The Blowfish Blog

[Greta Christina] Trying Anything Twice

I don’t remember where I first heard it — and Google is coming up short, mostly it’s sending me to some country song I never heard of — but many years back, I read a piece of advice that stuck with me.

It was advice on staying “young at heart.” Whatever that means, I hate that phrase . . . but the advice was interesting and valid anyway. It said, “To stay young at heart, you have to be willing to try anything twice.”

Not once. Twice.

I want to talk about how that applies to sex.

The first time I tried anal sex, I hated it. I didn’t know what I was doing, the guy didn’t know what he was doing, we tried it too fast with no buildup or lube . . . all with predictable results. It hurt. A lot. I stopped it short after ten seconds. If that long.

And for years, I was convinced that I didn’t like anal sex. Anytime anyone suggested it, I’d turn them down flat. And if they asked, “But have you tried it?” I could always shut them down with my reply, “Yes. I’ve tried it. I didn’t like it.”

To this day, I’m not sure what made me decide to try again. It may have been that I’d talked with more people who passionately enjoyed it. It may have been that I’d read more about it, had learned what I’d done wrong the first time and how to do it right. It may even have been that my lover let me do him first. (If “let” is the right word. “Enthusiastically proposed” was more like it.) But whatever the reason, I decided to give anal sex a second try.

And the second time, I loved it. Passionately. It quickly became my Number One favorite kind of sex, and it stayed that way for years.

I have similar stories about all kinds of sex. The first time I tried bondage was an embarrassing disaster: we were using tube socks, they were ridiculously easy to escape from, and the whole thing felt awkward and stupid. The first time I got spanked, she spanked way too hard and fast; I gritted my teeth through it for as long as I could before I called my safeword, which was about a minute. You don’t want to know what happened the first time I gave a blowjob. The first time someone went down on me; the first time I had sex with another woman; hell, the first time I had sex with a man. Failed experiments, all.

My point?

If I hadn’t tried these experiments again, I would have had a seriously limited, probably non-existent sex life.

And that would have been a sad, sad thing.

When it comes to sex, first times are, to put it mildly, often not the best indicator of how things are going to turn out. For one thing, first times are often done when we’re young, when most of us don’t have much information about sex, and aren’t that comfortable talking about it, and are kind of just fumbling around in the dark.

Maybe more to the point: We have this idea that sex should be natural and easy . . . but it isn’t. Not good sex, anyway. Good sex takes practice. (Especially the more, shall we say, complicated forms of sex.) The first time doing something sexual is often more about figuring out how to do it than it is about the actual doing. It can take at least one more try — one time when you’re not spending the whole afternoon figuring out what goes where and how hard — before you can even begin to gauge whether this is something you like, or simply isn’t as much fun for you in reality as it is in fantasy.

Now, of course, this is true for a lot of things. Not just sex. The first time I threw a dinner party, the first time I read into a microphone, the first time I got drunk . . . none of those went well, either. And for many of the same reasons.

But I think the high failure rate of first- time experiences — and the tendency to treat those failures as a permanent cutting off of options — may be even higher for sex. We have such great expectations of sex, and the disappointments can feel disproportionately crushing. And because we’re brought up to treat sex with fear and contempt, we’re more likely to see a unsuccessful first try as proof that it was a bad idea. If you already have a reflex to say “No” to sex, then “I tried that already” can easily become just another reason to revert to that reflex.

And I think that’s too bad. I think that when we give up on a sexual variation just because it didn’t work the first time, we’re cutting ourselves off from a entire erotic world that we might get great pleasure from if we just gave it a second chance.

Now, if you don’t care that much about a particular kind of sex — if you were just trying it from idle curiosity, say, or because it was the favorite thing of someone you were with and now you’re not with them anymore — then I don’t think giving up after the first try is a big deal. Life is short, the time we have to spend boffing is even shorter. Too short to try everything in the 500 Things To Do On A Rainy Day playbook — twice. (I tried getting fisted three or four times, and finally decided that it just wasn’t going to work for me . . . and I was only trying it because it was the ’90s and everyone was trying it . . . and I just didn’t care enough to bother.)

But if you’ve been fantasizing about something for years? Or it hasn’t been years, but it’s been an intense fantasy for weeks or months and you’d been looking forward to trying it with eager anticipation? If your reaction to an awkward and ineffective first try isn’t, “Oh well, no big deal,” but “Dammit, dammit, dammit”? Or if it’s your partner’s very favorite thing . . . or something they’ve spent years fantasizing about, something they were really excited about trying?

Then I’d like to encourage you to give it another try.

