-Barbie. I hesitate to extrapolate from this (as does Hansbury). I hesitate to even think about it, if I can help it. If one of my kids (I have a boy and a girl, a built-in controlled experiment) asks, later, what makes somebody good at math, you better believe I won’t say "testosterone." Unless it’s true. I can’t wait to find out, I tell you what.

There’s also the story in a recent New York Times mag about the current and discomforting (to some; I think it’s kinda cool) phenomenon of women entering colleges like Bryn Mawr and Wellesley and leaving as men, a situation the gender studies departments can pretty much take either blame or credit for, depending. I can’t think of a handier way to break down the old dualistic gender paradigm, myself. The new gents ought to take a lesson from the humorous and self-depreciating Griffin Hansbury, though, and be mindful not to act like total buttheads while they still have to share the dorm showers.

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.

Teacher’s bet

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I have a bit of a moral dilemma. I am a submissive. Sometimes I correspond with, or even meet up with, people I find on the Internet for no-strings-attached fun. I always feel like I’m in control of my life, even when I’m chained up and blindfolded, and I think that it’s a healthy (enough) expression of my sexuality. However, I am also about to start training to be a teacher of kids under age 10.

Obviously, the two parts of my life have no relation to each other. But is it possible to pursue interests that could varyingly be described as "niche" or "perverted," and at the same time be a responsible caregiver to children? Do you think it is possible for my private life not to get in the way of my professional development?

Love,

Tied up in Knots

Dear Knots:

Of course I do. I’d better. I’m a retired pervert (I have no time!), and still writing this column and consorting with every stripe of (harmless) freak you can or can’t imagine. If I thought that knowing the people I know or admitting in public to having belonged to clubs which would now no longer have me as a member posed any sort of threat to my children — ever! — you better believe I’d be out of Pervertville and living in the suburbs wearing those weird sneaker-loafers (snoafers) that normal moms wear before you could say "I shop at Talbots." Happily, I don’t have to. There’s nothing about your hobby which should impede your ability to be the bestest teacher of little kids you can be. There’s nothing wrong with your hobby! Your question does set off some alarm bells, but I have no question that you can be not only a good person, but a self-directed one, fully in control — of your life, if not your limbs — while still enjoying being caught in any number of compromising positions.

What does worry me is the online hooking-up for activities that leave you helpless to defend yourself. I understand that some might find the very phrase "helpless to defend yourself" kind of hot (hell, I find the phrase kind of hot), and I’m also aware that real life is not an episode of Law and Order: Sleazy Exploitative Plotlines Unit. But seriously, I would not let strangers tie me up, and I wouldn’t mind if you didn’t, either. If you live in a major metropolitan area, you can join a club or take classes or otherwise meet people who would love to tie you up, and, even more important, meet other people who know those people. The chance that any of these Internet strangers might wish you harm is admittedly slight, but there are bad people in this world. Please try not to meet any.

The other thing about strangers, of course, is that you don’t know very much about them, including where they work and whom they know, which brings us to our next area of worry: how to keep your two worlds from ever, ever meeting. I’m imagining the principal at your new school arriving, toy bag in hand, to administer a good caning to that girl he met on the Internet (Or are you a guy? It doesn’t matter either way.) That scenario is far-fetched, granted, but you’ll be wanting — needing, actually — to keep your two lives rigorously separate from now on, if you aren’t already. I said your personal proclivities should not affect your ability to be a great teacher, and indeed they should not (if you find yourself so drawn to the alleged Dark Side that you can’t get it together to sleep or do lesson plans or get up for work in the morning, we’ll have another talk), but that depends utterly upon your ability to keep your secret self secret.

I am not a huge fan of the deep dark secret any more that I am big on urging people to blab to Aunt Babs at Sunday supper about their previous night’s exploration of scrotal inflation and anal electrodes: to everything its proper time and place, I say. You, though, are going to have to learn to be spectacularly discreet. Perverts are not a protected class, and people with little exposure to these things haven’t the faintest idea how to separate the lurid and usually deadly "whips and chains" depicted on Law and Order from the usual run of kink-sex reality, which is slightly less dangerous than golf thanks to fewer lightning strikes. Should they discover that one of those whips-and-chains people is — gasp — teaching the children, I can assure you that they will not be interested in becoming educated about it. They will be interested in having you drawn and quartered, and not in a fun way. Go ahead with your plans, but do shut up about it.

Love,

Andrea

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Edgeward

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

This is my third serious boyfriend. I think I’m his second. He’s into fairly hard-core masochism. Not like smack-me-around-a-little-Master masochism, which I’d cheerfully go along with, but shit like choking and knives and fire and no safewords. He’s also tried to convince me to fuck him without lube or preparation, which doesn’t sound like a good idea to me. He says that he’s played like this before, but never to the extent that he wants to. I’m wondering how rough can I get without actually hurting him? Any suggestions for good books or Web sites?

