e[lust] #15 includes my “Waking Up”

Posted on June 12, 2010 in miscellany | No Comments

Welcome to e[lust] - Your source for sexual intelligence and inspirations of lust from the smartest & sexiest bloggers! Whether you’re looking for hot steamy smut, thought-provoking opinions or expert information, you’re going to find it here. Want to be included in e[lust] #16? Start with the rules, check out the schedule in the site’s sidebar and subscribe to the RSS feed for updates!

~ This Week’s Top Three Posts ~

Evolution – Open Marriage, Swinging, & Polyamory – Do we REALLY believe that there is one love for us? Do we really believe there’s one cock or pussy to fuck for the rest of our life?

Sweet To Taste – “I’m dinner tonight,” she breathes. “So don’t let me get cold before you start feasting.”

Having a boyfriend makes me feel fat - I know my worth as a person isn’t devalued by my weight – but I can’t get past the notion that my worth as a partner is.

~ e[lust] Editress ~

Fucked by a Stranger – For as long as I can remember, I’ve had this bizarre, twisted fantasy. The roads leading to it were different, but the end result the same: a stranger fucking a very willing me in my bed in the dead of night.

~ Featured Post (Lilly’s Pick) ~

At Her Mercy – “You have been such a good boy today. Where do you want me to put your cock next?” she said with a wink.

See also: Pleasurists #78 and #79 for all your sex toy review needs.

All blogs that have a submission in this edition must re-post this digest from tip-to-toe on their blogs within 7 days. Re-posting the photo is optional and the use of the “read more…” tag is allowable after this point. Thank you, and enjoy!

No Comments | Category: miscellany | Tags: community, e[lust], links, sexy blog posts to read, what's happened in the last week

Mr. Sexsmith’s Other Girlfriend: Prom Is So Gay

Posted on March 24, 2010 in miscellany | 1 Comment

My latest column from Sex Is discusses the lesbian prom scandal concerning Constance McMillan. If you haven’t been following, Jesse James has been keeping up with it from quite a few bad ass angles.

Clipped from: www.edenfantasys.com by clp.ly

Jesse even made “prom is so gay” tee shirts, which are now available at Cafepress. I’m still waiting for mine (pink letters on black) but will certainly model when I get it.

1 Comment | Category: miscellany | Tags: columns, how to stalk me, jesse james, let the lesbians dance!, my writing elsewhere, prom, sex is, the use of the word "gay" pejoratively

eLust #10: Weekly Sexblog Roundup

Posted on March 24, 2010 in miscellany | No Comments

Welcome to e[lust] - The 10th edition! Your source for sexual intelligence and inspirations of lust from the smartest & sexiest bloggers! Whether you’re looking for hot steamy smut, thought-provoking opinions or expert information, you’re going to find it here. Want to be included in e[lust] #11? Start with the rules, check out the schedule in the site’s sidebar and subscribe to the RSS feed for updates!

This Week’s Top Three Posts

Negotiation – Not Nearly As Awkward As Having a Breakdown in Public – All the worries about getting to know a new person (“Am I dressed ok? Are they gonna like my stories about my grandma?”) get exaggerated when you’re talking about sex and desire…

Dollar Store Domme – He definitely can’t elude the dollops of toothpaste I dab onto his nipples. It takes a delicious second before he feels the cool burn penetrate his flesh. By that time I’m already up and selecting a plastic spatula from the credenza.

The Best of Both Worlds or Lost in Limbo? – Whether intentional or unthinking, bisexual denial is a frustrating thing for bisexual, pansexual or ‘fluid’ people to have to deal with.

e[lust] Editress

Navigating Genderqueer in Suburbia – But pray tell how do the rest of us navigate it? How the hell am I supposed to know if you identify as male or just like dressing like one?

Featured Post (Lilly’s Pick)

The Daddy Issue: Sexualizing Abuse – I needed to walk through this fear, and turn it into pleasure. I needed to prove to myself that he hadn’t broken me. That he hadn’t changed who I was to become. That I was not affected by what he did. That he didn’t abuse me.

