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Archive for November, 2008

I went to the store for a colon cleanse kit (details to come in another entry) and some other goodies while Delia was at her meeting. The worker bees were doing their nightly cleanup routine where they’re totally in your way except for when you want to check out, and then they ignore you (and you know your irritation with them is totally reciprocated because you’re in THEIR way, too). I walked out happy with my purchases, but making my foul “I hate people!” frowny-face.

In the empty parking lot as I loaded my bag into our van I happened to glance out into the dark street just in time to see a car swishing by. It looked familiar . . . was it? YES! It was my girlfriend on her way home and she SAW me! You have no idea how big my grin was by the time Delia turned on her blinker and pulled in, rolling down her window just to give me a kiss.

I know it’s totally dorky and makes no sense that it would make me so happy to see her like that when we’re together 97% of the time. I can’t explain it, but it felt so good. Less than five minutes later we were both home together again, kissing in the driveway and talking about our colons.

I am the luckiest girl in the whole wide world.

While other women are out shopping for bargains today, we’re staying home to masturbate on cam. Yes, I planned it that way deliberately to target the men in the states who stay home jacking off to internet porn while the wimmin-folk are out in the malls blowing money.

I’m sure many of those women would call me evil, exploiting the Thanksgiving holiday for profit by appealing to people’s “base” instincts. Leading their men-folk astray and causing them to cyber-cheat while their loving wives are out dutifully blowing wads of dough.

Can you tell I think that’s all a crock of shit? The way the chaste and moral crowd points their fingers at whores like me while they’re out TRAMPLING PEOPLE TO DEATH for Black Friday bargains?

A worker died after being trampled and a woman miscarried when hundreds of shoppers smashed through the doors of a Long Island Wal-Mart Friday morning, witnesses said.

The unidentified worker, employed as an overnight stock clerk, tried to hold back the unruly crowds just after the Valley Stream store opened at 5 a.m.

Witnesses said the surging throngs of shoppers knocked the man down. He fell and was stepped on. As he gasped for air, shoppers ran over and around him.

As far as I know, no one has ever had a miscarriage watching porn, so take THAT family values!

I break out into a cold sweat whenever I hear about and imagine crowds-gone-wild; all of those sports arena horror stories and such make me crap my pants; I am deathly afraid of the mob, of our basest, wild-eyed instincts stomping the fuck out of each other. Of having the breath crushed out of me.

We were watching one of those MOST SHOCKING CRAZY-ASS THINGS CAUGHT ON VIDEO shows the other night showing a riot in Vancouver after a hockey game; people running amok, setting shit on fire, overturning cop cars, smashing into storefronts, etc. It’s just bizarre to me that people are so scared by PORN and do so much to try to censor it out of existence, but no one ever says we should stop allowing mass-attendance at sporting events, or we should ban sports all together. It’s a stupid proposal, I guess, but one that makes WAY MORE SENSE than getting rid of porn or continuing all the lame-ass crackdowns on sex work in general.

People are fucking insane, especially when they’re in large groups where they feel no personal responsibility for the damage that can be done by the mad power of the unstoppable horde.

On that note, I must now prepare myself for the unruly, anonymous crowds that might attend my webcam show in a couple of hours. But no matter how badly they behave, it couldn’t possibly be as unpleasant as SHOPPING today.

Thanks to Delia for the heads up on today’s trampling death.

The other night we heard Martin Short ask Conan O’Brien if it’s okay to say “penis” on television. Conesy assured him that if it’s a “medical” word you can say it on tv. So they said it, “PENIS”, over and over. Martin also said, “ding dong”, “my unit” and a whole bunch of other terms as he used his hands to indicate EXACTLY what part of his body he was talking about.

Google agrees that “penis” is a word that should not be censored; even if you have SafeSearch on “strict filtering”, you’ll get 33,000,000 returns.

Guess what happens if you do a search for “clitoris”? BIG FAT ZERO.

I only learned of this reading Susie Bright’s post about this twisted double standard. Of course, to be fair, “vagina” doesn’t seem to be considered a dirty word since I just turned on strict filtering and did a search for that term and came up with (considerably fewer than penis) results so . . . yeah.

It IS upsetting and there’s clearly a weird double standard; it’s hilarious (in a very dark way) that anyone would think a clitoris is more dangerous than a penis, and “dangerous” IS the opposite of “safe”, isn’t it? Still, I don’t know that I feel exactly the same way about it that Susie does, though I think hers is an important perspective full of many truths and that we should all be pissed off about this kind of bullshit. But part of the hate, shame, and willful ignorance of women and women’s bodies is wrapped up in the shame and disgust men feel (and women AND MANY *FEMINISTS* REINFORCE AND ENCOURAGE) over straight men’s sexual response to women. If it’s a part of the body that makes a straight man’s dick hard — something they want to see and touch and lick and talk about and see pictures of — then it needs to be censored to save those crazed pudwhackers from themselves and the women from the damage that is wrought when men think of women in a sexual way!