Love,

Gentle Ben

Dear Ben:

Your boyfriend is into "edgeplay," and/or possibly "RACK," (risk-aware consensual kink) the recently named alternative to the long-used and unnecessarily apologetic-sounding "safe, sane, and consensual" label for S-M activity. There’s a little essay which explains the distinction between SSC and RACK here: www.leathernroses.com/generalbdsm/medlinssc.htm. But for those who aren’t online right now, the idea behind risk-awareness is that you acknowledge that what you’re doing is potentially dangerous (rather than pretending that knowledge and precautions can render any activity completely "safe") and agree to accept that before continuing. It doesn’t mean that you have to do dangerous stuff, or that you do your dangerous stuff less safely — far from it. Truly "risk aware" kinksters, after all, are presumably also aware of things like proper technique, good gear, and common sense.

As for how far you can take it, well, that surely depends on which "it" you’re talking about. There are a lot of things on your list with a wide variety of potential risks. Knives and fire, for instance, can both be managed with little risk of real harm, assuming you know what you’re doing. You can take a class on knifeplay, for one thing; and for another, a very sharp, very clean knife applied lightly to a nice expanse of muscle like the upper arm, thigh, or the ever-popular buttock just isn’t that dangerous. Fire, in the form of dripped candle wax, singed arm hair, or flaming swathes of alcohol, can give a similar big-bang-for-small-danger buck, again provided you know what you’re doing. Of course, the most experienced, dedicated, total freakazoid sadist I know did kind of set his girlfriend on fire with flaming hand-sanitizer once, and in front of an audience at that — but even they emerged more embarrassed than crispy. For tips and tricks, it’s probably best to learn from an experienced player or take a class, but failing that, Greenery Press‘s Toybag series is probably your best resource.

The no-prep, no lube business is potentially problematic, but I can see how lots of people — really, really experienced people — could actually handle that. Find out if he’s one of them. Of course, you could always cheat and put the lube on you and never tell him. He can’t see back there, you know.

You may have noticed that I didn’t include choking in my "not as scary as it sounds" list, and for good reason. Personally, I think choking/breathplay is precisely as scary as it sounds, and I’m generally anti. Unlike practices which might cause a nasty infection or an unsightly scar, breathplay can make you dead in very short order, and completely unpredictably. Jay Wiseman, the emergency medical technician and kink educator who’s studied and written about this the most, comes down firmly against it in his well-known article, "The Medical Realities of Breath Control Play.&quot The other authority on such subjects, the much-published Charles Moser, MD, is somewhat more equivocal: when I talked to him about it, he basically said, "It can kill you. I won’t tell you not to do it, though. Oh, but it can absolutely kill you, and you’d never see it coming. People have a right to do it, though…." He might have kept on like this — "Kill you! Right to! Kill You! Right to!" — until I slapped him, Chinatown-style, but we don’t have that sort of relationship. If you and the b-friend are negotiating this stuff, and you’d better be or I’m coming over there and kicking your ass myself, I suggest you agree to oh, I dunno, carve "I LUV BRITNEY" on his chest and flog him through the streets with a flaming medieval flail, but you should refuse, categorically, to choke or black him out. Just say no.

As for playing without a safeword: fine, whatever. You know and he knows that if he were really in trouble he’d manage to communicate this to you, and you would stop what you were doing. No big deal. There’s one more thing we haven’t covered about consensuality though, and it’s a big one for you, the presumptive top: Do you even want to do this? You get to say no too, you know. Call out your own "safeword" if you have to.

Love,

Andrea

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Secret crush

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By Andrea Nemerson


› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I’m having the best sex of my life, but when I’m having a good time — which is often — my PC muscles have minds of their own and they get enthusiastic. I know I’ve got strong PC muscles because the last time I went to Doc Stirrup she told me to squeeze and then said, "Whoa." The end result is that I inflicted one doozy of a bruise on my poor guy’s junk.

He’s being a sport about it and says he doesn’t mind, but I know it hurts him afterwards and I’d rather not strangle my man.
Any advice?

Love,

Supergirl

Dear Girl:

I think we’d all rather you not cause permanent damage, physical or psychic, to your sweet baboo’s manhood (also either physical or psychic, come to think of it), and I do think I can help, although I understand that you are a woman to be reckoned with and he probably shouldn’t take anything for granted. (Note: I know the writer slightly, and nobody would mistake her for anything less than a force of nature, although obviously I had no idea just how much of a force. Bruising! Really.)

Now here’s the thing: the whole deal with yer basic dentata muscles is that they do operate via conscious control, so even though you’d rather be all transported and let your eyes roll back in your head and all that, you’ll need to think, really think, about relaxing those muscles while you’re at it, exactly the way those with less-toned bits have to concentrate on contracting them. In fact, perhaps it’s best to look at this entire problem backward, if you will.