I’d like to encourage all of us — myself included, I’m writing this to cheerlead myself as much as anybody — to remember that first times are often less about getting into the groove, and more about finding your feet. I’d like to encourage all of us to remember that people change, and that just because we didn’t like something five or ten years ago doesn’t mean we won’t like it now. I’d like to encourage all of us to remember all the first times that didn’t work out — not just with sex, but with cooking or dancing or surfing or anything else — and to remember the second or third or fourth times when everything suddenly fell into place. And I’d like to encourage all of us to think of some sexual experiment from our past that was awkward or messy or embarrassing . . . and to give it at least one more try.

Greta Christina, copyright © 2009. Be sure to check out Greta’s blog.

Share This

[Greta Christina] 25 Things I Want (In Bed)

I am stealing this idea shamelessly from Adam Savage of “Mythbusters.” Savage did a reading at a recent Writers With Drinks event, a piece titled (if memory serves) “100 Things I Want.” You might think a piece like that would be self-involved, even whiny, interesting to nobody on Earth but the reader himself. But it was fascinating. It was inspiring. It was a loving and hilarious anthem to optimism, to possibility, to the goofy marvel of the human imagination. And giving it that extra techno- magic- realism touch, it was a whirlwind blend of things that are physically impossible, things that could only happen if Savage devoted his entire life to them, and things that would be entirely within his reach with just a little effort.

But in a freakishly glaring omission, not one of the 100 things on Adam Savage’s list was about sex. (Yeah, I know. Not everyone likes to parade their sexual desires in public. Weirdos.)

So I got inspired. And I decided to share my own list — and keep it entirely sexual. Like adding “in bed” to a fortune cookie fortune. I hope you find it funny and inspiring, and not self-involved and pointlessly confessional.

Quick set of rules: I’m limiting my list to things I genuinely would want to do — or at least that I think I’d want to do — not just things I fantasize about. I’m limiting it to things I either have never done, or haven’t done in a long, long time. This isn’t about my sex life: it’s about my sexual mind, the places my sexual desires go when unfettered by practicality. And due to space considerations, I’m limiting myself to 25.

•

I want to get spanked until I cry.

I want to have sex on gym equipment.

I want to watch two guys fuck. (I’ve done this, actually; but it was years ago, and besides it was at a sex party so it kind of doesn’t count. I want to watch two guys have sex where I’m the only one watching.)

I want, at least once in my life, to have groupies. At least one groupie. I want to go on a book tour or a speaking engagement and have admiring fans throw themselves at me sexually.

I want to be able to sprout a functioning penis at will. (And, of course, to be able to make it disappear when I’m done with it.)

Pursuant to that: I want to be able to shapeshift. I want to split my tongue in two like a snake and wrap it around someone’s clit. I want to sprout extra hands, so I can pin someone down while I spread them open and fingerfuck them. I want to transform my arms and legs into tentacles and violate someone in all their holes, like a demon in a Japanese anime porno.

I want to get violated by a tentacled demon in a Japanese anime porno.

I want to spend an entire day devoted solely to sex. I don’t want to spend the entire day having sex — I think that would be exhausting and ultimately unpleasant — but I want to have a day where sex is the entire agenda. Having sex, talking about sex, reading about sex, writing about sex, eating sexy food, watching porn, having sex some more.

I want to lie back in the arms of a lover, who’s holding my arms and holding me down, while a vampire sucks my blood and then licks my clit with my blood on his tongue.

I want to act out a Christian domestic discipline fantasy. I want to pretend to be a good Christian wife, getting punished by my husband for being disobedient and not respecting his dominion over me as the Lord commands. With both of us desperately pretending to ourselves that this isn’t about sex.

I want to get caned while saying ten Hail Marys. (And I wasn’t even brought up Catholic.)

I want to act out a baron/ servant girl scene, in which I’m the baron. I want the fantasy scenario to be one in which she theoretically could leave, but desperately needs the job and feels that she can’t. I want to sit her down next to me, pull her onto my lap, begin to get inappropriate with my hands, while I explain how things are done in my home. I then want to punish her, in increasingly brutal, increasingly sexual ways, on the flimsiest of excuses, for offenses that are essentially made up. I want to tell her that it’s not enough to punish her by beating and humiliating her: I have to punish her by raping her. And then I want to rape her.

(Not for real, obviously. As part of the role-play. Just so we’re clear on that.)

I want to have sex with someone I’m telepathic with. I want to feel what they’re feeling having sex with me, and have them feel what I’m feeling having sex with them. I think the “infinite regress of two reflecting mirrors” thing could be really hot.

I want to spank someone who’s never been spanked before.

