Making Sense
I don’t think Ethan can even comprehend how much I want a cock.
Not even a penis in the proper sense of the word; just a cock. A 4-to-6-inch-long clit. Something to grab, something to fill my palm, some way to reach inside him the way he reaches inside me, something that can be sucked. Sometimes I cry when I think about how much I want a blow job.
Not for lust. It’s not about lust. It’s not about orgasm or power or getting serviced or even, I think, about being a man. As far as the nerves that connect my crotch to my brain are concerned, manhood is a petty societal thing and beside the point. This particular battle is about base animal existence, not fleeting concepts.
It’s about feeling the way I need to feel, being where I need to be, and who I need to be, and with whom I need to be with. It’s about love and humanity.
I want to look at my body and understand it at once, just like that. I want to touch myself with my bare fingers and not be tempted to cry, even when I’m in the most vulnerable of moods. I want to touch someone else like me, and feel safe enough to love him in the way that feels most right to me.
Does it make sense? This is always the question my body and my brain are asking each other.
Does this make sense?
Most often, the answer is, It does not. This is why it hurts. This is why trans people sometimes say they feel “trapped in the wrong body.” Something just doesn’t add up.
If I could have my sort-of penis and a breast-free chest and all the feelings that these features would lead to, my body’s irrational logic would make sense. This, I’m sure of.
I would make sense to myself.
Then I could have the kind of sex with Ethan that I’ve wanted ever since I first smelled him; and I could take a shower without pausing, just for half a beat, to think, “What the hell?” I could be faithful to the fundamentals of my animal existence.
I would no longer feel like a figment of my own imagination.
Being a congruent part of reality, I would therefore feel welcome to continue existing in it and influencing the path of events in my own small way.
Until I hear a more convincing definition of what it means to be human, I’m going to go on yearning for that physical understanding, that true form, that sense of completion… and that blow job.
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I admit I was more than alarmed last week when I discovered, in the midst of a long-anticipated threesome with Ethan and our close friend (and fellow pre-treatment trannyboy) “Rabbit”, that I’m an absolute slut for spanking.
I’ve read a lot of stories that involved spanking or slapping, and honestly, I tended to skip over those parts. They were less than alluring when compared to, say, complicated bondage scenes, puppy play, knife play, suspension, slavery, and feigned nonconsent. Even foot fetishes seemed more enticing and creative.
There was some ego in my disdain for it, for sure. As far as kinks go, spanking is one of the most vanilla out there. No one is impressed to hear that you’re kinky enough to engage in some old-fashioned spanking. Moreover, I was spanked as a child when I misbehaved, so the depth and breadth of my prior experience with it was decidedly non-sexual and undesirable.
My draw toward light-to-moderate masochism was always more about being dominated and being in a position of adoring servitude, like a dog fawning over its owner, than it was about being humiliated. And spanking a child as a means of behavior modification is all about getting the child to associate poor behavior with humiliation. (Pain is a by-product. If a parent spanks a child to cause pain, then it’s abuse.)
But then, they say the true effect of a good education is not that you brim over with knowledge, but that you become keenly aware of how little you actually know.
After a brief rest about 45 minutes into our three-way escapade last week, Rabbit, who is tragically inexperienced with consensual sex, asked what was going to happen next. We’d already gotten the standard oral, manual, and humping out of the way; no one was ready to stop yet; and everyone in the room shared a universal fascination with kink, even if only voyeuristically.
Earlier that day, Ethan had bought $15 worth of bright orange, extra thick, extra silky, woven nylon rope in the hardware section. A doubled-over length of it was now strung tightly between two hooks set deep into the doorless doorframe of our closet. Dangling from the rope line were the handcuffs – the metal ones that bite hard – and a pair of leather cuffs.
Our eyes collectively drifted over to the setup. I looked suddenly at Rabbit. “Wanna tie me up and spank me?” I said.
I was mostly joking, trying to get Rabbit to lose the awkward, half-afraid look on his face. He aspires to be a top someday, and I want to help him reach that goal (a not entirely selfless desire).
But Ethan’s never been one to tiptoe around. Next thing I knew, he was steering me over to the rope and tangling my wrists in the handcuffs.
