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I dreamt of a crowded seniors-only trailer park vacation spot where we went to get away from it all but then we were in my grandma and grandpa’s trailer or something (note: in real life my grandpa is dead and they never lived in a trailer park). I had to pee but every bathroom I went to was full of specialty handicapped nursing home toilets with heightened elevator-seats made of yellowed plastic, and equipment like stainless steel rails, hoses, sprayers, etc. I didn’t want to sit on any of them and a frustrated old black man (I think he was sort of like my dad, who was a deeply tanned Irish in real life but not black) was chasing me (slowly, with a hobble) out of his bathroom(s) that were for him to use, not me.

I came into a bedroom with a hospital bed. My grandma was in it, sort of gyno-exam style, with two female assistants handing her implements on a tray. My old old grandma had a pair of tongs or forceps, a long piece of sinew or thick brown dental floss or something and different needles to thread it through, and a scary circle of metal she was fashioning into a clamp (diameter: between a nickel and quarter). She was in pain but focused on the task at hand which was customizing the thin metal circle to act as a cinch on her cervix to keep everything inside. One of the women held a mirror between her legs and I was horrified by how painful this procedure was going to be for my grandma who apparently had to do it every night before bed and try to sleep with a sharp metal clip digging into the tender flesh of her insides.

A cat jumped up on the bed and its tail swished against the implements. I expressed concern over this, worrying that the implements weren’t sterile and Grandma would get an infection. She brushed me off and prepared to reach into her vagina and pinch off her loosely-gaping cervix. I saw hair and blood on gauze. I protested to one of the nurses “what about rubber or silicone or something softer . . .” as the nurse just shook her head, letting me know that YES, there were alternatives to all of this daily torture but the medical community didn’t care about my grandma. They had bigger fish to fry.

Then an overweight trailer-parky lady won an opportunity to confront the HEAD of the doctors. We walked into his operating theatre where she started yelling at him about what my grandma had to endure and that he had the power to help her and stop withholding the special silicone rings.

He looked at me with utter disdain as he snapped on latex gloves and reminded me that we need to think about the soldiers on the front lines and THAT was what he cared about and how dare I be so selfish when there is a war going on. The men, the heroes, the stupid stupid women crying about their soft trivial cunts, lying in cozy beds. I couldn’t get the words out about how she couldn’t possibly sleep, the agony she was in. I wondered how he could treat us this way when she’d won the contest; how could he humiliate the winner on national television and not even LISTEN? Did this happen to all of the winners in their confrontations? Maybe it was my fault for being there with her. Maybe my presence made it null and void.

We were loud and fat and the other doctors in scrubs didn’t even look at us. I felt ashamed. Our place in the world and the futility of struggling against it was very very clear to me then. We were the cats contaminating the sterile atmosphere, endangering the lives of the heroes and progress in the war just by distracting them with our voices, needs and complaints. Stupid and selfish.

*****

Not a dream: my cousin died of cancer at the end of April and I never cared much one way or the other whether we were to kill Osama or not. But I do seem to care how and that even though I see people talking about it, I haven’t randomly seen anybody worrying about us killing his “human-shield”/wife or killing three of Qaddafi’s grandCHILDREN-under-twelve. I know this is nothing unusual, “good” guys killing kids and other civilians and apparently only the stupidest of idealistic bleeding heart peacenik liberals would question whether or not its worth it to the point where I had to google it to see whether or not I dreamed that, too, since it seems to be a matter of so little concern that I haven’t seen any mention of these murders in my social network though I HAVE seen plenty of OBL talk. It seems pretty obvious that we (as a general population) don’t consider those kids human or valuable or much of anyone to mourn. WE’RE FUCKING HEROES BLAAAAAHHHH! Do you feel safer now? I don’t. Not at all. I don’t believe anybody is safer anywhere; there is no army or bomb we can trust not to kill kids and the other people we pretend we’re helping. BUT OH MY GOD WOMEN WHO HAVE ABORTIONS SHOULD GO TO JAIL (if you google the Qaddafi grandchildren story get a load of how few stories even MENTION these kids were under twelve – not that if they were thirteen or over it would be a-okay, it’s just hilarious when the pro-”life”rs don’t seem to mind these things, but sucking out a blob of cells is MURDER)!! Fuck the world.

