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Archive for the ‘fears’ Category

Back in 2001 there were more teasey story-porn pictorials around; I loved them for the buildup and wish we had time to make all (or a lot) of our porn like that.

Here are a couple of 2009 examples from a couple of my favorite web chicks:

Sequoia Redd with Brandi Belle in the Penis Pump Challenge

Poor Cinderella

*****

I’d *love* to do a brain dump here of all the blog-drafts in my head, but I’m starving and trying hard to stop feeling guilty and worried about mistake(s) I/we made. I feel like we don’t have enough time or money to do anything RIGHT, but the truth is we do a lot of things right and fucking up every so often and doing some things half-assed a lot shouldn’t erase all of that. Plus I need to stop kidding myself that perfection is attainable with time and money. It’s not. It never will be. We could have all the time and hired help and money in the world and we’d STILL make mistakes. In fact, we’d probably have the resources to make even more of them with more embarrassing consequences.

Reminding myself: progress, not perfection. Promptly admit when I am wrong. Make amends. Use my own mistakes as a reminder not to judge other people so harshly.

Normally I love fall, but it took so long for winter to go away this year that I’ve actually been apprehensive about letting go of the summer. Fortunately, we’ve had an extended Indian summer. Last week I *thought* it was over one night when I found myself craving heat, but this week it’s back. Sunny yesterday, sunny today . . . and clear for viewing the full moon last night and crone moon tonight.

It’s also been spider season with one lady in residence in our line of vision from bed in the corner of our sliding glass door:

Spider Lady & Half Moon

She’s been there every day and I know we should get rid of her big egg sac or we’ll have shitloads of spiders in our bedroom, but I haven’t been able to do that to her. I love seeing her there at least once a day and/or night. It doesn’t seem like the best place to have a web with us sliding the door open and closed and some of her anchors being attached to it. But I guess there’s no spot to weave a web that is completely invulnerable.

Lamp-lit spider on web.

Our dog’s much better after her trip to the vet’s. The x-rays didn’t show any arthritis but part of her spine had some degeneration, probably from aging in an area of past trauma which Delia thinks must have been from a time when she was a young dog and made a quick break out of the door of their house straight into the side of a moving car on a busy road, bounced off said car, then ran back inside never appearing any worse for the wear.

There have been times in the past nine months where Nico has seemed so old and uncomfortable and tired — and she IS old. Fourteen, I think. Everyone thinks she’s a puppy because she’s a runt of a husky and looks so young, up until recently when you see her walk, especially watching her from behind and her whole hind end just takes so much awkward effort to move. SOMETIMES. But if she’s excited? She’ll still bound and bounce and run around the house like crazy, even though, to me, her yips of excitement sound tinged with pain. I don’t think anything but the most debilitating pain can stop a husky from doing her husky things, so when we started noticing her having real problems has been at night when she can barely lie down and whimpers/cries like a squeaky wheel, circling around and around before painfully lowering herself down.

Anyway, the vet put her on prednisone, a steroid, which seems to be helping quite a bit. We took her on walks in the woods the past couple of days, which she loved even if she’s slowed down a lot since I met her and Delia seven years ago. Now her pace is really pleasant and companionable. She still runs ahead a little bit, but there are times when she actually walks right beside us, or takes breaks so she’s always close by.

Watching her yesterday on the trail looking so much better than she has in a couple of months I thought about how long it took for my dad to die and how unprepared I was for that. How there were so many times where I was impatient for it to happen already, for all of us to be put out of our misery of waiting, and then having days where he was present and I was so happy he was still around and it didn’t seem possible he was anywhere NEAR ready. At least, not nearly as ready as I recently had been. I feel that way a lot with Nico where I can’t help contemplating the convenience of her death one day when she seems uncomfortable, lethargic, and droopy-faced, then feeling overjoyed the next with how well she’s doing — how alert and happy she is, how it’s so not time yet — how YOUNG (for her age) she looks.

My ninth grade (and seventh grade) English teacher did something pretty fucking progressive and unheard-of for kids as young as we were in a public school: she taught us a section on Death and Dying. Practical planning stuff about funerals and wills, the Kubler Ross stages of grief, and of course literature like some story about a brave young man  with a brain tumor (title escapes me, but not the memory of how much I disliked that book) and one I’m forever grateful for being exposed to and having TAUGHT to me (not just read on my own), The Plague.

I remember all of us talking about what we wanted to happen to our bodies after we died and everyone laughing when I said I wanted to be dressed up like the Chiquita Banana Lady and thrown into the woods to rot and be scavenged by animals. Since then I’ve changed my mind, partly because I loved my dad’s funeral including seeing him all dressed up in his coffin that we picked out with special things tucked in to go with him, including stuffed animals that were ours, but that he kept after we outgrew them. I was shocked by how much I did not want his eyes to be plucked out for harvesting; I’d assumed he was ineligible for donating because of his glaucoma (which he was, but they weren’t aware of it so the question was posed to me anyway) and I was just totally unprepared by the topic even coming up even though of course we are all listed as organ donors, but MORE unprepared by how viscerally opposed I was to having his body — especially his eyes — taken out of him when I’d been looking into them MINUTES before that.

So. Aside from it being illegal to throw costumed dead women into the woods, I realize people have emotional, albeit irrational, attachments to the bodies of loved ones and I’ve even become attached the IDEA of my own dead body and perhaps want a more traditional type of ritual to accompany me to my final resting spot. Plus I’m extremely fond of coffins.

I asked Delia if she knows if people can come to our house to put Nico to sleep when the time comes so she can be at home and we can bury her. Delia said she’d prefer to take her to the vet’s. When I heard that I experienced another one of those irrational, emotional reactions (especially since Nico is really DELIA’S dog, not mine) of not being able to bear the thought of taking her to a place she’s afraid of and have to die there. I know it’s over fast, but having done that (thankfully only once and with a kitten we’d hardly had for any time at all) the drive there is just too fucking sad and crying your heart out in a clinic standing around in that sterile setting is just not the ideal to me. I am so glad my dad died in hospice where we got to hang out with his dead body for a few hours afterward (I probably wouldn’t have understood it before, but that is incredibly comforting and helpful, not to have to be seperated physically from each other right away), but obviously a seventy year old parent is pretty different from a fourteen year old pet.

