Thoughts On Sybians
As with all my crazy-sexy essays, given that my sexuality’s in a bit of a state of flux (as chronicled here), I’ve posted this one on FetLife. The obligatory excerpt:
I was talking to LucidMoon the other day about Sybians, the Death Star of sex toys. Supposedly you mount the most frigid, repressed, born-again woman on one of these babies for ten minutes and she’ll stagger off of it with her hair down in tangles, shuddering with delight, having renounced Jesus for the joys of electricity and kinky goddamned science.
I’ve thought about getting one myself, and unfortunately I am in the middle-class financial value of “It’s not that you CAN’T afford it, it’s that you SHOULDN’T.” I mean, I could shell out $1400 for what looks like a gymnast’s horse designed by horny satyrs… But should I? Would we use it enough? Would my wife divorce me, figuring that the hobby horse of doom is a lot cheaper than I am and more satisfying to boot?
And really, where would we put it when the kids came by? It’s hard enough hiding the whips and chains in our closet in a box marked “YAHTZEE.” They’ve gone to play a board game before, and discovered what Mommy and Stepdaddy like to do, and been scarred.
But no. The real reason I want a Sybian is….
The Best Thing I've Written This Week….
The best thing I’ve written this week is not here, but in fact over at the literature site Fantasy Matters. They asked me to write an essay for banned books week, and what came out was an intensely personal piece on parenting, the danger of books, and the need to manage censorship properly.
A sample is thus:
One cannot help but think about censorship when you’re showing your sixteen-year-old daughter rape scenes.
Not that I set out to show her rape; we were simply playing our usual summer challenge of “What movie should I have seen by now?” Whenever my daughter Amy stayed for the summer, she would call me over to our voluminous library of DVDs so I would help further her cinematic education.
“Well, what are you in the mood for?” I’d ask, and choose a significant movie that she should have watched by now – from the bureaucratic nightmare of Brazil to the comfort watching of Princess Bride to the hard-edged romance-meets-reality of Casablanca. Then we’d discuss what was interesting about the movie — the approaches to character, plot choices, and of course the history of the production, with constant lookups on IMDB.
For the past week, we’d been on a Stanley Kubrick kick – she’d despised The Shining, liked Full Metal Jacket, and so I said that really, no showing of Kubrick could be complete without watching A Clockwork Orange.
…which I did not remember being quite so rapetastic. I remembered violence, certainly, and scenes of sexual assault, but I didn’t remember them as being this brutal and explicit and extended. This was far ahead of what I was comfortable showing her.
Should I stop the movie? Should I censor this, and move to another film?
Should I have ever let her see it at all?
Love and Time And Ferretts
I make an odd distinction in love that I’ve recently come to realize is not universal:
I love easily, passionately, and freely. And for me, love is defined as something that I wrote to Jenphalian (although this love I’m describing is more amorous in nature, while much of my love is platonic):
“Each love I have is a unique thing where I sigh a little differently. (Gini has ‘An S smile’ she gets when she’s texting with her boyfriend S, which amuses me.) For me, a core need is to know that I’m not some interchangeable widget in my lover’s personal factory, and that if I left it would leave a small, Ferrett-shaped hole – a tiny wound that could be worked around, perhaps even eventually heal over without much scarring, but a thing that still would cause a unique and wondrous ache in its absence.”
Anyone I love, I would be there for if they needed me. That’s a part of that love – that their happiness is, in some part, essential to my own, and I’ll work to fulfill their needs.
But there’s also a strange, flip side to it that I realize is not present for most people: the intensity of my love does not necessarily require a similarly-intense time component.
Which is to say that I love Nayad, who is a wonderful person and smart and witty and fun to hug, but I can go several weeks without hearing from her and not be particularly the worse off. Don’t get me wrong, I like to hear from her – my day is always much brightened by a Nayad text or an email – but despite my deep feelings for her and the way I’d drop nearly anything to help her if she was in trouble, there’s no obligation to spend my days in touch with her.
Likewise, I love JFargo, a wonderful man who I wish I had more time with, but though we exchange comments and Facebook posts and whatnot, there’s no need for me to plan all my time in New York to see more of him. I’m just happy when we intersect, and I don’t necessarily need to eke out more time. That’s the way it works for me.
Those are both platonic loves, of course, but it works for many of my more amorous loves as well. In many cases, we’ll exchange spates of flirty texts – but they’re busy, I’m busy, I barely have enough vacation days as it is. We’ll think about planning an intersection when I’m in their vicinity or vice-versa, or plan an annual get-together… But it’s not the burning need to spend every day with them. The fact that I don’t have a requirement to see them doesn’t mean that I love them less, it just means that my love’s a slightly different flavor.
Which is weird. I mean, I do have loves who I need to see (Gini, Bec, Angie being the main drives, which is why I suppose they’re my “main” partners) – but to me, that’s just one of many wondrous factors that goes into making those particular loves unique.
Yet I can have a torrid affair with someone who I see maybe once every two years, and keep that love going, and not necessarily have a burning urge to drive out to Albuquerque. I’m not sure how weird that makes me. Pretty very, probably.
Fuck Yeah, Little Girl
A seven-year-old girl speaks out on the new Starfire.
“I want her to be a hero, fighting things and be strong and helping people.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because she’s what inspires me to be good.”
David Willis’ Shortpacked! strip on the same topic is also very good. Dude, one can enjoy sex without being a joy-dead robot.
Severe Tire Damage, Track 1
This is the blistered horror of my left hand. Note the blood-blister just below my wedding ring, the regular blister on my middle finger, the open wound on my index.
It’s a good pain. It means I’m drumming again.
A very pretty girl was foolish enough to tell me that she liked men with nice arms, and I thought, “Well, I used to have great arms.” Plus, I needed to get into exercise again, having fallen off recently, and there was this full drum kit downstairs – so why not do that?
Vanity, thy name is Ferrett.
Drumming’s a little different than other instruments in that you can’t drum in silence – or, rather, you can if you have a) a very expensive electronic kit with headphones, or b) silencing pads. I don’t have a), and b) means I can’t actually hear what I’m playing, which means that when I practice, the whole neighborhood gets to hear me fucking up. And I am fucking up, because my style of drumming has always been “technically sloppy, but big on feel.” Which means that I play differently every time, going for these elaborate fills and winding up off-beat because once again, I bit off more than I could chew.
As I’ve been playing over the last ten days or so, though, I’ve felt those skills surging back – and there’s a strength in going for an elaborate set of triplet-to-kick-pedal fills in the middle of a song and nailing it. There’s that Babe Ruth feeling of the called shot, of going, “I fired here and dropped back into the pocket, fuck yeah.” Which is nice. It’s not so nice, only playing along with other people’s music, but the iPod makes that considerably easier than it was back when I played along with CDs or (gah!) tapes.
I’m too old to be in a band, alas. Don’t have the commitment or the social network. Would be nice, though.