Where In The World Is Avery?
Forgive the poor (camera phone) picture quality. No “guessing” if you’ve already been told!
Quick Note: Minimums
Recently I’ve received several emails from people I’ve never met before suggesting we get together for “2-3 hours.” Inevitably I’ll reply, “three hours is my minimum.” And inevitably they’ll reply “I know.” If I may be forgiven for lapsing into internet-speak: ?????? I think I’m missing something here. Or at least, one of us is.
So I’ve added a little paragraph on my practical page explaining why I ask to spend three hours with those I’m meeting for the first time, since it apparently was unclear. (It’s reproduced below for your convenience.) I’ve actually been thinking a lot about changing my request to a four hour date for the initial meeting, and I can just hear the message board regulars now: “Four hours?! What fresh hell is this? Couldn’t she offer a more humane alternative, like burning me with a cigarette or making me stand in a freezing shower?” No, Sirs! Only forcing you to endure my company will satisfy a power-mad tyrant like me.
It’s my goal to meet gentlemen who are interested in me as a complete person instead of (only) an appealing body. Longer dates tend to foster better connections, and I have no interest in merely being another notch on a bedpost. As Webster Schott writes, “Sex is beautiful. To live without it, is to be less than alive. And to live for sex alone is to be less than human.”
If the thought of spending three hours together strikes you as far too long, we are not well-matched.
For The Future
As I believe I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m scheduled to have new pictures taken in June (by more than one photographer even—a photo extravaganza!) and I’m planning on some site improvements to correspond with those images, so I can launch an full site upgrade sometime in July. I’ve got a long list of changes and additions but I thought I should ask if there’s anything you’d like to see done differently, too. I welcome suggestions from those I’ve met before.
“They leave me and I love them more.”
Maurice Sendak died today, as you’ve no doubt already heard, and with his passing comes the inevitable sharing of interviews and quotes and stories about his stories moving someone or many someones. I’m at attention for it all, and was grateful to be sent this Guardian interview in which he dispenses plenty of predictably hilarious quips as well as some very tender observances. He spends much of the discussion on the tense, knotty relationship he had with his parents, people to whom he felt bound yet not close. His homosexuality in particular was a point of stress, for while his parents met his partner of over half a decade, the true nature of his relationship with this other man was never explicitly acknowledged or condoned. But he speaks of one positive experience:
I went through the album and picked some of my mother’s relatives and some of my father’s and drew them very acutely. And they cried. And I cried. So there was that. And there still is that.
And I cried! What an elegant, piercing way to sum up those enduring moments of connection that take place within otherwise fraught and painful relationships, and that become our life jackets in a sea of hurt. His last interview with NPR contained similarly moving passages. I will miss his way with words more than his way with images.
I have nothing now but praise for my life. I’m not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more. … There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready.
G-Spot Fatigue
I love reading about sex, but I share Dr. Petra Boynton’s frustration with this constant dithering about the g-spot, and I’m sad to see that there’s still pressure to categorize women’s experience of sexual pleasure along some type of hierarchy, within which anything originating internally (vagina) ranks higher than externally (clitoris.) The fact that any women feel the need to describe their g-spot as “elusive” saddens me—are they otherwise unable to access any type of arousal? I doubt it. But I bet they’re denying themselves a lot of pleasure in the process of fruitlessly searching for some thumbprint-sized area that will (allegedly) guarantee amazing sex.
The question of whether or not the g-spot exists has, for me, been satisfied: yes. I know this because I used to employ mine regularly towards the end of squirting, which was a fad in the mid-2000s that doesn’t seem to have much cultural cache anymore. But it doesn’t always feel good for me to have my g-spot stimulated, particularly vigorously. It simply creates the sensation of having to pee. Squirting is really, really fun but the build up is uncomfortable, and while I find it plausible that (uncomfortable) g-spot stimulation might result in my having a more intense orgasms, my orgasms aren’t so dissatisfying as to be in need of much amplifying. In other words, I am not regularly having orgasms and then thinking, “eh, that was okay…but not great.” I tend to have the best orgasms when I respond to whatever feels best in the moment, not when I toil away in some awkward position to produce an unpleasant senstation. Which is why I so loved Dr. Boynton’s gender flip of the way female sexuality is often treated in our culture:
If you talk to men you discover some get intense pleasure from testicle stimulation and are unable to orgasm without this. Some hate their balls touched. Some get a lot of pleasure if attention is paid to the shaft of the penis. Some find direct stimulation to the glans uncomfortable. Others experience more pleasure from anal stimulation.
Yet we do not suggest because men can and do experience pleasure from different areas in their genitals that there are specific spots that guarantee male orgasm or that men are somehow deficient if they do not experience say, a left testicle orgasm. We don’t scan, survey, or perform autopsies on penises to establish the most sensitive parts. Nor do we have self help books, courses or sex toys designed to coach men into experiencing orgasm through stimulation to specific areas of their genitals.