I want to spank someone who is much younger than me. Legal age, duh . . . but young enough to feel like they’re not.

I want to get punished for not knowing enough about the current news.

(Okay. I think I need to explain that one. I’ve always been gun-shy about playing with punishment, it’s a heavily loaded issue for me . . . but I’m getting increasingly intrigued by it. But I don’t want to be punished for something real and important, like missing deadlines or breaking promises. I already feel like a guilt- ridden failure at the drop of a hat. At the same time, I don’t think I could take it seriously if I were getting punished for something ridiculously trivial like not folding my T-shirts right, or for some totally fake fantasy misdeed like not doing my spelling homework. Hence, not knowing enough about the current news. It’s real, and I think it’s important . . . but it’s not going to crush my spirit if I get lectured and punished for fucking it up. And it would make watching the news kind of dirty.)

I want to have sex in the back of a moving truck.

I want to have sex in a castle.

I want to have vicious, brutal, unspeakably filthy sex with Severus Snape. (Yeah, I know. Me and fifty million other people. I’m not embarrassed at how perverse this one is. I’m embarrassed at how trite it is.)

I want to watch people having wild, intense sex . . . while I’m tied to a chair, unable to participate or even touch myself.

I want to be the center of attention in a gang bang.

I want to have a sex buddy with whom I only have sex. Show up at their place; do it like rabbits; leave. Don’t ever see them until the next time we fuck. Don’t ever talk about anything else.

I want to have sex that feels non-consensual, even though it’s not.

I want to have bruises from a spanking that last more than a day.

I want to act out one of my erotic stories with someone. In every detail. I’m not sure which story; I’m not even sure it matters. I just want to know what it feels like to be inside one of the scenarios that I’ve spent so much time and care fleshing out.

•

I think that’s enough for one day.

So what about you? What do you want?

Greta Christina, copyright © 2009. Be sure to check out Greta’s blog.

Share This

[Greta Christina] Nom, Nom, Nom: Susie Bright’s “Bitten”

This, for me, is the true test of good porn.

If porn gets me off because it hits my particular erotic buttons… well, that’s not much of a test. I can, for instance, get off watching almost any spanking videos, almost regardless of whether they’re any good. I can get off watching some of the grainiest, cheesiest videos that SpankingTube has to offer. Where’s the sport in that?

The true test is this: Can it get me off, even though it doesn’t hit my particular erotic buttons? Can it get me off, even if it’s the actual antithesis of my erotic buttons? Can it get me to feel what the writer finds erotic about this kind of sex — and what the characters find erotic about this kind of sex — even if it’s the last thing in the world that would occur to me to think about when I’m whacking off?

“Bitten: Dark Erotic Stories” is that kind of book.

I should explain. Constant readers might think that a porn anthology subtitled “Dark Erotic Stories” would hit my buttons like a five- year- old in an elevator. Constant readers, in this case, would be wrong. Yes, I like dark porn. But “dark” isn’t the only theme of “Bitten,” or even the main theme. The main theme is… I guess you’d have to say Gothic. The stories aren’t just dark: they’re serious. They’re obsessive. They’re not particularly funny. And most of them are about the supernatural.

And supernatural porn is really not my thing. (No, not because I’m an atheist.) As constant readers may know, my number one fetish in porn is believability. When I read a dirty story, I want to feel like it might really have happened, like it might really be happening right now. That’s what gives me that immediacy, that feeling of being projected headlong into someone else’s sweaty skin. So porn about magic, about incubuses, about ghosts, about sex with the devil… it doesn’t usually do it for me. (Except for the Snape fantasies. That’s different. I can’t explain why. Shut up, that’s why.)

But I found “Bitten” almost completely compelling. Like, “reading it raptly until two in the morning, then masturbating as quietly as I can because I don’t want to wake my partner but won’t be able to fall asleep with these stories in my head until I do” compelling.

Why?

Because that’s what good porn does.

Good porn — like the porn in “Bitten” — gets you feeling what the characters are feeling. Even if what they’re feeling, and doing, is physically impossible. Good porn can get you inside the skin of someone who has the Devil’s cock shoved into their mouth, through their body, and out through their anus (”Get Thee Behind Me, Satan,” by Ernie Conrick). Good porn can get you inside the skin of a bar vamp who seduces men and steals their souls (”The Devil’s Invisible Scissors,” by Sera Gamble). Good porn can get you inside the skin of someone getting ravished by a shape-shifting incubus that can take the form of water and smoke (”The Unfamiliar,” by Allison Lawless — probably my favorite story in the book). Good porn can expand your libido, make it larger and richer, fill it with images and ideas that might never have occurred to you before but that you now can’t shake.