We’re all smart enough to know that television and movies are inaccurate and unrealistic, but I personally never realized how much until my dad took years to die, and then again especially during the days and hours surrounding his actual death. I felt and still feel very unprepared for the process of death by aging and protracted illness. My mind is still boggled by the concept that all of us, if we are lucky, have to watch our parents die. I don’t feel like I was taught to expect that or how to process that even though I’ve probably been given more tools and experiences to deal with that than most post-baby-boom American kids have. I’d had friends who lost parents way too young and I knew it was devastating to them and in some cases they even talked about it a little, but not nearly enough to ever intimate exactly how huge that loss was. I and my dad were not too young, it wasn’t a tragedy, and it’s still hard and has taken SO LONG. I mean, it’s still not over for me. I’m still shocked by the revelation that death is never over or never not coming and that it’s VISIBLE and active for So. Many. Years. I’m trying to accept that with Nico . . . even to use her as practice and I am flummoxed at how ill-prepared I still am . . . how disbelieving, impatient, sad, and scared I am in spite of feeling that’s not really in my nature. I feel like I’m the kind of person who should be able to embrace aging-towards-death gracefully, with serenity instead of blubbering.

I don’t even know how my mom has handled the past thirteen years, seeing her own dad’s decline and death, living with and taking care of my dad/her ex-husband (they continued to have a fond and extremely helpful dysfunctional relationship even after his death), packing up the house she grew up in and moving her mom out of it and into first one home, then another, and now a third offering an even higher level of care. I really do not fucking know. I don’t think she really knows either, but I know it’s a lot harder for her than she’s gotten help for, and my distance from her doesn’t help. What I still idiotically fail to GRASP is how this is THIS LARGE a part of life. Because tv never taught me that and even though my family has always talked openly about these things and plans for when we die, I still can’t remember exactly what I’m supposed to do with my mom’s ashes and I still can’t believe that IF I AM *LUCKY*, I will live through many more loved ones’ deaths. I read so many young adult books about death — GOOD books about a girl whose dad was shot about a kid with Lou Gehrig’s disease about drug addicted kids . . . about pretty much every kind of unanticipated death you or someone you know could have but not so much about the deaths we all aspire to without any proper planning.

What is the life span of a spider? I have no clue. I am still trying to brace myself for the day this season when I look out the window and in the cracks around the sides and she’s not there and doesn’t come back.

I’m struggling under the weight of a lot of things right now. Nothing that should be debilitating, but the end result is that I’ve been acting almost completely disabled. Money problems, health problems, overwhelming-to-do-list problems, incompetency problems . . . you know, life.

The struggle on my mind right now is trying to figure out how much energy to expend on conservative friends and family who have issues with my work and/or with my partner being a transwoman. Not that they know that word. And I should be patient because how many people DO? It’s not THEIR fault, right? And with me being in the kind of relationship where I even USE the term “my partner”. My girlfriend. My not-a-man not-a-husband not-a-boyfriend.

My mom has been struggling with how to tell HER mom (my grandma) and her born-again-Christian-asshole brother (my uncle) so I haven’t even seen my grandma in way over a year.

God, it makes me tired even trying to blog about this bullshit.

Now one of my step-brothers, the one I WANT to be in touch with a little, is coming out with his family for a visit next month. My mom visited them in Pennsylvania last year before the election and came back so disturbed by his wacko right-wingerism that she doesn’t really even want to see them again (AND didn’t even want to get into the basics of telling him anything about my controversial-to-them “lifestyle”).

Delia’s family in the Midwest still doesn’t know about her transition. We had a plan for telling them that we cooked up with her therapist who said that ideally you shouldn’t break the news in a letter, but face to face. We tried to get them to come out here last year so Delia would meet them at the airport presenting as a male (a concept that now seems totally ludicrous, uncomfortable and weird to me), she’d sit down with them and tell them all about it, the next day she’d present as a woman, and we’d all go see the therapist so they could learn about transgender. A nice idea, but there’s no way to lure them out here when the REST of Delia’s family is in the Midwest and her dad can’t take time off work; it just makes more sense for us to visit them there.

So Delia’s parents offered to buy us tickets to come out for a visit, like, RIGHT NOW. It would work out perfectly for the whole coming-out-face-to-face (except we wouldn’t be able to take them to our counselor) BUT Delia already changed her name so in order for them to buy a ticket she could actually get on a plane with, she’d need them to know ahead of time her real femme name (or we’d have to buy the tickets ourselves which we can’t afford to do right now). So after some soul-searching and discussion she decided to write a letter which she’s still working on.

As the word “transition” implies, it’s a process. And part of that process is . . . all of this bullshit of informing, educating, explaining, confronting, and dealing with loved ones and not-so-loved ones.

It made me feel sad when my mom said she doesn’t know if she wants to see my brother / can’t handle his fucked-up views. And I know it makes HER sad, too, but I feel like it will only be a few hours and it would be wrong to shut him out completely. I wouldn’t say this about my other stepbrothers or about my ex-stepdad, but this brother? I would. So I wrote him and his wife an email about “my lifestyle” so they wouldn’t be hit with surprises and wouldn’t ask about my job in person if they aren’t comfortable hearing me talk about what it really is (and told them, in short form, that I make adult websites). And the wheels are turning and they’re paying lip service to not judging other people, but copping to being “REALLY conservative”. And expressing concern over their seven year old daughter. He doesn’t want her to have to “learn too much about life” at this tender age. Like, what aspect of life does he feel he needs to shelter her from or that I’m going to so-inappropriately expose her to?

As usual I can’t help comparing my apparently depraved lifestyle with other people in our family and in Delia’s family. In both of our families there are those who have HUGE problems with my job, yet think nothing of letting the children be around people in the family who’ve actually sexually molested other family members. Nobody objects to the lifestyle of the family members who worked for the chemical company that made Napalm and Agent Orange and other killers and cancer-causers. When I had a husband who worked for Boeing, it never bothered anybody in the slightest (including me) that a family member worked for a company that makes machines of war. Their job is something to be proud of, but MY job is a big, scary, society-eating disease. Excuse me, but as much as you try to fallaciously connect porn depicting consensual sex and non, I DIDN’T DO THIS TO KIDS. Not even close. My brother doesn’t have a problem with his kids being around one of his other brothers who has stolen cars and served in Iraq and laughs with glee at videos of US soldiers beating and kicking the shit out of Iraqis. But oh, GOD!! WHAT will we tell the children about Trixie and her tranny girlfriend or that she has a job making grown-ups feel pleasure?

