Anna’s Adventures

… in the belly. Everyone asks “do you think you’re pregnant?”.

Yeah, sure. Its pregnancy. \/\/ateva. Is this the only way that the world can come to terms with me being a sexual adult?

I recently had a party and my sister got a bit drunk and started offering to give people pap smears with the ice tongs. That was hilarious. Our cousin wouldn’t hear of it: “in my mind, you are still 6 and 8″…then why was she mixing us cocktails?

http://www.debbydoesntdoitforfree.org/

There’s something in the air that’s taking me back to the sex of my adolescence. No, I’m not revisiting a time of innocence and discovery, but a time without shame. The first thing I had to do as a teenager, was to lose the part of my shell which kept me back from loving and accepting myself.

But losing that shell carries the rise of being exposed to nasty people.

Something happened, though. Some monumental shift of cogs and gears within me let it all click: internal validation is the name of the game and pleasing my own tastes is the aim. Now, by this I hardly mean orgasm or various ways to reach one. I do mean selecting my partners in sex and love and friendship with much greater care.

I’ve had partners who were distant. I’ve had partners who didn’t care. I’ve had partners who cared too much, and I’ve had partners who cared to the psycho point of manipulating me into submission.

Now this thing that’s happened has shattered all the silliness, all the shell and safeguards I’d put in place and left a naked truth or 2.

First off, and most obviously: I’m fine, and what I want to do is fine.

Secondly, I don’t like being grabbed by sweaty guys with one hand on their cock and nothing to say for themselves about it. I’m attracted to people who have some understanding of the world past “food/fuck”.

Fact 3: In the past I’ve tended to go for people who’s intellect beckoned me onto new paths, but I’ve since found that they aren’t what I need. Sure, they are very pretty in conversation and they have (usually) good spelling and grammar, but they simulate intelligence and inquisitiveness through competition and domination. If you question them, then you’ll be quoted out of the water before you can pick up a reference book.

Fact 4: There are some smells I really like. Skin, light sweat, motor oil, the salty lake at Swansea, ginger and roasting lamb.

Fact 5: I like engines. Eh, what can ya do?

Fact 6: Some people use honesty as a way to manipulate and hurt. They do the wrong thing with eye wide open, and then confess to their partner, who can only suffer and offer absolution or create drama by resisting. I’m not into that kind of honesty.

Fact 7: Honesty in itself isn’t a bad thing, but I flinch when I hear people tell me that its important in a partner / friend. I’d rather be lied to than routinely stuck like a voodoo doll.

Fact 9: (Many of these aren’t facts precisely) Its not that I don’t like men, I just don’t like lots of things that many of them do. To me. To the ladies I love. To themselves. Urgh.

Fact 10: The most degrading sexual act I can think of is sex without consent. I won’t allow it to happen in any form in my world. That’s not to say that I’ve been raped, but it is to say that I have seen some behavior recently that’s made me question how some people obtain consent, and I am not happy.

Fact 10b: (I’m really not into the idea of shit in a sexual context though - just me!)

Fact 11: It’s OK to routinely fall in love with people, things and the world. All that love comes back. I’d rather make love and fun with friends than have undramatic sex with the same partner for the rest of my life.

Fact 12: I’d rather have sex with a polite stranger than a violent lover. I’d rather have sex with a violent lover than a manipulative partner. I’d rather have sex with no-one than with a bland partner. I’d rather have sex with a bland partner than a sleazy moron. I’d rather make love with friends than most of the above.

Fact 13: I’m not going to make you complete, and I’m not going to wait for you to make me complete.

Fact 14: I don’t mind waiting sometimes. But not too often. And not for nothing.

Fact 15: I’m not jealous. Not anymore.

I am reading A History of the Wife by Marilyn Yalom. Though I am not looking for a husband, or a wife, or a partner, I find it enthralling to see how my own attitudes to sex, love and partnership are shaped by very old traditions. My favorite parts are reading about the people who had separate relationships for family, partnership, sex and love.

I wonder what she will say (if anything) about polyamoury, polyfidelity and “swinging”?

Things are different.

I am slower, mentally. I don’t have enough room in my head for all the things that I used to have time and space for.