See also: Pleasurists #69 and #70 for all your sex toy review needs.

No Comments | Category: miscellany | Tags: e[lust], my post is included but not featured, weekly roundups

Spanking 101

Posted on March 16, 2010 in miscellany | 6 Comments

Someone emailed me recently with a question about starting to play with spanking, and after looking around online for a bit, I didn’t find much, so I jotted down my basic thoughts on the subject.

Here’s the question:

I was wondering if you know of any good resources for spanking. I have a friend who wants to get spanked and I said that if he wanted to, I would do it. Any tips? Handouts? Diagrams?

Babeland has a decent How To Spank article, so that’s worth a read. And there’s Rachel Kramer Bussel’s collection of erotica stories called Spanked and the corresponding Spanked blog.

This is what else comes to my mind:

Where to spank: Spank the fleshy parts of the ass & thighs, make sure to avoid the parts that are bonier like the little triangle coccyx bone right above the butt crack, the spine, or the kidneys. Basically, steer clear of the low back. Some people like to have sensation on the upper back and shoulder blades (though that perhaps is for later)
Start light: Start light with pats rather that swats or hits, jiggle the flesh even, warm it up, gradually increase pressure. Generally when I start I go light and fast, then work up to the big hits later, with full big arm strength, taking pauses and breaks between to press my body close, run my palms along the flesh to sooth it, and whisper sweet things
Hand vs Ass: So much of the pain is psychological, not about actual damage. It can hurt, but there are hundreds of teeny bones in the hand, and compared the big pelvis and femurs down there by the ass & thighs, the hand will get harmed way before it could do any real damage to those bones. Which is not to say you can’t bruise—you can—but that’s not the kind of damage I mean. Be sure to be reassuring vocally (or with pleasurable touches) as you’re getting heavier, and warm up slowly
Spanking to Sex: I tend to start spanking closer & closer to the genitals toward the end, working in some fingering in between spanks. That can be a nice way to segue from the spanking back to the sex play, and also when someone is turned on they can take a whole lot more sensation, so I tend to be able to hit harder then
Positions: Try a couple different positions: leaning over a bed with feet on the floor, on all fours, across your lap on the couch, hands high leaning against a wall. People have different preferences when both giving & receiving, so try out a few different things
Toys: My hand usually gives out before her ass does. Consider a little paddle maybe like this one, you can go for longer. ones that are flat and wide tend to be “thuddy” and ones that are thin tend to be “stingy”—usually people prefer thuddy ones, especially if they aren’t so experienced. Same rules apply for paddles

Readers, help me out here. Anything else? Any tips and tricks for taking or giving a spanking? Do you know of any online beginning spanking resources that I’m missing? How did you get into spanking? What’s your favorite way to get spanked? What are your favorite toys to get spanked with? Leave it in the comments!

6 Comments | Category: miscellany | Tags: babeland, dear mr. sexsmith, I don't have a category for basic sex tips, I learned how to spank in a babeland workshop, questions from readers, rachel kramer bussel, spanking

Radical Masculinity: Reinventing Our Icons

Posted on March 12, 2010 in miscellany | No Comments

“Have you seen the Dockers ads?” someone asked me recently at a conference, after I told them I write about masculinity. “A friend told me he liked those ads, because he is so unsure of what it means to ‘be a man’ right now. Everything has changed. There are no icons pointing men where to go, what to be like.”

I hear this frequently, and I have asked myself this often, too, in my own personal identity development process of coming to a female masculinity as butch. Where are the feminist men? Where are the radical depictions of masculinity? Where are the examples of health and strength and skill and honor that I can admire and emulate? Who can I look to? Who will be a mirror showing me my reflection so that I can push myself in the direction that best fits me? I speak to this when I talk about depictions of healthy relationships in the media, too—where are they? What does that look like? Where are the heterosexual couples with men treating women with respect, value, care? Where is the equality? Where are the conscientious, thoughtful dads?