I’m not sure “the giant obscene ‘F’ word in Internet censorship is feminism”. Yes, I think this is a feminist issue, for sure, but I don’t think the sole or even the primary motive for/cause of banning a word like “clitoris” from google’s safe search is a clear desire to silence feminists and shroud women and their bodies in a reinforced veil of ignorance. Sure, that’s one of many RESULTS (and there are plenty of places where plenty of people DO make silencing feminists and campaigning against women and knowledge of women’s bodies number one on their agenda) and it’s easy to see why Susie would feel especially pissed about it when she’s not one of the sex-negative feminists who thinks that every boner sprung is a rape waiting to happen (a way of thinking that, combined with the conservative, supposedly apolitical woman’s belief that every time a man masturbates to pictures of women who aren’t his wife that a family is destroyed, has made the men who are still in charge very eager to PRETEND to try to disapprove along with us of their dirty habit of jacking off over images of our bodies) . . . and when you turn safe search off to find “clitoris”, the seventh page-one result is her post on the internal clitoris, etc. Obviously safe search filters could make it harder for Susie to sell books.

A little diversion: laughably, the retarded UNfactual “ask men dating and love tip” page on “understanding the clitoris” ranks higher than Susie’s or Scarleteen’s pages, but that’s probably because a site like AskMen works a lot harder on search engine optimization than educators, artists, writers, political activists, etc.). The web used to be more of a woman, but now it’s poorly micromanaged by algorithms cooked up by men. Are their little mathematical formulas conscious attempts to censor feminist obscenities (like truth)? No. I don’t think so.

There are so many more pointed ways that women and the truths about our bodies told from our own perspectives are smacked down by corporate censors that the banned google clitoris isn’t at the top of my list of things to use as an example. It’s the more obvious and uncomplicated stuff I’ve had to deal with as a pornographer (one of those “commercial porn-makers” Susie identifies as someone who she thinks doesn’t suffer from bans and censorship the way artists, writers, educators and political activists do, which is an annoying and probably unintentional slap in the face I’ve felt delivered from the latter group and their “poor, starving, I-do-it-for-love-not-money mentality” before — I guess they always think we’ll know that they don’t mean pornographers like Tony Comstock who of course get to be included as ARTISTES) that really chap my hide as clear-cut cases of misogyny combined with the anti-sex backlash perpetrated by the feminists who deign to speak for all of us. Again, it’s not that Susie is one of those people, it’s just that I see feminism as one of many complex contributors to internet censorship, not just a victim of it.

So what IS a clear cut case of anti-woman, ignorance-enforcing internet censorship? When credit card companies and their processors tell me my body (and yours, if you’re a woman) is OBSCENE when I’m menstruating and I’m not allowed to talk about it or show pictures of it or have sex with myself or other people while I’m having my period on any domain where I make money selling my porn. When they spider our sites looking for banned words, take them out of context and threaten to take away our ability to be paid for our work even when it IS political, educational, artistic, etc. Guess what? Google is not the entity afraid of my bloody pussy. Google is not the entity hiding or demanding I delete blog entries discussing political, legal and ethical issues containing banned words. I just have to cross my fingers when I make posts like this one that they won’t come fuck with me, but technically I am defying their terms of service right now by posting this and could have my business shut down because of it. And it’s not just “the man” who’s against me, it’s the (other) feminists, too.

Censorship isn’t something you can blame all on men and their holy penises and their desire to stamp out feminism. And I’m starting to rethink that great old joke she mentioned; “if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” It’s totally true, but I’ll bet if that were the case today, feminists would quickly become the new pro-lifers. The gender wars are far from one-sided and I’ve been hit by a whole fucking lot of “friendly fire” over here on “our” side.

I know I’m being oversensitive and carelessly lobbing my own grenades in the wrong direction at people who are my allies, but oversimplifying everything as “anti-feminist” undermines all of our arguments and neglects to acknowledge the ways that some of feminism’s “successes” have led to these failures along the way. There’s a bit Bill Maher does that annoys the FUCK out of me to listen to (off-topic sidenote: I didn’t like much about “Religulous“, fyi), but I can’t help thinking of it right now because some of it’s true and applicable:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z8j4QJ0oiY&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6&border=1]