So I’m kind of depressed and just want to watch Star Trek, that much-ridiculed series of shows that actually has a fucking moral compass. What would Jean Luc Picard do? None of this bullshit, that’s for sure. Though the whole Robin Hood redistribution of Qaddafi’s wealth plan sounds sort of cool. Definitely a Captain Janeway kind of move.

Note: I am not writing this to change people’s minds or get in arguments or anything, I’m simply sharing my feelings with those who are curious. Because this is my blog. I understand why some people have different feelings and perspectives on this/these issues.

Also, I feel much better after sitting on this post for a day. I’ll try to post something more jolly soon, I just wanted to make a record of this nightmare.

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.

Guess what gets the most play on our satellite? It’s the XM channel called Audio Visions playing new age music. We have it on almost all of the time; our dog LOVES it, curls up right next to the speakers and trances out. During the day they sometimes play annoying cheesy crap, but at night they start up with “Night Visions” and this creepy woman with a vampire accent practically whispers interjections like, “in the TOETull dahknessss of nighyyt you sseeeee nahthing but ah beeelliyawn starssss . . . NAHthing but peeeeeeeeace, sweeet peeeeeeeeeissssssse. This is oddyo veezhuns, and you haf nighyyt veezhuns.”

So yeah, we totally love it and daily mimic her pronunciation of Audio Visions, like when we see the longing look in the dog’s eyes and ask, “awwww, do you want your awwjoveezhuns?”

Audio Visions rocks at night when they play spookier, spacier new age music, including delicious programs from Hearts of Space (note: only new age nerds would be oblivious enough to the world to waste an excellent three-letter domain like hos.com on music that once had such a limited audience it could only find space on public radio, but I digress). I’ve bought a lot of new age mp3’s based on play they’ve gotten on Audio Visions that I never would have heard otherwise.

Because Audio Visions, Night Visions and Hearts of Space have been cheap auditory therapy for our household I’m pretty fucking attached to the channel which is why I’m freaking out today upon seeing the channel name has changed to read, “Spa (replaces Audio Visions)”. Does this mean no more Hearts of Space? No more vampires reading poetry accompanied by the sounds of trickling streams, heartbeats and twittering birds?

Of course, it’s possible that it won’t change, or that if it DOES change it will be for the better, though I doubt it if their recent broadcast of a muzak-styled saccharine rendition of a sickly sweet piano tinkling the precious Beatles’ melody “In My Life” layered over ocean waves is any indication of what’s to come. Apparently there’s some kind of Sirius / XM merger going on which I haven’t taken the time to read about but is fucking up almost all of the music we’ve been enjoying via Directv.

Note added Aug. 8th 2010: I just found this interesting post on the Hearts of Space website with more information about XM, Sirius (who recently dropped HOS), Audio Visions and Spa.

This is even more upsetting to me than when Court TV changed their channel name to the criminally deceptive “TruTV” and amped up their programming with even more super-dramatized crime and disaster “documentaries” with titles like, “Most Shocking” cops and robbers high speed chases with fake sound effects dubbed in. I pray for media literacy to be taught in this country, but I don’t hold my breath. Don’t get me wrong, I love watching all of that shit, but it pisses me off when mainstream media gets away with passing skewed misrepresentations of real events as “truth” without disclosing how they’ve distorted it with artifice, bias, and added “production value”.