While your (boyfriend’s) problem is not unheard of — one can, for instance, rapidly lose all feeling in one’s hand after inserting it up to the wrist in the terrifyingly well-toned interior of a Kegel-exercise enthusiast — the opposite complaint is far more common. When a woman can’t feel much upon intromission, or her male partner finds himself diligently thrusting away but has to keep reminding himself that he isn’t just pumping blindly into thin air, then it’s time for some Kegeling and some applied mindfulness. I suggest that you practice not contracting your pelvic muscles when excited, either with his help (warning: this exercise is not particularly erotic), or alone, or both ways. Women trying to get their muscles under conscious control can buy something such as a "Kegelsizer" or "vaginal barbell," even. These are rather lovely, smooth, heavy devices of stainless steel or similar, and one practices holding onto the larger, more bulbous end and progresses to the smaller, at which point one may also be able to project ping-pong balls across the barroom or smoke a cigarette in an unexpected manner. (But of course you’re not interested in such circus tricks. You’re not, right?)

I am quite sure that you could employ such exercises in the pursuit of less instead of more, since it’s less reflexive clenching you’re after, not less muscle. Just do be careful not to accidentally ultratone yourself. You could break something.

There are also, of course, tips and tricks for genital-size-discordant couples that could be brought into play here — in reverse. Women who want more friction for themselves and/or their partners keep their legs close together, so do the opposite. The famous but not-for-amateurs modified missionary position where the woman lies supine and the man straddles her legs, keeping them clamped between his manly thighs lest they dare to make a break for it, is another obvious no-no. The one with your feet up around his ears while he clutches your hips? Don’t do that. Also, all those tricks for better alignment (hip-tilt pillows and whatnot) are meant for G-spot (internal clitoral) stimulation, but that is accomplished partly by just making things tighter in there, so they’re contraindicated too. I’d also throw in whatever you yourselves do in pursuit of greater sensation, since in intercourse sensation is linked to tightness, which is linked to friction, and quit doing (briefly, we hope) whatever you were doing when you caused the bruising. Remember, we’re in Bizarro World here, so whatever feels especially intense is on the "quit it" list, at least until you get those Supergirl muscles under control. And in the interest of equal time for opposing cartoons, stop eating spinach.

Now, let’s consider lube. Lube is tricky, since it actually decreases friction yet improves sexual sensation, making a lie of what I said above about friction, but never mind that. Yes, I tell people who aren’t feeling enough to try more lube, and yes, I tell people who are feeling too much to try more lube. What the heck, it’s cheap.

Love,

Andrea

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And also, herpes

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

You guessed right — those letters about women who can’t have orgasms were both mine. Maybe I was so frustrated that I lied about my age so you wouldn’t think they were from the same person. Anyway, I’m in a stupidly worse situation now: I contracted herpes, despite having had sex with only one other human being. My boyfriend engaged in some ill-advised polyamorous experimentation about two years ago: I agreed to it even though I wasn’t sure it was a good idea. And he proposed it even though he was pretty sure it wasn’t a good idea, either.

It’s just HSV-1, but I can’t get over how unfair it is. I don’t even like oral sex! I have this irrational feeling of being punished. I hear that HSV-1 isn’t nearly as bad as HSV-2, and that I might never even have another outbreak (though it doesn’t feel that way). Plus, my boyfriend keeps saying that around 20 percent of Americans have genital herpes, which sucks because that means 80 fucking percent don’t.

While I love my partner, I never thought he’d be the only person I’d ever sleep with. However, I’m shy: having to have the pre-sex "I have an STD" talk means that I’ll just avoid sex. Since I wasn’t enjoying it anyway, this shouldn’t bother me. But now, I feel disgusting too. My boyfriend admitted that he had to leave school on STD Day because he was so completely grossed out that he felt faint. At least he’s unlikely to get it, since HSV-1 doesn’t like to jump from genitals to genitals.

Add to all this the fact that I don’t really want to be touched sexually, and you get the result that my boyfriend is unhappy too. Of course, now that I regret having just one relationship so far, I’m screwing that one up. It’s like some kind of terrible paradox.

I know that I’m overreacting, but I’m just so mad and unhappy. I know that outbreaks can be treated, blah, blah, blah, but then I’m just a less-ulcerated, less-contagious plague carrier. I know that I have to talk to some kind of therapist before I become even more messed up, but I thought that someone whose area of expertise is sex would be a good first person to ask.

Love,

Angry and Contagious

PS: Thank you for your previous advice, but I don’t think Betty Dodson will be advising me until everything involved doesn’t hurt.

Dear Contagious:

Sorry, nope. You totally have to talk to a therapist as well as a gynecologist, but mostly to a therapist — and possibly a psychiatrist too. Don’t you think you’re depressed and anxious enough to benefit from at least contemputf8g medication? I do!. And maybe you should speak to a yoga master about learning deep-breathing techniques. Or get a paper bag and breathe into it until you pass out or don’t pass out — however that trick is supposed to work.

