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I’m not totally sure, I answered. However, I believe I’ve transposed my desire to drink in what was a futile effort at maintaining a semblance of control into a fervid need to NOT drink, in an effort to preserve that very same control.

I’m not sure that’s the whole truth but it’s certainly part of it. I prefer to have control over myself, over my behavior, and over what is ultimately my life. When I discovered that drinking was simply a reflection of the contrary, it became clear to me that it had no place in the clutter.

But still, I struggle. Day by day sometimes. And at others the time stretches between the struggles are longer, depending on what is going on in my life.

These days it’s minute by minute.

I sat and listened to her after I’d answered the question, listened to the sadness and the questioning punctuated by genuinely heartfelt sentiments, all highlighted by the haze of booze. And I understood.

Being in our bodies can be challening, can’t it? Existing inside ourselves, sensing every single drop of blood as it runs screaming through our veins, threatening, it can seem, to stop abruptly before it decides willfully to carry on. I feel as if I am floating. Blood is my mode of transport, frothy bubbles that wash me to my next destination, toward all the places I am supposed to be present for, but can’t help but approach through myopic lenses – waking up in the morning, showering, making breakfast for my daughter, taking her to school, doing work, contending with school assignments I can’t concentrate on and and a cat who has decided that a litter box is superfluous.

But such is life inside our bodies.

I want to control my body when in fact what I need to do is listen to it. Listen to the wave of sensation it sends through the stream, listen when it tells me that drinking is a bad idea even though goddam it sure would take the fucking edge off, and most importantly, listen when it says, You’re okay.

Which is exactly what happened this afternoon. The conversation I participated in, with this sweet woman I’ve known since my birth, and for whom drinking has also been a struggle, reminds me that, really? I am okay. We are all okay, after all.

We just don’t always know it, do we?

I have told many a confession here and in other places ‘round the web and it has certainly been interesting seeing my confessions evolve – through strings of stories, tales of encounters and situations, around thoughts that surround them, interweaved with lessons I’ve learned… and even a few that were probably missed. I’ve enjoyed every bit of sharing my thoughts and experiences here, even when I didn’t love the circumstances or situations that lead to my expressions of them.

And isn’t that what confessing is all about after all? Putting out there for at least one other person to hear so that we can release a piece of ourselves – leveling, unifying, communicating, creating a connection of some sort so that we don’t feel as if we are alone in it – whatever it may be. Chances are if we have had a thought or experience, someone else has had a similar one.

I confess that I have loved discovering that I’m not alone out there in the infinitely vast landscape that is life. It’s made me feel secure, like a pillow across my lap while I watch TV. Confident like a brand-new pair of well-fitting jeans. Contented as a young child in her mother’s lap.

I also confess that I am in the midst of what feels like, thus far, the most arduous and overwhelming thing I have ever experienced.

He moved out this weekend, my husband of 15 years. Our daughter helped him pack up some of his belongings and install his provisions into his new apartment. They shopped for new home items together, she excitedly helped him set up his bed and whateverelse, and together they carved out a special space for her. She will rotate between us weekly and throughout this entire process she has done very, very well.

I however, have been confronted by the abject aloneness of finalizing a departure from someone who has functioned as so much a part of me for so very long. Coming home yesterday to a half empty closet and a reminder of what was sent me absolutely reeling with dread and overwhelm… and sadness.

But I will work through these bits of challenge. It’s what we do, isn’t it? We take what comes our way in the manner we know how. I can complain and cry or I can suck it up and move forward. For the time being, I suppose I will do some of both. In the interest of balance and all that. I will just have to try to remember during the particularly difficult parts that I’ve designed it this way. I asked for what I wanted, what I needed – space for each of us to figure some things out – and I got exactly that.

So, really, I can’t complain. Besides, I still have hope that this thing will work out between us.

And the wonderful thing about hope is that it can spur us toward action – something that relationships must fully and steadily encompass in order for them to be sustainable, but which is often tragically forgotten.

So, here’s to hope, to more confessions… and to whatever else will be.

Oh, and desire.

For more. Of that.