“TRU” my ass! Maybe they think the stupid spelling is enough to act as a disclaimer: TRU! Not true in any boring conventional sense of the word. TRU! Because you don’t have time to squeeze in all of those letters, much less all the pesky facts! TRU! As much truth as we can squeeze in between ads from our sponsors! TRU! For people who don’t believe in accuracy of reporting OR spelling! I know, I shouldn’t take the misuse of words like “reality” so seriously. I guess I’m just old-fashioned that way, especially when I suffer from the double standards that allow television giants to distort and shit all over essential words in our vocabulary while I am threatened with federal obscenity prosecution and having my payment processing taken away if I dare to tell the TRUTH about my body (that blood comes out of my pussy and that’s totally healthy and I can and should be able to have sex with myself and others while that’s happening). Instead I am forced to misrepresent myself, women’s bodies and sexuality by hiding my period on my porn sites.

Seriously, is my bloody cunt more dangerous than using words like “truth” so loosely?
How irresponsible is it to degrade the meaning of words that are supposed to be the cornerstones of civilized ethics? I do not trust that all people will intuitively recognize the difference between “TRU” and “true”, “reality show” and “reality”, or porn pussy and real pussy.

How did this post arrive here? This is why most of my blog entries wallow in draft mode. I’m going to have to start advertising myself as The Naked Non Sequitur. Except it’s not really true that I’m naked right now or even most of the time just because I’m a webwhore, but I guess it’s TRU enough.

Reading Rachel Kramer Bussel’s piece contemplating how many partner makes you promiscuous I finally started work on something I’ve wanted to post for members for a long time: a numbered list of all the people I’ve fucked or had some sort of sex with.

There are so many layers I’d like to explore that I haven’t finished it yet: why I feel compelled to maintain such lists, how I feel about the numbers (and the possibilities of adding to them), the different ways such a list may be fetishized, whether less data presented in very simple form is more erotic than more data presented in detail with complete sentences in story form or even captured on video or in pictures, how making indie porn and being with Delia since 2002 has effected the numbers, how my list may or may not be different from a man’s, etc.

I also wanted to dig through some of my old photos to find images of some of the people on the list which led me into the frustrating chore of trying to recover corrupted data off of a cd I burned ages ago (most of our photos are backed up in numerous places with different kinds of storage, but not these images which have sentimental value to me now). None of the photos are pornographic and I own the rights to them since I took them, but of course I’m struggling with the ethical dilemma of whether or not to share some of these images (and if so, which ones and whether or not to blur parts of them) and all of the different ways I’m justifying doing it while still feeling like it’s wrong. But wanting to anyway. For the record. Which is a huge compulsion for me, wanting everything to be recorded and saved for posterity. Which I feel is very RIGHT which is part of why I follow trains of thought and say offensive things, many times at my own expense and/or the expense of others, because it represents something interesting or is an example of something that fascinates me and is thought-provoking. I am one of those assholes who acts like ideas are more important than people and that gets nasty and squats on boundaries when the ideas I like are ABOUT people.

Anyway, for those of you who are members and have been looking forward to reading the list, I apologize for underestimating how long it would take for me to get it done. I could post it now, but not without some of the context and thought I want to put in it.

*****

My random thoughts on/responses to Rachel’s piece about promiscuity:

This is SO TRUE: “Your number of partners and how “special” the sex is are not necessarily related.”

Not that I think sex has to be “special” for someone to deserve to have it and be exempt from moral judgment, but it IS a way of connecting with other people, yourself and even the divine and sacred (if you’re into that). It’s a basic human need. A core drive. Anyway, is every meal you have “special”? No, but you still need to eat and are programmed to do it at regular intervals.

It cracks me up when many of the people who are judgmental about sex are the same people who put really bad food in their bodies every day. Food that is unhealthy, that they aren’t mindful or thankful of when they eat, that they waste, that was unethically and/or immorally produced. That’s WAY worse than choosing to enjoy putting a stranger’s cock in your mouth. Anyone who scarfs down corn syrup, meat, chemical-laden and genetically modified food is in NO position to judge a woman for what she puts in her vagina.