And Susie Bright has a unique eye for good porn.

I should tell you right now, in my official “conflict of interest” alert: I have no objectivity at all when it comes to Susie Bright. We’ve known each other for decades: she’s a colleague and mentor and friend, and I can’t review her work the way I would with just any old erotica editor.

But part of the reason she’s a colleague and mentor and friend is that I have such strong admiration for her editorial vision. We don’t always agree — her definition of “erotica” is often pretty broad and loose, whereas I prefer my porn to be pretty straightforwardly porny — but Susie has an almost unerring eye for stories that display first-rate writing, a unique voice, and a vivid sexual imagination.

And that eye was wide open with the stories in “Bitten.” They are unique. They are exceptionally well written. And to call them “vivid” is a grotesque understatement. Lore Sjoberg once wrote that iced mocha “makes me happy to be alive, in the literal sense that it forcibly alters my brain chemistry.” These stories forcibly altered my brain chemistry. It was like being violated, in the best possible way. It was like a masochistic fantasy in which a pitiless, unnervingly perceptive top forces me against my will, not just to do shameful and terrible things, but to want them.

Of course, I have one or two complaints. I almost always do. Like any anthology, some of the stories are better than others. “Historical Inaccuracies” by Julia Talbot was fine but didn’t do anything for me, and while I very much enjoyed Anne Tourney’s “The Resurrection Rose,” I though it needed some trimming: the concept of the perverted libidinous flower was neat and hot, but it was too much of the same idea for too long. But unlike many erotica anthologies where the stories range from “Meh” to “Good,” the stories in “Bitten” range from “Good” to “Fucking awesome.” I’m not sure that even qualifies as a criticism.

My other complaint is not so much a complaint as it is a consumer advisory. The stories in “Bitten” are excellent… but I couldn’t devour them at one sitting, the way I usually do with erotica anthologies. A few at a time was enough. The intensity, the passion, the seriousness, the other-worldliness… if I read too many in one sitting, it would all get to be much. Like a RenFayre nerd who never gets out of character, and never shuts up about it. Reading “Bitten” would be a wild, fantastical trip into imaginary sexual worlds for a few stories… and then, with just one more story, it would suddenly get cloying. I needed a good dose of raunchy humor or a plain old fuck story as a palate cleanser. It was like a strong, sweet, strangely-spiced dessert: a few bites was lovely, but if I ate a whole meal of it, I’d get sick of it. For me, this was a book best read in small doses, spread out over a few nights.

But again, that’s really not a criticism of the book, so much as an advisory on the best way to enjoy it. And if your tastes are different from mine, if supernatural Gothic porn is your very bestest favorite, you may gobble up this strange dessert like peanuts. If you like dark, spooky erotic fiction, you need to run to your nearest bookseller and buy this book right now. And if you don’t much care for dark, spooky erotic fiction but you’re curious to see what the fuss is about, I can’t recommend a better place to start.

Bitten: Dark Erotic Stories. Edited by Susie Bright. Chronicle Books. ISBN 978-0-8118-6425-1. Paperback. $16.95.

Greta Christina, copyright © 2009. Be sure to check out Greta’s blog.

Share This

[Greta Christina] The Ethics of Public Sex

Is public sex ethical?

Be forewarned: This isn’t one of those pieces where I gas on about some sexual topic that I already hold a strong opinion about. This is one of those pieces where I gas on about a sexual topic that I haven’t figured out yet; where I try to figure out what I think and where I stand by writing about it. So if I get this wrong, please accept my apologies in advance.

My initial reaction to the question I myself am posing is that public sex is at least borderline unethical. I think it creates a troubling situation where consent is concerned: you’re making other people be voyeurs in your sex life, when they haven’t consented to be. Even if you’re in a public place where you hope not to be seen but might well be, where you’re trying to be hidden but part of the excitement is the fear of getting caught . . . I’d say much the same thing. You’re deliberately taking the risk of getting caught — in other words, of forcing other people to be involved in your sex life. This was the essence of the piece I wrote last week about how parents should deal with their kids being sexual and masturbating: I said that you could be a sex-positive parent, and still teach your kids to keep their sexuality private, since not everyone wants to see them masturbate.

But I realize that this is a complex question. And like many complex questions, it’s complicated by one simple question: Where do you draw the line?

Not everyone has the same standards of sexual privacy. The standards for what constitutes appropriate public sexual expression, and what constitutes a violation of other people’s right to not participate in your sex life, vary tremendously from person to person, and from situation to situation, and from culture to culture. (And, of course, they change over time.)