First off, do we know how you got the genitally located oral herpes? We do not. Do we know that the introduction of the GLOH to your ménage was due to one of the women your boyfriend kissed during that brief foray into ill-advised polyamory? We don’t know that, either. Unless there’s something you haven’t told me, it’s possible that the boyfriend either picked it up somewhere far less ooky (it’s only oral herpes, after all) or already had it but it hadn’t made an appearance yet. Furthermore, do we believe that you had to agree to doing something that even your guy thought was a bad idea? Nuh-uh. I know you were young and silly, but so was he. I’d chalk that one up to "our bad" and move on.

You’re going to have to disentangle your anger with your boyfriend from your beef with fate and, for that matter, yourself. What happened happened, and hey, it could be worse. By the way, about 20 percent of Americans have genital herpes but somewhere between 50 and 80 percent have the oral version, so you’ve a ton of company — and some of it is quite nice.

If you drag your angry self to a clinic or to your regular gyno you can get on an antiviral, which will not only suppress your symptoms but make it far less likely that you could spread this thing to a putative future boyfriend that you don’t even want, especially since you still like the one you have. Then you won’t hurt as much and can get back to where you were before: frustrated, angry, and bitter because sex isn’t any fun for you. And then you can go see a therapist. And then, after that, maybe Betty Dodson and I can help you.

And before you think me unsympathetic, I’m really and truly not. I just think you need a swat on the behind to stop dithering in fury and start fixing stuff. I swat because I love.

Love,

Andrea

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What a pain

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Readers:

In the process of starting to crawl out of my "I just had two babies! Leave me alone!" cocoon, I’ve been teaching some new workshops, one on what it’s really like to have twins, and one that I’m calling "Is There Sex after Motherhood?" — hoping the idea comes across even though motherhood is, technically, a lifelong venture ending in death, after which, one assumes, not so much sex. I debuted the sex one recently at the original "clean, well-lighted place for buying things to stick up your hoo-ha," Good Vibrations. There was a decent crowd, and everybody seemed to have a good time; and when we got to the Q&A, I was gratified by the number of questions. (That’s how you can tell if people were interested in your presentation, right? Not so interested = polite thanks and drifting away; interested = hang around asking questions until the management kicks you out.) There’s some serious sadness haunting the new and newish mothers though, so while it’s all good and fun to talk about how a simple blow job between child care tasks can save your marriage (ask me how!), some of the questions stayed with me after we’d cleared away the cookies and juice (yes, mothers are served toddler snacks, don’t ask me why) and gone home.

It’s surely true that during the first few years after having kids, your sex life tends to be … well, "lackluster" is a nice word, but I think "laughable" might be more accurate in a lot of cases. Some of the women at these events are really beating themselves up over it though, which I guess is expected and is why I’m talking about this stuff in the first place, but one of them really saddened me when she said, quite matter-of-factly, that intercourse was still quite uncomfortable for her several years later and she hadn’t mentioned this to her husband. "I think you need to communicate with your husband," the other speaker, a therapist, offered. "I think you should find out what hurts and make it stop hurting," I countered.

How many women, mothers or not, are having painful sex and just not mentioning it? The most common cause of uncomfortable insertive sex is nothing more complicated than a case of "not ready–itis" or lack of lubrication, but a Harvard study cited by the National Vulvodynia Association (see www.nva.org/media_corner/fact_sheet.html) estimates that 16 percent of women in the United States suffer from the chronic vulvar pain called vulvodynia or its subtype, vulvar vestibulitis, affecting just the opening to the vagina. That’s a lot of women! Most are young when it starts, and most can locate no particular event or infection that set it off, but the pain can be paralyzing (many describe it as feeling like acid was poured onto sensitive tissues, or "like knives"). So we have a mysterious etiology; a location in the parts that many women simply don’t mention in public, even if that public comprises their doctor, themselves, and nobody else; and an exclusively female population of sufferers; and what do we get? Predictably, silence, confusion, and shame. And while I have never been a big fan of men-versus-women jokes and somehow doubt that if men got pregnant, ma- or paternity leave really would be two years long with full pay (come on!), if men often had agonizing, unexplained pain in their manly man parts, surely they wouldn’t have been subjected to generations of doctors pronouncing it "all in your head."

The good news — there has to be some — is that vulvodynia is finally getting the research money and attention it deserves. Recent research (see www.nytimes.com/2008/01/29/health/29brod.html?_r=1&ref=science) has turned up solid, quantifiable, and most important, curable causes of the pain: some women, the researchers found, had serious inflammation two cell layers deep that had not responded to steroids, a typical treatment. What’s even more interesting is that many of the women have a genetic abnormality — as I’m sure they could’ve guessed, considering the kind of hypersensitivity they’ve been putting up with — in which there are too many nerve fibers in the area, which produces a pain response to what in other women would just be normal sensation, like the pressure from your jeans against your crotch while seated. The linked article contains some success stories; the treatments (surgical or medical) are not perfect, but they have the potential to make life worth living again for some women who’ve been silently suffering, too embarrassed or too debilitated to say anything about it. That does count as good news, no?