My guess is that banning “clitoris” has very little (if anything) to do with a campaign to censor feminist thought and information and women’s bodies, and
a whole lot more to do with thoughtlessness along with this thing Bill Maher talks about, with men trained to bow to “feminized”/feminINE values that anything that makes them erect is BAD. When you layer that onto the big problems that we SHOULD be focusing on like a) the people that make decisions in big companies being men, and b) men assuming everyone who uses their tools (like search engines) ARE men, and c) all men are straight, you wind up with guys jumping to the conclusion that any search for a clitoris is one that’s going to make someone bust a nut and is therefore unsafe. Or maybe a whole lot of confused and retarded thought WAS put into it (with a, b and c still factored in) and they decided that since, as feminists will proudly point out to you, they’ve heard that clitoris is the only organ with the sole function of PLEASURE, and MEN HAVE BEEN TAUGHT THAT THEIR PLEASURE IS BAD if they experience it themselves, especially by objectifying women in pictures or on the internet, that it should be banned. Or maybe it’s totally ridiculous to imagine ANY THOUGHT WHATSOEVER went into this arbitrary “decision”. I highly doubt that a bunch of people came together in a room with a picture of a cock on one side of the chalkboard and a vulva on the other, and came to a consensus that CLITORIS is a dirty word but PENIS isn’t, and high-fived each other on the way out the door saying, “right on, man! Another way to stick it to feminism!!”

Ultimately I think it’s paranoid to say, “it’s been clear for a long time that the giant obscene “F” word in Internet censorship is feminism.” And untrue. And I say that as someone who believes it IS true that feminism (and accurate information about women) is censored, misrepresented, considered obscene and something to quash and oppose on a very large, grand scale. I just don’t think that’s the case here with google and the clitoris, and if you want to point at double standards, the more glaring one is ignoring how much power and influence feminists and women in general have had and continue to wield in censoring the internet, art, and women who capitalize (the first offense) on men’s desires by selling them access to their bodies (second offense). It’s wrong to imply that feminist writers, artists, etc. have suffered more from internet censorship than pornographers.

Sure, feminist writers, artists, etc. make less money than smut peddlers as a whole, but that disparity has nothing to do with censorship – porn makes money in SPITE of censorship that FAVORS women writers and artists (who don’t create graphic material that is VISUAL), and is DEMANDED by the tag team duo of feminists and conservative women. You want to know why most women don’t make money on the internet? BECAUSE THEY DON’T WANT TO. Because they don’t even try. Because they are content sitting around bitching and blogging and crying on each other’s shoulders feeling superior because they aren’t whores motivated by money, no they care about PRINCIPLES and getting warm fuzzies commiserating with each other and expect the “community” to take care of them rather than creating something marketable and making enough money to buy influence and support their causes themselves. Because they rely on the man to pay them just enough that they can bitch about it being unfair and that they only do it because they HAVE to, rather than BECOMING the man long enough and with enough success that they can subvert the system. Women don’t make money because they love just scraping by and they think that makes them superior to men, because they don’t think big except in terms of imagining some big plot designed to keep them barefoot and pregnant.

Whatever. Enough of this baloney — I need to stop being a hypocrite and make me some fucking money.

This is a long-ass entry. I already cut out a lot and saved it for future entries, but I was still left with all of this, so be forewarned; it’s not a quick read:

When we started letting friends know that Delia identifies as a woman and decided to transition from presenting as a man to living as a woman, one of the first questions was from a friend who sent this to me:

So now the million $ question:
Do you think of yourself as a lesbian?

The short answer? No. I do not think of myself as a lesbian. I never have and I never will.

Sorry to disappoint folks who were looking for a juicy DELIA: MY TRANSSEXUAL GIRLFRIEND AND HOW OUR LIVES ARE NOW A CRAZY LESBIAN FUCK-PARTY! entry, but her transition doesn’t change my sexual orientation, nor does it change hers. I didn’t grow up feeling “different” (not because of my sexual preferences, anyway; I felt different in other ways, but those are different subjects). I have always been hot for men, starting with Elvis, little boys in the neighborhood, and hot ethnic dudes from seventies television like Erik Estrada on Chips (wheeee tight black gloves!), Chico (see Chico and the Man), and Epstein on Welcome Back Kotter. Real LESBIANS do not grow up feeling “hot for dudes”. Seriously, just looking at those images makes me hot in a special way reserved for triggers set early in girlhood. Of course, I’m rather partial to men’s mouths when they look suspiciously like hot pussy: full, juicy, blood-infused lips decorated with hair (see also, Isaac on Love Boat: that kind of mustache always gives me a big fucking clit boner). And I can’t deny that I had a very special, tingly interest in Jo/Nancy McKeon on Facts of Life. And Blair. And titties. And naked girls in magazines. Yes, the “Jo” archetype has been in many of my lesbo masturbation fantasies, only the setting is less boarding school and more prison.