For the remainder of the evening, I stood there wondering – Is it too much to ask for someone to do exactly that? Just hold my hair, grasp it tightly in your thick, rough hewn fingers right there at its root where the hairline meets the nape of my neck and pull it, gently, and hold, hold, hold please, for just a little a while, then pull again, upwards this time and more forcefully until my heels and then toes slowly and desperately begin to peel off the floor, my soles stuffed full of intention and fixation, teeming with urgency and craving and lust and… hope? Can I hope that someday soon this particular little base, dirty desire will be fulfilled without me having to ask, to hope… to yearn? Is this yearning, which threatens wickedly to become an absolute fucking necessity, this yearning to be suspended by my hair in someone’s strong and impassioned fingers, is this more a mark of loneliness or of resolve? Resolve to find someone that can meet such a very simple need.

Like the shiver that begins its journey on the outer edge of my thigh and then creeps serenely down the length of my leg, I am quite obviously in a state of flux. And I believe, from inside the quiet depths of me, that the possibility of at least temporary grounding lives inside an integral and sweet spot inside my feet-soles.

And with their rise, so too will I.

It didn’t matter.

Stepping away from my life had become an absolute imperative, so my trip to Burning Man couldn’t have been better timed. Leaving my husband and child behind gave me no pause whatsoever. I needed this trip. Needed it like dust needs a surface on which to cling.

We had several breakdowns along the way, mechanical difficulties that I endured and my two male cohorts labored through (I held the flashlight and sweet-talked gas station attendants for supplies while they did the actual dirty work). Yet these setbacks did not impact my serenity in the slightest. I was committed to practicing presence at every moment. And did I ever succeed.

So, driving into the limits of Black Rock City, a place where possibility exists far beyond the realm of the most active imaginations (and exactly fifty-three hours after we had embarked upon our journey) I was mellow. As mellow as I had been in quite some time. Mellow as yellow. As laid-back as a Golden Gate Park hippie in the California sunshine.

Mellow.

What could I possibly say about Burning Man that doesn’t sound cliché and trite? Words don’t capture its essence, nor do photographs give credence to the magic that occurs at every turn of a bicycle’s wheel, a hipster’s head, a dime in the sand.

See? Trite. Cliché. I can’t even give the experience adequate description.

But because my experience there in the black-hot Black Rock desert was one of acceptance, of love, and of learning – really learning to open myself up to creating connections with people, connections that might last a forever lifetime or be the fleeting moments they were designed to be– because this was my experience, and because I had so many fantastic, flashing interludes laced with lessons about me and who I am in this world, and because despite the heat and the dust and the gazillions of dirty, sexy people I managed to maintain my mellow for a solid two weeks, because of these things… I can be okay with the fact that I can’t properly communicate how motherfucking awesome it was.

Perhaps a picture of me in the midst of my mellow will have to suffice. And perhaps mellow is something I should learn to cultivate here at home too.

Another lesson to learn… and counting.

Nah, I thought, I actually look better!

When I’d lived there in California I had been the quintessential party girl. He knew me as that free-spirited, unrestrained, kindafuckedup woman. Since then, getting sober has pulled me together – it helped me drop a considerable amount of weight, compelled me to stop smoking and allowed me the energy to get to the gym regularly. I am three years older, yes, but I definitely look better now than I did back then.

Plus, I’ve learned who I am which means that I am comfortable in my body. Grounded, rooted even, inside of it.

Well … usually, anyway.

He had seen me the day before. We’d had lunch and as he sat across the wide, black-laquered table from me, it was clear that he was appreciative of my appearance. But he hadn’t seen me unclothed, exposed, vulnerable, wanting. He had yet to unwrap the package of me, and relish gifts of comfort, diversion, satisfaction. And while we certainly had a past, what had once been between us had fallen, unnoticed, by the wayside; littered remnants of sweet but distant memories. The possibility that lie between us existed inside a quiet hotel room across town.

My phone lit up – Here, his text read.

I collected my purse and walked out the door towards his car. We made small talk on the way to the Hilton, about what I don’t remember, it is a bit of a blur. I do remember that the receptionist at the hotel didn’t blink when I asked for a day use room, maybe because I have reached a point in my life where the possibility that a hotel clerk might think I’m a slut has become wholly inconsequential to me, and so my confidence in asking for a room to fuck in for the day has reached its utmost peak.

Plus I was beyond horny.

Beyond.

We took our time getting to the room. Slowly we walked from the elevator down the hallway, he holding my hand behind his back in a gesture of temporary ownership. It is his style to go slow in the beginning, let the moments build upon each other in fevered anticipation of what might be next. It is also his style to lay temporary claim to me during the time that we are together, a practice to which I completely conform. Happily even. And it didn’t take long to recognize that we had come together completely empty-handed – no vibrators, no dildos, no booze, no weed, no ties, no blindfold, no lube. Condoms were our only accoutrement, and they, like sweet memories, went unnoticed.