I don’t really see a National Crotch Pain Month hitting the calendar anytime soon, but I do see this as the beginning of the end of one more way for women to suffer in silence and shame, so a cautious hooray for that.

Love,

Andrea

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Going solo

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

Regarding the recent column on women who can’t have orgasms [1/30/08]: I hate to say it, but it looks like you phoned this one in. Where are the partners in the equation? If you were the boyfriend, wouldn’t it seem rude for your girlfriend to say, "I’m going to put you on hold while I play with toys to feel better sexually"? I think it would be better for her to say, "We need to talk," then describe what’s going on with her sexual responses and feelings. Why shut him out? That doesn’t help the relationship. They can figure it out together; maybe it can even be a playful exercise in experimentation. If he can’t deal, then he wasn’t the right boyfriend for her anyway.

I really do enjoy your column.

Love,

All about the Teamwork

Dear Team:

Hey, that’s OK. I really do enjoy your feedback. I actually didn’t phone this one in, though. I told the young women to put their boyfriends on hold for a while because partnered sex was not working for them. And desperately trying to have a good time works about as well in bed as it does out on the town on New Year’s Eve, which is to say, not at all. If I neglected to tell the young women that they ought to at least notify the boyfriends that they would be checking out for a bit to do some exploration on their own, well, that was sloppy, and I do apologize. (Girls, tell your boyfriends why you’re not having sex for a while, OK?) But I stand by my original suggestion that they should, indeed, skip the partnered sex in favor of masturbation until they can at least say with some conviction that they know what an orgasm feels like.

I said in the original column that it isn’t fair, but women often get out of touch with their sexual responses in a way that’s pretty rare for men. And although women certainly have no lock on extreme self-consciousness, what gets in our way is a mostly female blend of "Oh no, he’s looking at me and he’ll see I don’t look like [insert current icon here]" and "Oh no, I’m taking too long. What if he thinks I’m selfish or gets bored?" plus fear of losing self-control and looking slutty. And sometimes the only way to ditch all of that stuff is to run away alone.

I also mentioned Lonnie Barbach and Betty Dodson but somehow forget to include Julia Heiman and Joseph LoPiccolo, whose Becoming Orgasmic (Prentice Hall, 1976) has been around since the ’70s and originated some of the ideas I toss around as though they were obvious, which I realize they are not. Heiman and LoPiccolo do not begin their program with "tell your partner what you like" or "masturbate in front of him" or any of the other fairly advanced techniques that sex experts throw at women who are having trouble with orgasms (I’m sorry, I’m enough of a geek that I can’t see that phrase without thinking, immediately but unhelpfully, of tribbles). Instead, it starts way back, with examining your history and your ideas about sexuality before you even get close to literal physical examination — and when you do get there, you get there alone. (For those who prefer their sex help with early ’90s hair, there is a video version, also called Becoming Orgasmic [Sinclair Institute, 1993], which you can order online.)

The idea of solo exploration before allowing the partner back into the bedroom reminds me of something else (besides tribbles, that is), and now I realize what it is. It’s all very similar to the late, lamented (he seemed like a nice guy, and he sure wrote a useful book) therapist Bernie Zilbergeld’s well-known program for overcoming premature ejaculation in his (please forgive me) seminal book The New Male Sexuality (Bantam, 1984), which was rooted in the work of Masters and Johnson. You start slowly, with guided imagery and masturbation, and not even particularly fun masturbation. Gradually, over weeks or months, you add partnered activities. The program works much better for men in stable partnerships, but that doesn’t mean the partner is involved every step of the way.

So no, I didn’t mean to imply that the anorgasmic girls’ club ought to nail up a permanent "No boyz allowed" sign, and of course I think it would be silly and almost certainly destructive to embark on such a program without fully informing any partners first. But if the problem is compounded of various parts self-consciousness, bad messages, fear of judgment, and just plain fear, then no, I don’t think taking one’s very first, faltering steps toward sexual self-confidence in front of an audience is necessarily the best idea.

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.

Buddy movie

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

Recently I shared a hotel room with a buddy on a trip and we masturbated together (for the first time). His cock was bigger than mine, and he had an incredibly big come shot. I am not attracted to men — we are both married — but I was very aroused by seeing this. After the awkward silence, I commented on the volume of his load, which led to a conversation about how he gets no sex and never receives a blow job because his wife is grossed out by come. After an hour-long discussion on the pros and cons of cocksucking, we exchanged oral sex (it was the first time for this too). This was about two weeks ago. So finally, here are my questions: Is this unusual among hetero men? My justifications for my actions are that it’s safe sex and just a mutual favor between buddies, not cheating per se. Am I delusional? Can someone else taste come in one’s mouth after oral sex? It seemed like I could taste it for a long time afterward, even once I rinsed.

