Reasons Why People Are Going To The Women’s March

This past weekend women around the country gathered to march against Trump, a disgusting excuse of a man who somehow made his way to the presidency. Women marched for their own deteriorating rights and for the rights of all people to prove that struggle is linked. Men marched alongside them. People who identify as neither gender marched. A lot of people marched for a lot of valid reasons. And a lot of people attended (or in some cases just threatened to attend) the march for other, less noble, motives. Some attended the march to say that the march wasn’t worth having. Some threatened the protesters. Some formed halfhearted and poorly argued counter protests that hardly resembled protests at all. Basically, various individuals all showed up for various reasons. So, I’ve accumulated a list of ten reasons (good, bad, disgusting) that someone may have attended the women’s march:

1. Women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights.

2. To subdue women with the threat of death via firearm (in a world where the number one cause of death for women is firearms) to prove that violence against women isn’t actually a problem.

3. I need somewhere to wear my corporate-produced feminist apparel.

4. Boredom.

5. To participate in the radical feminist ritualistic pagan slaughter of all innocents.

6. To fight for reproductive justice and affordable, accessible health care for all women.

7. To Make America Great Again by protesting people’s right to protest.

8. To bury the streets in male tears and menstrual blood.

9. It was my New Year’s resolution to eat healthier and march more in solidarity with women, people of color, immigrants, the LGBTQ community, and all other oppressed and soon to be more oppressed groups.

10. It’s time to expand beyond the Facebook comments section and start trolling in person.

11. I like pulling out my lawn chair, wearing my American flag shirt, and shouting petty insults at protesters with legitimate demands under the guise of being a true American patriot.

12. “To fight for those whose rights are uncertain.”*

13. Because the only way to cope is through doing.

*I want to give a shoutout to Sarah Rudkin, Jane Ifland, and all of the others who worked to organize (and/or who marched in) the women’s march here in Casper. As Sarah said, they marched to fight for those whose rights are uncertain. And they put a lot of work into it.

 

Sex Club on a Tuesday

Going to a sex club on a Tuesday is bound to be interesting. It seems a weekend activity to me. But, I suppose switching partners and engaging in public orgy like endeavors is a post-work happy hour as good as any.

I went to the sex club on Tuesday purely because it’s what my schedule would allow and because on Tuesdays, single women get in for free. Normally it’s twenty dollars. For couples, it’s sixty dollars. For single men, it’s one hundred and twenty dollars. This price break up could say a lot about the economics of sex and who is likely to pay for it, and I feel this is especially true of a Tuesday. Perhaps sex is worth splurging for over the weekend, but on a Tuesday? Download some free internet porn and go to bed early. Spend that one hundred and twenty dollars on takeout. Or rent.

This sex club does not allow walk-ins. I had to reserve my spot online, and then they sent me a follow up email regarding the location. They gave me an address, which was the address to a lighting store in the middle of a dilapidated Chinatown neighborhood. Then, they told me to go through the door bordered on both sides by closed silver shutters. I was to talk up the stairs and tell them I was there for the “Adult social.”

I had three drinks at a bar nearby beforehand. There is no bar in the actual location, but patrons can bring in their own bottles and leave them at the desk. So I also brought a bottle of wine. The woman at the front gave me a robe, a locker key, and told me to proceed upstairs when I was ready. She told me where any additional sex supplies were and emphasized consent. As I thought her speech was finished, she said “you do know this is a sex club don’t you?”

I think she was referring to my attire. I was wearing a baggy goodwill cardigan that clearly belonged to a grandfather that may have died in it. My hair was pulled back in a 90’s style half pony tail and it was evident that I did not dress for sex.

I nodded, changed, and walked upstairs. Before I noticed the people on one of the communal beds engaged in a makeshift threesome, I noticed the snack spread. It was impressive. Rice crispy treats and nature valley granola bars in one bowl, cheese puffs in another, and a well curated selection of tiny cookies on a paper plate. The room itself was also impressive, and characteristic of what one would expect to find in a sex club: there were beds with bright red comforters lining each of the walls, and a seating area for mingling or making small talk before launching into sex.

And launching into sex is exactly what people did. At first, it was one couple on the bed. The woman was bent over, her husband penetrating her from behind, and she was holding another man’s penis. Delicately.

A couple sitting next to me in the mingling area started touching one another, and right next to me she pulled out his penis and put it in her mouth. They then migrated to the bed, next to the other couple, and were immediately followed by an entire group. There were four couples, all having sex side by side in a strangely beautiful symmetry. Most people in the club were older, and their bodies showed it. But this particular pattern of individuals looked genuinely well choreographed. It was striking in an entirely non-pornographic way despite the fact that it was, essentially, live porn.
Then came the small talk. I wondered this going into the club. How do people converse when sex is happening all around and when sex is the stated goal?
It turns out, the same way everyone else does.

“What brings you here?”

“What do you do for work?”

“Where are you from?”

“What are your goals, future aspirations, and have you experimented with kink?”

It’s the same conversation people have in bars all the time. The difference here is that one of the men asking me these questions was rubbing his dick and one woman was getting her tits massaged while telling me what she did for a living.
Some people showed up in lingerie. Some people showed up, like me, in cardigans (most didn’t but perhaps some did. It’s winter).

