Alt.sex.column Archives — Page 9 of 10 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

I’ve got a secret

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February 13, 2007

› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

My newish husband and I are madly in love. We’re extremely experimental and both love porn. We share a healthy sex life (five-plus times a week) and talk about everything — except the fact that he secretly jerks off after I leave for work or when I’m in the bath, whether we have sex or not. (The signs are all there, so I know I’m not mistaken.) It’s not so much that I’m upset about it (I’d love to watch!) but that it decreases his volume and ability to achieve orgasm with me. Though he does come every time, he seems to struggle. But on the weekends, sex is amazing because he hasn’t released beforehand. So should I tell him I know? Am I wrong to want to talk to him about it?

Love,

Hands Off!

Dear Hands:

Wrong? No. But before broaching such a discomfiting subject, it’s a good idea to ask yourself exactly what you want by bringing it up — and if your chosen route is the best way to get there.

So what is it you need? Your sex life is already about 200 times better than that of the average married couple, so don’t tell me you want to do it more. (When would you catch up with all the shows on your TiVo?) You did mention volume, but how much fluid comes out is a nonissue. Your partner’s struggle to orgasm may be a problem, but you should ask yourself why it matters to you before you go bugging him about his private pursuits. (He is coming, after all, so it’s not like there’s some big dysfunction that needs fixing.) And keep in mind that if he’s OK with the struggle (I’m sure he knows what’s causing it and has chosen to carry on regardless), he’ll be unmotivated to change.

Also consider that at a certain level this isn’t even really your business. He’s doing it for himself (in both senses of the phrase). There’s a limit to how much you can reasonably expect a partner to change long-standing habits and preferences to suit you. Sometimes you just have to accept who you chose, and try to remember how great that person is — even if that person doesn’t do everything the way you’d like, when you’d like, and just for you.

If you do broach the subject, be mindful. Saying "I know you masturbate as soon as I leave the room" may not inspire your husband to do anything but feel his privacy’s been violated. (Nobody wants to hear that their spouse is tracking them around the Internet or riffling through their used Kleenex, no matter how loving, trusting, and shame-free the relationship is.) The best gambit I can see, in fact, isn’t even aimed at getting him to stop. But it might address your grievance about having to wait for the weekend to see Old Faithful go off: you say you’d really love to watch him sometime? Don’t tell me. Tell him.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

My boyfriend is a flirt. We have a good relationship, but the flirting bothers me — and has for the whole course of our relationship. Recently, when I was on his computer, he’d left his inbox open, and I found a slightly juicy e-mail from a girl. His response was that he has a girlfriend and was sorry if she thought otherwise. But now I’m addicted to reading his e-mail; and though I’ve been reading a lot, I’ve found nothing. I don’t even know what I’m looking for or what I’d do if I found it. I want to stop this nasty habit. I feel untrustworthy and sneaky. Be as harsh as you want. I deserve it.

Love,

Snoopy

Dear Snoop:

Way to take the fun out of harshing on you, dudette.

Look. You know this is wrong and stupid. And it’s not like I can prescribe you some kind of magic no-sneak pills. It would be tricky to explain wanting to start using passwords on your home computers — not unlike saying all of a sudden "You know what would be fun? Using condoms!" and expecting your honey not to think you’ve been cheating. You could try buying him a nifty new laptop with fingerprint recognition, but that’s a pretty expensive fix.

No, I think you’re just going to have to quit cold turkey. If you must, put a rubber band around your wrist and snap it when you have the urge to sneak around his inbox. (And not one of those wimpy Livestrong wristbands either. They don’t hurt enough.) Or whenever you feel the itch to snoop, you could just remind yourself of the two foolproof ways to wreck a relationship in no time: one, betray his trust; and two, demonstrate that you consider him unworthy of yours. Then, voilà! You’re done.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea Nemerson has spent the last 14 years as a sex educator and an instructor of sex educators. In her previous life she was a prop designer. And she just gave birth to twins, so she’s one bad mother of a sex adviser. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her previous columns.

Small Favors

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February 6, 2007

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I have a small penis, and I want my wife to have sex with a man more endowed than me, but I don’t know how to approach her regarding this.

Any suggestions?

Love,

Small but Fearless

Dear Fear:

I’m trying to re-create in my head the conversation from the other week which culminated in my suggesting that someone could really clean up at Cafe Press with an "Ask Me about My Small Penis" T-shirt. I can’t, but suffice it to say that nobody disagreed.

If you don’t really need her to do this but just want to enjoy thinking about it, you don’t have to approach her. You can just … close your eyes. If it’s the humiliation you’re after (and you wouldn’t be the first or the thousandth), you can clue her in so that she can bring it up at (in)opportune times. There are few women, it is true, whose personal chimes get rung by panting, "Oh, Charlie, your dick is so small … and kind of limp. Oh, do me with your small, limp dick!" but there are certainly some who would gamely follow the script if it made you happy, especially if it isn’t even particularly true. (My dominatrix friend reports that men who announce their tininess ahead of time, hoping to be berated for it, are nearly always perfectly normal-size; it’s the customers who never mention a thing who turn out to be hung like a grape, and not one of those big grapes, either.)

Be very, very sure of what you want before you go asking your wife for a favor of this magnitude. Unless you already have reason to believe she’s amenable, she will likely be terribly shocked and wounded and wonder what she ever did to make you think she’d agree to such a thing and if you love her anymore. Or she may agree way too eagerly and rush out without so much as a "see ya" — and you probably wouldn’t like that much, either. Show her this column, and see what she says.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

I love ticklish women. How did I develop this fetish?

Love,

Elmo

Dear Mo:

Oh, who the hell knows? Early sexologists such as Alfred Binet and Richard von Krafft-Ebbing and later theorists and researchers such as Sigmund Freud and the behaviorists have tried to explain how we make associations or get imprinted or conditioned (or whichever theory was in at the time) and end up getting weird about rubber aprons or white gym socks or used Kleenex. None of it’s very convincing. It doesn’t seem as though early (or "premature") masturbation in the presence of the object, nor possession of a congenitally low and criminal character, nor symbolic substitution ("The shoe, it is a vagina! The foot, it is also a vagina! Um …"), nor lovemaps, nor any other attempt to explain why we are attracted to things and parts as well as to people is ever going to emerge as the one true explanation. In fact, I would venture to say that they’re all wrong, as is the question itself. We can’t determine how or why fetishes develop when the category itself is such a catchall.

There are individual, idiosyncratic fetishes but also societally determined ones, which are also subject to the vagaries of time (the well-turned ankle, anyone? teeny-tiny feet?), and there are fashions even more ephemeral. There are drives so powerful they seem bred in the bone, and there are fancies adopted and forgotten like Paris Hilton’s Chihuahuas. There are objects that are not really fetishes at all but props or costumes necessary to someone’s fantasy scenario, and there is Fetish, which is the sort of tight and shiny stuff that many people fetishize but others wear or covet merely because it looks bitchin’.