I know it’s hard, but it’s not THAT hard. Especially given the truly fucked up things that people are perfectly willing to ignore, live with and even brag about. He’s a soldier! He’s a chemical engineer! He works for the military industrial complex!! So easy to boast about. And even those other people who have actually HURT people — kids — get the benefit of the doubt: He deserves a second chance. But how many people boast about “my daughter, the pornographer!”? Actually, my mom does and my dad did. In small amounts, but still. They are extra ballsy and good. And I guess if all these little things are hard, I still have that to be extra specially grateful for and don’t know what I’d do without it.

*****

It would be easier in the short run to just say we’re going to be busy. Too busy to see my step-brother and his family. Too busy to fly out to the Midwest. Too busy to communicate on any deeper level with old friends than filling out those email quizzes about what our favorite colors and drinks are and coming up with a different reason than the real one for the last thing that made us cry.

I could do that (and have and still will to some extent), but sometimes you have to TRY. Because they’re family or because you really need a better reason than fear and exhaustion to sever ties with them. No, you have to try your hardest to be patient with their ignorance and fears and confusion (thankfully people have been patient with MINE). You have an obligation to make yourself fucking vulnerable to being told that what you do — whether it’s selling pictures of your beaver on the internet or it’s defying the status quo of letting your genitals define your gender or it’s being in a non-straight relationship — that you’re destroying the moral fibre of the country, tearing families apart, degrading humanity, and damaging our sensitive youngsters and oldsters who shouldn’t be EXPOSED to our depravity and perversion in their fragile mental and physical states!

You have to be gentle with them while they insult you and beg for your protection. Oh but mom is just too old to understand . . . oh god, I just don’t want to upset Grandma Seriously? These women have televisions and they’ve all HAD SEX. When I’m in my eighties I hope people don’t think I’m too stupid to understand new shit or that I can’t handle knowing that some women charge men money to get their dicks hard. I think they can handle it, and if they can’t? OH WELL. I wish someone would protect OUR feelings for a change. Like maybe not insulting the girl on the television for having “too masculine of a jaw” right when you’re sitting next to my trans girlfriend
who might feel self-conscious enough as it is about her OWN masculine jaw. Like maybe not saying that I’m going to warp your seven year old when YOU are the one warping her with your stupid, bigoted views.

I know I’m being a baby to complain about it because so many people have had it so much worse, but I’m *sick* of coming out to people and trying to hold their hands through the process when I just want to scream at them. It feels like such a gigantic waste of time and energy for me, personally, when I don’t even LIKE socializing with people. But I know it’s not healthy to take the easy way out and be isolated. I know that talking to people makes a difference, not just to us, but in teaching tolerance and understanding on a broader level.

*****

Basically I just feel bogged down. Getting together with family is expensive enough, emotionally & financially, and communicating with old friends that you aren’t sure you have anything in common with anymore takes enough of a toll, that having to pay all these extra costs is really draining. It’s like walking through a field of land mines every time you connect with someone who doesn’t know who you are and what you’re doing lately. Are they going to freak out or pat me on the back and laugh? Should I brace myself for them to say something inadvertently hurtful or let myself trust them to be wiser than that?

Once I started writing this blog entry I realized that the most important thing we can do when it comes to friends and family right now is to cultivate our relationships with people who FUCKING GET IT. Our porn friends, our trans friends, our not-so-straight friends. I’m not very socially energetic but there’s no way I can cope with some people’s bullshit without having the comfort of other people’s understanding and similarities. And I can’t help sort of resenting the amount of energy I’m putting into the one camp when I could be pouring it into the other. OR WORK.

Jesus, I can’t afford this bullshit. Including my own — all I want to do is sleep and read and eat and listen to music. I feel sort of guilty and wretched and oh-so fucking tired.

A couple of new blog links for you:

Cum 2 Oasis Blog

I just added Oasis’ blog to my links and wanted to point her out to you. If you’re interested in knowing all of the groundbreakers in internet porn — people who had amateur sex sites before there were role models for such things — read her blog because Oasis is one of a small handful of them.

She’s one of those legendary people in *my* circle of do-it-yourself porn people, and has a hands-on, hardcore approach of swinging, fucking fans, flashing, gang bangs, interracial and party girl antics.

Another new addition to my blogroll:

Born Whore

I don’t know much about her (yet) except that she’s doing sex work in Australia. I was introduced to her recently through tweets linking to this post she made — It’s You I’m Afraid Of — that made me cry because so many parts of it rang so true for me, especially since I’ve been trying for the past few months to reconnect with family and friends and acquaintances from high school and college, some of them cops, many of them religious, loads of them Republicans, and a few others “liberal” (yes, in quotation marks).

“Folks want to be supportive but sometimes they don’t get it and that’s OK. I don’t expect people to know everything—I’m still learning too! But you should know that when you don’t get it, it can really sting or, I’ll be honest, irritate the shit out of me.

So it’s you that I sometimes protect myself from. It’s you who I will avoid or go silent with because I just don’t want to deal with how disappointed I feel. It’s you that I write for and to. It’s you that I want on my side. You are the ones who’s judgments, stereotypes, awkward silences and ill-informed questions I watch out for. It’s you I’m afraid of.”

The other day I treated myself to a trip to the spa as a reward for being 33% of the way to my June 1st weight loss goal. I decided to get a body wrap for health reasons (it helps you detox) and out of curiosity since I’d never done it.

I knew going into it that I *might* really hate being wrapped up like a mummy and mostly-immobilized for forty minutes, but I also knew I *might* really enjoy it and, at the very least, could endure it without feeling as though I’d been placed in a straitjacket.