For some, there was a barrier between their “real” lives and their sex lives. There were a few business men, some travelers, and quite a few couples, most of whom had been married for a substantial period of time. My favorite couple was a slightly older couple who had an authoritative presence in the area.

The woman gave me some of her Franzia sangria and the man offered everyone advice on the politics of sex club etiquette. Basically, it boils down to (as it should everywhere), no means no.

This particular sex club is not indicative of the sex clubs that used to exist. Well, it is. But these are the types of sex clubs that will always exist because they’re frequented by a specific type of clientele.

A sex club that makes itself inaccessible to people who can’t pay will probably always exist. As long as businessmen are willing to pay one hundred and twenty dollars to watch people fuck and maybe get fucked the club will be immune to political and social fluctuations.

That’s what’s problematic – the infamous sex clubs of the 60’s and 70’s disappeared precisely because poor people could go to them. Queer people went to them. When it’s primarily straight, wealthy people – somehow public sex is less of a threat.

Elections and Sex Lives

I haven’t written a blog post since the election. I feel like it’s pertinent.

These elections are inextricably tied to our sex lives. The people we elect do and will impact the ways we have sex and the repercussions from the sex that we have. Take, for example, Ronald Reagan. I consider him one of the most dangerous presidents in our nation’s history. His maniacal death grip extends far beyond the genocide he funded and helped execute in Central America and enters into the domestic sphere. By domestic sphere, I mean our bedrooms. He wasn’t just a war criminal, funding the ruthless slaughter of entire populations in an attempt to “thwart communism,” but he initiated the entire “family values” rhetoric we hear today – a rhetoric that implies that reproductive freedom and a well-informed sex life are incompatible with families.

He refused to fund AIDS research because he didn’t really like gays that much and despite logic and science proving the fact that AIDS was an epidemic that impacted everybody, he still wanted to prove a point. And prove a point he did. He was president for over seven years before he even acknowledged a health crisis that killed over 650,000 Americans.

We’ve had a lot of terrible presidents. I think Reagan was one of the worst because he tricked an entire population into thinking he was benefiting them, and that racial minorities, queer people, and single moms were entirely responsible for any sort of economic repercussion that the country might face. I think Trump’s rise is a product of a number of really terrifying realities our country needs to own up to, but I also think the “family value” rhetoric is largely responsible. A massive number of otherwise decent people can somehow find compatibility between grabbing women by the pussy and retaining family values. And that’s because family values have come to be associated with hetero-normative nuclear families who buy massive cars and intentionally dull their senses with ads for large electronics and some new frozen food shit like sugar coated beefsteak or cheeto chicken fingers (I’m looking at you Burger King).

On election night I attended a bizarre underground warehouse costume/dance/pole dancing party in which people listened to music while the results poured in. Initially, the mood was relatively celebratory. Even the most skeptical in the crowd were willing to drink and dance at the beginning. By the end of the night though, as the results grew bleaker and bleaker, people stopped. One young gay man who oscillated between putting on the most incredible acrobatic pole dancing routine I’d ever seen and sitting on his partner’s lap, just stopped and stared silently at the screen. He grabbed a piece of tape and put it across his mouth. He was followed by the DJ, and then other party-goers, as the room began to grow somber. The music still played but sounds that once emanated the rhythm of a night out now felt daunting. The room pulsated with a specific type of fear. The man who had been pole dancing was especially reminiscent of that. He was Hispanic and gay. What would happen to him?

A few neighborhoods over another group of friends of mine were in a seedy little gay bar when they heard the news. One friend reached for the man closest to him and started simultaneously kissing him and crying. As he told me, he just didn’t know if that would be legal anymore. He didn’t know what else to do. The friend he was with fell asleep on the couch, a form of physical denial. A way of coping. He was then disturbed by a particularly aggressive bouncer who felt that his sleeping on a couch was a way of disturbing the space. He shone a flashlight on his face and aggressively shook him awake. An otherwise irritating action was suddenly cloaked in a particularly dark type of foreshadowing. As a gay man of color, my friend sleeping on the couch will soon be considered a threat simply for existing.

Women are terrified too. We fought to get basic access to reproductive health and still live in a world in which some women have to drive entire states to get an abortion, where some women simply cannot afford the means that would prevent the pregnancy and therefore prevent the abortion, and where some women still have to simply hope that the lump on their breast is benign because going to the doctor is out of the question. One of Trump’s primary goals is to defund Planned Parenthood and that is genuinely terrifying. Cancer will skyrocket. Unplanned pregnancy will skyrocket. STD’s will skyrocket. And people will not get the support they need.

Luckily, people are organizing. Even in Casper there is a well organized and relatively large group of feminists ready to support one another and their community. This is hard. I wasn’t in Casper for the election, I was at a liberal minded underground warehouse party and even that was terrifying. I visited Casper and saw way too many oversized pick-up trucks sporting Trump-Pence bumper stickers and I wanted to throw up. The struggle here is real. There are protests happening all over the city, but the struggles happening in small communities are especially commendable because they’re uphill all the way. But that makes it all the more important.