You don’t really have a fetish for ticklish women, anyway, do you? You have a thing for tickling, but you don’t know which women are ticklish (and most of us aren’t about to tell you), and you probably don’t find their ticklishness arousing as much as you are aroused by tickling them. OK, I’m nitpicking, but still. Tickling is usually a power thing, of course, and many incidents of seemingly harmless tickling are acts of aggression in (flimsy) disguise. Being tickled can be particularly dismaying to the victim, because unlike, say, a sound kick in the ribs, tickling is supposed to be all in good fun, so a ticklee may feel like a party pooper or a crybaby for insisting that is in fact neither fun nor funny — she (it’s usually but by no means always a she) really wants it to stop right now. Are you one of those ticklers? Because if so, well fuck you, sir, very much. Cut it the hell out. If you are the other sort, of course, the tickler who tickles only willing ticklees or stops as soon as the recipient cries uncle, well good for you and carry on.

I really hate the first kind, in case that wasn’t clear. And ticklish? Me? Certainly not.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea Nemerson has spent the last 14 years as a sex educator and an instructor of sex educators. In her previous life she was a prop designer. And she just gave birth to twins, so she’s one bad mother of a sex adviser. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her previous columns.

Newer skin

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January 31, 2007

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Readers:

Who would have thought that the column with the letter from the guy who was contemputf8g gluing his dick shut to spare his wife contact with his precome would have garnered so much attention?

Mainly, I got suggestions for changing the flavor of semen (nobody but me seemed to notice that it was not semen but Cowper’s gland fluid that was bugging them), most involving pineapple juice. This subject has been covered and covered but suffice it to say that some people get good results with pineapple juice or parsley or figs wrapped in prosciutto or whatever the experts are suggesting these days, and others diligently down the stuff and remain pretty gamy. The last time I wrote about this I made fun of Yum-Cum or whatever, that powdered stuff that was hawked all over the Web a few years ago; I heard back from some indignant executive for Yum-Cum who wanted to send me a sample, but my lab partner wasn’t having any of that.

Precome is pretty near flavorless, and if someone’s were actively raunchy, I’d be sending that dude straight to urology. I assumed that the wife was just an unusually delicate flower, a princess and the pee hole, if you will, but when body fluids are a little too piquant, I recommend starting with lots of water and fewer bitter alkaloids such as nicotine and caffeine before making any dire dietary changes. Ingesting lots of fresh, sweet fruits and vegetables is rather nice, though; so by all means, eat up if the spirit moves you.

After the pineapple juice people, the next guy suggested a thumb cot, which is pretty much the same suggestion as a condom rolled down to cover only the head, except nobody seems to carry (or make?) thumb cots. Finger cots, sure. The only thumb cots I could find were wool-lined, and that just cannot be good. I did find a rather startling product, though: Finger Gloves. They are eight to ten times thicker than a finger cot, so are probably not ideal for our purposes, but they "snugly conform," and the Web site, www.fingergloves.com, is strangely alluring — rather beautifully designed and given to eccentric but persuasive pronouncements of product virtue: "Can be utilized during virtually any circumstance. A contingency where rigid inflexible tools awkwardly struggle." I’m not at all sure to what sexual purpose Finger Gloves might properly be put, but I urge someone to figure it out.

And then there was this guy, whose letter I present chopped to bits, as it was about eleventy billion paragraphs long.

You missed one suggestion that’s perfect for this guy, and it’s a big miss — from Mantak Chia’s book Taoist Secrets of Love: Cultivating Male Sexual Energy, "External Locking: the Three Fingers Method."

A man can press an area near the perineum right before the point of ejaculation. [Complicated instructions, etc.] He still has wonderful orgasms, except this external pressure blocks the semen from shooting out the penis and into his wife’s mouth. It gets reabsorbed into the body (and doesn’t leave a man in that worn-out, must-sleep post-come state, either). I did this for a few months, and it was amazing — come without the mess.

You can get to the point where you can do it with your internal musculature, but that takes a lot of training. There are more amazing benefits to it, but one of those will be keeping his foul-tasting semen from his wife’s mouth. I’m sorry, but it sounds like you’re not empathizing with how much a layer of latex decreases the sensitivity of a penis. He wanted uncovered penis solutions, not creative condom usage.

Anyway, he should practice it solo before giving it a try with the partner.

You must know about Chia’s The Multiorgasmic Man. I’ll assume you have ignored his earlier works because their Taoist approach brought you horrid visions of new age, aikido-practicing, vibing, oversensitive, and completely unfuckable men.

Yep, right on the money there, chum. I’m not opposed to Taoist-tantric-shamanistic-kabbalistic-woohooistic ways of knowing, as long as I don’t have to practice them myself. I do know people who have learned some pretty advanced tricks (sorry, I do think of them as tricks, like eating light bulbs or squirting water out your eye) that way. I do believe this writer when he claims to have successfully cultivated a habit of retrograde ejaculation, the only remaining question is, why bother? All the theories about the benefits of conserving precious bodily fluids kind of fall apart when you realize that the body is saving exactly nothing — no calories, no nutrients, no effort — by depositing semen into the bladder instead of into a wad of dirty laundry. It’s a little less messy is all. The other "amazing benefits" are ineffable as well as unquantifiable and unfalsifiable, being more in your head than in your pants. But hey, you go. It still won’t help our guy, though, since it wasn’t semen. It was precome, and I dare you to stop precome by humming at it and poking yourself in the perineum.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea Nemerson has spent the last 14 years as a sex educator and an instructor of sex educators. In her previous life she was a prop designer. And she just gave birth to twins, so she’s one bad mother of a sex adviser. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her previous columns.

Up the butt, Bob

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January 24, 2007

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

My girlfriend and I came home from the club blind drunk and started getting a little crazy. I was in her vagina as well as her anus and swapping between without cleaning myself. I also didn’t wear a condom. In the morning, I noticed there were blood stains on the sheets from her anus. I also licked her anus that night, but I’m not sure whether or not I got any blood in my mouth. I am really worried about diseases and infections even though we are both healthy with no infections. She has diabetes, however. Please help! I don’t know what to do.

Love,

Fretting

Dear Fret:

You can stop worrying about catching diabetes, for one thing. Type 1 diabetes is a luck-of-the-draw thing, not brought on by excessive donut consumption nor certainly by having drunken butt sex with a diabetic person. You knew this, right? Tell me you knew this.

This is not to say that what you and you girlfriend got up to that night was not stupid. It was not smart. In a long-term partnership it’s possible to anticipate most moderately plausible disaster scenarios and come to some mutual agreement about what to do if X happens. There are some Xs that ought to be avoided no matter what, but I trust mature long-term partners to make reasonable decisions about who can be exposed to what (fertile gametes included here) and when. And then there are the couples I wouldn’t trust as far as I could roll their drunken asses down the stairs.