Love,

Buddy-Buddy

Dear Bud:

Yeah, OK, I’m going to answer this out of nostalgia — it’s been some years since I was free to give sex info over the phone at San Francisco Sex Information (www.sfsi.org), but when I did, it was during the first shift on Mondays, and I got tons of calls from you guys, the "I had completely unexpected homo sex over the weekend" people. I have to say, though, that I don’t believe this happened to you any more than I believed it happened to most of those other dudes. The big tip-off? It wasn’t the blow job; it was the use of the word buddy. Who says that? I IM’d my own best buddy this question: "Under what circs could you imagine yourself referring to a male friend as a ‘buddy’?" And after he recovered from the shock, he offered, "If we were in a bowling league together?" which made me laugh, but you know, I still don’t buy it. Guys you have beers with are friends or guys you have beers with. Buddies are people you trade imaginary blow jobs with in hotel rooms that the two of you are mysteriously sharing in the unexplained absence of your wives. OK, then!

So, just for the sake of the good old days (mine, not yours), let me answer your questions.

Yes, it’s pretty unusual. The experimental hand job among teenage boys may be common, but straight married guys do not customarily go down on each other just as soon as they’re done raiding the minibar. It doesn’t happen. I’m not judging, mind you. I could not care less about random blow jobs among buddies. Harking back to the San Francisco Sex Information model, though: we were trained to normalize things by placing them on a continuum. Rather than saying "People don’t do that," or "Everyone feels that way," we use the words some, many, most. For instance, we say things like "Most people have fantasies, many people have homosexual fantasies, some people act on them in hotel rooms they are mysteriously sharing with a ‘buddy.’<0x2009>" Most guys don’t! And — keeping in mind that I don’t care about the gay angle or the blow job itself — I do disagree that it isn’t cheating. Ask your wives if it’s OK with them and you’ll see what I mean. On second thought, don’t.

It’s funny, just as I was sitting down to pull this column together a friend (specifically, one of the friends my husband regularly has a beer with and never, ever refers to as a buddy) called to tell me there was a show on advice giving on the radio, featuring the "Radical Honesty" guy (www.radicalhonesty.com), Brad Blanton. Apparently BB was perched in one studio telling the Chicago Tribune‘s Amy Dickinson, who was in another studio, that yes, those pants did make her butt look big, and bloviating on about how — and this is from his Web site — "Radical Honesty means you tell the people in your life what you’ve done or plan to do, what you think, and what you feel. It’s the kind of authentic sharing that creates the possibility of love and intimacy." Now, I am a firm believer in the occasional use of Radical Obfuscation and honestly believe Brad Blanton is probably a total tool, so obviously his philosophy is not for me. I suggest it’s not for you either. It’s far better to do something not great (the random blow job not exactly being the moral equivalent of setting fire to an orphanage), shut the hell up about it, and never do it again. Of course, if you find yourself turning from your wife’s touch and longing for your buddy’s instead — well, that’s a different problem and maybe a little radical honesty might be called for. But I think not.

And yes, the taste will linger forever. There is nothing that will loosen its foul grip upon your tongue, so you might as well get used to it.

Kidding! I think if you’d actually given a blow job instead of just fantasizing about one, you would know this, but pungent as it may be, semen is just proteinaceous glop like any other. Brush your teeth and it will go away.

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.

Overdrawn at the sperm bank

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I had a beautiful child via donor sperm from a sperm bank. My partner (female) and I are very happy, but recently I have been having sexual fantasies about the donor. I have not told this to my SO (she would not understand, trust me). I feel an almost spiritual bond with this unknown man and am concerned I may be getting a little obsessed. Have any experience in this minefield?

Love,

A Matter of Sementics

Dear Matter:

Not directly, no, but as we used to say at San Francisco Sex Information when somebody would call looking for a bisexual transman into water sports to answer a question, "We all have the same training! OK if I give it a try?" Of course, we, whoever we are, do not necessarily all have the same training, but if my time in the trenches has earned me anything, it’s an impressive virtual Rolodex of people, many of them good friends, who have done or seen or charged for whatever the experience in question might be. I have produced for your edutainment a professional singer who gives great head without harming her throat, a Realtor who would throw you out on your ear for attempting that "house humping" business, any number of well-spoken hos, a dominatrix who can testify to the fact that men who want to be kicked in the balls never show up for their appointments, and another who can prove otherwise. In other words, here’s your expert, my friend who has worked as a teller at the sperm bank, if you will. Call her Polly. Polly Enmity. She says:

It’s not uncommon for women using sperm banks to get really attached to their donors. No, really attached. When I worked in the semen industry I spent countless hours on the phone with women who wanted to know how hot their donor was, if I would do him (they were asking only hypothetically, I’m sure), what celebrity he looked like, how nice he was, what he wore, if he smelled nice. So yes, it’s supercommon to feel attached. I was offered not insignificant sums of money to divulge donors’ identities (which I never did, and that’s why I’m still broke), and at least one woman asked if we did "live inseminations." In my experience, donor fantasies and attachment are very common, and yours seems to be on the less stalkerish end of the scale.