I went to a conference once in which one of the speakers said “we need to win the revolution so that we can all make love.” He didn’t mean this in a particularly hippie type of way, not in a free love trumps all kind of statement. He meant that until there is economic, racial, sexual, and gender equality – some people’s sex lives will not be legitimized or enjoyable. So on that note, keep fighting the good fight. Our lives and our sex lives count on it.

Do Sex Clubs Still Exist?

I’ve been reading about sex clubs lately. I’m curious about them. Not simply in a sexual way, but in a sociological way. I have yet to attend one. I know there’s a hotel dedicated to swingers in Denver, a few underground you have to know people type clubs all over the place, an underground BDSM club in New York in which the first fifty female guests receive a free paddle, and an Eyes Wide Shut style club in LA in which high ranking celebrities go to have sex with one another. I’m sure there are others – these are just the ones I’ve heard most about.

There used to be Sex Clubs everywhere. Times Square, now littered with ads selling makeup and retirement accounts, used to be filled with porn theaters and sex clubs. Now, there’s one strip club in close proximity to the Applebee’s and the Olive Garden and based on its location, the patrons are probably twenty year old tourists who have barely seen tits before.

I think Times Square was better the way it used to be. I wasn’t there, but to say it serves a higher community purpose as a mega-corp driven billboard than it did as a seedy-sex ring doesn’t make sense.

Bear with me. Most would say that regardless of political affiliation, clearing out drug infested spaces filled with prostitution would be a good idea for any community. But let’s think for a minute about who the “community” is, and who it was when the sex clubs were demolished and sex brought further underground.

First though, it’s important to mention the role sex clubs have played historically: They were safe havens for people whose sexuality was considered outside of the norm. In the context of Times Square – the most famous once sex filled space in the country, it took on a couple of forms but catered primarily to gay men. And that’s because a lot of gay men flocked to New York. A lot of everyone flocked to New York -anybody who felt as though their identity was not entirely welcome in their small suburban hometowns. This was anybody who maybe wore too much of the wrong color or who had hair that didn’t match well with the hair everyone else had or who felt art was a trade worth pursuing just as much as business or marriage. But gay men were inevitably amongst these circles. (I’m not trying to exclude lesbians or any other identity, but historically, sex clubs catered – and do cater – towards men. Although, to an extent, they may be evolving. I’ll get to this idea slightly later).

So anyways, the gays boarded a bus to New York because they wanted to have sex. And have sex they did. Sex clubs and porn theaters filled Times Square and the area around Port Authority bus terminal. People could watch porn and publicly have sex with themselves or with someone else. Anybody could enter these theaters regardless of sexual orientation or gender, but most were gay men. And this was entirely because they were looking for a space in which they could express their sexuality freely, and in the process they created a space in which they could have sex freely. And interestingly, these spaces became important centers of community exchange. Everyone knows the historic importance of bars like the Stonewall Inn. But the historic importance of these sex clubs has been widely eradicated from public knowledge. They were spaces where people’s needs were met. Not simply sexual, but emotional. Closeted people went to experiment or to meet with people who could legitimize their identities, people made friends and repeat sex partners and became regulars in one of the only venues they felt as though their sexuality took on a certain level of importance.

The spaces took on a financial nature as well. They were indeed venues in which prostitution thrived. And, this makes sense. Parents were far less likely to throw money at a kid who ran to the city because he was gay than a kid who ran to the city to pursue business or even art. So, maybe he jerked a few people off in a porn theater for a few bucks. But more than that, he built relationships with patrons who actually looked out for him. Who knew his material needs had to be met. And because these spaces were one of the few in a socioeconomically divided city to cross class lines, their needs often were met.

I’m not trying to glamorize sex clubs, but rather to defend them as valid social institutions. They were primarily eradicated with the rise of “family value” rhetoric. Some say they were closed down in response to the AIDS epidemic, out of fear of free love and heroin. Which, in the minds of most politicians, were linked. So the sex clubs were shut down and businesses catering to suburban tourists were put in place. It’s clean. All the lights are advertisements. It’s a glorified shopping mall.

So where have the sex clubs gone?

I’m trying to find out. I know of a few gay bars that provide badly lit back rooms explicitly for an illicit tryst, but have they expanded beyond that? To an extent, yes. There are some only for women. There are some only for couples. But where are they? Do they still hold some sort of communal value? My hypothesis is that they do. So I’m going to try and find out.

And that’s what my next blog post will be about.

Trump and Sexual Assault

Considering recent events, it’s only appropriate to comment on Trump and his disgusting comments regarding women.

First of all, I should probably note that I’m surprised he’s getting much backlash at all. Not because he doesn’t deserve it, but because he’s rich and white and therefore people tend to excuse such behavior.

Of course, there are still the people who seem to think Trump’s comments should be dismissed as frivolous “locker room talk.” First off, this is such an irritating phrase. It implies that this type of lingo is okay in a locker room, which implies that male athletes (because apparently female athletes don’t use locker rooms?) are allowed to talk about sexual assault, which is absolutely never okay in our society. Oh wait, people seem to think that’s okay too. The same people who thought the Stanford swimmer should get off because he didn’t know better are the same people who think Trump should be allowed to “grab women by the pussies,” are the same people who say boys will be boys. And every single person who thinks that way are guilty of perpetuating sexual assault.