Almost.

Inside that hotel room, the one across town, occurred a primal blur of bodies, steeped in longing so deep that it bordered upon compulsion.

You are absolutely perfect. With you I will fill my cup, he whisper-spit at me in one sweet breath, laden with greed, tinged white-hot with need. He took me then, made me his – in one motion flipped me violently onto my back and threw my legs with a grasp so tight my eyes stung, up towards the flat-white ceiling; thick, drenched tongue found my cunt after it ran primitively down the entire side of my body. My sigh, the sigh that wrote more than words could ever render, was audible. Palpable even.

I had returned.

The blur continued through to the afternoon. Cups were filled. Giving was taken, received, spit out like watermelon seeds seeking solace in the soil. And taking what was given? That was a given.

It was, after all was said and done, the most perfect afternoon – a splendid combination of worship and abuse.

What more could one ask for after a three year absence?

The fact is that I never did.

But I got exactly what I wanted anyway.

I had become emotionally triggered and I unfortunately allowed myself to spin completely out of control, despite the number of times I’d said to several different friends on recent occasions, regarding their own issues with spousal squabbles, Nothing will get accomplished when you’re in a heightened emotional state, so when you feel yourself becoming reactive, walk away from the conversation and revisit it 20 minutes later after you’ve calmed down.

It seems I don’t even know how to take my own fucking advice.

I had been standing on Battery Street in the middle San Francisco’s financial district, yelling into my phone at him, railing about how he wasn’t doing it right – whatever “it” was I am sure I could recall if I wanted but the truth is I’d rather forget. I have occasionally found myself in this over-reactive state. I am human, after all, and this whole separation thing has been something of a challenge. But I was in very rare form this particular afternoon, and I am sure there were some businessmen and women heading back to offices from lunch breaks who received unpleasant earfuls of my vitriol. I wasn’t holding back – my tongue sharp razors of blame and punishment.

It was a couple of days later that I was able to get clear as a bell that my expectations of him are beliefs I am not free to have, that his actions are totally out of my control, and that the foundation of my happiness hinges upon no one else but me. But I didn’t know it then. Well, on some level I understood those concepts…. but I wasn’t practicing them. I was, instead, blaming. Shaming. Beating him up while I stood indignantly on the sidewalk as workaday passers-by gave wide berth to my bitterness.

It was not my finest hour. But it was, thankfully, short-lived.

It is amazing how quickly a mood can shift, how focus can be derailed, how one’s psychological atmosphere can morph from contempt into contentedness.

I had just hung up the phone and was looking up towards the tops of buildings searching for their street numbers. I was looking for the parking garage where I had deposited my car, pre-lunch, just a few hours before. I had suddenly become disoriented (likely due to all the adrenaline I’d ushered forth as a result of my outrage) and couldn’t remember what block I had been on. It was exactly that moment, not three seconds after I’d put my phone back into my purse, when a cute guy walked up to me and said, You look like you’re lost, can I help you?

Yes, I replied, grateful for the offering. My car’s parked at a garage on Sansome, but I am not sure where that is exactly. Oh, he said, it’s just over there. My office is right above it. I thanked him with a big smile and began to walk up the block towards the garage.

Funny how focus can shift. How possibility opens up like quiet fields in front of us. How simple directions to a car can become a catalyst for temperament change.

Hey, he shouted towards me as I was leaving, you are really cute. I turned back towards him and if I blushed, I did not know. I only knew I liked how I felt inside of my skin right then. My response was in kind, Well so are you. I smiled.

It’s my birthday! he remarked, and whether or not this was the truth was at that moment irrelevant. The fact that he was standing there speaking to me, acknowledging me, and then asking for exactly what he wanted from me was as big a turn on to me as gay black gangster porn.

He was twenty five, and one of the things he had just decided he wanted for his birthday was to make out with me.

So I said, Okay.

And in the middle of San Francisco’s financial district, on a warm and sunny Friday afternoon, I kissed this cute young man because, well… he was cute, and also because he had asked for what he wanted. Put it right the fuck out there. And I did not even consider moving his hands as they wandered up and down and around my ass as we stood there, but instead grabbed the back of his hair with my hand and very gently tugged. And after a few of these lovely moments I pulled away. Although I really didn’t want to.

But I had to go, I told him.