By the time my appointment rolled around at 4 pm I’d been soaking, sweating, reading, and steaming at the spa since 10 am (I should’ve made my body wrap & massage appointment beforehand but was afraid to in case I couldn’t figure out how to pay for it or wanted to do something else instead so 4 pm was the earliest they could get me in) and was GIDDY with anticipation.

The girl explained what was in the mud (mugwort, seaweed and a bunch of other stuff I can’t recall), instructed me to disrobe and sit on the massage table (on top of a sheet of plastic on top of a metallic emergency blanket on top of MORE blankets) with my back to her. She warned me to expect the mud to be fairly “warm” because it cools off so quickly, then she started slathering hot goop on my shoulders, back, and arms. She had me lie down after that so she could apply it to the rest of my body. Right before she smeared it on my boobs, she prepared me to anticipate the touch in a nursey-kindergarten voice: I’ll just apply some to your breasts now . . . (circle, circle).

After she got it all over me except RIGHT between my legs, the soles of my feet and my face, she closed the plastic around me, then the reflective blanket, then the other blankets and towels until I was thoroughly cocooned with only my head sticking out. She asked if I wanted a pillow or for her to bring water or tea when she came back to check on me in ten minutes. Then she turned out the lights (as I requested) and left me alone in the dark, unable to move. AND TRAPPED WITH A TERRIBLE CD OF ROMANTIC/NEW-AGEY GUITAR MUSIC CRAP.

The first ten minutes were pleasant (except for the hideous music). I didn’t even attempt to move, afraid I would make myself itchy and be unable to scratch myself. I could see how easily I could become panicked if the slightest carnival-ride twist had been added to it (it WAS April Fool’s Day, after all). Like if she’d laughed maniacally before she left and I could hear the door being locked from the outside. Or if weird scrubby things began to descend from the ceiling towards me. Or if the walls just started shrinking inwards. I kept my eyes closed JUST IN CASE so I wouldn’t have to see anything like that happening. Or if a man with a bunch of surgical tools were to simply walk in, bend over my face and start whispering at me you can’t move you can’t move you can’t get away from me or my tools! and just put his hands heavily on my chest.

So yeah . . . this might help explain to you PART of why I’m not interested in being bound. Because it would be way too fucking easy for someone to scare me psycho. I can happily lie motionless for hours, but FORCE me to — restrict my mobility — and I might freak the fuck out. Part of me can appreciate the appeal, imagine experimenting with it under very specific conditions, and be tempted by the psychological challenge of it and another part of me just thinks the (psychological) risk is not at all worth the scariness. I feel the same way about LSD. It sounds really interesting but I think I might be a little too vulnerable to bad side effects. The body wrap at the women-only spa is about as far as I can go.

One time I did let someone bind my hands behind my back with his leather belt (a natural outgrowth to him of my spanking and man’s-leather-belt fetish, but to me it was just not the direction I was interested in going once I was face down on his bed — it was crazily exciting, but the fear of having my arms locked behind me that way and of him possibly being able to put his weight on me and smother me was just too fucking freaky for me and I begged for mercy so it didn’t last long. I was far more interested in being whipped with the belt (but not to the point of bruising or bleeding), but he wasn’t so much into that so that little experiment didn’t last very long. I know that some of you are thinking I just didn’t do it with the RIGHT person, someone I TRUST. But the point is a) my imagination doesn’t trust ANYBODY, and b) testing my boundaries on this is NOT as important to me as preserving them. For a whole lot of reasons. Thinking about it is provocative, but I am (and always have been) more interested in having force applied to me in a psychological way (and even more so applying it to others) in ridiculous role plays. I like being bound by RULES and structure. I like things that happen inside my HEAD way more than things that happen to my body. Or maybe I’m just lazy. I don’t know. Woops. Now that I’ve written this I can recall a few different instances where I’ve been bound in different ways and liked it. Hmmmm . . . still, not exactly my “thing”.

Back to the spa.

The first time the girl came in to check on me she brought me tea with a straw that she lowered to my mouth. I wasn’t prepared for it and giggled because THAT is totally hot to me, being treated like an invalid. I wasn’t prepared and dribbled tea down the side of my face, then I got her to change the CD to a variety of new agey music I enjoy — Shamanic Dreams or something like that. She asked if the level of heat was okay (yes – warm and cozy) and again if I wanted a pillow (this time? yes).

When she left I decided to try to sleep since I’d only gotten three hours the night before. And sleep I did, for a few minutes. Let me tell you, it was NOT pleasant waking up mummified, sweating like a pig in a strange dark room with weird pagan drum music going on. I decided not to go to sleep again and couldn’t wait for her to come back. When she did I asked for the heat to be turned down. She did, and blotted the sweat from my forehead and cheeks with a cool cloth (yummmmm . . . more pampered-invalid feelings). I wanted to ask her if anybody had ever lost control of their bowels while getting a wrap but decided against it, fearing she’d think I was planning something disgusting. Still, the thought was entertaining. I know SOMEONE, somewhere has done that on accident or on purpose, and I’d really love to hear about it.

Note: I’m far more likely to experiment with and enjoy shitting in a warm, plastic-wrapped bed than with being tied up. Just an FYI. I don’t PLAN on doing either, but a warm bed of crap seriously sounds more fun to me than letting someone tie me up. Maybe I’m just a loner with a short attention span, though, and wallowing in my own poop is an experience I could live fully in five to ten minutes by myself whereas the whole bondage scene requires time and at least one other person. I guess there are some things I could do to myself, but again, I’m too lazy and disinterested for that. Plus, scat is just a whole lot edgier than bondage and I like the idea of being able to make people think by gleefully confessing I’ve shat myself for the pure, HAMRLESS fun of it. It’s stupid, but poop is so much more taboo (and illegal/obscene) than bondage these days. Again, I HAVE NO PLANS TO DO THAT. I’m just comparing/contrasting. For fun.

Anyway, I survived the last twenty minutes without losing my mind, going back and forth between feeling blissed-out and on-the-verge of screaming, “GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!!!” I kept reminding myself of what good “exercise” it was for me and how much healthier I’d be afterwards. I worried that I’d be so sick of lying there that I wouldn’t enjoy my massage afterwards (but it actually worked the other way, mad
e the massage seem longer and way better). Basically I endured the procedure a little bit more than I enjoyed it. If I get a body wrap again I will definitely bring my own cd with guided meditations or something so my mind won’t wander to torture scenes.