If neither of you has any infections, why are you "really worried" about diseases? I mean, chances are good neither of you is actually harboring anything ghastly, but I’m going to guess you actually know that. For instance, there is some disagreement in my sex ed circle as to who originated the line "If rimming did not exist, hepatitis would have had to invent it." (It was me, me, me!) You have to consider heps A, B, and C if you’re going to — there’s really no delicate way to put this — lick blood off of somebody’s asshole. Or you could just not do that, which means looking before you, uh, leap, and maybe trying new, potentially problematic activities while sober enough to think, if not to drive.

In all likelihood, the most you’ve done is put your girlfriend at risk for bacterial vaginosis, but if you feel sick or turn yellow or anything else dramatic happens, see the doctor. And both of you, go get tested for a whole bunch of stuff (including pregnancy — hello, condoms aren’t just for prophylaxis, you know) before you go quite that crazy again. You have not proven yourselves smart enough to act that stupid all the time and get away with it.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

My boyfriend and I were having sex, and he asked if I’d like it up my butt. I told him to go for it. It was a little painful at first but then started to feel kind of nice. He asked if he could come in me, and the thought turned me on, but I didn’t know what bad things might happen. After searching the Internet and finding only porn, I thought I’d ask you.

Should I have any concerns about him coming in there? Will I drip for hours? Will it all drip out? Also, he has tested negative for HIV. However, I have not. What would be the chance of him getting HIV from me in this situation (not that I have any reason at all to believe I have it)? Lastly, I would like to clean myself before if possible. If I wanted to give myself an enema of some sort, how should I time it?

Love,

So Many Questions!

Dear Quez:

Wow, you don’t waste any time, do you? One little spontaneous anal episode and look at you now!

I’m not one of those condom-every-time people. I’m really not, especially when we’re talking about (presumably) monogamous couples, but I can’t help noticing that nearly every one of your concerns could be addressed by 75 cents worth of latex. Nothing will drip (it doesn’t much anyway, since the lining of the rectum is nothing if not absorbent); HIV worries would be assuaged (as the penetrator he’d be at little risk from the virus you don’t have); and anything messy can be skinned off and disposed of, never to be thought of again. If that’s not clean enough for you, you can get a "rectal syringe for anus hygiene." I think you’ll find them next to the hemorrhoid cream and just down from the Depends, but you can mail-order if shopping in that aisle makes you want to die. You can use it whenever, unlike a real enema, which must be done the night before if you want to avoid a horrible mess.

Condoms are neater, but nothing too terrible will come of bare-backing with a trusted partner, although it may not be a habit you want to cultivate.

Love,

Andrea

Skin Flick

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January 16, 2007

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

Your question form says to "try to be interesting." Hmm, performance anxiety … and I’m only talking about sex!

My wife is very sensitive to tastes, and she gags on my pre-come. On the other hand, I really don’t like the reduced sensation of using a condom during oral sex. So I was considering temporarily sealing my urethra with some of that "liquid bandage" stuff — no mess for her, plenty of good feelings for me.

I have several concerns. This stuff is used on small cuts, so it should be safe, but are there any nasty solvents that would make it problematic? After it’s dried, are there any risks if it’s ingested? If it works, I hope to use it often, so how can it be removed without lasting damage?

Love,

New Skin

Dear Skin:

Well, you succeeded. Your idea is interesting, and (this hardly ever happens) it is new. We oughtn’t let the fact that it’s also kind of crazy stop us from celebrating its novelty.

Dude. New-Skin contains alcohol and oil of cloves. Fingernail polish may dissolve it. It can, apparently, stain floors and countertops. It is labeled for external use only, of course, and also as not for use on "mucous materials." Is the inside of your urethra not a mucous material? My guess is this stuff will not permanently damage you but will hurt like hell and be difficult to remove if it gets inside. It’s not designed to fill holes anyway, so it wouldn’t even work.

Or did you mean the newer, higher-tech liquid bandage, the stuff that’s basically Dermabond, a.k.a. superglue? Have you not thought through the ejaculation problem? How, exactly, do you expect this to work?

This leaves us with three possibilities: The spray-on latex condom, although offering many opportunities for hilarity, won’t work, because it’s supposed to cover your entire penis (you stick your dick in the can, I believe) and because it isn’t on the market yet. Paint-on sex latex (google "liquid latex" or "deviant") is nontoxic and more or less meant to go naughty places but also is not meant as a gap filler — not that your urethra is a gap, precisely, but you know what I mean. Plus, latex is meant to be kept out of body cavities.

Last up: using a regular condom but rolling it down to cover just the glans. This is probably your best bet. It’s not creepy-cool like fake skin nor especially innovative, but it’s also not likely to maim you or require dramatic and embarrassing medical intervention, which, if you think about it, is really the least we can ask of our marital aids.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

I love having raspberries blown on my tummy — you know, when the lips are placed against the tummy and then blown, causing a vibrating and tickling sensation. I’ve loved this ever since I was a child and also love doing it. I don’t know how to bring it up with friends because I’m afraid they’ll think I’m weird. I only like women to do it to me, not guys! Is this unusual?

Love,

Herbert

Dear Herb:

Not at all. I know a number of people who are fond of the zerbert, at least one of whom can be instantly yanked out of the deepest, sloughiest slough of despond by the judicious application of sputtering lips to belly — but they are all babies. The reason nobody talks about this is that it’s something we do to entertain infants, like making faces or putting unusual objects on our heads. Few adults continue to laugh hysterically every time you put a stuffed pig on your head, and most would look askance at you for doing so.

Look, I don’t think this is even sex — it’s just something you do with your body that isn’t eating or excreting or sports, and we have trouble categorizing bodily acts that aren’t sex and aren’t any of those things either. We’re just weird about bodies. Perhaps we should all try to get over that, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.

All that aside, though, nobody wants to hear you talk about this. If you’re lucky enough to find yourself frolicking naked with a likely female prospect, you can probably get away with it as a lighthearted, jokey thing, but do not bring it up over dinner, the way one might broach the topic of, say, S-M. People who wouldn’t blink on hearing that you are fond of pain or sex parties or any other normal kink like that might never feel quite the same about you after hearing you wax rhapsodic about belly raspberries. Probably because of the association with babies, the only people whose shirts we are allowed, even encouraged, to yank up without prelude or permission to shmoozle their tummy-tum-tums, it just seems a little unseemly.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea Nemerson has spent the last 14 years as a sex educator and an instructor of sex educators. In her previous life she was a prop designer. And she just gave birth to twins, so she’s one bad mother of a sex adviser. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her previous columns.