Things are changing. That is my entire premise of this series of articles on Radical Masculinity: that we are at a precarious time, in transition, finally studying what it means to “be a man” in this culture, much like feminists and gender scholars have been studying femininity and women in the past forty years. Underneath the question of what it means to “be a man,” as queers and butches and trans and genderqueer folks are also asking, is what it means to be masculine. The concepts of masculinity have changed, and is still changing, and while there is no singular meaning (like perhaps the fictional version of the nuclear family and breadwinner in the 1950s), I’m finding that there is no shortage of masculine icons.

Read the whole thing over at my column on Radical Masculinity at Carnal Nation: Reinventing Our Icons.

No Comments | Category: miscellany | Tags: archetypes, carnal nation, icons, masculinity, people to look up to, radical masculinity, reinvention, this one was really hard to write but I like how it turned out

Word of the Day: Antevasin

Posted on February 12, 2010 in miscellany | No Comments

I’m not one who tends to read bestsellers. In fact, when I do pick up—and like—a bestseller such that I actually want to carry it around with me and read it, I am often way embarrassed to be seen reading it on the subway. As if I am one of those people who only read popular books.

But of course, sometimes bestsellers are bestsellers for a reason: they are very, very good. I would argue for the Harry Potter series, and for The Time Traveler’s Wife (though against the Twilight series).

What made me pick up Eat, Pray, Love by Elisabeth Gilbert, aside from my sister‘s strong recommendation, was her talk on creativity from the TED lecture series.

I’ve probably watched this four times now, and a new part of it sinks in every time. This really jives with many of my conceptions about creativity works, and I really appreciate the shared responsibility of creation. YES.

So I picked up Eat, Pray, Love. And … it’s beautiful. Seriously. I hesitate to call it One Of My Favorite Books because who knows, I haven’t finished it yet, maybe it’s just speaking to me at a particular time about a particular thing and everything is just so resonant and perfect right now.

Like this:

Maybe the best thing to do with favourite films and books is to leave them be: to achieve such an exalted position means that they entered your life at exactly the right time, in precisely the right place, and those conditions can never be re-created. Sometimes we want to revisit them in order to check whether they were really as good as we remember them being, but this has to be a suspect impulse, because it presupposes is that we have more reason to trust our critical judgement as we get older, whereas I am beginning to believe that the reverse is true. —Nick Hornby, Shakespeare Wrote For Money

I had it out from the library, and I ordered my own copy from paperbackswap.com (my current guilty pleasure, though I suck at getting to the post office to do the mailing-out part). I’m looking forward to reading it again, and marking it up.

Yesterday, I came across this:

So I saw it during my last week at the Ashram, I was reading through an old text about Yoga, when I found a description of ancient spiritual seekers. A Sanskrit word appeared in the paragraph: ANTEVASIN. It means, ‘one who lives at the border.’ In ancient times this was a literal description. It indicated a person who had left the bustling center of worldly life to go live at the edge of the forest where the spiritual masters dwelled. The antevasin was not of the villagers anymore-not a householder with a conventional life. But neither was he yet a transcendent-not one of those sages who live deep in the unexplored woods, fully realized. The antevasin was an in-betweener. he was a border-dweller. He lived in sight of both worlds, but he looked toward the unknown. And he was a scholar.

—Eat, Love, Pray by Elisabeth Gilbert, p203

And oh my god that word is just so … potent. Perfect. I immediately saw it as an elaborate cursive tattoo over my collarbone or on my upper arm. That’s my word.

Then I started thinking: this is everybody’s word. That’s why this book is a crazy insane-o bestseller. Everybody thinks they live on the borders. Nobody thinks they fit in. And, sure enough, when I searched for “antevasin” online, many of the results are from personal blogs saying, “I recently read a book that described the word and I felt like it was describing me,” and “In one of the many books I am reading at present I came across a word and an idea that really resonate.” (Funny how they don’t necessarily identify the book. Or perhaps it’s just obvious enough that they don’t have to.)