*What does promiscuous mean, anyway? To me, it just means having many partners in a short time span and that’s a meaningless definition since “many partners” and “short time span” are so subjective. I think promiscuity can be very healthy and don’t think there should be a value judgment attached to it though I recognize THERE IS.

*15 partners is not a lot, in my book. If you’re not in a long-term monogamous relationship your entire adult life (and I don’t think that is more morally right than NOT being in a monogamous relationship, I’m just acknowledging that most people consider them ideal, rightly or wrongly, and you have more opportunities to fuck) and you’re only averaging one new sex partner a year then . . . that pretty much sucks ass for the average human and you’re definitely NOT a “slut”. Its healthy to have sex at least 1-3 times a week, and if you aren’t in a relationship of course you will probably have multiple partners. The UNhealthy/wrong thing to do is get into or stay in a relationship just so you can have access to socially acceptable sex. Even if you’re only hooking up with a new person to have sex once a month (which is pretty fucking DRY) you’d still have twelve new partners a year.

*I agree that the double standard does still exist and the pressure for women to not be openly promiscuous (and the response to those who are or are perceived to be) is FUCKED UP and has really scary repercussions. Namely that your worth decreases and ownership of yourself disappears the more people you fuck, making you a target for all sorts of abuse. I think its a representation of our (society’s) feeling that women do not own themselves, or are only permitted to temporarily own themselves if certain conditions are met. People think that every time a woman’s body is accessed by someone else that she’s transferring some ownership of it, having part of her soul and dignity sucked out of her, and losing her ability to have “meaningful” relationships with other people (like her all-important future husband, the final titleholder!). Like she’s becoming less human and more animal, “degrading” herself from personhood to a piece of meat, and we’re told that once she “does that to herself” (fails to/refuses to meet the requirements to be human which are different for women than men and designed to make her fail because doing so would make her NOT human) it is OPEN SEASON ON HER ASS — she asked for it. If she doesn’t care about herself (and “caring for herself” actually means denying herself what she wants), why should anyone else?

It’s uhhhh . . . pretty fucking crazy and yeah, I do totally believe that extreme misogyny is the foundation for all of the anti-slut sentiment (and the way most people use the word “slut”).

*I don’t think most people who are intimate with more than three people in their lives can actually remember who and exactly how many people they’ve screwed around with. Having kept track of it myself, I am positive that if I hadn’t logged the information I would not remember most of the people on my list (especially since I can’t easily recall a lot of the people that are on it, even with their names right there). I interact with far fewer people than most do, so if *I* can’t remember people I’ve fucked, I’m sure people who are actually normal social creatures drop a lot of interaction, even if its sexual, from their quickly-recalled memories.

You have to be a bit of a freak of nature to know exactly how many people you’ve had sex with. On top of that, so many people don’t qualify a lot of sexual behavior as “sex” (the whole “blowjobs don’t count” thing, or “he only went down on me but we didn’t actually have sex”). I just don’t think you can trust most people’s numbers, not only because they will lie about them on purpose but because they honestly don’t remember everything or don’t think of all kinds of sexual intimacy as “SEX”.

An overwrought, incoherent mini-tribute to my favorite periodical and worthy cause, $pread magazine:

Do you know what it’s like to go to the newsstand and see business magazines like inc. and then for a second get excited because you see a magazines for WOMEN-run businesses. But it’s called something like “PINC.” and you buy it even though you know absolutely nothing inside will have anything to do with the one industry that women should dominate. The sex industry (the pinkest industry). Not. One. Word. Of recognition. It’s like trying to plan your own funeral in a society that doesn’t have a word for death or acknowledge that everyone dies in the end. That’s how crazy it seems to refuse to acknowledge the business of sex in general discussions about business, particularly businesses run by women. That’s how fucking backwards and NOT progressive we are (but I’m sure most straight business-women think that IS progress, to not associate women in business with the possibility of anything remotely sexual except for harassment and victimization). The new ambitious woman is required not to be in charge of her body or to enjoy it in her off time or to use it to get ahead, but to project a consistently professional asexual image, don’t you know? God forbid word leaks out that she even HAS a body underneath those clothes! No, the working woman can only advance in status by keeping her tits and pussy discretely locked away in a witness protection program; showing off our assets only serves to make them a liability. If we show them to anyone on purpose it might make it harder for us to use them to prosecute some guy later who took an uncivilized interest in them.