Finally she came in to unwrap me and I went down the hall naked to the shower with the glass-door making my clean-up efforts visible to anyone who walked by. I decided to pee in the shower instead of wasting my massage time putting on a robe and traipsing down to the restroom, but I worried about it, wondering how many other people do/don’t pee in the post-wrap shower, worrying that there’d be some way they’d know I did and would talk about that disgusting customer with the long toenails who peed in the shower. Silly fears, but still. I have them. Which goes to show you just how very VERY far away I am from ever pooping in a plastic-wrap cocoon.

*****

After the anxiety of the day BEFORE the spa and the super-extended stay I had there, I was in recovery mode all day yesterday, totally drained and exhausted and verging on a big fat headache. If you’ve never gotten body work, steamed, soaked, detoxed, etc. then you probably thing I sound like a fucking crybaby asshole, complaining about how TIRED I am after spending a day doing something that sounds like pure luxury to most Americans but that shit is MEDICINE. My throat and eyes burn after all the gunk inside me is dislodged and stirred up and swirled around and sucked out. It feels like preparation to go into hibernation, like the final step in this cleansing/healing process is to go into an induced coma for two days.

The spa experience is totally my cup of tea, though. The front desk lady seemed to think I was crazy for wanting to stay there for more than eight hours, but since I go so rarely it hardly seems excessive. It takes me awhile to really turn my brain off and melt into it, so that cuts down on the time I’m really benefiting from it, but it’s exactly my idea of the perfect mini-vacation. Alone, not talking to anybody, with scads of naked ladies walking around, walking from one hot room to another, from one pool to another, being ministered to by talented, paid hands, smelling good things, and trying to become invisible to myself.

If my “porn” were standing before the judges on American Idol, Simon would totally call it self-indulgent nonsense. Like shooting almost entirely non-nude sets of pictures with a ren-fairish flavor just because I REALLY LIKE WEARING LONG VELVET DRESSES AND THIS IS MY FAVORITE NECKLACE AND I LIKE PRANCING AROUND IN THE FOREST!! From my latest members-only update:

Most people don’t “get” non-nude or softcore porn, and I do think there’s a bigger market for straightforward explicit hardcore sex (and I myself prefer to masturbate to fairly explicit, genital-oriented content, though not the generic kind), but make no mistake . . . there’s definitely a market for the soft stuff. I’m not sure, but I’m *guessing* that its appeal diminishes the older the model gets, but I could be wrong. I *hope* I’m wrong. Because I will proceed as though I *am* wrong about that. Because I’m totally a self-indulgent softcore kind of lady. Well, not totally. Which is what makes my site difficult to categorize since I love hardcore stuff, too.

Running a personality site means I’m selling myself — intimate access to WHO I am — as much as jack-off material (which is everywhere nowadays for free), but maintaining a balance can be a challenge particularly since the balance other people want to see really varies. There are a lot of people who think the porno stuff is boring and others who think the “self-indulgent” softcore/personally revealing stuff is boring. I don’t get that information from my own members (who I guess usually know it’s futile/counter-productive to complain about what I do/don’t do), but from surfing around and reading the variety of opinions/assumptions on this matter. I gave up on trying to please “everybody” a long time ago, but still feel self-conscious sometimes KNOWING that people will look at some of what I put out there, particularly something they paid for, and will be dissatisfied. Even when you know you can’t please everybody, you still feel crappy sometimes that you can’t. That you know someone will be distinctly UNhappy because you’re older, because you’re too nasty, because you’re not nasty enough, because you’re shaved, because you’re hairy, because you’re too quiet or not quiet enough. It’s a constant challenge to silence that chatter in your head of what other people might be thinking and listen only to what you yourself want and think. But when I do, I hear that I want more cheap, stretchy, crushed-velvet dresses from the thrift store. I want more of the scenery I love that is home to me. I want more cleavage and swooning and vulgar meaty thighs.

I like being suggestive without fully delivering. I wonder how much of that’s a (mostly) chick thing — enjoying having a scene set and characters drawn and then using your own imagination to fill in the blanks to your own liking whereas (most) men want all of the blanks filled in for them in explicit, glossy detail. I have actually been thinking about duplicating and reformatting the way I present some of my softcore picture sets in order to fill in some of those blanks, or ramp up to the nudity in a way that makes it feel more like a money shot once you get to it, but I’m not sure I’ll ever have time for that project. I think it would be very effective, though.

Lately I feel a little tempted to stop updating my site as frequently and focus more on marketing Delia’s site. Financially, that would make a lot of sense, but I don’t want to do that. The fact that Delia’s site significantly outsells mine does free me up to think of her site as the bread and butter that allows me to totally fuck around on mine and do whatever I want without worrying that we’ll lose our main source of income when I alienate all of my members. Not that this would happen, but the appeal of Delia’s site compared to mine does give me a sense of freedom that it’s not all about me. It doesn’t all rely upon me. That’s a huge relief that allows me to end these annoying trains of insecure thought on a positive note and go back to indulging in my own flights of fancy. In the forest! Twirling around in a long dress! Wearing a gypsy necklace with amethysts! And what more do people want than my boobies, anyway?

Before I post a bunch of frivolous softcore-in-the-Seattle-snow pics today, I want to at least mention that today’s an important one: The International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.

When the economy is in the shitter (the direction it’s headed right now) people are MORE judgmental and resentful about how much other people are paid and for what kind of work; that’s a recipe for even more violence against sex workers. Lots of perpetrators of violence against sex workers explain that their crimes are justified because they shouldn’t have to pay for sex — the woman (or sometimes man) and the work s/he’s charging him for are not worthy of payment and/or should be punished for thinking she is. Check out this guy who said a prostitute put her head in his plastic bag by mistake when he wanted his $100 back. For trying to kill her he’ll only get a few months in the slammer.