Emily Postfeminist

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January 2, 2007

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

Recently, my boyfriend and I were at a strip club and bought a lap dance. My experience has been that, as a girl, the hands-off rule generally doesn’t apply to me. However, out of respect for the girl, I don’t touch until she invites me to. This one invited me to touch her. Caught up in the moment, my boyfriend asked, "Can she touch your pussy?" I was a bit shocked because I assumed that was off-limits, but she said, "She can, but you can’t." So I started touching her on the outside of her G-string. I got a little braver and went under her G-string but still stayed outside. She moved a certain way during her dance, and my thumb kind of slipped right in. A few seconds later, she stopped it. She was nice and hugged me and told us to come back anytime. Did I go too far? I feel guilty that I may have made her feel like a hooker. Or is it really no big deal? I’m embarrassed to go back, and I’ve asked my boyfriend to not make that request in the future. How often does this sort of thing happen to a dancer?

Love,

Thumbelina

Dear Thumb:

Just what we needed, a new set of ethical dilemmas and moral failings to keep us awake and tossing on those long dark nights of the soul that tend to hit around this time of year. I really don’t think this is the sort of thing that used to bother people before half the female grad students in the country started stripping and writing books and doing performance art (oh, so much performance art) about it. For that matter, I don’t think other girls used to feel either as permitted or as obligated to go grope those girls for money at their places of work. I’m not entirely sure that what we’re seeing here is really an accurate demonstration of human sexual behavior in the wild — there are too many layers of politics and performance in there to tell what’s really happening — but I’m confident we’re at least seeing some genuinely new situations and their accompanying etiquette issues in play.

I’ve known any number of posteverything strippers, hookers, and dominatrices, but one in particular comes to mind. She’d been working at a womyn-owned crunchy organic peep show, but — surprise! — she could barely make her rent, so like so many before her, she’d given up her ideals and gone where the money is. Hired on at the grimy mainstream porn theater and Olde Lappe Dance Emporium, she was coming home with her pockets and God knows what else stuffed with 50s every night but complained to me that some guy came while she was wiggling around on him and ew, ew, gross, yuck, how dare he? I commiserated at the time because I’m a wimp like that, but honestly, isn’t this an occupational hazard? If you’re going to be a sex worker, you deserve to be treated with respect and decency, of course, and what you say goes as far as who’s allowed to touch where with what and so forth, but come on. Into each stripper’s life a little semen must fall. If that’s absolutely not going to work for you, dance behind glass (for lower tips) or, hey, get your Realtor’s license or something.

Most of the female sex workers I’ve known have been at least passingly bisexual, but even those who really aren’t seem quite genuinely enthusiastic about female customers, both prospective and actual. There are elements of novelty to the appeal, I’m sure, just as there are elements of safety and sisterly enthusiasm. What there ought not to be, and what you ought not to worry about, is an expectation that female customers aren’t really customers at all, that is to say, are not paying the sex worker for sex. While many women who go to strip clubs or book time with a dominatrix may be doing it to please a (male) partner or as a learning experience or a lark or just to make a statement of some sort, it would be pretty silly for a sex worker to be surprised when a customer, male or female, appears to be interested in having some sort of sex with her.

Your dancer granted you access. Maybe she liked you (or likes girls in general) or maybe she was milking you for tips, but whatever, she said yes. She has a sense of how sturdy or flimsy a barrier her G-string presents to curious fingers and was probably not surprised when you got where you got. Most tellingly, she invited you back whenever, which she was certainly under no obligation to do. I think it would be fine to go back there and fine to whisper "Sorry I got fresh last time" and fine not to. It would also be fine for her, in turn, to refuse you service, but I bet she doesn’t.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea Nemerson has spent the last 14 years as a sex educator and an instructor of sex educators. In her previous life she was a prop designer. And she just gave birth to twins, so she’s one bad mother of a sex adviser. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her previous columns.

Don’t mess with it

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December 26, 2006

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

In last week’s response to "Pill or No Pill," I’m glad that you mentioned that playing around with endocrine systems can be harmful. When I was diagnosed with anorexia, the doctors told me that if I kept missing periods, I would be at risk for things like low bone density and osteoporosis. It seems suspect that doctors and pharmaceutical companies are now advocating pills that limit a woman’s period to four times a year. What can you tell me about it?

Love,

Keeping My Period

PS In regard to "Pill or No Pill," why can’t they have sex during her period?

Dear Period:

I don’t get a chance to say this very often, but your doctors misspoke. There’s no doubt that your endocrine system was messed up good while you were anorexic, but it wasn’t the missing periods that were doing the damage. Both the amenorrhea (lack of periods) and the potential bone loss were symptoms of messing with your endocrine system. When one hormone gets knocked out, the entire chain is broken, and all sorts of havoc potentially ensues. You weren’t menstruating because you weren’t ovuutf8g because your ovaries weren’t getting the right hormonal cues because your pituitary gland wasn’t sending them because your hypothalamus wasn’t sending them because you were starving. It’s actually a good idea, if you’re an ovum, to avoid getting ovulated and fertilized while there’s no good material with which to build a baby.

Somewhere in there your ovaries also failed to get the hint to produce lots of estrogen, which is required for the absorption of calcium, and there go your bones. So yes, of course it’s potentially dangerous to mess around with your endocrine system, but we should remember that millions of women do just that every day when they take their pill, and they’re just fine. Better, even, since they’re not having to squeeze out another baby every year or so for the entire span of their reproductive years, the way our "ansisters" did and as women still do wherever reliable birth control is unavailable or forbidden. And speaking of our ancestors …

We (the Western, industrialized, supermarket-shopping we) are the freaks in a long line of normal people. As any number of evolutionary biologists and other researchers have pointed out recently, it is not at all the natural state of women to menstruate every damn month for 45 (damn) years. Contemporary hunter-gatherer (mostly gatherer) women start late, have a bunch of babies, breast-feed them forever, and die young, totaling about 100 or 150 periods in a lifetime. By contrast, supermarket women reach for the tampon box approximately 450 times. No wonder we’re crabby.

So is menstruation natural? Well, obviously, but an argument can be made that not menstruating is even more so. What seems a brute biological fact ("women bleed every month") turns out to be in part a social construct. Isn’t that cool? This sort of thinking isn’t really new — the developers of the original pill built in the bleedy part, the placebos at the end of the cycle, because they thought not menstruating would freak women out, not because it was medically necessary — but it’s not the sort of thing people tend to talk about. It will be, though, by necessity, and soon. As new products make four periods a year or no periods a year (seriously, this one has been extensively studied and so far so good for safety) increasingly popular, menstruation will become a lifestyle choice like any other. This will disgust the more moon-goddessy type feminists and please the "it’s all about choice" ones. For everyone else, after a while, it will just seem, well, natural.

You also asked, very reasonably, why the couple in the original letter (she wanted to take something to suppress her periods so they could have romantic weekends) couldn’t just have sex, blood or no blood. The answer is they could, of course. I’m willing to bet that they hadn’t even discussed and dismissed that option, as "no sex when the painters are in" is just one of those things everybody takes on faith until they don’t. If a woman’s "monthlies" turn out to be at least partly a social invention, the menstrual taboo is entirely one. Barring the presence of something nasty, blood-borne, and contagious, there’s no reason on earth (or the moon, for that matter, and aren’t we going back soon?) why a couple can’t have a threesome with him, her, and Aunt Flo.