I’ve been worried that I don’t have the same mental capacity as I used to. I’m certainly not encouraging myself to get creative. Though I am crocheting, which probably does count as being creative. Maybe I’m being a bit hard on myself by expecting to be purely engaged in being creative and productive.

Meanwhile, my brain is on sex overdrive. My dreams are invaded by tales of handsome young fellows, and Kalypso attends my waking thoughts. I miss him terribly in many ways.

In fact, I miss several people and I’m hardly going out any making new friends. Though I am going out to the gym, which is a brilliant way to spend time.

I did make it, with Kate, to the last ever Rocky Horror Picture Show Audience Participation night at the Greater Union. It was rad. Though, it starts at 11pm, and I didn’t get to actually sleep until about 5am - just because my sleep-wake cycle was disturbed. I meant to go out this evening with S, but fell asleep at 5pm, and woke suddenly at 10:40pm. Bleagh.

My last session with my psychologist went really well. The next one should be interesting - I feel like I’ve broken through some kind of resistance or self-knowledge barrier. More news on that soon.

Last night I watched a terrible film called “I am a Sex Addict” in which writer / director / star Caveh Zahedi details his sex addiction. The thing is, the film is a misnomer. It becomes increasingly clear as the stories unfold, that Caveh visits prostitutes in order to punish the women in his life. He compulsively visits street prostitutes, brothels, massage parlors, and strip joints. But the real “fix” comes from talking to his girlfriends afterward.

He wants to be honest, and make a genuine attempt at polyamory, but for some reason it always fails. The women take him at face value and engage with him to make the enterprise work.

He’s delighted when they’re accepting, but compulsively transgresses their stated limits. When one girlfriend says that it is OK to talk about his attraction to other women, he begins pointing out every woman on the street to evaluate this or that sexual characteristic. Even when he begins a relationship with a woman who openly encourages him to flirt, gives him space and time to do it in, he begins to insist that she watch him with a prostitute in order to cure his addiction. She responds by going to pieces and indulging her coping mechanism: alcohol. Caveh gets off scott-free because his girlfriend’s alcoholism is a bigger problem than his bastardry.

It was horrible to watch the gaping wound of all this relationship trauma. It is awful to see the repetition, the need to punish, to push for more and more power and less and less responsibility in the relationships.

Caveh tells us that when he is alone, and uses sex with prostitutes as a band-aid for loneliness and depression, he always feels empty returning home afterwards. The second half of the fix is missing. The audience watches each trainwreck approaching, and hopes for the girlfriend to escape intact. None of them escape unblamed, and none of them retain their privacy.

Caveh isn’t a sex addict, he’s a control freak.

Image222.jpg

Originally uploaded by AnnaAniston

Sunday. The day that Kalypso met Kate. We started at 10.30am in a cafe. Nervous. Unable to make chit chat. Kal suggested we all talk about being nervous, and that broke some ice.  

Then things got going, and there was a bit of talking, chatting, questions. Statements of need. Stories about what happened recently. What I had done wrong.

Then to Kate’s place to hang out with flatmates and watch a video. Then dancing rhumba in the living room. We looked over Kate’s homework, then walked out to an intimate milonga at NewTango. And then dinner with Jones.

A ten hour trial, a lovely day that started strangely and ended well. A testament to how lovely my lovely loves can be. It could have turned nasty. But it turned absolutely lovely.

I am going to have kids

That was what the dream was meant to tell Tomas, what Tereza was unable to tell him herself. She had come to him to escape her mother’s world, a world where all bodies were equal. She had come to him to make her body unique, irreplaceable. But he, too, had drawn an equal sign between her and the rest of them: he kissed them all alike, stroked them alike, made no, absolutely no, distinction between Tereza’s body and other bodies. Her had sent her back into the world she tried to escpae, sent her to march naked with the other women.

– Milan Kundera, Unbrearable Lightness of Being

Tereza has this dream that Tomas doesn’t understand. A mere fuck isn’t a betrayal. But that line drawn between her and all the others is. He calls her attention to her sameness, her lack of originality; but in causing her to suffer it, treats her differently to all the rest.

She is not the same, yet suffers as though she is.