Straight up, if you’ve ever said that “boys will be boys” you can fuck right off right now.

Even more bizarre is the fact that some women are still voting for him. I thought female bodies had a way of shutting that whole thing down. But there are some who are still actively supporting him. One woman went so far as to say she “would think something was wrong with him” if her husband didn’t talk like that. What world do we live in that makes you feel like you not only need to stay married to a man who talks like a twelve year old insecure dickhead but also act as though you like it? Is it because it’s just a man thing like cars and trucks and math and science? Is rape just a thing boys do because they simply can’t repress their animalistic urges to stick their dicks anywhere they want any time? I know a lot of men who are way better than that. And some of them even spend time with women.

Personally, I hope Trump sticks his dick in a light socket and electrically castrates himself.

Recently, a courageous twitter movement emerged that shed light on how often women experience sexual assault, and therefore how legitimately violent Trump’s language was.  At minimum, 50 women told their stories every minute. The accounts covered sexual violence in a multitude of forms, but one of the most prominent commonalities was that, often, nobody listened or nobody cared. People blamed the victims, made excuses for the perpetrator, refused to believe the rape was “legitimate.”

If you vote for Trump, that’s exactly what you’re doing to an entire population of women that has already been silenced enough.

Consider the ways such violent verbiage will translate into the presidential office if he’s there. His fervent nationalistic pride will take on violent, almost sexual edge. Nearly every dictator that has ever existed has used their authority not only to violently repress their own people, but to take advantage of the sexual power their position offers them. Because those attitudes are intrinsically tied. If you vote for him, that blood is on your hands.

Good fucking luck.

Some Signs That You’re a Douchebag and How to Correct It If It’s Not Too Late

I wrote a while back about how Cosmopolitan is an occasionally problematic sex-advice magazine that tends to favor absurd body-bending feats over anything remotely practical. Men’s magazines do the same, except from a more machismo perspective. Rather than tell you to spend all day in wait, ready to present “your man” with oral sex the moment he walks in the door, Men’s Health and Maxim and others like to tell men to dip their dicks in Nutella in pursuit of an enthusiastic blow job (you know how it is, girls and chocolate and stuff) or to avoid women with short hair because that must mean they’re “masculine and deranged.”

If these magazines (god forbid) sprang to life and turned into flesh and blood human males, I know exactly the type they would be. They would all be part of the same circle jerking frat which would eventually (in an ideal world in which the world cares about this) get shut down for slipping roofies into every drink they served. We’ve all seen that one guy in a wife beater staring at his muscles at the gym, sipping a steroid infused protein drink and sporadically running a hand through his excessively gelled hair.

So this post can serve as a condensed re-education for any of those males rehabilitating from a lifetime of being told that it is totally appropriate, and even encouraged, to count a woman’s blinks per minute in order to determine if her hormone levels indicate that she is on some form of birth control.

For this week’s blog post I put together a list of signs that you’re probably a douchebag and how to avoid being that douchebag. Sometimes it’s accidental and sometimes it’s intentional. Either way, just stop.

**Note: Douchebag is my favorite insult, and the phrase I think to be the most accurate. A real douche bag (the vaginal cleansing product) has been scientifically proven to be ineffective, unnecessary, and actually potentially damaging to the vagina. That’s precisely what I mean when I refer to a human as a douchebag.**

Here’s something that I think should be published in all of those magazines that tell men how to pursue women.

Some Signs that You’re a Douchebag and How to Correct it if it’s Not too Late

1. If you read any magazine that tries to tell you how to pick up women you’re most likely either a douchebag or twelve. You probably depend on weirdly manipulative tactics and sit at a bar-stool plying women with as many alcoholic beverages as it will take to get them to go home with you. You don’t have time to start a legitimate conversation because you’re too busy counting her birth control indicating blinks and wondering how early is too early to stick your dick in a jar of Nutella. So how do you correct this? Spend less time reading men’s magazines with horrible advice and read almost anything else. Once you learn how talk using words instead of grunts go meet some people and maybe one of them will even let you have sex with them.

2. If you use weird, biologically impossible insults to slut shame women then you’re definitely a douche. One of the most common insults is when men claim women have loose vaginas because they’ve had “too much sex.” Dude, sorry, but do you know what else vaginas are for besides rejecting your floppy dick? Pushing out babies. I know you picture your penis being way bigger than it is, but if she is biologically designed to push out an eight plus pound baby, your dick is not going to make that much of a difference. And the more dicks she has sure as shit won’t make a difference. If you think her vagina is loose I’m going to put money down and say it has way more to do with the minuscule size of your penis than anything else.

3. The decor with which you choose to decorate your over-compensatory vehicle says a lot about you. Do you have a huge truck even though you don’t need to use it for moving absolutely anything ever? You just like that it’s loud and big sort of like you? That’s an indicator that you’re a douche. Or at least insecure. Now, if you decorate that truck with bumper stickers asking people to show you their tits or with cartoon characters pissing on anything, you’re doubly douchey. If you have truck balls, that’s just a really solid sign that you’re using your truck as a replacement phallic figure because you don’t know how to use your own. How do you reverse such learned douchiness? Buy a vehicle that is not a clear indicator of your massive masculine insecurities and peel off any bumper stickers that indicate the same.