The world thinks that starting an ebay business selling crocheted kleenex box holders is a better, more legitimate career* for a woman than turning tricks or being a webwhore. This is unbelievably STUPID to me and it’s why women who do sex work are pretty motherfucking socially isolated. Because we’re not just doing a job that’s hard to talk about with other people, like being a paramedic or a soldier or a nurse who attends to the dead and dying and ends and saves lives; those people are considered heroic even if no one wants to hear the truth of their jobs. Those people usually work in teams, teams that don’t have to compete against each other for pay; they can talk to EACH OTHER about their work. I’m not denying that there’s competition in those fields for promotions (which do equal more money) and status and I’m certainly not denying that those jobs are hard (on the contrary) nor am I trying to say that sex work is harder than those jobs; what I’m trying to say is that doing sex work can be very isolating. Not only are we discouraged by polite society from talking about our work (and even laws against talking about it in some cases), but our work itself is often against the law. Very few sex workers can talk to their family, romantic interests, or non-whore friends about our tough days at the office, and developing a sense of camaraderie with colleagues is often challenging. There’s no human relations department where we can file grievances. I’m not saying these circumstances exist for all of us or are necessarily unbearable or even undesirable for a lot of us, I’m just saying that it *can* be pretty fucking lonely in ways that are fairly unique. I am really lucky that I am a hermit to begin with, my partner does the same kind of work I do, and I’m out with my family and can be fairly open with them. Plus, my brand of sex work is really safe, no-(physical)-contact stuff. Still? There are times when I realize that my friends and family have no fucking clue who I am, what I do, or what’s important to me . . . and don’t WANT to. There are some things that I can only talk about with other people who do the work I do. I’m sure it’s the same for lawyers, priests and teachers but they HAVE networks and coffee rooms and church and professional associations. Me? I am still stunned by finding out that my sister (who I’m very close to) assumed I would want my sites taken down if/when I die. Apparently my story is something she thinks I would want erased rather than shared and preserved in all of its grotesquely intimate nakedness.

So is it weird that seeing $pread for sale at a bookstore made my heart skip a beat and a pain dive down through my innards as though I’d just unexpectedly caught sight of someone I have a big crush on? I don’t know if I can explain where that intense feeling of recognition comes from and the sense of being on the verge of something life-altering, like standing in a crowd and having a beam of sunlight shine specifically down on just you, singling you out as deserving of solace and renewal. While everyone else just mills around the bookstore, you are aware of being part of a group of people witnessing and breaking through thousands and thousands of years of foul, soul-staining, isolating, life-killing bullshit.

I think it’s the sensation of battle (not war) victory upon seeing a visible representation of a long line of stigmatized women’s voices finally coming to be recognized and legitimized, our hiserstories written by ourselves and our concerns and specific business needs addressed. Uncensored, not twisted or misappropriated or degradingly pitied by academia and looky-loos and feminism-hoarders. Not perfect, not artsifucked, but really fucking important. Our stories. VALUED in print and for sale in public.

*Note: I mean no offense to crafty crocheters of kleenex box holders; I myself would love to know how to crochet. Plus I would never disrespect someone for honoring tissue boxes since I myself have a major kleenex fetish. I’m just reasonably sure that whoring is a more viable business than hand-crafting tissue cozies.