It’s not going too far to say that beating, raping, exploiting, infecting, killing, stealing from sex workers and/or refusing to abide by their boundaries is covertly state-sanctioned — the government says sex workers don’t have the right to charge money for their services in most places. Not only do they not have the right to charge money, they are CRIMINALS if they do so. In some places in the United States you can be arrested simply for carrying too many condoms — it’s intent to sell access to your body (which you have no right to do, and if you intend to flout the law in this way you deserve to expose yourself to disease and pregnancy)! You can be charged with a crime in many places just for advising other sex workers ABOUT sex work. The government might not have a bounty on sex workers and we all might SAY that killing them is going too far, but it’s a pretty fucking mixed message.

While most of my own work as a webwhore is legal (I say “most” because some of it could easily fall under the nebulous definition of “obscenity” – that and a couple of other things I can think of could land me in prison if the Department of Justice or other unsavory elements chose to target me) and I feel fairly safe doing this work (not just safe for a whore, but even safer relative to women with straight jobs), there are still more than enough people who resent me and women like me for making our livings this way. People who spew hatred and threaten violence that all falls under the category of, “BITCH! YOU DO NOT DESERVE MONEY FOR WHAT YOU DO & YOU DESERVE TO BE PUNISHED FOR EVEN SUGGESTING ANYONE PAY YOU FOR THIS!! I will *take* by force what you deny me for free.” I’m willing to bet these messages will only increase and intensify in the months and years to come as people get poorer, hungrier, and angrier.

There’s a march in DC going on right now. FurryGirl is there and taking pictures like this one:

The demand on the banner to “STOP SHAMING US TO DEATH” is powerful, especially in conjunction with the message that “ONLY RIGHTS CAN STOP THE WRONGS”. Violence against sex workers is made too easy because of wrongheaded laws that make some people’s versions of “immorality” criminal. It’s broader than the moral or religious issues, though: it’s about class and gender — specifically denying women (1) ownership of their bodies and (2) the right to charge people to access it (3) within boundaries each woman defines for herself.

Connect the dots in the bigger picture to shaky/compromised abortion rights, our continued unwillingness to recognize parenthood as real work worthy of payment, and our refusal to protect natural resources like WATER (where ownership by one entity should be really fucking hard to claim) from unsustainable corporate exploitation compared to our insistence upon denying individual women opportunities to profit from their own individual bodies (where self-ownership should be pretty fucking OBVIOUS/undeniable, especially when you consider how much money male pro-athletes make abusing their bodies for our entertainment and no laws deny them the RIGHT to exploit their bodies in those damaging ways***) — it seems pretty obvious that denying rights to sex workers is part of a bigger agenda to deny women opportunities to profit from work that is mostly performed by women because we are at a natural biological ADVANTAGE to perform it. Basically? It’s about making sure women are only punished for their gender rather than economically rewarded for it.

It will be a cold day in hell when someone goes violently vigilante on the asses of Wall Street executives and all the corporate fat cats and bankers getting bailed out for fucking us over financially; there are always loopholes to guarantee their “right” to be multi-fucking millionaires at our expense, but there are sure to be plenty of whores killed by men who get the message loud and clear from our government(s) (and all of us who tell them we LIKE our laws just like this) that there IS no loophole for a woman who thinks she’s entitled to earning a few bucks for a blowjob. God forbid we put a cap on the exorbitant amount of ill-gotten money men “make”; instead let’s keep making sure the whores don’t get out of pocket thinking their dirty pussies are worth a thin fucking dime.

Discriminatory laws against sex work and women’s work in general don’t just encourage and facilitate physical violence, some people would say those laws and their applications are themselves acts of violence — when you make it next-to-impossible for someone to work, when you take away her income, when you stigmatize someone by slapping a criminal record or a special stripper/whore license on her that will limit her job opportunities in the future, when you eat up her time in court and behind bars, when you make her pay fines, when you make her vulnerable to blackmail by thieves and rapists both in and out of uniform, that can at LEAST be called a hostile and dangerous violence-breeding atmosphere. Whether or not you believe Deborah Jeane Palfrey’s death was a suicide, you have to recognize that she (and possibly other women connected to her case) would not be dead now if women had the right to do sex work. Who needs the Green River Killer to cleanse the country of garbage as long as we have the government to ruin and destroy the lives of sex workers? And when I say “government”, I don’t mean that the rest of us have clean hands. Voters are the ones who had an opportunity in San Francisco last month to decriminalize prostitution and guess what? THEY DIDN’T. We’re not talking about old laws no one enforces anymore, we’re talking about active BULLSHIT that just keeps on trucking.

Yes, it’s impossible for me to calmly deliver a moderate, easy-to-understand argument about sex worker rights and reducing violence perpetrated against sex workers. I’m sorry for that. I feel guilty for not doing more for sex workers as a group — for not being more of an activist, for not staying better informed, for not being a more coherent educator. As with any minority suffering discrimination and persecution, it’s a challenge to have time to earn a living in that discriminatory atmosphere AND be an agent of change. That’s why discrimination and marginalization WORK SO WELL; when people are underprivileged and denied rights granted to others, they 1) lack the resources to effectively fight for change, and 2) can’t be completely honest or open about their own stories without fear of reprisals and punishment. It’s true that I feel relatively safe as a webwhore, but I said RELATIVELY safe, not just-plain-SAFE. I realize I am VERY lucky, but still vulnerable.

I hate that my blog entries on this subject wind up preaching to the choir and are probably ignored or misunderstood by everyone else, but seriously — this whore needs to spend the rest of the day trying to make money rather than blowing off steam just to hear her head rattle. With the poor economy and my own situation of having gone deeply into credit card debt to finance our business, I do have a heightened awareness of how my own safety and standing in society is threatened even more by the fact that I’m a sex worker and therefore considered disposable and fair game for scapegoating, at the very least. I know from my OWN feelings of jealousy towards people who are economically privileged and resentment towards those protected enough by their gender and class to get away with huge scams that are considered legit ways to fuck people for money that we all can become very, ummmm, mean-spirited when the chips are down.

I wish I could wrap this up with a big Christmas bow that would change the world for sex workers or at least make people WANT to see that happen, but I’m at a loss for how to do that so I will simply say THANK YOU to the people who are out their lobbying for change on behalf of me and other sex workers today.