He looked at me one last time and said, Wow, that was a really good kiss. Can we fuck?

Maybe, I considered. And I was reminded about how simply asking for what we want is the instrument for actually getting it. And with that I handed him my card and walked down the block, where I got in my car and drove away smiling, fascinated by how feelings are so very fluid – one constant rippling motion of delight and animosity. And everything that exists in between.

And how it’s time for me to dump my anger about my situation and move into acceptance. Of what is, of what will be. And how it is I that can make my life exactly what I want it to be.

All I’ve gotta do is ask for it, and make the shift.

All on my own.

Cuttting.

Just like saying goodbye to booze, ending a relationship that has lasted as long as ours is akin to cutting out a piece of my flesh, or a limb, an organ even. Fuck that feels dramatic to say, but drama is what I feel like I am embroiled in right now.

And I fucking hate it.

I keep saying to those who inquire, It’s not the openness of our marriage that has caused the many problems between us, it’s many things, not the least of which is our dynamic itself and how it changed (and not for the better) once I quit drinking and got my shit together. But, really? The marriage’s openness is where so much of our dysfunction has played out -and if I am being completely honest, is one that feels like at this very moment a shit-filled sandbox of misery and betrayal- and so pretty consistently I have been slapped in the face over and over again with the dysfunctions of a relationship concept that I support, defend and champion for. But I am reminded through this whole thing that we are all human, we make mistakes and we fuck things up and hopefully we learn from those mistakes and fuckups. However, some of us don’t. And so, I am also reminded something else very very important, and while it is a lesson I believe I always understood as truth, I also believe I took its relevance and its gravity for granted – IT TAKES ALL INVOLVED FOR OPEN RELATIONSHIPS TO WORK PROPERLY.

And frankly, all involved in my open relationships did not always act out of integrity, honesty, openness and with responsibility to everyone… and I can include myself among that group. But the problem is that it’s continuing, and I am done participating in the bullshit. There is more, of course, so much more. But I know that I can expect nothing more than what I can expect from myself. And so I will continue to grieve the loss of my marriage and try not to view it from a distorted, angry lens. Although right now? That’s really fucking hard.

I leave very soon for another two weeks, this time to California – San Francisco and Yosemite. So I will not be blogging for a while. Which is probably a good thing because the last thing I want is for this to become a dumping ground for my bitterness and resentment. Hopefully when I return, I will have a clear-cut and more level-headed perspective on things.

See you all on the flip side.

Love,
Sadie

It can be seen here

It’s a scary place to peer out from, despite the fact that I’ve been craving a change of such magnitude for a while now. For the last year, in fact, the thought of simple solitude has been a source of deep and abiding fantasy for me. Not dildos shoved into the asses of willingly submissive men, or the thought of teeth sunken deep into my flesh, nor my consensual participation at the center of an elaborately constructed gang bang. No, quiet time, isolation is what I have desired.

It looks like I will be getting some of that out of our separation.

But even though solitude is what I want, what I crave, and what I am sure I need, it’s overwhelming to consider that it is now time for me to construct the place for it. However do I begin? The concept of unfettered and scheduled “me time” is as foreign to me as the Martian landscape. It’s so very contrary to the way I’ve lived my 42 years on this earth. My marriage has been one -like most are I suspect- that tied me inexplicably to the helm of another’s boat, one that sailed its own destiny without fully consulting the wishes of its other passengers. That’s not to say I did not at times captain our collective ship, of course I played that role on occasion. At times. But mostly not. And so realizing that I wasn’t totally in charge of my own destiny any longer, that I had lost full command of my life, was a sobering and quite astonishing realization. And one that left me sad and questioning. I now understand that I had given myself to him, a gift for the groom, and in so doing I expected him to fulfill me; despite the other arrangements we had outside of our marriage. We do that when we marry, don’t we? I know this now. We strap ourselves to the person next to us and together we navigate the waters of our lives, each paddling one-handedly while the other two hold on to each other… for dear fucking life.

It’s time to go it alone.

So Scott and I are going hands free.

Free to swim, to sail, to paddle, to wave swiftly in the breeze.

To do whateverthefuck our hands want to do.