As Rabbit sat watching from the bed, and I stood bare-assed with my arms above my head, Ethan wrapped a leather belt around his hand and laid into me.
He was gentler than I would have liked.
I’m at a loss, for the moment, to say what exactly it was that got to me so easily. Part of it was the fact that my hands were tied, of course – my love for restraint is well established. But somewhere between the way each blow startled me, and the slap of the leather or of his palm, and the stinging tingle that followed (it reminded me of the utterly satisfying, bone-buzzing feeling of getting a tattoo), my brain ceased to function as normal.
Remember the scene from the movie “I ♥ Huckabees” (if you haven’t seen it, go do so immediately) where the characters take turns whacking each other in the face with a huge rubber ball? They’d stumbled upon the funny little observation that, after being struck a few times, their minds just stopped thinking.
The movie characters were aiming for spiritual insight and bliss. My own experience wasn’t that far off.
When you can’t hold onto a thought – at all – for more than the short time between one slap and the next, you can’t be concerned about how silly you look, pink-assed and prancing pony-like to try to get away from the blows, even though more blows is suddenly all you’ve ever wanted. They snowball on you.
To say that each blow brought me into the moment is an understatement. The moment was clinging to me. Eventually, between the blows and the empty-mindedness that followed, there was no more room for me, and nothing was left except the moment. Pure solid Zen.
Ethan reached around to rub me, clap-slapping me around the hips and thighs with his other hand, and whispered a command in my ear: “Come.”
The mere suggestion, at that point, was more than enough. I shivered and shook and moaned and my muscles grated spasmically against the inner layer of my skin. Minutes passed and I was still undulating as if a giant serpent were wearing my skin and tangled in my bones. Rabbit was bent over me wide-eyed; he looked ready to dial 911. Silly Rabbit.
I’ve never felt so… easy. This spanking thing just bypasses all my usual circuits.
I feel silly just writing about it. But the embarrassment is happening only now; there was absolutely no humiliation for me in the act. I think now that “humiliation” is probably a misnomer for the thrill of being repeatedly whacked on the ass. It’s an abolishment of the ego, a catharsis of individuality – absolutely releasing one’s pride.
Elimination of the ego, I guess, is not necessarily synonymous with humiliation.
I’ll be looking into this further in the very, very near future. The nearer the better.
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A Question of Normalcy
Of all the uncertainties there are in sex, the one that my society seems to be most concerned with is the issue of normalcy.
Dear Abby, is my low libido normal?
Dr. Ruth, is my boyfriend’s penis size normal?
Is my body reacting normally?
Is this amount of pubic hair normal?
Are these dreams normal?
Am I normal?
Oh, please. Give me a fucking break.
Trying to navigate the seven seas of sexuality is nerve-wracking enough with the limited information we’re given in health class and on the internet. Obsessing over the imaginary possibility that there may be something “wrong” with ourselves, our partners, our bodies, or the way we like to do things will most certainly not do anything to help the situation.
There’s never a definitive answer to the question, anyway. What entails normalcy, anyway? Is it what we personally think is normal? Is it what social code tells us is acceptable? Is it anything that statistics reveal to be widespread? Is it whatever the medical industry tells us it is? Is it even real, or just an unattainable ideal?
Fretting over whether one’s sex life is “normal” is, frankly, a waste of time and an unnecessary burden. The soil is fertile for self-fulfilling prophecies of inadequacy and failure.
I admit that I’m somewhat bitter about this point. I’m a fucking transsexual, dude. I don’t even have the luxury of asking whether I’m normal: by most standards, I am by definition not normal. I was damned before I even got started.
And really, I’m doing just fine, sexually speaking. I’m healthy; my partner’s healthy; we have a great relationship with gratifying sex; we experiment freely and are always learning. The fact that I have a vagina where my balls should be could hardly be described as “normal”, but damn if we let that stop us.
Normal? Hell. Fuck normal.
If you like it, if they like it, if it’s safe, sane, and consensual – shit, who cares if it’s normal? Who cares if other people do it or approve of you doing it? Who cares if it’s weird? All sex is weird. It’s sex, for chrissake.
Just lighten up and enjoy yourselves.
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Image post
Original doodle is about 3×6″. Shading was done digitally.