Speaking of the moon: women down here have connected their sexuality and fertility with the phases and pull of our satellite for so long that I have to wonder what happens to all that lunar blood magic when we’re living in bubbles on the moon. Nothing takes the mystery out of a hunk of rock and dust like having to dig holes in it to build a privy.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea Nemerson has spent the last 14 years as a sex educator and an instructor of sex educators. In her previous life she was a prop designer. And she just gave birth to twins, so she’s one bad mother of a sex adviser. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her previous columns.

Pee on a stick

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December 20, 2006

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:
We use a fertility monitor for birth control — my partner pees on a stick and inserts the stick in the monitor, and it tells her when she’s fertile. This device is designed to tell you when you are likely to get pregnant — we are using it to abstain on the fertile days. This would seem to be more accurate than the rhythm method. Do you think this might be a valid (and less invasive) method of birth control?
Love,
Sticks Not Pills

Dear Stick:
Sure, of course it is. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that they wouldn’t sell such a thing if it weren’t valid (“they” sell all kinds of stupid stuff), but there’s good science to support fertility awareness, both as a contraceptive method and a conception aid. In truth, you don’t even need the monitor, since a woman’s body will tell her what it’s up to if she knows how to listen. I can’t say the manual version is really for everyone though. It requires both obsessive-compulsive tendencies and a high tolerance for low-level grossness, which is to say, it suited me perfectly, but your partner is under no obligation.
If you (the generic you, not the specific, biologically male you) want to do fertility awareness without a monitor, you will need a cheap digital thermometer and some paper or a spreadsheet program. There’s a very slight, like a couple tenths of a degree slight, rise in temperature after a woman ovulates, best recorded first thing in the morning before she does anything else, like even sit up. Any given temperature reading is meaningless in itself, but over a few months a pattern tends to emerge. Some very nutty data queens get a kick out of making charts with multiple colored pencils; others enjoy downloading charting software to their PDAs. Normal people will just consider it another dull but necessary maintenance task, like flossing.
Perhaps the most meaningful, and certainly the ickiest, of the fertility awareness signs is the state of one’s cervical mucus. Toni Weschler, the queen of fertility awareness methods, likes to tell the story of how she was unable to get herself booked on any of the wholesome morning talk shows and was completely flummoxed — the audiences are mostly women! Women are very interested in birth control, particularly free or cheap, totally safe, and quite reliable birth control. Then she tried telling the producers that she’d be talking about cervical fluid. Nobody wants to hear about mucus, particularly right after breakfast. Anyway, cervical fluid runs free and clear like a mountain stream (except ickier) when a woman is fertile and dries up and becomes inhospitable, if not downright rude, to sperm when she is not.
There are other signs and wonders to marvel at and to record obsessively with colored pencils. The Internet is full of detailed instructions, as is Weschler’s widely read book, Taking Control of Your Fertility. I myself am a fan of obsessive charting combined with ovulation predictor kits, which are basically just the sticks without the little computer to read them out for you. The only real difference is that the monitor, when it determines that a woman is fertile, produces a wee hen’s-egg-shaped icon, which always bothered me a little. If I’m finding nursing a bit disturbingly bovine, I found that picture just a little too … chickeny. Now that I actually have kids, there are enough things around here that cluck and moo, thanks.
Love,
Andrea

Dear Andrea:
I am in a long-distance relationship. Sometimes when I see my girlfriend, she’s on her rag, and so we can’t have sex. She suggested buying some medicine to control her rag or at least delay it. I don’t know anything about pills: can they cause people to be unable to get pregnant? I know that she’s getting the pills because sex is important to both of us, but I’m worried about her health. Is there a pill that you could suggest?
Love,
Pill or No Pill?

Dear Pill:
You know that “on her rag” is not the proper technical term, right? I worry that you might approach a pharmacist or doctor with questions about rag control, and I’m sorry, I just don’t see that going well.
The “medicine” you’re looking for is just plain old birth control pills. While they certainly can cause people to be unable to become pregnant, that should not be a problem later (I hope much, much later) when your girlfriend is ready to have a baby. Regular pills will work if taken all month long, as will the fancy new ones sold specifically to limit a woman’s period to four times a year (sold as Seasonale). Any of these will require a doctor’s prescription, and I couldn’t be happier about that. You guys sound a little unclear on a number of concepts, which is fine as long as you’re not messing around with anything that could seriously screw up parts of her body if mishandled, like, oh, her endocrine system.
Love,
Andrea

Santa’s secret

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December 12, 2006

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
I’m a guy with a single, straight, platonic female friend in her mid-20s who could really use a first sex toy, but doesn’t seem comfortable enough with her sexuality to buy one on her own. The holidays seem like the perfect excuse to give a gift that keeps on giving. I was going to get her a gift certificate or gift from a woman-friendly online store, since she may be uncomfortable going into an adult store, and a vibrating gift under the Christmas tree might make Christmas morning a little embarrassing.
She’s the first girl I’ve ever met who doesn’t have at least one toy. I don’t think it’s occurred to her female friends to get her a toy or gift certificate, and I imagine she might be uncomfortable with me telling them she could really use a sex toy. But it’s been years since the girl’s had sex. I can see how giving a toy as a gift can be awkward because it can become associated with the visual image of the gifter. But among friends without a great deal of cash, it could also be uncomfortable for her to receive a gift certificate for $50 or $100. Is there a way around this that results in a more sexually fulfilled and less tense friend?
Love,
Secret Santa
Dear Santa:
She might be uncomfortable with you telling her friends she needs a good buzz-off? Do you think? Please, please, put down the gift certificate and back away slowly. There is no way for this to go well, and too many possible bad endings to count.
I mean, let’s say you’re right and she really has been utterly abstemious all these years, as opposed to uninterested in detailing the contents of her bedside drawer for you, her straight male friend. Even so, what could be more mortifying than a gift that says she’s hard up and in danger of drying out — and all her friends know it?
I suppose for maximum mortification you could save the gift presentation for whatever party she and all your mutual friends will be attending and let her do the stammering and blushing in public, but I’m confident that the moment would suck for her whether in public or alone with you, the friend who suddenly seems to know too much and be thinking too deeply about what does or doesn’t go on between her sheets. You’re very well meaning, and it’s nice that you care and all, but just don’t.
I see one way you could ensure that she has access to what you’ve determined she needs, but it’s both expensive and rather ridiculous: on the Romper Roomish principle that you shouldn’t bring any if you don’t have enough for everyone, pass out the gift certificates to your whole circle, whomever you’d normally be buying presents for, boys and girls alike. Then you’ll just be thought of as generous, if slightly pervy, instead of creepily overinvolved in the sex life of someone with whom you are not and will not be having sex. Unless you actually do want to have sex with her, in which case I still wouldn’t recommend buying her a vibrator.
Oy. This is very complicated. It makes me glad I’m Jewish and don’t have to buy Christmas presents for anyone, let alone receive any. It’s a minefield! Who knew?
Love,
Andrea
Dear Andrea:
We are trying to have a baby. After we have sex, the semen doesn’t stay in but trickles out of the vagina. Why does it happen, and what should we do to keep it in, so I can conceive?
Love,
Drippy
Dear Drip:
The only connection between your letter and the one preceding it is the way they produced an involuntary and audible “Don’t do that!” from me as I read them. Don’t have a baby!
Oh, relax. You can have a baby, but you should already know the answer to this, and I can’t help wondering what else you don’t know. The semen trickles out because it’s already done its job. Only a very small part of the ejaculate is made up of sperm; the rest is what would be called “inactive ingredients” if your partner were ejacuutf8g, say, toothpaste instead of semen. The carrier fluid coagulates briefly, just so it won’t run down your leg before the sperm have made their escape. Once the sperm that are going anywhere have gone, the leftover gunk liquefies and runs down your aforementioned leg to form the “wet spot” of lore. If it didn’t, you’d be carrying the leftover goo from a lifetime of sexual encounters around with you until you scrubbed it out with a bottle brush, and that’s not a pretty picture.
You’re fine. However, if your question really does reflect your general state of knowledge about these things, please get a book. Get several. Get a library card. This baby-having business is not simple, and while there is such a thing as too much information, too little information is worse.
Love,
Andrea
Andrea Nemerson has spent the last 14 years as a sex educator and an instructor of sex educators. In her previous life she was a prop designer. And she just gave birth to twins, so she’s one bad mother of a sex adviser. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her previous columns.