But, yeah, it’s overwhelming. Mostly from the standpoint of logistics- time for me to get another job, for us to together determine custody arrangements, and time to talk to our daughter about what’s going on with her parents. Her parents who have decided to swim solo. How does one explain the travails of a relationship whose time might simply be up… in terms that don’t feel fatalistic? In ways that make it possible to understand that by leaving each other for a while (or for perhaps longer) we have the best chance for survival – both individually, as a couple, and as a family. How do we approach this from the perspective that we’ve approached our entire marriage, just as we have always designed our relationship according to our specifications…we are doing so now.

This is just part of the redesign.

I guess we just do it as we’ve done it all along? Openly, honestly and with as much integrity as we can muster? And hope that it’s enough? It’s all I can think to do. It’s all I know how to do.

Overwhelm sometimes spurs us to movement. When it doesn’t paralyze, that is.

So I will continue on. Power through. Paddle through the stream.

This time, inside totally open waters.

Sounds about right, doesn’t it?

And once again, part ways.

Will this be forever? Who knows. I certainly don’t. All I know is what I know – I have committed to releasing any expectations, any attachment to outcome, and all the anger that has been threatening, balefully, to accumulate as a result of these expectations and attachments; I will not blame. I will take responsibility for my part in it.

I am coming to understand implicitly that separating is the only possible solution for any growth and all shifts that must occur in order for us to both live lives that are fulfilling. Be that separately or together. And I have become very clear that the only person that I am permitted to insist live in integrity, live with a commitment to growth, and operate in honesty and with respect towards others… is me.

It’s up to me.

And so I leave for the desert tonight. For Black Rock city and possibility. And in the two weeks that I am gone, I will begin creating the life that I know is here, the one that is waiting, patiently, for me to become aware of its presence.

And I will allow this genesis to take me.

Completely.

If you are in the Austin area, and if you like really yummy Indian food and small gatherings over intense yet sparkly conversation and, ummm…. ME, you are invited to join the fun!

Go here for more details and to sign up.

Naan bread, curries and spicy chutney awaits.

Sure, euphemize these foodstuffs if you feel so inclined.

I’ll just be over here noshin’…

What is that all about? Why does our species lack an inclination towards being okay with not being RIGHT all the time? In what part of our evolutionary process did we develop this incapacity for taking responsibility?

I have been watching relationships fall apart all around me in the last couple of weeks, and as I witness the effects of these dissolving unions, and as I hear and feel the consequences of their dissolution – pain and regret, desire and sadness – I get angry.

And no, not angry at the people involved, angry at the idea that we as a culture just don’t get it.

Now, as I speak of taking responsibility and ownership of one’s feelings (which is what the need to be RIGHT is about – it’s just a feeling, it isn’t anything else) I do admit that I don’t always get it either. But I am trying to.

Here is what I understand – If I feel a particular way about anything, it’s my responsibility, not yours. If I do or say something that is hurtful to you, you have the power to allow that to penetrate you or to deflect it. But you own it. Not me. If I am wrong and you are right, who really wins there? Does making me superior to you (which is always what is achieved when one wins) really do anything more but to inject a certain distance between us both?

In this society that we’ve built, wholly based upon consumption – I want, I need, I get, I I I I I I I I I I … there is no room for YOU. And so you, and I, we walk around with our arms outstretched, not in welcoming heartfelt gestures but with painful, boundary setting, arms-length commands, and that keeps that distance comfortable. But in that comfortable space, the one that is designed to cushion the blow of future sufferings based upon long-ago pains, no one gets in. But it’s not OUR fault that we do this. No, it’s someone else’s fault. Someone else who hurt us long ago. Or it’s the fault of someone else who is hurting us now.

Blame. It serves its purpose but at great cost.

We do this keep-away/blame-game with strangers, with acquaintances, with family, with friends, with our kids and most especially we do it with our partners – the ones we are supposed to love the most.

And when we do this, guess who really wins?

Nobody.

But instead, we chucked them all by the wayside.

I think the rules served their purpose, as a framework of sorts so that we could have something to guide us, keep us in check… and in line. But that was ultimately the problem with the rules, they confined us more so than we’d already been in our monogamous marriage. The restrictions only helped perpetuate the control we’d exerted upon each other without even realizing it – by subscribing to the socially approved tenet of monogamy.

So when we sat down recently and discussed revising them to account for where we are today, five an a half years into the open part of our marriage, we decided that it was ultimately futile. Because rules, guidelines, restrictions, whateveryouwanttocallthem, aren’t something that marriages (or any long-term relationships) really thrive under. In fact, I would venture to guess that they do exactly the opposite.

One of the mistakes we made (and others do, too) is operating under the assumption that opening a relationship will be “fun”.