Image © 2009 Mandias. All rights reserved. Do not claim, alter, or distribute.
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Perhaps it’s a bit late in the game to consider elucidating how, specifically, I define “sex.” While a Wikipedia search will tell the average person what a transsexual is, sex is not so easily defined. Everyone has their own interpretation of it, and of what “counts” as sex, and if you’re reading this blog you should probably know what I mean when I use the word “sex.”
My initial impulse when defining sex is to quote the spoken-word artist Athens Boys Choir and say, “If you think you’re having sex, you’re having sex.” But this does more to expose my deep reluctance to analyze and name what sex is to me than it does to shed light on where I draw the line between “I am having sex” and “I am not having sex.”
The line between those two declarations is hazy at best, and I feel it’s prurient to mention that, at this point in my life, I’m content with that postmodern blur. But you can’t write a blog about sex without sharing your own definition of it; that’s just rude.
My personal definition of sex
Sex is any stimulative activity that creates, perpetuates, or heightens a certain mental, emotional, and / or psychological state which may be described as arousal, excitement, or any number of other terms that generally connote a heightened state which cannot be achieved through other means (such as the use of chemicals). It usually, though not always, involves physical contact, be it self / other or self / self.
Orgasm, penetration, genital stimulation, satisfaction, pleasure, or feelings of well-being or affection need not be present or resultant of an activity in order for it to qualify as sex, although many of these things are closely associated with consentual sex.
Vaginal, anal, and oral sex all equally “count” as sex, as do masturbation, hand jobs, many forms of petting, sadomasochism, bestiality, phone and cyber sex, and many other forms of stimulation that are not so easily named or described. I would like to distinguish rape as separate from sex, and most of the time when I say “sex” I do not mean to include rape.
Whew.
How I got here
This vague, ridiculously complicated definition of sex is the result of a long, awkward process. I started with the narrow, heteronormative, oversimplified (and frankly, laughable) definition of sex I was given as a child, and I expanded it exponentially, based largely on my own experience, as well as on things I read or was told by others.
When I was 6, my older sister burst into my room boasting that she knew what sex was. (Apparently my mother had just given her an uncomfortable lecture on it that very afternoon.)
She then instructed me to make an “OK” sign with one hand, and to put the index finger of my other hand into the “O”. With my hands in this position, my sister proudly informed me that the “O” was a vagina and the finger was a penis.
I ran to the bathroom, cried for an hour or so out of sheer horror, then went to my mother and said, “That’s not true, is it?” She told me that it was – but was quick to add that only grownups do it, and I would never have to do it if I didn’t want to, and it wasn’t as bad as it sounded.
Later she yelled at my sister for letting the pussy out of the bag, which solidified my impression of sex as something so forbidden we weren’t even supposed to speak of it. Although Mom had insisted that sex was “nice,” her actions made it clear that it was something I needed to be protected from.
Middle school health class didn’t help much. Sex was an erect penis entering a vagina and moving back and forth in a repetitive, rhythmic motion until semen spurted out of the penis. Then came fertilization, pregnancy, and chlamydia. The added dimension of an entire galaxy of STDs redoubled my opinion of sex as that-which-was-to-be-avoided.
‘I’m your mother – I know what’s best for you’
I was still going through puberty in the early 1990s when homosexuality entered the fuzzy fringes of my worldview; Ellen had just come out, and my peers were tossing around the word “gay” as a synonym for anything unpleasant. Both my sister and I picked up on the slang use of “gay” without thinking about it, much to our mother’s consternation. So when the film In and Out was released, she took us to see it, hoping it would enlighten us.
There was nothing sexual in the movie (I think it was rated PG), but it caused me to make the connection that, if two ment fell in love, they would probably have sex as well. (Since sex was something that inevitably happened “when a man and a woman love each other very much.”)
This led to me asking Mom how gay men had sex. She told me they could have sex in the butt, but she neglected to mention that men have prostates, which would make anal sex pleasurable for the recipient. I assumed it wouldn’t feel good at all and that gay men were terribly shortchanged, which didn’t do much for my opinion of them.