Examples. You might be fine watching your best friend grope her boyfriend; your English professor might not be. You might be fine watching your best friend grope her boyfriend; you might be less fine watching your father or your sister grope theirs. An outfit that would get you shunned in Salt Lake City might not even raise an eyebrow in Miami . . . and in some societies, it’s considered a grotesque and indeed illegal breach of sexual privacy for women to wear pants. You might reasonably get squicked seeing a couple necking at, say, a law school graduation or an honorary dinner for the retiring president of the company. But at the Folsom Street Fair, if you see someone giving a spanking or a blowjob in broad daylight? In my opinion, you have no right to be upset. If you didn’t want to see that, then what were you doing at the Folsom Street Fair?

But I’m not just going to punt this question to “be appropriate for the context.” I’m not just going to say that you have to be culturally sensitive and do as the Romans do. I think that’s a cop-out. I think cultures that forbid women to wear pants are misogynist and oppressive and fucked up beyond belief, and I will stand by that position firmly and passionately. As a matter of practicality, I’m not going to wear pants in those countries . . . but as a matter of moral principle, I’m not going to accept that they have the right to make or enforce those laws.

Which leads me to my next point. The stricture against public sex can and does get used as a serious form of political oppression. It gets used to restrain women, to silence queers and other sexual minorities, to censor sexual information. In the bad old days, gays and lesbians could be arrested for public lewdness simply for kissing or holding hands. (In fact, same-sex public displays of affection are still often treated as inherently sexual, when equivalent opposite-sex displays aren’t.) Countries that force women to wear burqas are countries that treat women as disgusting fonts of sexual sin and shame. Some people consider the very act of writing about sex for public consumption, or selling books about sex in a public bookstore, to be a breach of public decency, a violation of their right to never have to encounter sexual ideas that they don’t approve of. The idea that “you shouldn’t express your sexuality in any way that other people find invasive” can all too easily translate as “you shouldn’t express your sexuality in any way.” Period.

But I still don’t like SM couples giving spankings at dinner parties. I still don’t like it when people I don’t know very well tell me graphic details about their sex lives. (Unless they’re at porn readings, of course, or are writing to me for advice.) I still don’t like opening my front door at midnight to take out the garbage, and finding a couple fucking on my front steps. It feels like a violation: like I’m being made to participate in their sex lives, without having been asked.

So what’s the difference?

I’m tempted to say that the difference is motivation. Are you being publicly sexual to make a political or artistic point, to point out society’s hypocrisies and inconsistencies about sex and to try to shift sexual mores? Or are you just doing it for a forbidden erotic thrill, or because you don’t have the patience to get a room? I’m tempted to say that if it’s the former, then mazeltov; if it’s the latter, then get a room already.

But there’s not always a clear, bright line between the two. What if the cultural more you’re trying to shift is the one against dry-humping in public for fun? The difference is often in the eye of the beholder: a half-naked gay couple passionately kissing at the Pride Parade may see themselves as expressing their pride and their love, and yet may be seen by a homophobic right-winger as deliberately flaunting their sexuality in a flagrant act of exhibitionism and seduction. And I’m not sure it makes much difference anyway. Am I going to be any happier with the couple fucking on my doorstep if I think they’re doing it as an act of erotic political rebellion? Not really.

So I’m not sure where I’m going here. It seems like there should be a line, or at least some principle that would help us figure out where that line is under which circumstances. I don’t expect that we’d all always agree about how this principle should be applied — even the clearest ethical principles are complex and have shades of gray in practice — but at least we could agree on what the principle is.

But uncharacteristically, I’m drawing a blank. I’m starting to wonder if this desire for sexual privacy is one of those deeply-rooted, “hard-wired by millennia of evolution” moral principles that got shoved into our social-animal brains hundreds of thousands of years ago when were living in extended-family tribes. I’m starting to wonder if the desire for sexual privacy is irrational at its core . . . and that therefore any attempt to find a rational guiding principle behind it is just going to be a back-formation: not a genuine understanding of the core of the principle, but simply an attempt to rationalize a belief that’s already in place.

I dunno. I’m coming up blank on this one.

Thoughts?

Greta Christina, copyright © 2009. Be sure to check out Greta’s blog.

Share This

[Fishnet] Good Vibrations

Chad pictured himself riding the gray- green of the Pacific, balanced there in the eternity between freedom and death. He opened his eyes. Bobby was frighteningly beautiful now. He reached up and unbuttoned the stranger’s Levis. A big, hard, uncut dick sprang forth.

Read “Good Vibrations” in Fishnet, Blowfish’s journal of erotica.

Share This