4. Axe Body Spray is another way to identify a douche primarily because if one is using it you can safely assume they believe the ads claiming that swarms of bikini clad women will actively leap upon them as soon as they smell the suffocating scent that is Axe Body Spray. Axe Body Spray is permissible in two scenarios: 1.) you are a pre-teen child who really just wants to smell okay after gym class or 2.) if you’re starting a fire.

5. Please don’t waste any time counting a woman’s blinks. If you want to know if she’s on birth control, wait until it’s appropriate to ask and make sure you ask with the understanding that it’s her body and she can pursue the reproductive control options she wants. And still use a condom if you don’t know eachother’s sexual history because that’s an indicator of mutual respect. If you count my blinks I’ll rip your eyelids off.

6. Nutella is good but not good enough to deceive anyone into eating it off your dick. If you and your partner are into it, go for it. But if anyone ever sticks his dick in my jar of Nutella I will lose my mind.

Dating Apps

I might be a little behind on the whole Tinder think piece idea, because Tinder has been around for awhile now. But, it looks like it’s staying. So I’m going to write a slightly late Tinder think piece about technology and dating and also our attention spans.

Let’s first go through a brief and admittedly under-researched history of the dating app:

Dating apps have always been inevitable. A long time ago, a man probably put an ad in the newspaper looking for a wife. He was too busy to actively pursue her, to take her on romantic wagon rides a la little house on the prairie. So, he requested a fine gentlewoman of healthy stock with a relatively stable fortune or a few farm animals to her name. Some woman who was eager to to be married and whose parents wanted to get rid of her probably saw the ad and eagerly answered with a proposal. It was a transaction much like the dating apps and sites of today.

**A fun, unsurprising, dark fact: the first woman to ever put a personal ad in the paper was Helen Morrison in 1727. Her primary request was to find “somebody nice to spend her life with.” Instead of finding that, she was sentenced to 4 weeks in an insane asylum for posting the ad. And thus began the process of harshly punishing women for articulating desire, no matter how mild.**

Fast forward some years and we have technology, and these print dating requests are bound to go digital. In 1965, a Harvard student created Operation Match, the first computerized dating service. Users answered questionnaires and the answers were used to gauge compatibility.

Then, the 90’s happened and the Internet was still slow but it was at least there. This was when match.com was founded. Dating sites initially held a certain stigma. People tended to associate them with sad single women who checked their dating profile in between online orders of QVC and bulk cat-food. But, it’s gradually morphed from catering to older adults the world has dubbed spinsters to younger adults who just consider themselves too busy to date. In between checking Facebook and Instagram and whatever other new technological breakthrough used to create a digital social life has recently emerged, they can get notifications about who is attracted to them based off of a photo and a list of vague interests.

This is why people consider Tinder shallow. People swipe right (approve) or swipe left (deny) at a glance. It’s a hybrid hot or not game; their profile pic is the first item seen but the swiper has to decide if their interests are attractive too.

Then, if there’s a match the people can chat digitally, state their intentions, and then determine whether or not to proceed into the real world.

It’s like a multi-layer job interview, a business transaction. People don’t have to give any time to swiping right or left, only a little more time to assessing their interests, and then some time to chatting digitally. They can make a fully formed decision about whether or not to dedicate the limited resource of time to actually meeting someone in person.

Technology has simply made dating more efficient. It’s always been a type of business transaction, but like all types of business, technology has just made it easier to do quickly.

And it’s also made dating more digestible. One of the pros of technology has been that we can quickly gather information – the Internet and social media has made activist work easier to organize, has made news accessible to a wider audience, and has given people a sense of community outside of the one they are immediately situated in. It also means that we can now get the news in the form of listicles and can receive updates on friends, family, and co-workers all while scrolling through our Facebook mobile apps and taking a shit. Because, with our waning attention spans, we wouldn’t be able to handle much more.

We can also, thanks to technology, meet our soul mates or our next hookup partner while taking a shit. They’ll never know that when you sent them that charming, mass-produced opening line that you were sitting on the toilet with your pants around your ankles.

Or maybe you were dating while doing homework, or at work, or while having sex with somebody else.

Basically, we want our love lives to be controllable and accessible. We want a way to digitize out non-tangible emotions into something that feels like a data assessment.

Maybe that’s why I always consider Tinder an app for people who work at startups. I always picture khaki clad button-up Bros who use google analytics to be experts at Tinder dating. This vision is not accurate and is entirely unfounded, but that’s still what I picture.

And that’s because Tinder oozes a certain corporate culture. Not corporate like Goldman Sachs, but cool corporate as in we have a functioning bar and organic snacks in our office type corporate.

Tinder says we still wanna date, we’re just not gonna sacrifice any time to do it.

Our Weird Identity Crisis Paintings

Identity is tough. Nailing one down can be incredibly difficult, and people tend to go through a variety of phases in pursuit of an abstract concept that may actually grow to fit them well into old age. When I was thirteen I went swiftly from thinking I should dress entirely in black and adopt an excessively emotional persona almost immediately into wearing blue eyeshadow and neon-bright miniskirts. I oscillated between identities trying to find one.