**Confession: I delayed posting this entry because I let my $pread subscription lapse and felt like it would make me a liar to post this without my money backing it up. Then I realized that’s silly since I will resubscribe and order the back-issues I missed. And who would know this if I didn’t tell them? Why am I so uptight and guilt-riddled? I also need to finish my site redesign and include more links to things and people I care about.

It’s time for me to brag about being in another book, so get a load of me in my sexy attire of choice before the boasting begins:

Here I am with the book, Best Sex Writing 2008:

The book isn’t full of erotic fiction, it’s an anthology of extremely provocative non-fiction pieces covering sex from challenging and unusual (but important and relevant) perspectives. Rachel Kramer Bussel edited the collection (and is looking for submissions for 2009).

Check out Audacia Ray’s video review of the book to get a better idea of my piece and the book. When she says “period porn” she is not talking about porn featuring people dressed up in anachronistic costumes; she’s talking about the the porn you find on BloodyTrixie and EroticRed.

For me, the best part of being included in this anthology is getting exposure to a topic that at first glance seems very “special interest” (the freedom to make and sell porn featuring menstruation) but really challenges people’s assumption that we live in a country where free speech is protected, women own their own bodies, and capitalism rules. We don’t. It’s exciting to know that more people are going to be exposed to the marginalized truth that fringe-dwelling pornographers like myself live every day.

The stand-out parts of the book in total are its depth of exploration and diversity of topics; a lot of mainstream media coverage of sex is so shallow, boring and repetitive. So much that we read and hear about sex is either a) entertainingly dismissive or b) hyper-judgmental fear-mongering. It’s usually some dumbed-down story to get ratings or clicks presented by people who really don’t know what they’re talking about. Sex is held at arm’s length and treated as something that doesn’t effect “real” life (except in a predatory way) or Matters of Serious Consequence.

I love the idea of people being shown by this book that THEY’VE BEEN MISSING OUT on fascinating, puzzling, and complex stories of personal and political import. This book is loaded with surprises and challenges while maintaining its readability. Each piece’s tone and subject is so different from the others that it makes me feel giddy hoping people will realize they’ve been gypped by not being told more stories like these before. The contents of Best Sex Writing 2008 show the field of sex journalism’s enormous scope in a way that makes it impossible to dismiss as fluff.

I’M HOLDING A DRAWING AT THE END OF MARCH TO WIN AUTOGRAPHED COPIES OF BEST SEX WRITING 2008:

Who can enter:
Anyone with an active membership to TastyTrixie.com, TrixiesHouseboy.com, DeliaCD.com or SpyOnUs.com during between today (February 28th) and March 31st is eligible.

How to enter:
Email me with your username and mailing address stating you want to be in the drawing. I don’t want to automatically enter everyone with a membership since some people may not even want the prize or may not have a safe address to receive parcels from webwhores.

How many:
If more than one hundred (100) members email me to be in the drawing, I will draw for a second book. If more than 200 members email, I’ll draw three (and so on). That way people will at least have a 1/100 chance (or better) of winning no matter how many new people join our sites.

Watch the drawing:
Tuesday, April 1st at 4 PM Pacific Time on our spycams and in our members-only chatroom.

“BUT WHO LET THIS HAPPEN??!!”

This is SO sad:

Despondent Fort Lewis GI fell through system’s cracks to his death

The thing that mystifies me, though, is this bizarre train of thought asking “who could have let this happen??” instead of even acknowledging for one fucking MOMENT *why* the guy wanted to blow his fucking brains out. He’s DEPRESSED BECAUSE HE IS/WAS IN A FUCKING WAR ZONE AND SEEING BLOWN UP CHILDREN. Where’s the mystery? What is there to be confused about?

I don’t understand how you can responsibly cover that story without providing even one morsel of a statistic on, you know, depression among soldiers. Before you go blaming the people who supposedly failed out of carelessness or some deference to (what everyone likes to consider) those PESKY privacy laws, try blaming the people who keep these guys over there. The people who THREW the country into civil war. TRY THAT.