So what IS my sexual preference? For most of my adult life I’ve been in the “it’s all good” category; I identify myself as omnisexual (aka pansexual). I’m what most people call “bisexual”, but have never liked that label: first, because I objected to wearing a special designation that seems to say I’m “different” from the majority of people (when I emphatically believe MOST people are just plain SEXUAL), and later because it assumes we only have two options to choose from. In a pinch, though, I will call myself bisexual because it’s the most efficient, accurate way for me to identify my sexuality to lots of people who aren’t familiar with all of these nuances and super-cool labels. Whenever time allows and it’s possible (during conversations or chat sessions rather than check-marking boxes on forms that never have enough options) I do try to remind people there are alternatives to the limited, oversimplified notions of sexuality and gender most of us were raised to accept.

The first time my sexual preference was called into question was in elementary school in the seventies. My friend, Irene, and I had been playing our special game of “Elvis” with each other since we were four or five and continued through fifth or sixth grade. One night at her house after we got done humping each other, she was overcome with guilt and teared up, confronting me with the weirdest question I’d ever heard in my life:

“Trixie . . . you know we’re gay, don’t you?”

Ummmmm . . . actually, no. No I did not know that. And I told her so.

Let me clarify; I didn’t tell her that I wasn’t aware we were gay, as in “wow, Irene! So *that’s* what we are! Because I’ve really been wondering; thanks for clearing that up!”. I told her we WERE NOT gay. Even with my very limited idea of what “gay” meant, I knew I wasn’t. I knew what we were doing was normal even though I knew it wasn’t something we were supposed to tell everybody about. I looked forward to doing it, it was fun, and hey, we were playing Elvis, right? Elvis was a guy that all women wanted to do it with, so how could that be gay?

She reminded me that the big girls at school had called us gay when they saw us holding hands with each other in the hallway and I tried to reassure her that they were just mean. There’s nothing WRONG with friends holding hands! I knew intuitively that we were basically just little girls (fourth grade, I think) who loved each other in a way that couldn’t possibly be that weird. Again, I wouldn’t have wanted the big girls with the feathered hair to SEE us humping each other, but that was none of their business. Their world wasn’t my world — those girls were people to be avoided or stared at because they were pretty but they were in no position to know who we were or call us grown-up names. Also, they were stupid — the kinds of girls who would never win a spelling bee (they’re actually dead now and the little know-it-all in me attributes their early deaths to their own stupidity, but it was really much sadder than being dumb and I didn’t know them well enough to gauge that anyway; one of them actually wound up with her severed head stuck up high in a tree, but I digress).

In fact, Irene was pretty stupid too. I think I believed that if it had never occurred to me to worry about this “gay” thing myself, it couldn’t possibly be something to concern ourselves with. I was the smart one who tried to spend all of her recesses in the library reading dirty books, so it felt natural to conclude that Irene was just wrong and had a stupid thought in her head. I’d already seen her make a million stupid tear-stained mistakes in our short lives, like the time she wanted to steal candy in the drugstore WHILE WE WERE WITH HER MOM after the guy at the dry goods store failed to bestow his customary free suckers on us. She tried to convince me to steal, then as soon as we were out the door she broke down crying and confessed to her mom. Whaaaaaaaaat a dumb ass! Seriously, I couldn’t believe the way she operated sometimes.

I’m only now considering the possibility that maybe I was wrong. Not about my own regular brand of opportunistic sexuality, but about hers. After all, SHE always insisted on being Elvis while I was always in the Ann-Margret role (”woman” astride, though). I never really challenged her too much on that because the action itself along with the thought of Elvis was fulfilling enough for me. I guess I just thought she LOOKED a lot like Elvis (not in a butch way, she just has the same exact mouth as him) so it made sense at the time. As an adult I *have* wondered where she got some of her ideas; we were about five when she told me that “Elvis always pees on his girlfriends.” which now does seem like an advanced concept for one so young; one secret (of perhaps many) Irene DID manage to keep from her mom was how the Bugs Bunny beach towel got completely soaked with piss.

I wonder if Irene knew she was gay all along and I totally dismissed what she might have realized from the beginning. She went on to do all the things straight girls did in rural high schools in the late eighties: drinking, fucking and frosting her hair. Now she’s married with kids. I even went to her wedding chock full of those sick Bible verses about the husband submitting to God and the wife submitting to her husband, followed by a reception full of their wasted relatives raging about that dirty fucking Bill Clinton and how he should be impeached . . . or shot! I still love Irene and hope to Christ she’s NOT gay and stuck in a straight
marriage with me being the only pussy she ever got. That would be tragic. I’m pretty sure I called it right back in elementary school, though, and that she just let what those mean girls said bother her. Sex play with same-sex childhood friends, even if it continues into your teens, is not a good predictor of sexual preference just like GENDER is not a good predictor of sexual preference.