***there are definitely class (and race) issues at work that allow mostly poor men of color to beat each other senseless in boxing rings and suffer tons of injuries in other pro sports with regulations that do very little to protect them; by bringing this up I’m not saying boxing or other sports should be illegal or even necessarily more heavily regulated — I only mention it as an interesting comparison to sex work. It illustrates the irrationally contradictory double standards when it comes to women’s bodies versus men’s bodies and what kind of work they can put them to for how much money.

You don’t need me to tell you that times are financially tough right now for a lot of people. You might be curious, though, whether or not recessions and looming depressions have an effect on our porn site sales. The answer? Yes, sales have been a little harder for us to make but overall I feel much more secure than I would in almost any other industry. The main sign we’ve seen that people’s wallets are thin is that we get more denied credit cards.

My main financial concerns right now are not about falling sales, they’re just about having finally reached our limit, unfortunately right at the time when banks and everyone else have reached theirs. I try not to feel a sense of shame or failure about my debt load regardless of how our country tells us that we little people are to blame for overextending ourselves or for being given loans and lines of credit we somehow didn’t deserve. Our only mistake was being born poor while extremely unscrupulous banking bigwigs are bailed out for fucking people anally with insanely high interest rates. Example: it cracks me up that Citibank not only gets away with raising my interest rate and leveling late charges against me for sending a payment in on time that I accidentally wrote for fifty-seven cents less than the minimum payment that month (YES I have written them letters to no avail), but taxpayers get to foot the bill to save their fucking asses.

I’m getting off track.

Point is, after filing our taxes in October (yes, totally late) and maxing ourselves out like crazy we simply need to make more sales. Really, there is no excuse for us not to be making much more money at this point except that we tend to focus more on keeping our members happy than on actually, you know, FINDING MORE MEMBERS. It would be nice if we could do it all, but at this point we need to cut back on some things and rearrange others, at least until we meet some financial goals. So here are a couple of changes we/I are making:

*REALISTIC NUMBER OF WEBCAM SHOWS EVERY OTHER WEEK.
Delia and I have been doing an insane number of shows for too many years: around twenty a month between the two of us. Most girls or couples with sites like ours who actually do live webcam shows do one or two a week, so maybe three to eight shows a month. Frankly it was sucking way too much sexual energy out of our relationship, leaving us very little free time to be spontaneous or go on shooting sprees or, you know, take a day or two off here and there.

We’re now scheduling a couple days of webcam shows a couple times a month/every other week. It still averages out to at least two shows a week this way, but that’s still less than what we have been doing and will give us more breathing room in-between to shoot videos and have recreational sex with each other.

Doing fewer camshows will also open up time to promote our sites in other ways; the truth is that the cam networks stopped being good places to get new members a long time ago. Even the girls who put on great shows and bend over backwards to be great orgasmic little entertainers do not make great sales because of those webcam shows. I will save explaining why for a different blog entry, but suffice to say right now there are more efficient ways of bringing in new sales; at a time like now we simply need to be more efficient.

*FEWER HOURS IN CHAT
I really really love getting to know our members and think an active chatroom with a readily-available hostess is a really awesome feature to have on a porn/spycam site. I’ve had many awesome conversations in chat and gotten to know people I consider friends. Unfortunately, I probably spent way too much time in spycam chat over the years when I should have been focusing more on marketing my site. Now it’s at the point where I really don’t have a choice and need to spend those hours promoting our sites (especially Delia’s because it outsells mine three to one).

I hate to say it, but I just don’t have enough members to justify scheduling so many hours in chat. I’ve tried to find ways to make it work, and I feel like the same small handful of people are coming in just so I don’t feel bad sitting in there alone. Combined with being burned out from all the camshows and being under pressure in other ways, I’m also just not as energetic an entertainer as I once was, anyway, so it’s probably not a very enticing feature anymore. I am, however, continuing to pay for our members-only chatroom (the plugin is only $12.50 a month, but still) and am popping in there every so often and scheduling chats here and there. I’ve also added a separate twitter feed on the spycam, chat and shows pages to notify people of upcoming chats and shows and spycam stuff.

I’ve made a goal for myself that once Delia has 750 members and I have 500 members, I will add 15+ hours of chat per month back into the schedule as long as we can maintain those numbers and people seem to enjoy the chats. I know that 1250 members sounds like a lot, but in the grand scheme of things it’s inexcusable that we don’t have that many and more members right now. When I see the way other porn sites have tons of members and offer so much less than we do, it really makes me mad at myself because there’s no reason we cannot be comfortable, debt-free and have the resources we need to make our sites better.

I just can’t justify doing as much as we’ve been doing and staying so deeply in debt. I’m getting too old for it and it’s taking too much of a toll on me. I need to buckle down and sell the fuck out of our sites, especially Delia’s because she has much less competition.

*LOOSEY-GOOSEY UPDATES
For about five years I was very rigid about my update schedule for members, posting something new every week, and for many years on the exact same DAY each week. I still feel like that’s the ideal way to do things (scheduled updates one or more times a week, depending on whether or not the site has anything else going for it).

Once we made our sites all-access (join one you get them all) I tried to relax a little on that and am finally feeling less anal about it. Now I am focused on our network of sites added ten or more new things each month, which isn’t two hard considering that we have DeliaCD, TastyTrixie, AmberLily, SpyOnUs and TrixiesHouseboy (which is paralyzed right now, but I digress). Still, I have been asking too much of myself and not really giving myself the opportunities to excel at what I do best and WANT to do most at any given time. When I see other sites that I think are great (and so do their members) and they don’t get all crazy freaking out on themselves for not updating like clockwork, I have to think I’m just sabotaging myself with self-criticism and essentially also disrespecting the work my colleagues do; if it’s good enough for them, why isn’t it good enough for me?

This was especially apparent to me when AmberLily joined our network; it was a sudden thing, so we didn’t plan on it by having a bunch of our own content queued up ready to go while we did the things we needed to do to help get her site up on our server and attached to us. It wasn’t that anything I did was particularly HARD, but it did take a lot of hours making phone calls, designing a tour, negotiating stuff, etc. Lots of little things that made me happy to do, but meant I didn’t have time to do other things. I *should* have said, “hey members! This month I won’t be posting new updates but AmberLily’s joining us and you will have her entire site to explore to make up for it!” But I didn’t do that.