Until I was 14, my mother was my main source of sexual information. I would hear something mentioned in the media – usually fictional media, like movies and soap operas – and ask her, “Mom, what’s rape?” or “Mom, what’s S&M?” At which point her face would go blank and she would give me a bare-bones description, just enough info to keep me from pressing the point. She’d watch me for a reaction… which mirrored her own: blankness, blandness.
She never refused to tell me anything, but she was always tense about my curiosity and avoided getting into long conversations about the many varieties of sex. I find it interesting that, although she was willing to tell me what rape and S&M were, she has never in my life said anything to me about oral sex. Unless I asked her about something specific, she would not offer me the facts.
Mom was masterful at formulating answers that didn’t give me enough information to formulate a follow-up question. Once my hormones switched on and I had a more vested interest in sexual knowledge, this became too frustrating to handle, and I began to turn to the good ol’ internet instead.
I think Mom’s approach to sex ed is the reason why, in my adulthood, I’m more nervous about oversimplifying sex than I am about finding a definitive answer. I grew up getting nothing but definitive answers – and once I became sexually active and began reading postmodern sexual theory, those answers proved to be less than helpful. Confused and anxious about my sex life and what it said about me personally, I had to expend an enormous amount of energy and time breaking down those answers and expanding them.
Lessons from lesbianism
I first became sexually active at 18; at the time, I was for all intents and purposes a woman, and I lost my virginity to a woman. I was a freshman in college and my sexual education was just getting underway as well.
She and I were together for about a year and a half, and never once in that time was penetration involved in the sex we had. But no one was about to convince me that what we were doing was not sex. So penetration – once the defining factor of sex – became an arbitrary add-on.
Neither one of us had an orgasm until we had been having sex for several months, so clearly orgasm was not a necessary component of sex, either.
She had been a victim of sexual abuse as a child, so (understandably) she had a somewhat rearranged sense of her body. For example, she quickly trained me out of the idea that women always like having their breasts touched. She claimed that hers were simply numb. And oddly enough, her most erogenous zone was located just above her kneecaps.
If that wasn’t enough to convince me that sex isn’t located within only certain body parts, we had an experience once, in a car… There was a group of us on an hour-long drive. She was in the front passenger seat and I in the seat behind her. At some point, she reached her hand back and I held it in mine, and at some point our fingers began moving together in a rhythmic, stroking-rubbing motion.
As the speed of the motion increased, we both began breathing faster and sweating, and I became extremely aroused. It occurred to me that I was having sex, although we were both fully clothed, silent, separated by the car seat, and not touching except for our hands. The other people in the car didn’t notice a thing.
When we arrived at our destination, we got out of the car, both of us flushed and panting, and after some stuttering and mumbling, we agreed that it was, in fact, sex.
Since then, I believe that sex is not necessarily genital, instead depending mostly on the mind, and how the mind interprets what is happening to the body. If you think you’re having sex, you’re having sex. This has become one of my most fundamental ideas about what sex is, what it means, what it could mean – it’s about probability, potentiality, and perception, much more than it is about all the bizarre ways that people realize those things.
A postmodern mess
When I realized that I view myself more as a man than a woman and made the decision to transition, this belief in the interpretive reality of sex led the way to a peculiar form of liberation.
Transsexuals are still mostly under the media radar, so my ideas about what it meant to be trans were… limited. Even harder to find were cultural ideas about what could possibly make a trans body sexy or erotic – mostly, we’re marketed as a pornographic kink (“dickgirls” and “cuntboys” and “shemales” and such). That’s not exactly supportive of a whole, humanlike sense of sexuality.
Since my culture wasn’t offering any thoughts on how I should view and use my body, I was forced to look elsewhere in the end. I had to write my own sexual scripts, or adapt existing scripts to include me, and that was a process that terrified me. The experience I already had with reconstructing sexual beliefs made this a little easier to handle.
My belief in the free interpretation of sex allowed me to, for example, refer to my clitoris as a “cock” and have that facilitate a satisfying sexual experience.
And my partner Ethan may penetrate my vagina with his penis. Judging by the physical logistics, that would be the very definition of heterosexual sex – but because of the meanings that we associate with the act, with the body parts involved, and with each other, we can honestly refer to this as homosex.
Through this lifelong and convoluted series of contradictory, shifting messages about sex, I’ve come to my own reluctant definition of what sex is: which is to say, what sex is is what sex means.
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