Maybe not everybody thinks they are at the borders, not fitting in. Maybe there are some people, like my girlfriend claims, who know they are the status quo and average and buying in to pop culture and like it that way. I guess it’s mostly just that “my people”—the queers and the misfits and the artists and the writers and the thinkers—are the ones who surround me, and of course we all tend to have this deep, deep belief that we never fit in, that we probably never will, and that we’re straddling multiple worlds, being border-dwellers.

But I guess my question is … if the majority of us are the ones who think we don’t fit, aren’t the ones who ‘fit’ actually in the minority, making them, by definition, not fit?

And also … how do we truly, deeply, believe that we do in fact fit, perhaps not into a problematic hierarchical oppressive society like this one, but in our own communities, in our own subcultures, in our own families, in our own lives, in the larger universal human family? I really do believe that we all belong, we are all valid, we are all just where we are meant to be: right here.

No Comments | Category: miscellany | Tags: antevasin, bestsellers, books, eat pray love, elisabeth gilbert, nick hornby, ted talks, video, words

Masculinity Icons: Happy Birthday, James Dean

Posted on February 8, 2010 in miscellany | 11 Comments

Today, February 8th, James Dean was born in 1931.

I’m working on a piece for Radical Masculinity about masculinity icons, particularly American icons (though I do have some plans to explore masculinity in other places too, in other columns).

James Dean comes up frequently as an icon, both as a traditional icon of American masculinity and as a personal icon. Take a look at the James Dean Lives tumblr for more photos and information about him, if you’d like. Good stuff over there.

I’m gathering ideas and statements for my in-progress (and vastly overdue) column currently, so I have a question for y’all: Who, in your opinion, are traditional icons of masculinity? Who are your personal icons of masculinity? What kind of traits do these icons portray? What kind of traits do you think icons of masculinity should portray? What makes someone (a guy, a cis-gendered guy in particular) a butch icon, or a radical masculinity icon, or a traditional masculinity icon?

I love pondering this stuff.

11 Comments | Category: miscellany | Tags: ask the hive mind, gathering data, icons, james dean, masculinity, radical masculinity, requests, what do you think?

Introducing: Mr. Sexsmith’s Other Girlfriend

Posted on February 5, 2010 in miscellany | 1 Comment

I’m starting a second column, writing weekly for Eden Fantasys web magazine Sex Is called Mr. Sexsmith’s Other Girlfriend, focused on New York City.

Mr. Sexsmith’s Other Girlfriend: A small-town Alaskan butch navigates queers, sex, and kink in her ongoing love affair with The Big Apple, a.k.a. The Naked City, New York. … Everyone knows I’m dating Kristen and living it up in New York City, but not everyone knows I grew up in Alaskan rainforest at the bottom of a mountain and have struggled with the vice, fast pace, and sensory overload of the concrete jungle. Here’s my ongoing saga of navigating life, love, gender, sex, kink, and really good food on an artist’s budget, all while trying to change the world through social activism.

Here’s an excerpt from the first column, The Myth of New York:

If New York City was on Facebook, our relationship status would say “It’s Complicated.” I love her, I do; I have idolized her since I was a kid, watching all my favorite cheesy eighties movies like Big Business, The Secret of My Success, and Big, over and over again. Our culture mythologizes her, paints her as the place to be, so full of potential. She might even be The One.

Everyone comes to New York seeking something very similar: belonging. Especially in the communities in which I run—the queer, the kinky, the subversive, the social change junkies—we have all come from other places, other more small-minded, limited, restrictive places, hoping that the Great Mythology of New York will hold true for us, too: “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …” wrote Emma Lazarus in her famous poem “The New Colossus,” printed on the Statue of Liberty.

Read the whole thing over on Sex Is, and keep an eye out for the upcoming articles, including How To Survive Your First Year in New York City.