From now on, I NEED to do that; realize I can’t do it all, and be proud of what I *do* do, and satisfied that it is enough instead of thinking all will be lost unless I run myself into the ground. The opposite is proving to be true
(duh): all will be lost if I continue to run myself ragged. I’m totally out of gas, which is sad especially when there are a number of women who would like to join our network of sites and I simply don’t have time and energy to invest in working with them right now.

There are tons of things I’ve neglected to do that I need to get taken care of, like redesigning the free areas and blogs for pretty much all of our paysites. How many years have I had the same confusing design on this blog and my site that is now totally outdated with pages of broken things, old pictures, etc.? It’s just unacceptable. And no, I am not listening to anybody who gives me shit about all my other little “projects” and how if I didn’t waste time with them I could finish all these neglected necessaries. Bullshit. If I didn’t allow myself to go off on tangents, then half of the reward of working for myself would be totally fucking DELETED. Whatever makes me want to do those things is the same thing that makes me good at the things people PAY for.

Oh, and speaking of what people pay for, I still really miss doing phone sex, private shows and the potential to do other one-on-one stuff; another set of things I’d like to mix back into my life soon or when we meet some of those money goals.

Basically I am *considering* posting fewer updates to the TastyTrixie members area for a few months or until I feel/look healthier. Lately I’ve been doubling up on them/posting “late”, mostly because I haven’t been happy with a lot of my content and sit on updates until I have something “better” to go with them. In fact, that’s what I’ve been doing with a set of pictures that I edited this week and really kind of hate.

Mostly I guess I need to stop making promises and just focus on making content. And even more than that, SALES. Note: it’s not that our content isn’t good enough to make sales or that we don’t have enough of it or that our members-only areas are lacking; that isn’t the problem at all. It’s simply that the webmasters promoting most porn sites don’t know how to promote us, or have never heard of us because we have no advertising budget, or it’s just not worth it to them to promote us because we can’t pay them as much as these big sites do (yet another subject for another blog entry) or we don’t give them enough free content in the format they like with a lot of bells and whistles and things to make it super-easy (I totally understand why this puts us at a disadvantage).

I know this is a really long post and maybe a total bore to most people, but I feel like I needed to communicate this stuff in writing and by posting it, make a commitment to it myself. Long story short, we need to focus on meeting some attainable, yet very immediately necessary sales goals. I have to close two of my credit card accounts before they raise the interest rates to some even-more god-awful amount; this shit is getting down to the wire and we simply have to stop living on the edge.

*****

One of my favorite books about “unschooling” tells readers that when you allow a young person to escape the lock-step of traditional schools, the person usually needs three months or more to get it out of their system and have their natural curiosity well up enough to be motivated to take advantage of other learning opportunities. Note: there are many things I love about traditional schools AND alternative approaches to education; I’m not knocking schools, just using this as an example. As I’ve alluded to in recent posts, making great life-changing decisions doesn’t always yield immediate relief and results and instant accomplishments; I’ve been pretty exhausted and overwhelmed on a bunch of different levels so I really don’t expect everything to magically be PERFECT and I hope my members are patient and understand that too, though I totally understand if people feel like canceling and perhaps coming back later when I have more to offer.

I’m really looking forward to getting back to making our spycams more entertaining, focusing on Delia’s and my relationship to each other, and feeling better about my body. Today’s the seventh day in a row I’ve exercised and I know by the time the new year rolls around I’m going to feel a million percent better (if the holidays don’t kill me .

After having family stay with us for a few days, I usually feel like I need a day off to myself to recover from the energy kicked up from so many people around me. During this visit, however, I kept retreating to WebWhore Headquarters (that’s what I call my home office) for a couple hours here and there, allowing myself to WORK to relax.

Instead of picking work that I really *need* to do that’s high priority for making money, I allowed myself to work on low-priority stuff that’s fun and not complex or stressful (except for feeling guilty for not doing more important things) and requires no interaction with other people. Stuff that’s compact, like blogging and posting one-pagers on domains I’ve had for a long time that have been sitting, completely BLANK. My thought is that anything I accomplish is a bonus since I should be taking time off from work while family is here for our late-Thanksgiving so I should do something totally relaxing instead of tangling with bigger projects.

Here are some of the one-pagers I’ve made over the past week or two:

Worse Than Porn
TrixieDoll
Borg Porn
DeliaTS
Give Me Sugar

It’s soothing to play with fonts and colors and inspiring to remind myself of concepts and ideas that interest me. Only a couple of those were frivolous, actually, with no immediate application, but I still feel conflicted all the time and defensive about the choices I make with my time. Like if I enjoy it and other people might not understand where it fits in the puzzle, then I should feel badly about it. There are a lot of things I’m choosing to NOT do, and I constantly imagine a crowd of people criticizing my choices, saying “what, she’s not doing X so she can do Y and Z?? THAT is stupid! She hasn’t earned the right to waste time doing that — I want X! I want X! Y and Z are useless! She would be so much better off doing X; a bigger commitment to doing X would solve all of her problems, can’t she see that?”

One of my goals is to stop worrying so much about the critics, both external critics and my own internal asshole voices who can ALWAYS find some way to make me feel like I’m not doing good enough. I need to focus on what I’m doing right (and right NOW), not what I’m doing wrong (or not doing at the moment). Unfortunately I’m often painfully aware that every choice I make to do one thing means not doing ten billion others. It’s depressing and I have to knock that shit off. Being on Ritalin does help a lot because I can sit down and focus on something without intrusive thoughts and ideas continually popping into my head of all the other things I can/should be doing which then make me totally anxious, overwhelmed, afraid to proceed with the task at hand, and hopeless because of my limitations and lack of giant progress.

I know a lot of people struggle with similar feelings, so I share this for a couple reasons: because I know other people can relate and it always feels good to know you’re not the only one with these kinds of challenges, and because it helps ME to type out my fears and remind myself I don’t want to carry them around. I want to be happy with what I *can* do and what I *want* to do right now at this moment. I want to look at what I’ve done and feel a sense of accomplishment and pride, not guilt and maudlin hyper-criticism.

*****

Anyway, the family is gone now, our spycams are back up, and Delia’s warming up some of her delicious turkey & stuffing leftovers. Life is good.