Identity takes on a number of overlapping forms. Sometimes we find an adequate mixture of factors to construct something that resembles a self. Other times, these identities seem at odds with one another. And other times, the identity does not exist at all.

For me, it has always been complicated.

I went to a liberal college in a liberal city and thus the formation of identity was an almost political process. I began forming my political and social self there and it seemed like if I didn’t I would never again have another chance. I was in a perfect bubble of identity-based community building. If I didn’t adequately form an identity, I would not ever have a community on which to rely.

This process took on multiple forms. I became politically active and formed ideological identities along those lines. I adopted a major and adopted the rhetoric of everyone else within that major. I became a religious drinker of black coffee and became anti-religious with everything else.

And, of course, college was a time in which I could try and form a sexual identity.

At this point in my life, I was a little bit lonely. My housing plan got derailed and I was left living in a single dorm with nobody I really liked around me. The walls were thin and my neighbors were having loud sex constantly.

I spent an excessive amount of time alone, crammed into a 120 square foot space, bombarded by an eclectic mix of posters pointing to nothing more than bad and indecisive taste, a coffee maker that was always running, and the only living thing in the room besides me: a bamboo plant in an owl vase.

And this bamboo plant in the owl vase will prove more important to the story than one would think.

During this time, I’d developed my first real emotionally and romantically intense relationship with another woman. It was soul crushing. We hooked up on a regular basis, professed the type of excessively romantic and undying love that seems exclusive to naive young people, and then would immediately start talking about boys. She would draw me in completely only to push me away a week later because it was time for her to focus on finding a boyfriend. Which she did, and then broke up with. And the cycle began again. And again. And again.

And then she was gone, for a semester. She was studying abroad about 6000 miles away. In addition, my male hookup partner at that point was also taking a semester off (but not because he was studying abroad. He got caught cheating on a test and was suspended). The two people to whom I dedicated all of my romantic and sexual affections were gone. And I was left in a cramped and empty space wondering what it all meant.

What did it mean to oscillate so easily from a male partner to a female partner and back again? I suppose I should have simply acknowledged a certain level of bi-sexuality and adopted a persona surrounding that. But strangely, such a label did not feel quite right.

I was so enamored with her that I thought maybe I could consider myself gay. But I liked sleeping with him to such an extent that I wondered if I could. So, I embarked on a journey of self-discovery in an attempt to create what I thought I needed most: an identity.

And, it wasn’t even really an identity I was looking for. I was looking for a concrete community. And beyond even that, I was looking for a solidified answer to the ever-looming question of the person that I was and the person I wanted to be.

This is where the bamboo in the owl vase comes in. I saw an ad for a painting project a woman was doing for her senior project. She wanted to paint queer people as a matter of representation. She wanted to paint couples, she wanted to paint gender nonconforming people, and people who adhered to more typical standards of dress. The common link? Their queerness and the fact that she wanted to paint all of her subjects with their pets.

I didn’t have a pet. But I wanted to be painted. I thought perhaps this could give me an answer. If I felt comfortable being painted as queer then maybe I was queer. Maybe such a project, such a complete piece of work, could solidify my own identity and I could work from there to construct it.

**a quick note for you know it all gender theorists: yes, I know that being queer can mean anything that exists outside of a gender or sexual binary. It’s supposed to be all encompassing. And as such, I should have just assumed that identity from the second I even began questioning it. But choosing to adopt a term is an identity all on its own. So respect the process, fools.**

I decided I wanted to find a way to get painted. It would be my golden ticket of self discovery, of community, of a solid identity I could offer people if they ever wondered or asked. “I float” is not an adequate answer to “what’s your sexuality?”

So, beneath the rubble of my tiny bedroom I pulled out my bamboo plant in the owl vase and asker her if, as the only living thing in my charge, I could consider that my pet.

She said yes.

The point of the project was to paint real queer people, authentic queer people that were presented in a variety of ways. So, I thought, how exactly do I dress for that? Since I had never previously presented as queer, did I need to beef up the lesbian look? Or should I tone it down for the sake of variety? What does my own authenticity look like if it’s still forming? And if I didn’t know the answer to that, should she still paint me?

I went with a yes. And it was awkward. I led her into my tiny little dorm room and sat in a hammock (I had a hammock hanging above my bed for decorative purposes) while nervously clutching my bamboo plant in my sweat soaked hands. Somewhere, amongst all the lesbians and their animals, is a painting of me in a hammock with a bright green owl vase containing a single bamboo stick.

But I’ve never seen the painting. After that mildly uncomfortable session of posing in my dorm room with my “pet,” I decided that the action itself was enough. Or, in all actuality, it wasn’t enough. But the realization that no single action or event would make me into one homogenous homosexual entity was enough to change the trajectory of what I felt I needed to do and be and look like to present as truly authentic.

Identity is made up of a variety of narratives, of an abundance of intersections and catalysts and once or twice repressed fears of inadequacy. Is a bamboo plant a pet? If it’s the only living thing around you and you want it to be, I would say it sure as shit can be. Is it a pet if you have a dog that does so many cute tricks that you forget you even own a bamboo plant? No. Because dogs are better. But still, the point is that you can decide. If your pet is a plant one day and an animal the next that should be okay.