Oh, this will be so much fun, we are going to go on dates and play and have sex with different people! Wheeeee!

Certainly this is part of it, but it is really only a small piece. But we have these blinders on that keep us from understanding the reality and the gravity of opening up a relationship. The blinders let us see only nakedness and playfulness and endorphin rushes and orgasms. And what they shield from our view? That those that we become involved with are people. People with expectations and needs and issues and … feelings.

We often disregard that those on the other ends of the openness can be hurt by us if we aren’t careful about how we behave.

But we’ve gotten caught up in the fun of it, and in so doing, we’ve only considered us in the situation, Won’t this be fun, honey, for me to watch you fuck another guy? and in the process we’ve completely forgotten that the other guy might have some attachment or belief or, god forbid, feeling about his role in our fun.

And I realized that our rules reflected this perfectly. It was all about us, and it was us thinking that by drafting the guidelines we would manage things just perfectly. But we could have never predicted any outcome even though we attempted in vain to do exactly that by drawing explicit boundaries (which I do think served an important purpose at the time). But there are a couple of them that, knowing what I know now, I would strike from the initial list – Each of us has Veto Power, and Fall in love, break it off.

Because while I get that veto power gives each partner a sense of control over the scenario – say a wife doesn’t like the chick her husband is fucking – it’s not ultimately her place to make that decision for her husband. That whole, We can’t control other people, only ourselves credo applies nicely here. And trying to control our partner inside an open relationship? That’s a recipe for a back-firing disaster (believe me, I know). And exercising veto power is a way to manipulate and control one’s partner. And this? Well this is monogamous behavior, monogamous thinking, and that sort of thinking doesn’t fit within the open relationship paradigm. Our partners are not ours to control. Hell, they aren’t even ours at all. Open truly means open in this sense – open to allowing our partners the possibility to navigate their outside relationships without our interference.

It’s a difficult concept to wrap one’s head around, much less embrace, but it is, I believe, paramount to the success of an open relationship.

And yes, the notion of one’s partner falling in love with someone else might seem scary, in fact it’s something that people ask me a lot – Do you think Scott is in LOVE with Sirena??? To which I always reply, Oh, yeah, they’re totally and over the moon in love with each other but that doesn’t have anything to do with me. And that’s because it doesn’t. There is no point in being open unless we are also open to the possibility of ourselves or our partner falling in love with someone else. No point whatsoever. Because the other people on the other ends of our open relationships? The one’s we are fucking around with for the fun of it? Yep… they have feelings. And those feelings might very well co-mingle with our feelings, since ya know, we’ve got ‘em too, and us people are social creatures who bond inexplicably over situations far less intense and intimate than joining genitals with each other.

And, ultimately, that’s okay. It really is. Just as long as we keep one foot planted firmly in reality and remember that those feelings, as intense as they may be, are simply that – feelings. They are not actions, they are not behavior, they do not pay the bills, they don’t care for the kids, nor do they erase the connection or the life or the memories that we have created with our long-term partners. Our feelings are, in a sense, not real.

Yet they are real all the same.

And this is why Scott and I threw out all the rules and decided to just be. … be with each other and allow the space for our relationship to be what it is. To let him be who he is with Sirena and me be with whomever else might come along. And to, instead, commit to each day as it comes and each problem as it arises with the respect and tenacity we’ve given each other up until now.

Because he is my partner. And that’s what partners do.

It’s not that I am unhappy or unfulfilled or un-anything for that matter. It’s just that my spirit is craving some completely dedicated Sadie time. Some time to spend with a good friend as we trek towards the desert from Texas in an RV towing a giant, drivable Tarantula. Some time to witness the the beauty of temporary art. Some time to get hot and dusty while wearing body glitter and little else. Some time to take part in something so real that at times it doesn’t feel so. Some time to reflect, sit, play, dance, screw, ride a bicycle, make new friends, reconnect with old ones… laugh. Cry.

All for no reason at all.

Yeah, I am ready.

Take me to Black Rock City, drop me in the middle of the playa where I may burn a deep, impenetrable hole in the desert floor, shaped like my soul, where I can bury myself and my psychic passengers while I search for what else can be.