It boggles my mind how willfully we refuse to look at REAL issues. Fell through system’s cracks to his death. Yeah, because if the “system” would have caught him his whole life after this traumatic ordeal would have been so perfect! A regular bed of fucking roses.

I’m sure the pro-war folks PREFER for these folks to wait at least a few months or years before they off themselves. And notice how you’ll never see a mainstream newspaper run a story entitled, “GI fell through system’s cracks into homelessness and mental illness”. Bwahahaha!!! It goes without saying, right? Errrr, no . . . that’s not the SYSTEM’S fault. I forgot. That’s just something much easier to ignore, when someone kills himself with a bottle or freezes to death or is lit on fire by some punk teenagers while he’s trying to sleep on a park bench. I’m not making this up — you might be surprised how many homeless people are beaten and/or SET AFIRE and it’s never reported in the papers, but you know FLAG BURNING — there’s an issue that deserves some attention, right?

The “news” most people read/hear/watch is just a bunch of diversions. I’m not trying to insult the intelligence of those of you who already know this. I just never stop being mortified by it.

DIVERSIONS
Tucker hooked up our television antenna today so we could watch the Superbowl (and so I could supply myself with new and disgusting bits of pop culture to mortify, shock and offend my own old-fashioned ideals). What the fuck is up with that disgusting Jessica Simpson Pizza Slut popper commercial where she suggestively “pops” the adolescent boy? What the fuck!?! Would they make a commercial like that featuring an adult male “popping” a twelve year old girl? It really got me in a lather.

The hypocrisy in our culture sickens me; it’s totally okay when a mainstream corporation colludes with broadcasters to air sexually suggestive advertisements on a Sunday afternoon depicting pedo relationships between goody-two-shoes Republican whores and little boys, but the FBI and Department of Justice censor, destroy and criminalize businesses that clearly label the same fantasies (even presented only in text format) as pornography. Every time I turn on the television I am bombarded with whores of all types peddling their wares and exposed to all kinds of pornography, and yet it’s only the honest whores and smut peddlers like myself who call a spade a spade who are considered criminals.

I felt a little guilty watching football today and couldn’t stop thinking about what Noam Chomsky says about sports. That they are served up to us to fill our heads with irrelevant bullshit and divert our attention from absorbing and processing news and information that really MATTER in life-altering ways. I also can’t help wondering how these whores on the field, these men who are destroying their bodies doing nothing of more (or even equal) genuine import than a janitor or a garbage man or a paralegal or a streetwalker does — these athletes are presented to us as virtuous noblemen, celebrities (people to be “celebrated”), patriots, heroes, icons, and role models. Some of these men do not even choose (or know how) to put their baseball caps on straight!! But we’ve all helped create (or consented to the creation of) this $213 billion sports industry elevating these completely inane games to epic proportions.

Think about it: the sports industry is worth “far more than twice the size of the U.S. auto industry and seven times the size of the movie industry.” Just the sports INJURY industry alone is worth over ten billion dollars!!! We pay to watch them get hurt, and then the doctors get paid to fix them. Go go gladiators!! Tell me again how prostitution is illegal for the protection of women. If we’re so concerned about people’s bodies, why are sports legal if they result in these kinds of injuries? If we can mass-consume sports injuries (and yes, I love watching a man writhing in pain on the field or punch-drunk in the boxing ring) and heroize the players for taking the battering ram like men, it seems like we could legalize prostitution (which would only make it SAFER for us). The obvious answer is that we really don’t give a flying FUCK about women’s bodies OR men’s bodies; when it comes to good clean sportin’ entertainment and fuel for our SUV’s we’re more than happy to let the body parts fall where they may. We keep prostitution illegal because we’d rather see scores of whores killed than actually allow that women should be able to safely charge access fees to their bodies and be protected in doing so the way any other low skill capitalist athlete is allowed to do. It’s so funny the way sports programs are seen as brilliant opportunities for underprivileged youth and how the boys who make it out of the ghetto to go onto BIG SPORTS INJURIES (or exciting military careers and possible death!) are jolly success stories; I’m not suggesting after-school streetwalking programs, but there’s definitely a weird double standard.