I completely sympathize with the urge to discover new sexual techniques that can give your partner (or you) increased pleasure. It’s well worth trying something new to see what happens, but there’s no reason to force the issue if the experiment isn’t a success.
Is That All There Is?
On some days, I step outside and the wind is just right, the air is just right, the sun is just right. I can’t believe I have the life I have; I feel so extraordinarily lucky and happy. And on other days…
When I first heard this song, it irritated me. It’s weariness and resignation seemed too affected, like the narrator * was trying very hard to be cool. I was a teenager, so I was highly attuned to that sort of attempt. I can relate to it more now. Depending on my mood, the song is either funny or frightening, ominous. (My favorite moment in Sleep No More was when Hecate lipsynched to a murky version of Tony Bennet singing the same. So haunting.) I think fundamentally I’m a too-sensitive person to take on this disaffected attitude for very long. But I imagine we all have our moments.
*Writes Thomas Mann, “Ecstatic poets have said that speech is poor: ‘Ah, how poor are words,’ so they sing. But no, sir. Speech, it seems to me, is rich, is extravagantly rich compared with the poverty and limitations of life.”
That Woody Allen
Here he goes again, weighing in on some of the issues raised by Venus in Furs:
Humans are clean slates. There are no qualities indigenous to men or women. True, there is a different biology, but all defining choices in life affect both sexes & a woman, any woman is capable of defining herself with total FREEDOM. Therefore women are anything they choose to be & frequently have chosen & defined themselves greater than men. Don’t be fooled by THE ARTS! They’re no big deal; certainly no excuse for people acting like jerks & by that I mean, so what if up till now there were very few women artists. There may have been women far deeper than, say, Mozart or Da Vinci but contributing their genius in a different socially circumscribed context. Note how I switched from pen to pencil at this moment because in Lelouch’s film, A MAN & A WOMAN, he switches from color to black & White—So I underline my point using the same symbolism—Very clever? OK, then, very stupid.
Venus in Furs
Well, it finally happened—I got to see “Venus in Fur” on Broadway. I’ve been wanting to attend this production since it was running off Broadway last year, and I’m kicking myself now more than ever that I didn’t, because it closes in mid-June and it is spectacular. It is wildly funny, the performances are brilliant, and the script is so dense and quotable that I immediately ordered a copy. It’s really something special.
Naturally it also inspired me to consult my copy of Venus in Furs, which I read probably five or six years ago and which resulted in excessive underlining. The novel is full of exciting, passionate declarations like “Woman’s power lies in Man’s passion, and she knows how to make use of it if man isn’t careful” and what interests me more than the corporal punishment moments, and what seems far more transgressive even today, is the assertion of a woman’s right to infidelity. Wanda tells Severin, “Nature knows of no permanence in the male-female relationship. It is merely the egoism of the man, who wants to bury a woman like a treasure. All attempts at using vows, contracts, and holy ceremonies have failed to bring permanence into the most changeable aspect of our human existence, namely love.” (Of course, this applies to just as many men as it does women.) Severin responds to this by reasoning,
In love there is no equality. [...] I’m horrified when I vividly imagine that a woman whom I love, who has requited my love, could give herself to another man without showing me the slightest compassion. But do I have a choice? If I love that woman, love her madly, should I proudly turn my back on her and let my boastful strength destroy me? [...] I have two female ideals. If I can’t find my noble, sunny ideal, a kind and faithful woman to share my life, then I won’t put up with anything halfway, anything lukewarm! I would rather submit to a woman with no virtue, no fidelity, no compassion. Such a woman in her selfish grandeur is also an ideal.
This in turn reminded me of a Doris Lessing passage that arose from her reflection upon the experience of stealing her husband from his first wife, a concept (that you can commit theft against another person in the emotional realm) that I have some issues with. But setting that objection aside, her interpretation is compelling, and she and Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch are in agreement that, on a fundamental level, women cannot be civilized. (I would argue men and women resist civilization, but I won’t muddy the waters by exploring that any further.) Here’s Sacher-Masoch:
No woman is so good or so evil as not to be capable at any moment of both the most diabolical and most divine [...] A woman has the character of a savage, who acts loyal or disloyal, generous or gruesome, depending on whatever impulse happens to rule her at the moment.
It’s baldly misogynistic yet understood to be complimentary at the same time. I suppose the notion of any living being acting in complete concert with its truest nature is something that evokes wonderment.
Here’s Lessing:
[I was operating with] basic female ruthlessness .. . [that] comes from a much older time than Christianity or any other softener of savage moralities. It is my right. When I’ve seen this creature emerge in myself, or in other women, I have felt awe.
Quick Note
Given repeated problems I’ve had with depositing old hundred dollar bills at my bank—their machine regularly marks the old ones as counterfeit—I’m going to ask that in the future, all donations please be made up of only new hundreds (or fifties, or twenties.) Thank you for understanding and I apologize if this creates any inconvenience for you. Images of the old hundreds can be found here and here. (A new hundred looks like this.)