I know I didn’t have enough information to really understand what Irene was worried about back then; we grew up with no internet, no same-sex kissing on tv, no real discussion of any of those things. I’d never been exposed to people being called names like “faggot”, but of course I realized and accepted that grown-ups “did it” in male/female pairs even if I had no awareness of a group of grown-up people who did it (and were discriminated against for doing it) the same way Irene and I did. I don’t know if I’d ever heard my parents talk about gay people and if we knew any, I wasn’t aware of it. I totally thought Billy Crystal was cute/sexy on “Soap” and didn’t understand ANYTHING about the show other than that I liked watching him. I didn’t know he was playing one of the first openly gay characters on television – I had no conscious understanding of that.

In kindergarten there was one kid who was clearly DIFFERENT, but I just thought he was obnoxious and then he moved to another school so I didn’t find out until many years later that he was gay; The memory of how he stood out is still so vivid to me, his shiny orange hair contrasted with his green turtleneck, his flair for the dramatic, his isolation . . . he was SO gay from the very beginning. As a teenager I remember when Donahue had some lesbians on his show and they explained that when most girls played with their Barbie dolls, Barbie and Ken wound up getting it on, but they were different because when THEY played Barbies, it was Skipper and Barbie who always wound up pressed against each other. Even with all the humping Irene and I did on each other, it never dawned on me to use Skipper like that when there was a KEN doll around.

It’s things like that — people being obviously queer and having to deal with identifying and coping with that difference their entire childhood — that make me adamantly opposed to ever calling myself a lesbian. Spending the rest of my life with someone who identifies as a woman — who I fell in love with because she was NOT exactly a man — will not make me a lesbian, and it’s not because she’s trans; I would say the same thing if she were born with a pussy. I will not call myself a lesbian because, aside from not being one, “lesbian” is a political word representing a minority with a set of experiences that I never had — never could have — because I have always felt myself part of the majority when it comes to the genders of people I like to have sex with.

Having said that, when I was in college I *did* come out to my friends and family as bisexual. I know, it sounds like no big thing today but things have changed a lot in the past fifteen years, you know? It wasn’t super hard or anything, but it was important enough that I thought the people closest to me should know that I might bring a chick home someday. I’d been aware since I was seventeen that women turned me on even when they weren’t pretending to be Elvis (did I already tell you about this orgasmic epiphany I had when I went to Girls’ State? I feel like I did, but if so, I can’t find where I posted it), but it took me awhile longer to even imagine having a “girlfriend”. Of course, everyone in college thought I was a lesbian anyway. Everyone EXCEPT for the handful of lesbians, so let’s just say college was one big dry spell for me.

Even though I consider myself omnisexual or pansexual, I can’t say that I’m AS sexually attracted to women as to men, and up until recently I had almost no concept of the spectrum of transgender beyond cross-dressers or a remote acknowledgment of “bizarre medical cases” totally far removed from my reality so my fantasy life hasn’t included trans people (except crossdressers). Transgender is something I’ve been ignorant and unaware of most of my life, so I definitely can’t say that I’m equally attracted to trans people as to bio men who present as men (most of the time, anyway). I did really love watching Bosom Buddies, of course, and found the guys way hotter when they were dressed up than when they were just boring dudes, but I think I always wanted them to ONLY be wearing the glossy lipstick and some girl clothes WITHOUT the wigs and the earrings. And for the both of them to be fucking Donna Dixon while they were in half-drag.

So yeah . . . my preference is more on the straight side of the continuum; I have a primal response to Elvis, Ponch, Chico, and Epstein that’s more intensely sexual than the one I have to Jo, Ginger (Gilligan’s Island) and Salma Hayak. Lately most of the time when I fantasize about fucking someone new, it’s guys or FTM people. That’s a shift from before Delia and I got together when I spent more time fantasizing about women than I do now. Why do I think more about hooking up with men or transmen these days? PROBABLY BECAUSE I’VE BEEN FUCKING A TRANSWOMAN FOR SIX YEARS. And back when I spent time longing for women, I was mostly fucking guys.

Even though I’m not a lesbian, I don’t think of myself as straight, either. In fact, my feathers were ruffled recently at a GLBT meeting when someone referred to Delia and I as a straight couple. Yes, I have grown up enjoying and feeling entitled to the privileges straight people have in our society, but we are not a straight couple. I’m not straight, she’s not straight, our relationship is not straight, and our jobs are not straight. We are not a straight couple. I don’t want to be called a lesbian couple (I was totally confused when I heard a transwoman referring to her work with her female partner as “lesbian porn”) but not being lesbian doesn’t automatically make us straight.