And even if you never met the guy, you did get some of his most intimate bodily fluids (albeit centrifuged and washed beyond all recognition) inserted into your most intimate parts, so your connection to this donor is, well, pretty understandable. Ever get attached to someone after a one-night stand? It can happen, sure. Now think about a woman who uses the same donor, cycle after cycle, hoping each time to get pregnant and finding out month after month that it hasn’t worked … again. It almost becomes like a relationship, albeit one that involves you picking your partner based on a short description and the kindness of the sperm bank workers who vouch for his character and looks. I’ve seen women feel upset, angry, even betrayed by this person they have never met.

Now, is this just fantasy, or would you want it to play out in reality? Think: Do you really want to know anything more about him? What if he turns out to be your neighbor who had your car towed last week? Or the jerk on his cell phone sitting next to you in a restaurant? If you met him, would you do anything about the sexual feelings, or would they remain in the realm of fantasy? I knew many of these donors, and, well, with a couple of exceptions, many of them were nice, average guys trying to earn a few bucks by selling their genetic material, but most of them weren’t really fertile fantasy fodder. Trust me on this: your fantasy of your donor is probably much better — and hotter — than the reality.

Listen to Polly! She has some hilarious and fairly scarifying stories from the deepest vaults of the sperm bank — tales from the crypt — and many of them involve people or their products not smelling so nice. This is not something you need to think about while cuddling your sweet baby, who I am sure smells lovely. While Polly and I both steadfastly stand by your right to fantasize about any damned thing that pleases you, some fantasies are just inconvenient and ultimately more trouble than they’re worth. You wouldn’t want to fantasize about your boss every morning in the shower, only to have to face him or her and be all professional and not at all sweaty as soon as you got to work, would you? This one isn’t that bad as long as you keep in mind that tracking down the donor would be like suicide, only messier — so that anonymity thing sure was a good idea in this case.

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.

Hey, hey. hey

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I’m getting superfrustrated. I don’t have the highest sex drive, but it is there. However, I can’t understand why my brain and my body tell me I want to do something that inevitably makes me uncomfortable and unhappy. Even with lube, sex leaves me sore for hours. I try to just give my boyfriend blow jobs so I can avoid having to have sex. I’m 21 and have been sexually active for about three years, and I just always figured everything would get better.

And it’s not just intercourse. I can’t even get satisfaction from oral sex or masturbating. It feels good, but then, instead of feeling really good, like you’d expect an orgasm to feel, suddenly the pleasure just kind of floats away. If that’s an orgasm, it freaking sucks. It is unpleasant. What is wrong with me?

Love,

Can’t Get Me No

Dear No:

Well, you’re feeling unsatisfied because you are unsatisfied, but I don’t suppose that observation will be much use to you. I believe that your sex drive is still hanging in there because you’re a normal, healthy girl, albeit one who apparently has some issues (we call them issues when we don’t know what else to call them) about sex. In fact, I’m not even sure you have issues. I think maybe you’ve just had some pretty disappointing sex, and now you’re so expecting it to be disappointing that you’re just kind of jumping straight to the disappointment part and saving yourself some time.

I hate to punt this over to the usual suspects, but I think I have to: there are books — lots of them — on learning to masturbate and becoming orgasmic, and there are some spectacular toys out there now, toys so good that I am not altogether positive I can still promise that using them will not interfere with partnered sex, but that is obviously a topic and a worry (an issue) for another time. The old classics are Lonnie Barbach (reads like a therapist writing for Redbook) and Betty Dodson (reads like someone you’d meet at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival circa 1989, naked), but they have accumulated an Amazon wish list full of competition. Poke around in the reviews and see if you can find someone whose voice you can stand, buy their book or DVD and whatever basic toys they recommend, then buy yourself some time and use them. Oh, and if there’s a boyfriend in the picture, tell him to just hang on — you’ve got some stuff to do, after which he’s welcome to come back and try again. If this works, it should be worth the wait.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

I’m a 20-year-old girl, and I’ve only had one sex partner in my life (high school to the present). My problem seems pretty basic: sex doesn’t feel all that great. I mean, the desire’s there, but after a few minutes the pleasure part just kind of slips away, despite my best efforts to keep it there, and the rest either feels like smushing body parts or else is unpleasant and sort of painful. I don’t understand how it can start off feeling good and then just go away. Maybe I’m on the right track: When I first started having sex (three years ago), it always felt pretty neutral. Now at least it feels good for a little while. I can’t masturbate to orgasm either. It is incredibly frustrating to want to have sex even knowing I always go away from it unsatisfied. What is wrong with me? How do I fix it?’