Excessively long metaphors about identity should also be okay sometimes when there’s no better way to explain it.

Our Successful Casual Sex Transactions

The other day, I executed one of my first succesful booty calls. (I hate the word booty call, I wish there was a better word for it. It feels outdated and the word “booty” has no romantic or sexual rhythm to it. It’s awful. I’m going to try and find another word for it in the course of this post.) I’ve had casual sex before, but I never really considered them much of an emotionless sex-date because there were either some sort of strings attached or because we had to watch movies or eat dinner first in order to cushion what we already knew – that we really just wanted to have sex with one another.

With this, even though the person I decided to sleep with and I were friends (work friends, now I guess we can consider ourselves real life friends), we specifically detailed the emotionless aspects of the sexual transaction that would eventually take place.

I was in a space in which I was excessively emotionally connected to someone else. That person was connected more seriously with another person which left me lingering almost constantly outside. My primary romantic interest had a secret – and that secret was me. I wanted to have sex with someone else because I wanted a second sexual outlet. And I too wanted the power that comes from having a secret.

The decision to sleep with the other person happened in an unorthodox way. The person with whom I had sex and I went on a fifteen minute coffee break together during work and as this person left, they yelled to me that if I ever needed a booty call, they were available.

I always make semi-reckless decisions when I’m trying to overcome my emotions for another person. This could have been one of them. I’ve slept with a few people in an emotionally stunted daze only to drag myself through some sort of bizarre scenario in which the turmoil of the actual act momentarily makes up for the specific breed of sadness that comes with permanently being relegated to the periphery. For some reason, whenever I put myself in a situation where I want little more than casual sex, I get bizarre sex. I get kicked out of bedrooms for demanding condom usage. I take ecstasy and attempt to feign intimacy. I sleep with bridesmaids at the bachelorette party and groomsmen at the wedding. At my worst, I even download Tinder and swipe right for distraction, only to find that I don’t really want to swipe right at all. Each time, I reexamine my entire life and then do it all again.

But, perhaps because of how thoroughly it was planned, this bout of casual sex was effective. If my primary sexual interest had a secret, then I wanted one too. It was as simplistic as that, childish really. So, the two of us discussed why we wanted to sleep with each other: for me, I wanted to reclaim some of the sense of autonomy that is lost when you feel more intensely attached to a person than they are to you. And, as she said, “she wanted to fuck.” But before we could solidify the contract, our fifteen minute coffee break was up.

So, throughout the course of the day, as I was monotonously selling my labor as a keg in the hyper-capitalist machinery that is the United States workplace, I made up my mind that I did want to sleep with someone else because I did want a secret and I did want a second sexual outlet. But I wanted to do it at least semi-correctly this time, so that day at lunch I laid out all my intentions immediately, from the start, while eating a strange concoction of sweet potato and zucchini smothered in enchilada sauce and my new “sometimes sex-person” ate a mustard and tomato sandwich because minimum wage does not pay for lunch meat.

“I do want to sleep with you. But I don’t have a lot of free time, and I don’t have much more in the way of emotional space right now.”

“That’s fine,” she responded, “I just like having sex.”

And so, the transaction established, the negotiations began:

“I have a mattress on the floor right now,” she said, describing the venue. “No air conditioner, but there’s a fan. I’ll get wine, but it will be cheap wine. Is that okay?”

“I’ll pay you for half of it.”

“I’m not using you,” I added, even though I guess I technically was.

“It’s okay if you are,” she abruptly responded.

“How do you feel about quickies?”

“How do you feel about sex-toys?”

“Will this be awkward at work?”

“What’s your address?”

“You’re ten minutes walk from me.”

“Convenient.”

Our verbal contract was sealed and we made up our minds to be secret sex partners for an undetermined amount of time.

So, a few days later, I called her. Showing up at someone’s house when you know you’re only there to have sex with them is awkward. I don’t know how to approach the situation, the pre-coital small talk. I’m not sure how to act while meeting the roommate, who’s cooking pasta on the stove, pulls me in for a hug instead of shaking my hand. I suppose when you know someone is in your apartment because she’s about to have sex with your roommate, one outer layer of formality can be prematurely shed.

I was glad we had wine. We sat in her room, on her mattress on the floor, in front of the broken mirror she found in a trash-bin outside her apartment. Mirrors are a luxury item. I didn’t have one besides the one I used in the bathroom. I didn’t know what my entire body looked like anymore – I only saw myself as a headshot, had only seen the my torso and face for the last couple of months. Minimum wage does not pay for full length mirrors.

It doesn’t pay for much more than a mattress on the floor. But besides the wine, that’s all we needed.

I sat awkwardly on the mattress and thought of something to say. She had a book on the bed – Toni Morrison’s Beloved. I talked about that, talked about her exposed brick. She apologized for the mess. I told her I didn’t care.

I barreled through two glasses of wine before she admitted she didn’t know how to approach initiating sex with me when I wouldn’t stop clutching the glass. She didn’t want to make me spill but she also thought it was time to get things going a bit. So I set the glass down and we did.