Still, it was pretty wacky last year when we went to a GLBT event right after Delia decided to transition and I felt like an intruder, not because anyone treated me like one, but because I kind of AM an intruder. I know that the “B” in GLBT stands for me and I know that I just said I’m not straight, but the room was small and I felt like I was taking up space someone else might have NEEDED and DESERVED more than I did. As a woman, I feel really strongly that people in minority groups have protected spaces with good energy from people who GET what it’s like to be where they’re at and where they’ve been. Like I said before, I didn’t grow up feeling “different” (I don’t FEEL like bisexuality is a minor preference, even though I know that the political reality is that it’s not accepted when it’s anything more than two girls dabbling but running straight home to the cock after they “experiment” and “get it out of their systems”) so it was weird to be in that room and for the first time automatically qualify on what felt like a technicality — because my partner’s trans. At the time I wasn’t sure I had anything to offer or anything I could rightfully gain from throwing myself into the GLBT mix.

Or maybe it was just a wake-up call, that I don’t have an excuse to avoid standing in the middle of a group of people that’s openly hated, persecuted, and targeted for special kinds of violence reserved especially for special kinds of people. I know what that feels like as a woman, a pornographer, a nerd, and a sex worker, but I exempted myself from feeling it about my sexual preference, or, more accurately my LACK of a strong preference. I could advocate and empathize — and stand safely out of harm’s way. Not anymore.

It gets tiring, too, standing in another group where I feel like a liar because my profile is different and has a bunch of things in it that I know many people would reject if only they know. Like when I go to church and feel like a liar because I don’t believe in their church God on an intellectual level the way almost everyone else does
who likes going to church. Or when I identify myself as a feminist to women who I *know* plot ways to get rid of the scourge of pornography. When the GLBT group of people sees me out and about with someone who sometimes looks like a boy and uses a boy name, I worry that they’ll think I’m a liar even though I never SAID I was a lesbian. I still cringe imagining those people and people at church and feminists all turning to look at me, aghast when they realize how I betrayed them just by walking in their midst, pretending to be one of them. A man-fucker, an atheist with a weakness for ritual and the mystical, an exploiter of women and a user of cunt, a democrat who wants to drown herself in money.

It seems like such a simple question, “are you a lesbian”. But like everything else that’s attached to someone or something I love, I feel like I need to explain how much more complex it is than yes or no. That if I don’t explain, I’ll be guilty of some deception.

*****

Just for fun, I’m imagining being offered the chance to pick someone new to be intimate with every week for a year out of everyone in the world. When I think of it that way, men and women would probably come out pretty even with some transgender competition thrown into the mix. I don’t know if that means I don’t really lean as far towards the straight side as I thought, or if that’s just a typical buffet mentality speaking where you pile a lot of different things on your plate that you might not have ordered if you could only pick three or four of them. I’m a sucker for a buffet, though. A good (or even a mediocre) buffet is my idea of heaven. Damn, I’m hungry.

Tonight’s ending on a very positive note that could even be viewed as a metaphor for other things going on in our lives; we finally installed a second hard drive for storage on my main work machine so I’m moving big files off my weighted-down C drive. It feels like a fresh start! Right now I’m filling up some of that space by transferring non-work photos over to this machine so I can enjoy playing with shots we’ve taken for fun/to learn about our camera.

November 20th: a buck Delia spotted in our neighbor’s backyard:

Our “new” camera (Nikon D300) has been therapeutic for me, making me stop and take time out to really LOOK and lose myself in details outside of myself. I’m not the kind of person who tries to capture EVERYTHING with a camera — I definitely appreciate being in the moment with family, friends and on vacation — but when we’re at home (which is the same as being at work unless we make a really concerted effort for it not to be) doing the daily grind it’s a big challenge for me to get out of my head. But now, when something mundane and beautiful captures my attention I feel justified in grabbing the camera, ostensibly to learn to take better photographs, and spending 5-20 minutes to really SEE and try to understand what I’m seeing: the light, the textures, the motion . . . challenging myself over what’s real and not real because it can look so different viewed with my eyes compared to how it’s captured by the camera. Immersing myself in all those different versions of truth and light and darkness and the stories we instantly create and details we insert after pulling them out of our asses when we think we’re looking at our surroundings.

Looking out our window a few hours ago:

We actually bought three 500 GB hard drives months ago for three different machines and up until today, had only installed ONE of them because of little nuisances like not having Dell’s annoying little drive “caddies”, not having serial ATA cables with the 90 to 180 degree corner jobbies so the case will close properly, me despising crawling around on the floor fucking with all the cables and cords tangled around dust bunnies, etc. If you heard me screaming last night it was when I bashed my elbow into the corner of my desk during that process. Anyway, we finally took care of it and I ordered everything we need to install a couple more on other machines.