Love,

No, No, No

Dear No:

I had to reread very carefully to make sure you and your doppelgänger are not the same person, but look — you’re slightly younger! And very, very faintly less hopeless, I think, but that is open to interpretation. I do find it slightly heartening that you are experiencing a bit of pleasure now, since I’d have to agree that it would be difficult to get motivated in the complete absence of anything more exciting than "neutral" sensation.

It’s neither fair nor just but is common for women to be out of touch with their sexual-response cycles in a way that simply doesn’t occur very often in males. I hesitate — nay, refuse! — to get into any historical-political reasons why this might be so. (It’s not that they’re not interesting, but they are unfruitful and dreadfully distracting, which is exactly what we don’t need when we’re already having trouble concentrating.) I’m afraid you too will have to buy media products and a vibrator that tickles at least your fancy, put the boyfriend on hold, and get practicing. I wish I could wave a magic wand for you, but I think the motor in mine is burning out. They don’t last forever.

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.

A glossary

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I’m a little confused. Could you please explain all the different genders? It seems there is so much more out there than just male and female: transsexuals, he-shes, shemales … And are hermaphrodites real? I’m most intrigued by them. Do they live as male or as female? Are they born that way? Who’s who?

Love,

Gender Confused

Dear GC:

OK, but you should know going in that you’re setting me up for abuse from a certain segment of the genderfolk, that overearnest subset that thrives on righteous indignation. I don’t know what it is about the Gender Weirdness Club that renders so many of its members both unnecessarily hostile and so shockingly humorless — you’d think living as a guy in a dress, for instance, would pretty much force you to develop a sense of humor — but if I talk about this, I will infuriate people, and this time I blame you. That’s OK, right?

Transgender is an umbrella term. It used to be pretty much interchangeable with transsexual, but the latter is on its way out (too identified with men who went to Sweden in the early ’60s and came back looking like very-large-footed stewardesses, I guess). Many people in the gender community now use the term transgender to describe anyone who does not fit readily into the "a boy is a boy and a girl is a girl, and that’s that" paradigm. When I say umbrella term, mind you, I mean a really big umbrella. There’s a crowd under there, from the girl in combat boots who would have been described as a tomboy in a previous generation (I was one, and it never would have occurred to me to call myself anything other than female, but fashions and perceptions change) to the aforementioned guy in a dress, with a large and oddly dressed crowd doing the Time Warp in between, including some who blur the line for kicks and others who are just trying to mess with you.

Transsexual used to be the common term, as I said, for someone described as trapped in the wrong body. Now you’re more likely to hear transman (a man assigned a female gender at birth, later corrected by some combination of introspection and self-acceptance, gender presentation, hormones, and/or surgery) or transwoman (the same but vice versa). Some transfolk make a distinction between the idea of transsexuality (literally "crossing sexes") and being a (trans)man or (trans)woman: they feel they never changed genders, just other people’s perception of their gender, so they don’t feel a term like transsexual accurately describes them. Many would probably prefer to be known as men and women, for obvious reasons, but accept or proudly bear the trans label.

He-she is a term from the carnival sideshow. You’d probably best just file that one away with the rest of the historical oddities if you want anyone to talk to you about this.

As for shemale … I recently pissed off an earnest transperson — let’s call her Ernestine — merely by answering a question about shemale porn; the writer’s boyfriend was nuts about the stuff, and she wanted to know how worried she should be. Not very, I said. "Lots of people enjoy blah blah blah shemale blah …" Blam! "No transsexual woman," Ernestine wrote, "would expose her genitals like that on the Internet." She meant to convey the fact that transwomen are not freaks and need not find work at the aforementioned sideshow, a noble sentiment and all, but the fact that they are not freaks does not preclude some of them from becoming whores. There is a huge market for transporn, and much of it does use the admittedly objectionable, if undeniably retro amusant, term shemale. Sorry, Ernestine.

And finally, you asked about hermaphrodites. Nobody uses this term anymore unless they’re describing worms. There are lots of people born with a condition referred to as pseudohermaphroditism, but really, these ought not to concern you. The important thing to know is that there are kids born with ambiguous genitalia and others born with outward and inward sex parts that don’t match. The default medical response was and mostly still is surgery, but the foundation on which that treatment was built — basically, that you can raise anybody as any gender by strictly enforcing "appropriate" pronouns, toys, outfits, and love objects — has crumbled in recent years. We hardly know anything, but we do know that most people are born with sense of their own gender; and while you can beat almost anyone into admitting anything, telling a little boy he’s a little girl, no matter how insistently, will not make him a girl — it will just make him angry and possibly crazy. We are learning, finally, to take people’s word for it: I’m a girl, even in combat boots, and you are whatever it is you say you are.

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.

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