Post-coital casual interactions are far less awkward than the pre-coital only if you leave almost immediately after, which I did. There’s no waking up smothered and sober. Only a walk home, alone, happy to have the space in which to reflect on if you want the sex to happen again.

And, because our interactions were honest and rooted in some level of respect for our intentions and the particular spaces in which we found ourselves, it was something I wanted to do again.

Our Sexual Coming of Age

The first time I feel like I really had sex was in college. In high school, although I’d had sex, the experience were primarily made up of fruitless backseat blunders, of frustrated attempts at sexual satisfaction through the hands of sexually illiterate teenage boys.

Before college, I assumed sex was supposed to be bad. I assumed it was supposed to be awkward and that I was supposed to be awkward and that I was supposed to awkwardly resign myself to non-rhythmic pelvic thrusts of the worst order. I didn’t bother faking orgasms because that was irrelevant to the people who would have been giving them to me.

So, we’ll say that my sexual coming of age came in college. It started with a man we will call Sven, because that’s originally what I thought his name was. He was in Spanish with me, and I was attracted both to his height and his name (Sven) which was not really his name. The teacher’s accent made it sound like Sven. It was really Van. Well, everyone called him Van. In reality, his name was Marvin. His middle name was Van. I found both of his fake names appealing and pursued a man because of a name that was not really his.

Of course, I also pursued him for other reasons. He was stereotypically attractive – very tall, sort of cocky, athletic. Normally, I don’t date athletes. I especially don’t date cocky athletes. But somehow, on Van, it suited him.

I also never dated him. But I did sleep with him for two years.

Perhaps one of the reasons I didn’t date him was because he was an athlete. And he had a fan base. Women would gather at his games holding signs with his name on it, fawning over him like anything ever done on a court actually mattered. I was generally opposed to athletic based glory, with the entitlement that came from sports notoriety. I only attended his games if they were offering free food.

But, seeing him the first few days of Spanish class getting called a name that wasn’t his opened up a space for me to pursue someone I otherwise never would have.

Actually, I need to emphasize the point that at eighteen I was not interested in the same people I was at 22 or 24 or even earlier – at 21. At 18 I was interested in pursuing people who made me want to actively engage in sex with another person. Something that my high school boyfriends never actually did. I liked Sven’s/Van’s/Marvin’s back. That was enough.

So when I saw Van, who I thought was Sven, who had a muscular back and a persona that was actively sexual – a persona unlike any other eighteen year old I had at that point met, I decided that I was going to have sex with him.

And I did. In the library.

It was the first time I had actively taken control of my own sex life. Before that, I sat passively and allowed occasional penetration more as a formality than as anything even representative of legitimate desire.

I had read somewhere that if you look at somebody’s mouth when they’re talking to you that it will automatically situate you in a sexual context. Ignoring the fact that I have no recollection of where I’d heard this, ignoring the fact that this idea likely resembles much of the overly analytical and entirely inaccurate sexual advice columns a la Cosmo magazine (magazines I grew to detest as my feminist consciousness gradually expanded), it worked.

It worked because it made me look at him and made him know that I was looking at him. It worked because for the first time, perhaps not as subtly as I intended, I intentionally put myself into a situation that I hoped would turn sexual. I didn’t just get put there.

So I stared at his mouth and talked to him and had sex with him in the library. And then again, in his room. And then again and again for the next two years.

But we never dated. We never even verged on serious. I would run into him while he was leaving his dorm with girl after girl, I would sometimes attend his games (like I said, if they offered free food), and we would still get together and talk. And have sex. We talked primarily about sex. He showed me the porn he watched. We talked, conversationally, about what we expected out of someone we were sleeping with. We talked about our evolving sexual selves and solidified that, although we got along well, we would not start dating. For Valentine’s Day, he took me to a sex shop in the basement of a barber shop and allowed me to buy whatever I wanted. It was the least romantic thing that a person could have ever done, but it was entirely appropriate.

It was, really, what our relationship was about. I liked to think that perhaps it was more than an excessively long bout of booty call, that he must have preferred me to the girls who held up signs at his games and flocked to his room in bulk. But ultimately it doesn’t matter. They wanted to have sex with him and did. I wanted to have sex with him and did.

What was important about the relationship, perhaps what gave it its staying power, was that through him I learned that it was appropriate both to have and to articulate sexual desire.

I talked to him briefly, recently. We caught up. He’s playing basketball in Germany and completed his masters and is probably still having a lot of sex. We talked about our lives and our plans and the lapse of time in which we’ve not seen anything of each other.

He took a semester off after our second year of college. We stopped talking during that time. I saw him, upon his return, at a bar near campus. He helped me carry my drunk friend home. As I sat with her, holding her hair back and watching her puke, he sat on a seat in the corner and said, “what’s your sign again?”

I looked at him. I was confused. Although amusing, I never found any real logic in astrology. I never cared for it. But, still holding my friend’s hair, I responded, “Aquarius.”

“I’m Aries” he said, “we’re compatible.”

Despite the illogic of it, we were. Maybe not romantically, but sexually. And really, at that time, that’s the type of compatibility I actually needed.