The past couple of days I had the alarm set for 8:30 in the morning to try to get us back into a groove of semi-normalcy; at least I *thought* I set the alarm for 8:30. Turns out I forgot to adjust the ipod when the time changed so we were actually being woken up at 7:30 which just didn’t feel right. We’ll try again tomorrow. Maybe I’ll even start my day by going outside with the camera.

November 2nd as the sun took a dive:

And now a couple of random notes:

*Check out Delia’s post about today being the Transgender Day of Remembrance (and way to go Governor Gregoire for signing the proclamation – the most we could have expected Dino Rossi to do would have probably been to wipe his ass with it).

*Last night I enjoyed a conversation with my wanker in which I wasted lots of time raving about this Teddy Thompson fellow and a performance we saw on Later with Jools Holland. Here it is, and it slays me:

I’ve only downloaded one of his songs (a cover of “She Thinks I Still Care”, one of my all-time faves) because there’s no way I can narrow it down so I’m trying to hold out to be able to buy some of his albums, though I will probably download his cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Tonight Will Be Fine”:

If you follow my twitter you know I went to Seattle for FootNight on Thursday thanks to AmberLily giving me a heads-up about the event and encouraging me to apply with her to be a “foot model”. It was a good opportunity to get out of my nerdy hermit bubble and enjoy having my feet fondled (something I’ve always enjoyed).

It was also a good excuse for me to get a pedicure: an expense and investment of time I rarely can justify since I don’t specialize in foot fetish porn (though we do try to include at least a few shots of my feet in most of my galleries).

99.99% of the sexually stimulating work I’ve done has been on the internet or over the phone, starting out with private shows on iFriends in 2000. Even though I enjoy private shows and phone, I have almost no time to do one-on-one stuff anymore (especially since the camworld is so much different from when I started) but I *miss* it, so attending FootNight was a way to get back to that a little bit while also experiencing something new in a safe environment with an emphasis on something I love: feet.

The rules were very clear for the event (no nudity, foot worship only, no direct sexual contact, no leaving the party with customers and coming back in, etc.) and all of the women were dressed to attend a nice cocktail party or fine art fetish shoot: black turtleneck dresses, shiny black corsets, etc. In my estimation, I was the only one dressed in a way that said, “it’s all for sale, boys! I’m a total hussy!” with my blouse buttons bursting, my skirt way too short and my boobs bouncing all over the place. I was also the most nervous person there, I think, next to many of the guests with my knees practically knocking trying to walk up and down the stairs in my unimpressively practical (but still challenging for me) heels and very unsophisticated sweat stains accumulating under my arms. The truth is that I don’t have any classy party garb that’s also sexy/leg-baring that I can still fit into.

Besides, I didn’t want to go to great lengths to “fit in”; I figured it was better to stand out looking like a tramp than try to blend in. On top of that I love upskirts and panties and have much more of that kind of thing than feet on my site so I was excited by the idea of having men on the ground below me able to see right up my skirt to my hot pink and black panties. Even if it wasn’t THEIR thing, it’s MY thing; I don’t get out much and planned to milk the tease for all it was worth.

I don’t actually think I have great feet; the only thing I have going for me is that they’re exceptionally small, but at the party there were A LOT of women with small feet. Maybe not quite as small as mine, but there were plenty of size five and six chicks there. All that small-foot competition gave me yet another reason to be glad I had a corner on the market for the super-slutty look.

So WAS there a market for it? Not so much, I don’t think, but wearing something less conspicuously trashy wouldn’t have made a difference. There were a couple of guys who expressed quite a bit of appreciation for the upskirt action, but as far as I know I didn’t have guys waiting in line to spend time with me and my feet at $20 for ten minutes. I kept busy and had fun, but probably only gained one new die-hard fan for the future.

The first guy to give me money wasn’t even there because he liked feet. He was there on a mission with a bottle of Scotch to try to get back into Lady Lydia’s good graces. He told me he’d been rude to her on the phone so she’d stopped talking to him and all he could hope for is that she would accept his gift, if not his apology.

In the process of relating this to me, he reached into his pocket with defeated contrition, pulled out a twenty and assured me that he KNEW the ONLY reason we ladies were there was to make money. “I know it’s all business and I don’t want to waste your time.” I told him that if he was going to pay me, we should at least retreat to a more private area (ie a different couch farther from the door) so I could make sure to give him the time that he paid for even if he didn’t care about my feet or really anything besides Lady Lydia. He and I also agreed that our move and the open exchange of money for time would serve as a model early in the evening for the other guys to take similar steps to secure special attention from the “models”.