I don’t like agreeing with theories that say we’re a bunch of mind-numbed pawns in some enormous brainwashing conspiracy, but when I look at those statistics that say that even the STORIES we want to be told on film are of less importance than sports I have to agree that the powers that be are undoubtedly very VERY happy we are so busy consuming, both financially and intellectually, these ridiculously trivial GAMES.

Another thing that gets my goat is the culture theft. The way that the football people can buy off Dr. Seuss’ money-grubbing traitorous widow into letting them turn one of his stories into a pro-Super Bowl poem read by fucking Harrison Ford, but they won’t let bars advertise “Super Bowl” parties because the NFL doesn’t want to tarnish their image (or let anyone capitalize off of their game who doesn’t PAY for the privilege of uttering the sanctified game name). Seriously, the NFL has sent people cease and desist letters for violating their copyright (thanks Doc Holly for the tip on that).

It INFURIATES me when corporations infiltrate our lives and weave themselves into the thread of our culture and then try to govern and control and profit off of every single mention of their precious fucking names. Either you want to be embraced by society or you don’t. Either you want free advertising or you don’t. We shouldn’t have to PAY you a licensing fee for barging into our lives and making us like you, even if we then make money off of the way you’ve foisted yourselves into our homes and businesses.

Speaking of culture theft, if you care about this issue at all or are simply curious, check out WillfulInfringement.com.

On a more personal level, I resent seeing athletes portrayed as noble heroes and role models when they are just well paid whores who get the best surgeries possible when their pimps push them to blow out their knees, rip their groins, and dislocate their limbs. It’s not that I resent the athletes themselves or that I am “jealous” of them or that I don’t think they deserve good treatment, I just think it’s really “funny” that real whores aren’t allowed even a trifling of that kind of respect and we’re really doing extremely similar jobs, we whores and athletes. In truth, the athletes are the ones who are participating in a much more evil scheme that doesn’t even bother to meet any basic needs the way prostitutes do (and if you listen to Noam Chomsky, sports actually suppresses our drive and ability to take care of ourselves and act human because it’s not participatory; we’re only passively WATCHING the competition rather than engaging in it).

I hate demonizing an entire industry and everyone in it — I really am NOT trying to say that I want athletes to be paid less. I am NOT trying to say that I think Paul Allen is part of a plot to make all of us stupid sports-watching zombies via his ownership of the Seahawks. I’m not trying to say that. I’m just saying that if the sports industry can have all of that, why can’t sex workers and pornographers have ANYTHING? And if mainstream media can shove violence and sex down everyone’s throats on television to sell everything from pesticides to war to hormone-riddled milk to burgers made of cow eyeballs to gas-guzzling suburban tanks to alcohol, why can’t I sell my own motherfucking body if I want to? I don’t understand how all the sweet Mommies in our country think *I* am the enemy and thief of their children’s innocence with my porn website, but twelve beer commercials (plus more subtle advertisements like their Daddy drinking and driving the family home from the stadium) during a football game are a matter of American pride. Again, it’s not exactly that I think all alcohol commercials should be pulled (and it’s certainly not that I think pornography should be advertised during a football game). I’m just sick of the scapegoating and t
he overall stupidity.

But hey, I’m part of it too. I drank beer, I ate chips, and I wasted about five hours waiting for “my” team to lose. And I felt angry at the referees and full of certainty that they were against “us”. And I understand how that is so much easier for a country to swallow than thinking about the bad calls our “president” has made and how he and his cronies are buttfucking almost all of us as hard as they can.

I’m going to see what’s on tv now.