Thursday, July 30, 2009

A new Stranger column about a delicate matter: sex workers and race.

Like many of my Stranger columns, it's a subject that deserves far more discussion than I have space to give it. But I think it's worth introducing the ideas, and I hope they stir more discussion in others...

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

The Weather Outside Is Frightful

The Mistress is cranky about the heat. I know, I know, I don't like snow, either. So persnickety am I.

I admit that the heat is easier in some ways - I can drive in it, for example. And it hasn't yet made my power go out.

But while I can feel sexy when it's snowing outside, I cannot feel sexy with a constant trickle of perspiration running down my back. It's like wearing a latex catsuit, all the time. And while dewy women can be alluring, the charm of that wears off quickly. Like after about half an hour or so.

Still, at least no one provokes me into a towering rage by cooing at me about how pretty the heat is. I should find all those snow-loving, "Oh look, it's just like a postcard!" people and torment them by talking about how wooooooonderful record-breaking, 100-degree heat is. Walking in a summer wonderland!

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Complete and unedited email I got recently...

SUBJECT: my 3 guesses at what your fetish is that you indulge with Milo

1. He is an amputee
2. He has a very large/small cock (is that 2 guesses?)
3. He is Chinese

I get the most weirdly random email. I’m usually good at connecting apparent non sequiturs to a subject that makes sense, but this one took me a full minute or so.

What happens is: someone Googles some odd term or other, finds a page of my blog, reads it, but doesn’t note the date. And then they write to me commenting about a post from, say, five years ago. As if it would still be uppermost in my mind.

First things first: this letter is made of fail. The idea of race as a fetish is offensive to me. I am also repulsed by the idea of fetishizing people because they have lost a limb. For the record, I have had partners of all races, and I have been sexual with handicapped people. But people are not fetish objects.

I suppose you could say that someone fetishized cocks of a certain size, because cocks are sort of objects. Sort of. They happen to be attached to people, so I’m not crazy about that characterization. I’ll allow it, given that the owners and operators of cocks often speak of them as separate entities with autonomous government, and we're playing fast and loose with the literal definition of the word "fetish" anyway. But clearly the writer does not understand that women don’t usually fetishize body parts the way men sometimes do.

Other point of failure: this writer is also confusing two different people. Milo was a man I mentioned playing with, but Mike was a secondary partner of mine a little more than five years ago, before I started seeing Monk.

And Mike was not into BDSM, which I mentioned in a post I wrote about him, and I said there was a certain thing about him that I found particularly sexy, but I declined to say what it was. I was purposely rather oblique, but I’m willing say more now.

There were plenty of obvious reasons to like Mike: he was handsome, charming, intelligent, and he also proved to be good in bed.

He was also completely not-jealous and drama-free. That was a huge issue to me at the time - even bigger than it is now, which is still pretty big – because my previous relationship had ended in a firestorm of jealousy and drama.

Because of that, I spent several years skittering nervously away from anyone who even hinted they might get jealous of me. Someone I barely knew sent me a letter that was (I believe) intended to be sexy, and in it they mentioned being possessive. I think they were trying to impress me with their intensity, or something. But talk about the wrong thing to say! I all but took out a restraining order on them.

But Mike was perfectly fine with me showing up at random intervals, having a passionate evening, and then vanishing. No next-date setting, not much communication in between, and absolutely, positively no talk about where is our relationship going? It was great.

So you might say what I fetishized about Mike was his non-possessiveness. However, he did do this one thing that turned me on. He welded. I’m serious: he’s a metal artist, and he welded and worked in metal, and watching him do that was very sexy to me.

I do have a mild machine-sex fetish. Mild meaning: I rarely do anything about it, but it's fun to think about and I often think pictures of it are sexy.

But what I really have is a competence fetish. If I watch someone do something, and they are clearly very good at it, that can be a big turn-on. For example, watching Max do awesome rope bondage on people was what made me first say “Hey, that guy’s kinda cool.” I once got sprung on someone because she was a pool shark. Watching her just clean people’s clocks on the green felt table got me tingly. Looking at Mike’s art, and his tools, and seeing him do the whole make-the-sparks-fly welding thing? Yeah, that made the sparks fly for me, definitely. We had sex in his shop any number of times.

It was a charming arrangement and it was the perfect re-entry relationship. It ran its course, as relationships usually do. But it ended amicably, and Mike renewed my faith in the idea that it was possible to have a fun and affectionate casual-dating relationship without it leading to the type of insane drama that requires lawyers.

So would I get turned on by just any pool hustler or metal worker? No. But doing something manifestly well is sexy. Unfortunately for this person, he is demonstrating that letter-writing is not a skill he can parlay into hot dates.