After forty dollars worth of talking he felt compelled to resume his tortured quest to adequately humble himself to Lady Lydia. Even though it was the first face-to-face transaction I’d made like that, it felt very familiar . . . very natural to the point where I’m sure I’m forgetting a whole lifetime of doing exactly that: being the whore that men pay just to listen. Of course there’ve been a few other times I’ve gotten money from men face-to-face for certain things, but the circumstances were less formal and the terms not at all clearcut. No, I don’t think I ever blogged about them even though they’d make interesting reading. Much of my limited experience with photographers felt exactly like sex work too, even though they took great pains not to call it that — not to even call it porn — and they didn’t pay me with money; all factors that made it MORE compromising and awkward than work that’s commonly labeled as sex work.

Anyway, Lydia’s guy probably only wanted to spend twenty dollars on me out of obligation because I’d practically forced him to tell me his story simply by introducing myself, but my timer’s battery wore out making it difficult for me to keep accurate time. I’m still not sure if my unreliable timer worked in my favor or against me; on the one hand I wound up giving people more time than they paid for before I realized the timer had no intention of beeping. On the other, they sometimes paid for more since I would discover this too late for them to turn down the next ten minutes since they were already in progress. We were advised by the party organizers to keep a discreet eye on the time but my timer was NOT discreet AT ALL; I pulled that fucker out at the beginning of every session and beeped in ten or eleven minutes in a very obvious way, nerdily assuring them this would help me NOT be distracted from the fun we could have by worrying about the time while they raised their eyebrows and mumbled that I certainly was . . . prepared. If it had actually worked and sounded an alarm at the end of those minutes, I’m sure it would have annoyed a great many people so maybe it was all for the best.
/>I felt busy the whole time I was there, but didn’t really make enough for the trip to be worth what I put into it between the pedicure, ferry, gas, and time that I could have spent doing more lucrative things (like finishing the years-overdue redesign on my site and Delia’s and this blog and . . .). Still, it was worth it to me because it was FUN, super-erotic (I’ll elaborate on in another post) and a reminder of how good it feels to connect with customers individually.

It was also worth it to have BigD snap his suspenders at me, “work” with AmberLily to doubleteam a guy with our feet (again, I’ll elaborate in another entry), and to meet Lydia (I only realized when I got home that she’s the one Ron has told me so much about with so much admiration), Reyja (a fellow Emma Steel), and Mistress Matisse. We women didn’t have much time to stand around chatting with each other, but after so many years of reading Matisse’s blog and communicating online even the little bit we have via email and blog comments it felt to me like we were cousins at a reunion. You know how there are people that feel like they’re in your life — that you’re related to in some way — even though you only see each other face-to-face a couple times in your life and rarely interact? That’s what it was like being in the same room with Matisse: totally uncommon but still irrationally familiar. In fact, that’s what being with customers face-to-face is like. There wasn’t anything weird or new about it that I didn’t recognize as the same as a million other interactions I’ve had and kinds of work I’ve done which is probably what made it so hard for me to accept that I couldn’t just climb on top of a couple of these guys and fuck them dry for a few dollars more. Not that any of them asked for that (everything was very above-board, no-pressure, polite, and legal), I’m just saying it’s hard for me to accept the stigmas, restrictions, and separateness attached to sex work and all the little subtleties built into some of them so that they can avoid being labeled as such.

Another vague and boring entry:

I’m trying to figure out how I can be more of a whore, more of a photographer, more of a blogger, more of a web maven, AND a better person/friend/family member while staying healthy (you know, SLEEPING) and maintaining enough focus/having enough time to efficiently make money to pay off our huge debt.

All of you who’ve known me and read my blog for any length of time know that I’m easily excited about new ideas, projects, learning experiences, and concepts particularly when they involve sex and money and offer fascinating insight into my own and other people’s intimate lives and thought processes. I want to do (and LIKE to do) too much to really specialize in any one thing, FINISH any one project, or devote enough time crafting and marketing any one website to make it truly successful.

A couple of weeks ago I was really on track, ready to push aside distractions and FOCUS. I had a plan and felt great about it, but then new opportunities and reminders of old ones started running through my field of vision and now I’m tiring myself out again trying to figure out how I can do it all. Because I really REALLY want to. Unfortunately I just don’t have the competency, stamina, or appropriate temperament to do it all or even 10% of it in a way that’s worth more than just the fun of being able to say I “experienced” it and still have anything left over for the people who love me so they don’t have to deal with me acting like a monster, whirling around in my own chaotic dust storm like the Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil.

I guess I need to go back to the plan I had a couple of weeks ago, write down the past two week’s distractions and set them UNDER the goals I need to finish before I get to them, and remind myself that I can go back to scatterbrained messing-around when I get our debt paid off. It’s a lot of money, but not so much that FOCUSED work on our sites for a year shouldn’t be able to erase. It sucks that I have to prioritize everything by what will make the *most* money the *fastest* and most *efficiently*, but that’s life. It’s really a very simple concept and I’ll be very proud of myself when I finally apply and master it. Then I can allow myself to just do stuff that makes me the most horny.