Mit-what-a?

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September 26, 2006

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
Many years ago, I contracted the Hepatitis C virus (HCV). I had many partners before tests became available. None, to my knowledge, has contracted HCV from sexual contact with me. I know it’s possible to pass it through sexual contact but it’s very rare. It requires blood to blood contact: someone would need to stick their bloody penis in some equally bloody orifice on my body — not gonna happen! I’m always safe when it comes to anal sex. As for oral, well, that does give the opportunity to examine my partner more closely. Am I obligated to tell every partner I have about my HCV status?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) consider HCV to be a sexually transmitted disease, but health departments of other countries — Australia for example — do not. My faith in the truthfulness of an agency of the US government in the current political climate is doubtful, especially when it comes to sexual matters.
I’m not a slut, but I satisfy my needs when they arise. I’ve never had an STD of any kind. I don’t know if it matters, but I’m a transsexual woman.
Love,
Liver It Up

Dear Liv:
Nope, doesn’t matter a bit!
It is maddening that we still know so little about sexual transmission of hep C. There are studies, but they contradict each other, are too specific to generalize from, or are otherwise just not capable of answering the big question: can you for sure get this from fucking? Seeing as the virus is pretty common though, there really ought to be more cases of transmission between monogamous non-drug-injecting partners. The cases just aren’t there, so it is tempting to shrug and say, “Guess it isn’t sexually transmitted after all.” If hep C were the common cold, I’d be cool with that, but seeing as it’s the leading cause of liver transplants in the United States and can totally kill you, we can’t be quite that cavalier about it.
It’s worth noting that while the CDC groups HCV with the sexually transmitted diseases on its Web site, it has little to say about actually getting it through sex. Click on the link and you get a list of risk factors (transfusion or organ transplant before routine testing was implemented, injection drug use, etc.) with nary a mention of sex of any sort. And when you dig a little deeper you find this: “HCV can be spread by sex, but this does not occur very often. If you are having sex, but not with one steady partner: You and your partners can get other diseases spread by having sex (e.g., AIDS, hepatitis B, gonorrhea or chlamydia).”
This is really a nice bit of legerdemain: “Sure, it could happen, but we don’t want to be quoted saying it could happen to you, so, uh, don’t get the clap.” I was guilty of the same sort of sleight of hand way back when I was working as a women’s safer-sex educator but really didn’t believe that the population we were reaching was actually at the slightest risk of contracting HIV through sex. No matter how stridently the AIDS establishment insisted that everyone was at equal risk, it wasn’t and still isn’t true, so I’d hand the girls the AIDS-prevention pamphlet I was paid to distribute and then tell them how not to get warts. Win-win, as far as I was concerned.
So do you have to tell everyone? This may be more of a question for that ethics guy than for me, but I kinda want his job anyway, so I’m going to have to say yes. You can play it down, you can say the chances of exchanging enough blood during sex are extremely low and you’ll be using condoms anyway, but since there have been cases of sexual transmission (no, we don’t really know what those people were doing, only what they say they were doing), we can’t pretend that there’s zero risk. “Almost zero” isn’t zero. I’m really sorry.
I had to do this, kind of. I discovered that a forever-ago partner had developed the disease, and as much as I would rather have sporked my own eyes out, I called the people I’d seen since (thankfully, there weren’t many of these) and informed them of the teensy-weensy risk. Nobody cared. I do hope I called them back after I finally got tested … um … all clear, guys, OK?
As for the right-wing antisex conspiracy, well, I’m with you as far as not trusting this administration as far as I could throw them — and really, really wanting to throw them — but the CDC is not so bad (and anyway the World Health Organization agrees with it about HCV). Look up Dr. Julie Gerberding, the Bush-appointed director of the CDC, and you’ll find her support for safer-sex education reviled and her appointment tsk-tsked on the Web sites of Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for America, and Accuracy in Media, among others. The enemy of your enemy is your friend.
Love,
Andrea
Andrea Nemerson has spent the last 14 years as a sex educator and an instructor of sex educators. In her previous life she was a prop designer. And she just gave birth to twins, so she’s one bad mother of a sex adviser. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her previous columns.

My sister! My mother!