I’ve been thinking a lot about porn lately, as I’ve seen a few of my feminist friends, via my Facebook news-feed, take decidedly anti-porn stances. Their position is stalwart, and from what I gather this is because of the perceived harm porn does to the women involved in its production, because a woman’s participation in porn is assumed to be coerced, and because porn consumption can give men a very damaging notion about what it is that women want from their sexual experiences. Not all of us want to be pounded without passion like much porn appears to exhibit. Not all of us want to be  dehumanized or degraded or tied up or tossed around like an old sock.

But some of us do.

Yep. I’d even venture to guess that lots of us do, even.

And likewise, some of us really need some clit play, something that I don’t see much of in straight porn (although, I rarely watch this type of porn, I am more of a gay porn kinda girl.) I myself love me some clit play, in fact I require it. But not everyone does. Which speaks to a very simple point -perhaps it’s simple to the point of being naive, and I totally realize it doesn’t fully justify the issues that the anti-porn feminists are raising, but I will make the point anyway- some women like their sex rough, others like it romantic, others somewhere in the continuum between… and beyond even! And? The same can be said for men.

As a male friend said to me yesterday, Porn is just animals screwing. 

Yes, this is very true. And a lot of people, animals, all of us, really like to just screw. Other’s don’t.

I am one of those people who like to just fuck sometimes. But at the same time I am also a person who really loves making love. Slow, romantic lovemaking that transcends and transports. Body moving, face softening, chest heaving, romantic sex. And I find it rather gorgeous that we animals have this dichotomous capability to enjoy both the base as well as the passionate and romantic aspects of sex. It’s a humanizing facet.

So isn’t it unrealistic, and perhaps even dangerous, to make sweeping assumptions about an industry that survives and in fact prevails in what is becoming an increasingly sexually aware society? Isn’t there some middle ground, a happy coupling of feminism and pornography?

I hope so.

I was having dinner last week with Lillith Grey, a doctoral student in the field of Psychology who also teaches classes in feminist studies at a University here in Texas, and who is also an amazing burlesque dancer. I asked Lillith her opinion on the matter, for she has seen the research that links certain kinds of porn to sexual aggression, and the sex-positive feminist in her feels very conflicted on the matter. Because on one hand, the high number of women in porn who are in the business voluntarily, on their own accord and volition, value the opportunity for free and sovereign expression of their sexuality. And many women porn performers outright resent the notion that they are victims, and they don’t much care to vilify men simply because they with their dangling appendages are products of a sexually-repressed culture fighting for the opportunity to bring sexuality out of dark taboo.

Nina Hartley, an inspiring woman whom I’ve had the pleasure of meeting twice, had this to say in an article she wrote for Counter Punch several years ago (this passage has been edited by me for contextual relevance) -

“[Why] defame male consumers of pornography with the same broad strokes used to stereotype the experiences of female performers[?] Do [we] really believe that the average man cannot tell the difference between a movie and real life? Do [people] really think that young people’s difficult times with sex are more attributable to porn than to the enforced ignorance resulting from twenty years of abstinence-only “sex education” and anti-choice propaganda? Does anyone seriously harbor the idea that individual conceptions of intimacy and sexual pleasure are shaped more by exposure to pornography than by the examples parents set for their children? … And to confabulate the images on a screen, which are created performances, with the actual experience of the performers themselves, would be laughably literal-minded, were it not so profoundly insulting. Sex performers, like the products they make, vary greatly in taste and temperment. We are much more than the characters we play. Like it or not, many female performers enjoy what they do, including things [others] find repellent. If we are not to choose what forms of sexual expression we find appropriate for ourselves, who is to do the choosing for us?” (emphasis mine).

I agree with Nina, but I also get that, like all media, porn can be influential in ways that could prove maladaptive. It often does eroticize sexual aggression, and a lot of it fetishizes the male dominant/female submissive dynamic. But not all of it. And doesn’t the impact of porn wholly depend upon who it is that is receiving the messages being sent and how it is they process those messages? I think so. Why try to suppress an entire industry (fighting is futile, when will we learn that?) when we can just discuss exactly what porn means to different people? Surely the messages are different for all. I think if we did that, naive as it sounds, then we might view porn differently.

And yes, I mean that in a literal way as well as an abstract one. There must be a better way to bridge the gap between feminism and porn without capsizing the First Amendment rights of anyone, especially consensually contracted sex workers who are operating out of personal agency.

Did you know that there is feminist porn being made and is readily available for mass consumption? Yep, Porn made by and for women of all sexual kinds. Which of course means that this porn (like all porn) will mean different things and carry different messages for different people.

It just depends upon how they receive them.