1 Comment | Category: miscellany | Tags: column writing, eden fantasys, mr. sexsmith's other girlfriend, new york as a lover, new york city, sex is, technically my relationship with kristen is open so I'm not cheating, things that I think about

elust #5: Quiet Holiday Version

Posted on January 12, 2010 in miscellany | No Comments

Welcome to e[lust] - your source for sexual intelligence and inspirations of lust from the smartest & sexiest bloggers! Whether you’re looking for hot steamy smut, thought-provoking opinions or expert information, you’re going to find it here. Want to be included in e[lust] #6? Start with the rules, check out the schedule in the site’s sidebar and subscribe to the RSS feed for updates!

This Week’s Top Three Posts

Late Arrival: An Airport Encounter - I saw a possible haven ahead: a pilot disappearing into the pilots’ lounge. I could think of nowhere else that would offer us even a modicum of privacy. Time to brazen it out. With her still walking obediently alongside, I pushed my way into the lounge.

The Condom Question. Confession #397 – Luckily, this time I had my wits about me enough to reply with a categorical, Yes a condom is absolutely necessary, darlin, but history has proven that, while I’m naked and horny, I can offer no more justification as to why such protection is paramount.

No more… - “I’m so sorry, I can’t…”. Words, words, so many words… reasons and reasoning and things and stuff and none of it made sense, and through all of it, disbelief, dread, a sickness of heart… I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing.

e[lust] Editress

Sex as a Panacea - As I begged “faster” “harder” “more!” I felt my orgasm come on, a mere minute or two after we began with this combination. A thunderous orgasm overtook me as he kept up with the dildo and I with the Climax for the first big wave.

Featured Post (Lilly’s Pick)

Bad Girl – I take off my coat and stand proudly before her in my black lace corset, suspenders, stockings and heels. She looks me up and down and smiles at me when she catches my stare. Desire is already zinging through my body.

See also: Pleasurists #59 and #60 for all your sex toy review needs

No Comments | Category: miscellany | Tags: community, e[lust], my post is under kink and fetish, things worth reading, ways to waste your time reading sex blogs

e[lust] #4: Reconciling Butch Top + Feminist in the Top Three!

Posted on December 29, 2009 in miscellany | No Comments

Thanks to the lovely judges over at e[lust], my post Reconciling the Identities of Feminist & Butch Top is featured this week in the top three.

I’m glad somebody stepped up to fill the shoes of the former Sugasm. This’ll keep me busy on this freezing cold New York pre-January afternoon.

—

Welcome to e[lust] - your source for sexual intelligence and inspirations of lust from the smartest & sexiest bloggers! Whether you’re looking for hot steamy smut, thought-provoking opinions or expert information, you’re going to find it here. Want to be included in e[lust] #5? Start with the rules, check out the schedule in the site’s sidebar and subscribe to the RSS feed for updates!

This Week’s Top Three Posts

Interrogation - I looked up at him, feigning cluelessness. “I know you can understand me. So I ask you again. Where are the lenses?” Another strike. I crumpled into the bench.
Reconciling the Identities of Feminist & Butch Top - There’s something supposedly anti-feminist about wanting to dominate. There’s something in the feminist rhetoric which says we are all equal especially in bed, so that means I-do-you-you-do-me….
Fire and Ice – The rain comes down harder around us, the freezing drop pelting whatever skin lies exposed over the surface of the water.

e[lust] Editress

By the Twinkling Lights… - His lips found my nipples and I forgot about the cold. If a car were to drive by and the passengers were to look past the twinkling lights on the tree, they would have seen a naked woman’s rear end pressed against the glass wall..

Featured Post (Lilly’s Pick)

Ronjazz: Late Night Rendezvous - Meet me in the parking lot at the post with the broken lamp. 10PM sharp! Do not be late! Stand facing the post, eyes closed. Wear a flimsy dress and heels – nothing else!

See also: Pleasurists #58 and #59 for all your sex toy review needs