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September 19, 2006

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
I have these dreams that my mother is trying to have sex with me. I want to leave, but I freeze in place and can’t move. I feel sick when I think about it. I’m a bisexual woman in a healthy relationship with a man. I don’t know if this has anything to do with it, but I also have another problem: I really want to have an orgasm with normal sex. I can come if my boyfriend goes down on me or rubs me off, but it usually takes a long time. He’s wonderfully patient but I’m still frustrated with myself. I always feel like I’m almost there, but then we’ll have been at it for so long (two hours or so) that I dry up and it starts to hurt and the feeling is gone. Is there something terribly wrong with me?
Love,
Bad Dream, Bad Sex
Dear Bad:
There’s only one thing about you that really worries me, and it’s that you would ever imagine in your wildest dreams (and your dreams, you must admit, are pretty wild) that the perfectly normal way in which your sex life is unsatisfactory could have anything to do with your mother. I don’t think that the Oedipal (not the right word, but “Electral” doesn’t quite work either) dreams have any connection to your bisexuality either. Whatever’s going on with your feelings about your mother is way too fraught and Freudian for me to touch, but I’m willing to bet it has influenced neither your sexual preference nor your sexual performance.
As for coming during “normal” sex, well, you already are. Of course you’d like to reach orgasm during intercourse, but please understand that if you did so, you would be in the minority, hence no longer “normal” yourself. Relatively few women (the number is unknown but often reported at about 25 percent, which is probably too low, but it’s all we’ve got) reach orgasm purely through vaginal intercourse with no additional clitoral stimulation. This may seem unfair, but Mother Nature, admirable as she is in many ways, has never been known to play nice.
The feeling of getting “almost there” during intercourse is, regrettably, extremely common. It is also good news — if you’re almost getting there, there is at least somewhere for you to get to. My advice: quit the grim, goal-oriented grinding (two hours is really pushing it, guys), don’t let yourself dry out (there are many fine wettening products out there), and when the good feeling begins to fade, do something else. And no matter what happens — pay attention, this is very important — do not think about your mother.
Love,
Andrea
Dear Andrea:
I was rereading your column “Sister Act” and had a question. When I was maybe eight or nine, I’d play daddy and my sister would play mom. I don’t know where we got this idea, but sometimes I would get on top of her (clothed) and kinda grind away to orgasm. I think we both knew we weren’t supposed to be doing it, and if my parents came in, we’d quickly separate. So, is this at all normal? Also, is it normal that later as an adult I still desire her (I’m bi)? I’d never act on it, but I feel awful just for thinking it.
Love,
Sister Act II
Dear Sis:
I wrote a column called “Sister Act”? I wonder what it said? Probably something about how even socially unacceptable fantasies are harmless and, like ghosts and other apparitions, unable to affect things in the real world unless somehow incarnated, so don’t incarnate them. Something like that.
Playing house, including the weirdly gender-bound role-play and the not-so-innocent grinding, is indeed common and even normal. Most kids get up to this sort of mischief once or twice and nothing bad happens (of course there’s always that one kid who likes it a little too much). Cousins and next-door neighbors are the classic partners in crime, but siblings will do in a pinch, and to call this “incest,” let alone “abuse,” seems an unnecessary pathologizing of pretty harmless childhood exploration. This is all assuming that it stops at some reasonable age — preferably before puberty. It’s uncommon to even remember the game all that clearly, let alone long to go back and pick up where you left off.
In short, while there are many definitions of normal as applied to sex, none can fairly be said to include sex with your adult sister. There is nothing to be gained by feeling awful about it though. We’re not responsible for what we want, only what we do. Don’t do anything — that includes saying anything — and you really have nothing to feel guilty about. Weird, yes, but not guilty.
Love,
Andrea
Andrea Nemerson has spent the last 14 years as a sex educator and an instructor of sex educators. And she just gave birth to twins, so she’s one bad mother of a sex adviser. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her previous columns.

If once, then always

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September 12, 2006

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
I started dating this guy (I am a girl) about six months ago. I knew he had a girlfriend in another country. I knew it was wrong, but he was only going to be in town for a few months. We ended up really falling for each other.
So the time came for him to leave, and I thought that would be it. But then he told me that he broke up with his girlfriend as soon as he got home. He flew back to visit, and we started talking about the long term.
Then it all crashed. He told me he was having doubts, he was feeling very guilty, and he was really in love with me but was confused. At first I was angry — but I really care about him and want him to be happy. I told him to do whatever was right for him, that I still loved him, but he needed to figure out what he wanted, and I couldn’t be strung along forever.
Now he says he’s made up his mind. He’s coming back. I’m worried I won’t feel secure now. Not only did this whole thing start as a lie (he was cheating — he says he’d never cheated before, but still), but now I fear I’ll always worry that he’ll think he made a mistake. Is there any way this can be salvaged? Can honesty and communication eventually smooth things over, or was this relationship doomed from the start?
Love,
Hopeful
Dear Hope:
Just to be perverse, I’m going to take up against the legion of advice columnists (and friends and bartenders and busybody neighbors …) who nod sagely and intone, “If he’ll cheat with you, he’ll cheat on you.” Sure, a bounder is a bounder and a rat is a rat, but can people not change? If you prick a bounder, does he not bleed? (OK, that last bit didn’t make any sense, but it sounded good, didn’t it?). In most cases, sure, a cheater who doesn’t cheat again is merely a cheater who hasn’t been caught, but — surprise! — people aren’t perfect. Sometimes we make mistakes, like hooking up with the wrong person for the wrong reasons, and sometimes only more bad behavior will remedy the situation.
The smug fatalism of “once a cheater always a cheater” depresses me. It’s like when the HIV counselor insists that you can never be sure your partner is monogamous, you only know he says he’s monogamous. Oh, shut up, Cassandra. I do too know, so butt out. Sometimes it’s just necessary to take a leap of faith, although not, of course, without looking where you’re going. It’s entirely possible that, having extricated himself from the wrong relationship and inserted himself into the right one, our boy will never look back nor stray again. Don’t kid yourself, though, that there’s much you can do to ensure this. If he is the cheating kind or easily bored, there is no level of devotion, no intensity of attention, and no righteous excellence of blow job guaranteed to keep him home.
By the same token, don’t count on honesty and communication to smooth things out. As relationship guru John Gottman has persuasively demonstrated, it’s not the communication style that makes or breaks a relationship, it’s what is actually being communicated. The ratio of “positive interactions” (sharing jokes and happy memories, saying “thank you”) to negative ones — according to Gottman — can predict success or failure far more accurately than the use of “I” statements ever could. (“I want to leave you” is an I statement; “No sane person could live with you” is not.) Whether a couple can improve their relationship by upping their ratio of positive to negative interactions is still in question. Maybe happy couples simply have a high positivity ratio to begin with. Either way, though, it isn’t the honesty that predicts success, it’s the positivity.
If his adventure with you does represent his one and only episode of cheating, and if the ex is really ex and was never the right girlfriend for him in the first place, and if he not only knows how to make up his mind but keeps it made up, I’d be inclined to give you decent odds. It should go without saying, although I will say it anyway, that taking a chance on love is a pretty good song but don’t quit your day job or sell your house. And if by chance you have a farm, don’t bet that either.
Love,
Andrea
Andrea Nemerson has spent the last 14 years as a sex educator and an instructor of sex educators. In her previous life, she was a prop designer. And she just gave birth to twins, so she’s one bad mother of a sex advisor. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her previous columns.

Ghost story

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September 5, 2006

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
I was on antidepressants for a year and just came off them recently. It was situational; I have no other psych history. I’ve always fantasized about being submissive but never seriously acted on it. But since I’ve been off the medication, I’ve experienced an intense surge of sexual interest. I’ve developed an online relationship with someone in which I am his sex slave–toy. I’ve just sent him some pictures of me. I’m a professional and my friends and family have no idea.
I feel I’m about to go out of control with this desire. Out of control is bad, but is being a sex slave bad? I need to either find a safe place to act out my cravings or go to counseling. How do women who want to be submissive slaves become so safely? What the hell is wrong with me?
Love,
Slavey
Dear Slave:
In my little subcultural corner over here, not a thing, but I wouldn’t be so sanguine about it if I had evidence that you wished yourself harm or were not, as they say, tall enough to ride this ride. You seem a cautious, even somewhat timid sort of girl though, and while that might hold you back a bit, it’s better to be held back than to hurtle blindly over a cliff.
I know a couple who established a relationship like yours, never intending to meet, let alone fall in love, and last time I heard, they were living on a boat and raising kittens. That’s rare though. More typically, what happens online ought to stay online, if you ask me. I don’t mean online dating; that’s fine, but if you’ve established a master-slave deal with this guy based on nothing but, well, mastery and slavishness, what are the chances you are otherwise compatible?
Keep Mr. Web Master–your Web master as a toy (he’s your toy as much as you’re his) and start from scratch. If you’re not out trolling for scary strangers who could actually hurt you and you’re not being driven so crazy by twisted desire (can’t you see the pulp-style illustration?) that you can’t maintain your respectable, professional standing, you don’t need counseling. You need to read some books (not the pulp kind, the kind they sell at nice sex stores), join an S-M educational group or attend some “munches” (coffee klatches for would-be perverts), and start experimenting with being the sort of sex slave who sheds her collar after a couple hours and goes home and feeds the cat. This sort of program, entered into knowledgeably and pursued in moderation, ought to get you where you want to end up: as a “slave” who commands respect and controls her own destiny. There’s no such thing in real life, but this is hardly real life, and that’s the point.
Love,
Andrea
Dear Andrea:
I’m not-so-recently divorced and starting to think about having sex again. My problem is, whenever I start thinking about sex, it’s memories of what my husband and I did (mostly BDSM) that come to mind, and I just shut right back down because I don’t want to think about him. Do I just need to buy a bunch of random porn and hope I’ll light on something else that arouses me?
Love,
Long Dry Spell
Dear Dry:
Not a bad idea, but you don’t have to buy anything. (You really have been gone awhile, haven’t you?) Porn is free for the finding all over the Internet, and you should be able to find representations of not just BDSM scenarios but the exact BDSM scenarios you used to act out with your husband — minus the husband. Looking at or reading some of this stuff may not fully exorcise your husband’s unwelcome ghost — it probably won’t — but it is sure to help. BDSM also, unlike other sexual proclivities, has the advantage of being a spectator sport. If you live in or near or can visit a major metro area — the kind that can support a leather shop or two and has a gay pride parade featuring humans, not golden retrievers, being proudly leash-walked through the center of town — there will be some sort of club or private party circuit where you can see S-M in action. The disadvantage of live display is that the people are unlikely to look as good in leather panties as do the models on the Internet. Plus, you have to be polite to them and ask if you can watch — in short, you have to talk to them. The advantage, of course, is that you do have to talk to them and thus might make a friend or find someone who is neither your husband nor the ghostly afterimage of your husband with whom to do S-M. This is all very hard work, and for the confirmed introvert it (speaking) will never come naturally. But compared to being alone, lonely, haunted, and unable to masturbate, it’s got to be a breeze.
Love,
Andrea

Too bad, Dad

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August 29, 2006

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
I’ve prided myself on having a good relationship with my daughter, and we have always been able to talk about anything, but I was shocked when she asked me about anal sex. I was at a complete loss. She’s only 14 and it never crossed my mind that she would even know what that is, but I guess it’s not like it used to be. She said it’s the “cool” thing to do at her school and that most of her girlfriends have had it. I don’t want her to think that she can’t come to me about things. I could give her the “if your friends jumped off a bridge” speech, but then again, well … at least I wouldn’t have to worry about her getting pregnant. LOL. How should I handle this? Should I be supportive or honest or just refer it to another female like my sister or one of my coworkers?
Love,
Puzzled Pop
Dear Pop:
Sorry. Unless you’re raising her alone in a supermodern ranch house on a lonely and distant planet, she could have asked someone else, but she didn’t. You’re up, and I’m afraid you’ll have to be both honest and supportive. It should help to hear that “supportive” does not mean “Butt sex? It’s no biggie. Get with the program, kid.” Plus, if she came to you for advice, chances are good that she’s not already doing it and liking it or else what would she need your advice for?
We do hear (where have you been?) that these kids today spend more time having anal sex and attending blow job parties than they do on soccer, MySpace, and homework combined. There was a moment there when it seemed every possible media outlet featured a scarifying exposé of rampant oral gonorrhea among kids at elite suburban middle schools or rings of barely pubescent girls selling their anal favors for Bubble Yum. Much of this stuff is clearly exaggerated for effect, extrapolated from precious little data to garner ratings, sell magazines, or whip up a panic among parishioners or PTA members.
There is, however, some measure of truth along with the disinformation, if fairly nonpartisan bodies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Johns Hopkins are to be believed. Every study conducted in the last decade or so has shown at least some increase in the number of young (in some cases, very young) people having oral and anal sex. In some cases, these are the very kids who sign abstinence pledges, promising not to “have sex” until marriage, another downside to using “sex” to mean penis-vagina intercourse. It allows for all sorts of weaselly usage, from the presidential “I did not have sex with that woman” to the willful misinterpretation of decent scientific data by groups like the Heritage Foundation and Focus on the Family.
I did have a point here: do not assume that she’s wrong or exaggerating when she tells you that anal is the “in” intercourse at her school. It may not be as prevalent as she thinks or reports (at least some of her girlfriends are lying), but it is happening.
It would be useful to know what your daughter actually asked you — I’m having a hard time believing she requested your blessing to start taking it up the butt, so what did she need from you? I’m going to go with the most likely possibility, that she mostly just wanted you to listen while she processed her own thoughts and feelings, and surely you, Mr. Sensitive Dad, could handle that much without having to palm the poor child off on your secretary or the mailroom girl?
Chances are your daughter also needed some information about what people actually do with their butts and stuff, since adolescents, even adolescents who affect a world-weary air and claim intimate knowledge of whatever arcane subject is under discussion, are notoriously vague about the nitty-gritty details. I think it’s perfectly legit to outsource this part, but only this part, probably by recommending one of the sex education Web sites specifically targeted to teenagers. I like Scarleteen.com, but it really doesn’t matter as long as you don’t just point her at the Web and tell her to go look up “anal + teen,” OK?
Let the professionals handle the “does it hurt?” and “will I like it?”-type questions, but as her dad you don’t get to shirk the harder parts, where you ask her what she’s heard, how she feels about it, whether her friends are pressuring her, and what she will do if they do pressure her. I would hope you’ve already talked to her about respecting herself and her body and not doing anything until or unless she really wants to, and then only once she’s educated herself about risks and how to avoid them. If you haven’t, well, for God’s sake, man, she’s 14. She has all kinds of excuses for stupid and irresponsible behavior. What’s yours?
Love,
Andrea